coe039_alaimo.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:22] Hello, folks. Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, this is Dominic Boyer. I am here with my co-host extraordinaire, Simone Howe. And we are so happy to have all you energy, humanist energy, humanist allies. And you know what? Let's just welcome our environmental humanities friends, too, because you know what? We all have the same DNA, and you know what I just heard about today? There's also something called blue humanities. I guess it's like the Blue Lagoon. Simone, how what do you think about blue humanities?

Speaker2: [00:00:49] I was just worried for you that you had never heard of it before.

Speaker1: [00:00:52] I literally heard about it concerns me ten minutes ago, but yet it exists.

Speaker2: [00:00:57] I could tell you exactly what it is, except that I know that it has to do with the kind of humanistic, maybe even social scientific investigation of oceans and sea water, for sure. But perhaps even water, just it's kind of a watery humanities. And I think I first saw it with this author who he's a historian. His name is Steve Mintz, OK? And he's got yet another Anthropocene variation, which I won't go into right now. But I think that's the first place I saw Blue Humanities.

Speaker1: [00:01:30] Anyway, I love it. Sounds great. It's a great idea. It sounds great. And I like it that it's the blue humanities. It's not just, you know, is it the green humanities? Oh, but apropos of

Speaker2: [00:01:40] That, green is really plato.

Speaker1: [00:01:41] It's kind of played out. We need some new colors to get behind. But listen, apropos of that, perhaps Simone would like to tell everyone about who we're talking to today on this podcast.

Speaker2: [00:01:51] Yeah, of course. We are speaking with Stacy Alaimo, who is a wonderful interlocutor and intellectual

Speaker1: [00:01:58] Yes,

Speaker2: [00:01:59] Who is a professor of English and also a distinguished teaching professor and director of environmental and sustainability studies, the minor at University of Texas at Arlington.

Speaker1: [00:02:12] So practically an actor

Speaker2: [00:02:13] And yeah, practically a neighbor, and she's got a lot of really cool books out there, which I think you're going to put in the liner notes to share. Her first book was on domesticated ground recasting nature as feminist space. And then she did a great and very well recognized collection and edited collection called Material Feminism a

Speaker1: [00:02:34] Very important

Speaker2: [00:02:35] Book. And then equally, maybe even more important, bodily nature's science environment and the material self where she develops the idea of trans corporeal, which we talk about in the podcast. And this is, I think I think this is her kind of her signature theoretical moment, at least during, you know, for this moment, it's something that she's really developed so far.

Speaker1: [00:02:58] There's more to it so far.

Speaker2: [00:02:58] No, I didn't want to. I didn't want to bracket her that way. But trans corporeal is what she's, you know, got a lot of fame and recognition for. And it's a super cool concept. And I'm not going to give it away here because you get to hear about it in the podcast. More stuff, more stuff upcoming again, that we talk about in the podcast, but we also have a new book from her that's called Exposed as got really cool cover art, which I think was done by Marina Zuko. I think it was. It looks like Marina Zircons art, and it's called exposed environmental politics and pleasures and post-human times. And it just came just came out September twenty second.

Speaker1: [00:03:37] So please go and get yourselves a copy of this wonderful work.

Speaker2: [00:03:41] Yeah, it looks really, really good.

Speaker1: [00:03:43] All right. Yeah, go. And she's got another. So we talk about that. We talk about bodily nature as we talk about her new project in the works, which I think actually is the one that's the bluest of her projects. If I may now use to start using this term wildly. But yeah, fascinating. A fascinating conversation with with Stacy. And she's also just, you know, a delight, a delightful person as so many of the people on our podcast are. I guess we're we're doing a good job of finding nice people. Or maybe you know what? Maybe it's that energy and environmental humanities these days just attracts nice, decent, intelligent. And, you know, often, you know, somewhat concerned, folks. I mean, people who are concerned about the world we're living in and who have, you know, who are really trying to grapple with an honest and and,

Speaker3: [00:04:29] Well,

Speaker2: [00:04:30] Intelligent way. And I know it's important to index energy humanities as distinct from kind of environmental humanities, but I think it's also important to not forget the social scientists in the mix.

Speaker1: [00:04:40] Yeah, well, right.

Speaker2: [00:04:41] Two of us sitting here right now, yeah, for example. So it's a human sciences. Absolutely right. So it's got to be both.

Speaker1: [00:04:49] We're talking expansively. Humanities is just a shorthand because human science is ET. No one knows what that is.

Speaker2: [00:04:54] No, but and capacious.

Speaker1: [00:04:56] And so humanities and social sciences is too many words, as we found out in many occasions.

Speaker2: [00:05:01] People can find their way into that.

Speaker1: [00:05:03] Totally. Yeah, absolutely. Now we're all we're all committed to the same process of investigation. We're just using different disciplinary techniques and different concepts sometimes. But I think we're all have a common cause here. So you know who else has a common cause in this podcast? Felix the dog Stacy's. German Shepherd Felix makes a guest appearance or two on the podcast.

Speaker2: [00:05:26] Well, people already know about that because they've already seen his portrait.

Speaker1: [00:05:28] They've seen this portrait and that is Felix, who is a very handsome dog, I think. And you know what else? I think he may have a future career as a podcaster because his timing was impeccable when he came in. He came in just at moments when it really was important to hear as somebody other than a human being speak to hear a bark and to hear bark or a whine or a whistle.

Speaker2: [00:05:49] Well, my favorite thing about Felix is that he barks at the mailman.

Speaker1: [00:05:54] Totally. Yeah. Which is so kind of like Mayberry, you

Speaker2: [00:05:58] Know, it's like something out of a cartoon. I mean, you couldn't even script that. It's like he's barking at that. And I think it was a mailman, not a not a mail delivery person, but like an actual mailman. Like, yeah, old school.

Speaker1: [00:06:10] Old school.

Speaker2: [00:06:11] Yeah, his old school dog in that way. But you know, it's like the with the blue humanities and kind of green environmentalism or kind of green everything. And it's true that green is played out. So this blue humanities has a nice ring to it. But then it makes you wonder, like, what if you got deeper into the color wheel? Yeah. Well, what would you know, sort of purple humanities look like? Or what would orange social science look like, especially in terms of thinking about these ideas and these proposals? Like, Would it be okay? Let's think about the orange or maybe yellow. Yeah. Is that sort of.

Speaker1: [00:06:49] I am curious yellow humanities.

Speaker2: [00:06:51] Yeah, could

Speaker1: [00:06:52] Be. That's a kind of a shout out to some weird Swedish soft core pornography from back in the day. Oh, shut up. Yeah, really?

Speaker2: [00:07:00] I think purple, and the only reason you said that is because we're here in Scandinavia, but don't get, oh, don't start talking about pornography and trying off track. Listen, because I had the purple out there already, but that was probably kind of humor you're trying to share.

Speaker1: [00:07:12] Purple also. But I also thing when I think purple, I think Catholic Church, Easter somehow. So I feel like that's

Speaker2: [00:07:19] Got a religious point. It's got a royalty thing going on. All right. But you also got to think about Purple Rain. Paisley Park, I mean, purple is kind of an alternative color in a lot of ways. What else can we say about purple? But I don't know. I think the yellow and the orange could be like sort of solar, humanities or solar.

Speaker1: [00:07:35] Oh, OK, I like the

Speaker2: [00:07:36] Social sciences because, you know, it's got that kind of heated effect. Or maybe that's red humanities.

Speaker1: [00:07:42] I listen. I love the idea of solar humanities. I think that is

Speaker2: [00:07:46] Solar humanities that could be yellow and orange. It's kind of a, I don't know, maybe it's sort of mustard colored, OK? And then red, I don't know. That's like the humanities of Utah, like rocks and stones and sandstone.

Speaker1: [00:08:01] Sure, sure. Like red rocks, Mars, you

Speaker2: [00:08:04] Know, Mars could be Mars

Speaker1: [00:08:07] Anyway. Well, you already disclosed the fact that we're coming to you this week from Scandinavia and more specifically from Denmark, where we're here for the final symposium conference of the Alien Energy Project, which you've heard about an earlier episodes of the podcast, but it's lovely to see that exciting project about geothermal energy and wave energy entering its final. Its final laps, I guess. And is there more to say about that before we move on to the conversation?

Speaker2: [00:08:36] No, I mean, we've talked about alien energy before with Laura Watts, which is one of the earlier podcasts that we did and also with Brit Winter, right? So we do have a couple of chats about that. I don't think we have to go into too much detail, but I don't know. I mean, Denmark is a very interesting

Speaker1: [00:08:54] Place, and it's our first time here. Like full disclosure, we have not been to Denmark before this

Speaker2: [00:08:59] Weekend or energy exchange with us. Who are they doing the hydro electric with? Not Germany, Norway, Norway. So I mean, incredible amount of renewable energy resources here and they've been breaking

Speaker1: [00:09:14] In Denmark may very well be the first country to have a carbon neutral energy system. I mean, they certainly are the only ones who really seem to care about achieving that, and they have a lot of the technology and political will to do it. So I mean, it's it is kind of you do feel as though you're in the middle of, you know, what could become a very important prototype for the future of all societies. Of course, the flip side of it is, you know, they also are a place that has political populism, that has anti-immigrant sentiments. And so you make you make a sort of sustainable net zero carbon grid. But then, you know, you don't want to accept a lot of people who don't belong, you know, right to the society and want and complicate matter. I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:10:01] Well, one of the other interesting things we heard this evening over the dinner was that this idea of energy independence, which you can take in a very positive register as being, you know, renewable and obviously like sort of covering that sovereignty can also be taken as a very nationalist, right? Exactly right. And that happens. Quite a lot in the United States. It's going way back like anything that's considered energy independence almost always tracks back to that sort of nationalist.

Speaker1: [00:10:30] Yeah, right.

Speaker2: [00:10:32] And that's what it does here, too.

Speaker1: [00:10:33] That's why Texas has this huge wind industry, in part is because we have a few patriotic, you know, investors like T. Boone Pickens, who wanted to build a wind industry to offset, you know, our dependence on Arabian sort of rather oil from the Arabian

Speaker2: [00:10:50] Peninsula crapped out like he was such the cheerleader for a while. And he lose a lot of money.

Speaker1: [00:10:56] What happened to him? No, I mean, I don't know the whole story. I think he's still in the mix. No, no. I think he's still in the mix. But yeah, I don't think he's as much of a public advocate as he used

Speaker2: [00:11:04] To be 10 years ago, I'd say 10 years ago.

Speaker1: [00:11:07] Well, I think part of what happened is that it happened like what he wanted to happen happened, and maybe he didn't want to see anymore happen. But anyway, you know, in a weird way, this does bring us back to where we started. It brings us back to Stacy, and I feel like we need to get there because you and I could talk randomly about energy for a long time. But Stacy is a fellow and I feel like probably transplanted Texan, you know, immigrant to Texas the way we are.

Speaker2: [00:11:32] She's a scuba

Speaker1: [00:11:32] Diver and a scuba diver and a snorkel and a free diver.

Speaker2: [00:11:37] And which we actually had to look up on the

Speaker1: [00:11:40] Interweb, right? But I feel like in so many ways, she is a fellow traveler and is doing such good work at texas-arlington that we very much appreciate and respect. And with that, I will say, or you will

Speaker2: [00:11:51] Say, Go Stacy.

Speaker1: [00:11:54] Stacy.

Speaker2: [00:12:12] Well, welcome back. Five people, we're really happy to have your ears on us, and we're especially happy to have here virtually in the studio. Stacey Alaimo, thank you for joining us, Stacey. We're really, really happy that you're here.

Speaker3: [00:12:26] Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker1: [00:12:28] So, Stacey, as you know, as we've just disclosed, we're huge fans of your work and we know that you have a very exciting new book project that is coming out in just a few days time. But you've already received a a material copy of your material feminist work. And I guess we want to start just by. Maybe we haven't had the we haven't had the pleasure of reading it yet, but maybe you could tell us a little bit, give us a little bit of a teaser or an intro to what you're what you're thinking and talking about there.

Speaker3: [00:12:57] Ok. Sure. Well, this follows from the book Bodily Natures, which of course focused on developing the concept of transport cordiality. The sense of the human as immersed within material agencies, flows, substances and bodily natures was very much focused on environmental justice movements and environmental health movements. And this next book is much broader and a bit more playful in the various topics that it takes up. So it's everything from rethinking a kind of ethics of inhabiting the architecture and landscape art to queer animals to naked protesting, and then to all sorts of activist and artistic representations of the Anthropocene at sea. So it's a it's a it's a real range of things. Most of the essays happened because I was invited to speak about one topic or another and one format or another. And in taking up that challenge, it did seem like everything that I was making a coherent point in a lot of these essays, and so it made sense to bring it together as a book. Although I work hard not to reduce everything to one sort of abstract notion, because that would go against the very thing I'm trying to argue, which is about these sort of very messy, immersive states that we find ourselves in in the Anthropocene.

Speaker2: [00:14:34] And you mentioned, Stacey, also that all these phenomena that you're looking at, all these events and activities and activists protests are taking place at sea. So as though is the book based around the kind of oceanic oceanic components of the Anthropocene or

Speaker3: [00:14:51] Only the last third, only the last third is at sea. So in that in that section, there are chapters about various forms of plastic activism, but also scientific stories about the human, the oceanic origin of the human or of all life, and whether or not those stories and with a kind of trans corporeal presence or that's my dog here. He's been good all day. And now suddenly, suddenly he knows it's time he

Speaker1: [00:15:26] Wants to be on the podcast, too. He's very he's more than welcome.

Speaker2: [00:15:28] It's a multi species, can

Speaker1: [00:15:30] It's totally multi species podcast,

Speaker3: [00:15:32] Which is the multi species

Speaker2: [00:15:34] We. We try to bring some dwarf hamsters once, but they don't speak very well, and they refuse to put their little noses up to the microphone.

Speaker3: [00:15:43] Well, Felix is getting very noisy. Maybe if I let him outside here and he'll he'll chase a squirrel, and I'm convinced he knows what metonymy is because he jumps up and bites the tree as if it were part of a squirrel that he can't bite. Yeah, very dogs don't. Dogs may not know metaphor. I'm not sure, but they definitely know metonymy.

Speaker1: [00:16:04] But much like dogs were all chasing our own squirrels, I'm sure you would agree.

Speaker3: [00:16:07] Or tails? Exactly, yes. So only a third of the book is directly focused on the oceans. The other chapters are a bit more wide ranging from there's there's a chapter about climate change and gender. There's a chapter about naked protesting, and then there's a chapter about queer animals and one about architecture and landscape art. So again, pretty wide ranging. Although some similar issues and dynamics emerge in a kind of rethinking of what ethics and politics can mean at various scales, starting with everyday life and material encounters with everyday sorts of practices.

Speaker2: [00:16:58] Well, it sounds like a really fun trip and stimulating trip through a lot of different elements, so we're really looking forward to seeing it. I wanted to read something a passage from an essay. You did recently, and it has to do with the Anthropocene, and so I'll just read a bit to kind of set us up for the question towards the end here. So you're this is the piece where you're talking about your shell on acid,

Speaker3: [00:17:25] Which is a, yes, a

Speaker2: [00:17:26] Wonderful like hemispheric CEO's favorite kind of commentary there. But. And in this essay you say, who is the anthro of the Anthropocene? Is it possible to inhabit this prefix or think from such a perspective, while the term Anthropocene would seem to hail us into a massive, disorienting expanse of epochal species identity? Many accounts of the Anthropocene re-install rather familiar versions of man in quotes, lowercase man and the human, which failed to embody a new species identity that the epoch would seem to require. Feminist theory long critical of the term man the disembodied, rational subject and materialist feminism, which stress inner inter or interactions between humans and the wider physical world, provide alternatives to accounts that re-iterate man as a bounded being endowed with unilateral agency. And so one of the questions I wanted to to pose to you because this kind of sets up a larger argument that that I think you've been making through your work. And that is there's been kind of a hand-wringing about confessions, let's say, of human culpability or human fault that appear coated with what you call species pride. And I wanted to to hear something more about what species pride looks like. How do you see that emanating or emerging in different places as we try and grapple with all the complexities and contingencies of Anthropocene and man with a lowercase M and man with an uppercase M and our own species being our own species habits? What might that pride look like?

Speaker3: [00:19:11] That's a great question. I think I mean, I won't talk about the the more sort of obvious renditions of this, which would be the pride of people who say aren't aren't thinking about these questions at all, but are very happy to have a very straightforward sense of mastery of nature. And the fact that man can do this and can do that. And man has done all sorts of things that no other species has done and all that sort of thing. But I think that that actually, in the visual presentations of the Anthropocene, this predominant mode of seeing from some sort of perspective from outer space or from up high. I think that that heroin was the God trick, as she called it a long time ago of this unmarked vision. I think that that is a kind of species pride that because it it's looking, it's as if everything is there to be seen by us and that whatever has is to be seen has already within the Anthropocene been remade and profoundly altered by us. And in what one of the things that's disturbing to me about this is that there are no other species in the picture. In most of these visualizations of the Anthropocene, it's as if the sixth grade extinction had already concluded, and those other species don't even need to be considered anymore. So even though there's a sense of this as being a kind of enormity of what the human has done and enormity in the sense of it being negative, it does still seem like a kind of species pride in that all of our other, all of the other species even say, look, the microbiome or something, that the fact that the human cannot exist as such without being literally inhabited by other sorts of species. All of that disappears and evaporates into this really clean, pure transcendent view. And I think that's that's what I'm trying to critique there.

Speaker2: [00:21:29] Well, one of the other things I love about this important point that you've made about the kind of transient, sort of transcendent, incorporeal but also omniscient sort of god trick that what you see in these representations of the Anthropocene is also the comfort of being the viewer and the watcher and sitting outside of that, as though we had a kind of view on the dominion of the Earth. And I think that's a really wonderful and important point that you've made in terms of reading these these visual representations of the Anthropocene.

Speaker3: [00:22:02] Thank you. And that's exactly right. And I think that that's where material feminisms and the whole history of feminism and other fields is really important. But I think it's I think I think that that that sort of delusional sense of the immaterial transcendent being has, of course, been only available to particular sorts of humans. So I think that's where feminism, race studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, all of those things are crucial, in my view, to imagining forms of new materialism and forms of humanism and environmentalism.

Speaker1: [00:22:48] Yeah, I mean, I think if I if I can jump in on this, you know, I think that this is such an incredibly exciting era for for feminist theory. And it seems as though the most exciting theory, you know, that's out there for for tackling questions like the Anthropocene is feminist theory. Not that we should be surprised by that, but it's interesting that in some ways, you know, let's say the whole Marxist tradition is in some ways been less. I mean, I say this as a kind of a as a Marxian myself in some ways is less well adapted to these critical challenges than I think the feminist tradition. And indeed, I think the whole shift kind of towards science and technology studies and we mentioned on a hirway before. I mean, all of this, this incredibly resilient kind of post-second wave eco feminist tradition is just incredibly generative right now. And of course, you're a big part of that. So I just was curious to to to hear your thoughts on, you know, well, why, why? Why do you think eco feminism material feminism is is such an important part of our effort to come to terms philosophically and also practically with the challenges that face us?

Speaker3: [00:23:56] Well, I think that in terms of feminism, it's that dual sense of having been positioned as both a subject and an object and that sense of of of theorizing and thinking, even while being a material being that that is important for. Rethinking how we can, how we can better make sense of the kinds of challenges in a world where you cannot imagine this distinction between the human and what used to be known as nature. So in the Anthropocene, we need much more complicated ways of understanding these things. And of course, feminist science studies has been doing this for a long time. Rethinking the nature culture divide. I mean, I think Donna is Primate Visions is one of the most brilliant books on that score, and that was it was quite early. But I do think that I do think that feminist science studies in general and science studies in general is very important here because I think that the turn toward materiality absolutely requires some engagement with science or all sorts of different engagements with science, because otherwise you don't have you don't you can't capture material agency. And to me, when you brought up Marxism, the key, the key element there for me, that Marxist theory in general doesn't have for environmentalism overall is that even though there are all sorts of ways of thinking through how humans and certain economic systems use nature as resource, there's not a way of thinking about how nature environments, animals, different forms of bodies and material materiality act or interact and have some kind of significance and force beyond how they're used.

Speaker3: [00:26:00] And I think this has been this is something that I think gets confused. A great deal. So the title of the collection that I did material material feminisms is different than materialist feminisms, which is, of course, the the Marxist and socialist feminist tradition. And I do think that even though a lot of material feminism's draw upon Marxist theory and do want to include analysis of economic systems, labor class, all of those issues, for me, the key thing is whether or not there's a way of thinking through how to capture material forces and by capture. I really do mean a sort of science study sense of that. So for me, since I've worked so much on toxins and invisible or effects of invisible toxins and environmental health and environmental justice movements, I thought that those science studies models were really important to think through. And then also, theoretically, so that you can you can retain a kind of post structuralist sense of social constructionism that yes, ideologies or Marxism to hear ideologies, discourses, other things affect profoundly how we imagine the world, how we act in the world, how we think. And yet there still is something that may act back or punch back or kick back there and interact with those systems. And so it's that something that I think new materialism try to get to.

Speaker1: [00:27:36] Oh, well, I was just going to just going to agree and to say that, you know, although I found Marx really inspiring muse for years and years when we come to work on energy and environment issues, I found that in some ways, the problem is that although I think some people have argued correctly, there's a kind of metabolic sensibility to some of Marx's theories, especially kind of labor theory that overall, he really is, you know, a kind of modernist who, if he were to be classified in terms of today's positions, would almost be like an acceleration test, because the belief is you have to kind of push through the capitalist system and create this massive use value producing apparatus so that at the end of the day, you can, you know, liberate humanity from from labor, at least kind of wage labor, et cetera. But there really isn't a kind of sense of the environmental cost of that anywhere in there, right? I mean, right, so. So I think I think your point is really well taken that in some ways for all the nice critical moves the Marxian tradition might offer. It really isn't. It isn't able to think about this kind of what you I think what you're calling a kind of more comparable sensibility doesn't really have that.

Speaker3: [00:28:45] Right, exactly. Exactly. And I think Nicole Shokin's book Animal Capital is absolutely brilliant and maybe one of the best analyses of how Marxism can be used for animal studies. But then at the end of that book, it's pretty bleak because the animal body and the representations of the animal are looped in in these ways that. It's hard to see anything beyond that, any possibility of ever changing any of those systems. When I teach that book my graduate courses, it's a pretty it's a pretty bleak day when we get to talking about the end of it, even though everyone always agrees how brilliant it is. And so I mean, I do think we even need different ways of thinking about politics because I guess I guess when you get so when you've seen when you've been here a long time and you've seen so much happen and you become more cynical, you have to find these sorts of micro practices and micro possibilities. Perhaps because it's hard to think that we're going to suddenly get rid of capitalism,

Speaker1: [00:30:00] Particularly for those of us living in Texas as all three of us do.

Speaker3: [00:30:04] Yeah, exactly. It's like in your face,

Speaker2: [00:30:08] In your face all the time. Although, you know, just to one final comment, maybe about the question of marks and maybe you're the one Dominic to write this book is that in some ways, Marks is all about the corporeal because he's all about human labor. Yeah, right? And the kind of expenditure that the body has and what the social consequences are for that. Exactly. So that's that's your next writing assignment to work on.

Speaker3: [00:30:31] Okay, I'm on it. I want and then and then make that multi-species. I'll do that, too. Thank you. Okay.

Speaker2: [00:30:37] All right. I'm going to let one of the hamsters can co-author with you.

Speaker1: [00:30:40] Although let's let's let's also shout out on mouse, because that

Speaker2: [00:30:45] Book is

Speaker1: [00:30:45] A great, great discussion of animal labor, too and its contribution to science.

Speaker3: [00:30:50] Yes. Yes.

Speaker2: [00:30:51] So, Stacey, I wanted to go back to something that you said a few minutes ago and starting your response to that question earlier. And that was, you know, why is why is feminism sort of having a resurgence? Why is it important? What are the kind of tools that feminism gives us in order to think about these changed environmental times to put a euphemistic spin on it? And then one of the things you said is that there's a way feminism has understood for a very long time the position of women and people who are marked as other in any myriad of ways through raise through through sexuality, through their geolocation as being objects, not only subjects, right, the both and. And so I think this is a really important point. And one of the other things that this involves, of course, when we talk about the Anthropocene is is how much the man and I mean man in both senses, man, as in, you know, male bodied human beings and man with a capital M, which for so long stood for anthropologists, how much do you think that that man is being smuggled back in through the idea of anthropologists? Or or have we really gotten to kind of post Enlightenment stage where we can say that that man really stands for the human?

Speaker3: [00:32:13] I think I think one of the ways that man has been smuggled back and is at this level of abstraction, because only only the abstract generic masculine so-called is universal in western culture. So because we have to think through the human in terms of these vast scales of time with the Anthropocene as as Chakrabarti has encouraged us to do. I think that that has led to this sort of abstraction. And actually, with his work, he's very explicit in trying to think through the human simply as this force, as this abstract force. And that's that's where I think the problem occurs. I don't think it's useful to think of the human as this abstract force separate from the thing that he has acted upon. But instead, I think that there has to be this kind of constant scale shifting. So even if you're thinking at the level of these, these vast temporal scales, each each human or group of humans or political group is still going to intersect with that from their own geopolitical location and their own, their own daily practices. It can't. It can't be. That sort of abstraction of the human doesn't really make sense as something to inhabit. And so I think in some ways he's asking the wrong questions and making the human immaterial in a way.

Speaker3: [00:33:57] I mean, I think I think that this this sense of the human as having acted upon the Earth. Needs to also be flipped and thinking about how these unruly agencies of things that perhaps the human has. Transform, say, chemicals, and again, I think it's very useful to think of Zenabis chemicals here, how they have then changed who humans are in terms of our bodies, our health, our psychologies and all sorts of things. And now I think that the field of of epigenetics as it can intersect both with the concept of intersectionality in feminist theory, but then also with environmental justice. I think that's a really good way of thinking through what the Anthropocene is and what the human is is a political subject. So as opposed to where Chakrabarti starts with this sense of the abstract as the abstract human, as a force on the Earth. I think we have to flip that around and think through human beings as trans corporately enmeshed within particular locations and the dynamics of something like epigenetics and environmental justice, climate justice and all of those things which map individuals and groups in their relation to these larger global forces and scales.

Speaker1: [00:35:31] So, you know, one of the things you talk about in the show on acid piece is also the need to think about an Anthropocene that's not always about questions of the terrestrial, but also questions of the aquatic. And I know that there's a lot of reasoning behind that. But it raises a kind of a more, I guess, a meta point for me too, which is, you know, thinking about the Chakrabarty and intervention and his climate theses. It raises not only the question I think of concept and maybe ideology, but also of narration like how do we write about it? How do we talk about it? How can we build ourselves better habits for for thinking through these issues where we we don't come back to kind of singular, monolithic agents, you know, because it's even hard listening to us talk. We're talking about the human like we're still kind of trapped in that rhetoric

Speaker3: [00:36:21] A little bit.

Speaker1: [00:36:21] Yeah, exactly. And so I don't know, but it seems to me in your writing, you are pushing against that and you're in part because of the the activities that you produce and the choices you're making in terms of the material you're engaging. I don't know if you'd want to reflect a little bit about that at that level.

Speaker3: [00:36:40] Yeah, that's that's a great point. So one of the things I'm very interested in is deep sea creatures, which is the topic of the the next book. I'm about halfway done with that book, and I'm really interested in the census of marine life and the way in which they've created these highly set sized portraits of various deep sea creatures and other sea creatures, including newly discovered ones, and thinking about how these how these images are delivered into computer screens and coffee table books, and how they circulate in various ways. And I'm not. I'm sort of suspicious of the idea that everything would be in narrative. I think I had this argument with somebody at at some conference I was at or something. But I think that with with with some creatures, of course, the ones on the bottom of the sea, it'd be it'd be very difficult for humans to construct any kind of narrative about them and certainly not from their perspective. And of course, aesthetics is problematic, too, because we're so attuned to consuming images and aesthetics is all about human pleasure. But I'm trying to think through how we could imagine the Anthropocene as a multi species event or unfolding and what these things would look like from the perspectives of of other creatures, if that's even possible to imagine. And actually, the thing that I would most like to have people try to imagine, which is really not thinkable at all, is the number of ocean creatures that humans have already rendered extinct that we will have never have discovered in the first place. So how many creatures are there that have met their extinction in the in the altered seas that we don't know about? And I think that those creatures are the ones that could be emblematic of a kind of Anthropocene thinking at sea?

Speaker1: [00:38:44] Is this is this what you're talking about when you talk about Eco Deluxe, which I love as a as you call a dangerous pleasure?

Speaker3: [00:38:51] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:38:55] Or not? Well, you you talk about you talk about dwelling and this is like dwelling in the dissolve, dwelling in the dissolve. And, you know, if we're not going to if we're not going to engage things through narrative or you're right, I mean anthropologists, especially the ones working on multi species. It's the same struggle, how do you how do you, you know, voice, what a dog is thinking or a cat or a tree

Speaker2: [00:39:23] Without always sort of relating it back to Anthropocene,

Speaker1: [00:39:27] Right? We're making it just a human fantasy that's masquerading as something else. And that's why I thought the Eco Delic was kind of exciting because it's it's kind of hallucinatory a little bit, but maybe that offers you a bridging. That's not just a matter of reason.

Speaker3: [00:39:42] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that Eco Delic is a is a good way to think. I mean, because there is that sense of even in drug cultures, of the expansion of consciousness. And you know what is what is imagining the Anthropocene itself or imagining these different temporal or geographic scales that we're all involved in, but a profoundly kind of mind altering exercise. And one in which affects and practices such as empathy play a part. I think I think the thing that I'm very suspicious and wary of is the sort of hyper separation and delusions of safety and boundaries. And I think that that's that's one reason that environmentalism seems entirely optional. You know, the more that we externalize the environment, then we don't have to think about it. It's just it's just a consumerist world. We work, we buy things. The world does what it's supposed to do for us, it's under control. But then the problem with thinking about any kind of environmental issue at this point in time is that it is so bleak. It's so horrifying. The more you learn, the more depressing it is. And I don't go from there to hope a lot of people will talk about hope. I really won't. I'm not. I'm not that hopeful. I really can't go there. And so I think for me that the eco delic was a way of. Staying with these profoundly disturbing realities without backing away, without taking refuge in some places safety, but also without projecting a kind of hope on things which I don't. That doesn't work for me. That seems, it seems sort of falsely optimistic. But but just staying with these realities long enough to perhaps try to imagine some ways of being and acting that could have some sort of less negative impact.

Speaker2: [00:42:05] You know, I wanted to ask you, too, Stacy, about kind of the method of of new materialism and how how you get into the material, the phenomenon, the the issues, the themes, the tropes and whatever these these dynamics. How how do we investigate them? And I'm thinking here of of Karen Barad, right? And she has a very, I guess, sort of obvious way to enter into the material because she's a physicist, right? So that's that's that's her world, that's her scientific training. She can, you know, speak very well in a very erudite way about the practicalities of physics for those of us who don't have that deep scientific training. How do we get into the material of, you know, whether it's neurotoxins and pollution or whether it's about, you know, species of birds and migration routes, or whether it's about, you know, creatures, deep water, sea creatures that have disappeared? How do we, as social scientists or humanists, sort of enter into the material world without how to put it, without pretending to be a scientist, I guess, or a natural scientist or physical scientists and still bring something to light? How do you go about getting into this world of science and materiality?

Speaker3: [00:43:24] Well, I think I come at it from a science studies perspective, rather than a particularly humanist perspective, although I am firmly in the humanities. I think it helps me to think about with bodily nature is the first. The second book that I wrote the practices of environmental, health and environmental justice movements through the people in those movements and the fact that they do need access to scientific information. But of course, that does not put science in a kind of separate care, the category at all, because the science that is created in the science that is available and the science that is disseminated does to some degree, depend upon the political movements themselves. So I see it as a as a real entangled, entangled kind of landscape that everyone has to negotiate. So maybe starting with X Risk Society that we need this information, we're dependent on this information that comes from science. And I don't think I don't think there's a there's really a way around that for a lot of the issues that I study because the book that I'm writing right now is about deep, deep sea creatures. And of course, I'm a scuba diver, but I can't I can't scuba dive into the deep sea, so I'm entirely dependent on the sorts of information that I find. But I think that that's fine because what I'm doing is looking at how how the aesthetics of that information is portrayed and how the creatures are portrayed aesthetically, how the information travels, who and who interacts with it. I don't for for the sorts of things that I work on. I'm not a real fan of phenomenology or a kind of direct experience because I think that with new materialism, there does have to be this sense of material agencies and material captures which then the question is how? How do you get to that? And I think that there does have to be some sort of scientific information with regards to the environment, certainly or animal studies or human health or other topics. Mm.

Speaker2: [00:45:45] Yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm working on a chapter now for a book, and the chapter is currently called species. And I think that one of the things that contemporary science is showing us and has been shown us for a long time are these rates of extinction right or or status of being threatened for different species? And so in a weird way, I mean, I know you've made a really powerful argument about the erasure of of of biological species and other creatures and kind of multi multi species in these, you know, these gods eye view of the of the Anthropocene. And yet I feel like the way in which. Other creatures and other species are emerging in this time is through their extinction, it's like they, you know, they're it's like they're in their very absence. They're rising and surfacing and having some kind of agency. I mean, it's really eerie. It's almost, yeah, and there is kind of a like a necrophiliac or an instinctive feel. It kind of sensibility to it where the way we know our creatures is through their disappearance,

Speaker3: [00:46:54] That is so disturbing.

Speaker2: [00:46:56] Yeah. Well, it

Speaker3: [00:46:57] Is so disturbing and I think so true. I think that's a brilliant point, and I don't know what, what, what to do about that. I mean, could that be a kind of if if there is a kind of necrophilia there, could that in some ways at least be better than turning away or ignoring it? I mean, could that be the draw in a sort of erotic, twisted eroticism there? Could that could that possibly be more positive than just a kind of blankness, I guess.

Speaker2: [00:47:31] Well, humans are nothing, if not twisted.

Speaker3: [00:47:33] So yeah,

Speaker2: [00:47:35] I'm happy to go without notice

Speaker3: [00:47:37] On it. Yeah, no, that's that's a really great point, though.

Speaker1: [00:47:40] There's also, you know, I think at the same time as I totally agree with that, there's also these weird and very selective kind of biophilia now around the types of organisms we imagine are going to help solve, especially like our fuel future. I don't know if you guys have been following, like all of this talk of, you know, harnessing algal fuels, right? Basically, this idea of harnessing massive amounts of algae and creating biomass out of it. I feel like that's, you know, and again, it's no better. It's just that it's like you either work for us, we eat you or you die the three

Speaker3: [00:48:13] Options or, you know, that's on the microbiome or

Speaker1: [00:48:19] Your or your companion species like Felix. I mean, he's doing OK, too, I guess, right?

Speaker3: [00:48:24] He's doing OK. Yes. And I am very aware of the fact that I've been a I've been a vegetarian since I was 13 years old. And yet, of course, when I buy dog food and cat food, it's animals who have been in factory farms. I'm sure who've ended up in those or fish or other things that have ended up in that that animal food. So yeah, the companion species are doing very well overall, although in Texas, that's actually another issue. There's a lot of stray dogs in Dallas, so not all of them are doing so well.

Speaker2: [00:48:58] Yeah, all the more reason to take a trip to Dallas, I guess. Yeah, I wanted to turn back to what's being called in some quarters that geological turn. And again, you've, you know, laid out some really excellent arguments about why that's problematic in different ways in terms of obscuring or forgetting bias and Chemo's in that that argument. I wanted to think about for a second Kathryn Yousef's argument that we're in this geological turn that allows us to kind of think differently. One of the things that I find challenging about that is human being's capacity to think in those long term durational escapes of of chronicity, shall we say, like the ability to kind of think geologically because I think that's what Katherine Yussuff is is suggesting that we do to begin to think geologically and not just in terms of demarcating, you know, are we in the Holocene or the Anthropocene or, you know, whatever scene you want to choose because there's a million of them out there. But do you find that there's something useful about the kind of the temporal questions that get raised in terms of thinking geologically? Do you think we can? Or is that a a fiction?

Speaker3: [00:50:20] Well, I think I really like use-of-force work and Jeffrey Jerome Koans as well and his really amazing book Stone. And I think that with both of them, what one of the things one of the many things I like about their work is that they do theorize this kind of enmeshment of the human, with the geologic, with the mythic. So there isn't that sense in the of the Anthropocene as something that you are distant from or geology is something that the human is removed from. But a much more material kind of entanglement there. But in terms of the temporality, I think that I mean, I think it is difficult to think in those terms, definitely. I think one of the things that someone like Jeffrey Cohen can do as a medievalist is from that vantage point within human historical timescales, Western history, which is of course, much smaller than the expanse of the Anthropocene itself. But depending on when you date that, that that he can, he can write with a much larger sense of history that he's engaging with in terms of thinking through stones and the cultural meanings of the stones and then also the not cultural meanings of the stones, he's trying to think in a dis anthropocentric way about stones, even as he's ranging across these different human timescales. So I think that I think that's really valuable. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:51:58] Mm hmm. Yeah. Know his his work is great. Thank you for doing the shout out to Geoffrey Cohen. I think he's doing really fantastic stuff and and stuff on the ocean as well. So yes, it'd be great to get him on the podcast, actually. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the other thing that struck me about this call for the geological turn is, you know, to think geologically, to think lyrically in some ways. And I think Stephanie Lemonnier, manager, would would agree with this. We've already been thinking and acting and practicing geologically for some time because we live within carbon and we live with petroleum and coal and all of these other resources that have been unearthed out of GEOs. And now we live in it and it lives in us, in the air, in in the gas tanks of our cars in so many ways as the basis of our economy. So I really love Catherine use-of-force work too. But there's a part of me that says, You know what? We already are thinking acting and living geologically because we are fully enmeshed in in petroleum and other carbon fuels. So, right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:53:08] And the manager is living oil is just it's an amazing account of that. Yeah, it's really, really breathtaking. And I think I mean, I think that's that's the trick. In some ways, what Lemon does is bring those things into this tangible everyday sense that we hadn't seen before. And she she traces the oil through all sorts of cultural artifacts that we may not have ever noticed it within before. And I think that's really brilliant as well.

Speaker2: [00:53:45] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker1: [00:53:47] So just to go back to something you mentioned before, which I think was quite provocative and wonderful where you said, you know, environment can be optional, which I think is great, a great point in a way. You know, the concept of environment is as much a hindrance as as a as a way forward sometimes. But nonetheless, you've talked, you've written a little bit, I guess maybe this is going back to bodily natures about, you know, maybe what a post human environmental ethics might look like. And I'm just curious, you know, if if that's still something you're interested in and if there's anything out there you find particularly inspirational in terms of modeling what what those ethics might look like?

Speaker3: [00:54:28] Hmm. That's a good question. I don't think I've found anything new since I have been thinking about the concept of trans reality. I mean, that's that's still where I am and in in lots of ways. And the reason I started the the other book, however, the deep sea creatures book is I wanted to try to think about places where trans cordiality couldn't extend. And so I felt the bottom of the sea would be would be a kind of problem for for thinking that through because we we can't, it's very difficult to imagine ourselves having any impact on the creatures at the bottom of the sea that we haven't even perhaps discovered yet discovered in quotation marks. But I haven't really figured that problem out yet. So. So I think I think I need more time if I'm going to formulate another sort of post humanist environmental ethics. In the meantime, in my own daily life, the concept of trans corporeal is pretty much all consuming, so I'll stick with that for a while. Well, it like

Speaker2: [00:55:43] It works on so many levels. Stacy, it's just it's got such extension to it. It can go. It has it has legs, it can go everywhere in many ways.

Speaker3: [00:55:52] Yeah. And I'm actually really interested in this notion of the of epigenetics and environmental justice and intersectionality as all coming together in a kind of trans corporeal way that's across generations even. It's disturbing, I don't know. Shannon Sullivan's new book about epigenetics is pretty is pretty disturbing about how, how you think about problems with race and the history of racism in terms of people. People embodying that in this extremely literal way. I'm not really quite sure what I think of that yet. I think there's a real danger possibly to to thinking in that way that she formulates, but also an extreme sense of responsibility for those histories that are embodied by living human beings in the present moment.

Speaker2: [00:56:47] Mm hmm. Right. And how in epigenetics, it's often the female body that gets blamed for, you know, living in toxic environments or consuming something that she's not supposed to write. So there's there's a lot of culpability that gets tied up in that, too. That's pretty, pretty nasty. Or it can be.

Speaker3: [00:57:06] Right? Yeah, I wanted to.

Speaker2: [00:57:08] And by the way, we have in anthropology, we have a quite a few people now who are doing work on epigenetics. So it's exciting. You know, I think it's happening across disciplines, which is great. So it's it's a good time for that. Mm-hmm. I wanted to go back to, I don't know, maybe this is a more challenging question or provocative or something. I know I keep mentioning this, you know, this sort of erasure of bios and Chemo's again, because I think it's really important and fundamental. And one of the best elements of the work that you're doing is how the Anthropocene or how the scene and geology sort of obscures. So if if we if we sort of let go of the scene, if we move away from the geologic and we move back towards, you know, sort of chemicals, toxicity, pollution or bias and the protection of of different species and creatures. Here's the provocation is it isn't that what many environmental movements have been doing for so long is trying to address pollution and environmental contamination or the loss of certain, of course, charismatic species like the megafauna. You know, we've been doing those sorts of projects in environmentalism at least since John Muir, and we haven't quite figured out the response, right? Because we're in this pickle that we're in right now. So how is there a way that we can refresh or renew that, that focus in terms of, as you're saying, environmental justice or eco justice and kind of take back those domains because I think, you know, they've been through such a long history, you know, bias and Chemo's has been it's been tracked by by environmentalism for so long. Is there a way that we can kind of retake those, those areas?

Speaker3: [00:59:00] Well, I think that one of the opportunities that the concept of the Anthropocene holds and really, you don't even need the concept of the Anthropocene. You just need to say drive around the North Texas metroplex and see that everything has been so overlaid with the human that we need to really start emphasizing the possibilities for environmentalism that are incredibly local, but in a way that that doesn't let anything off the hook. So really any any building that is built, I mean, I would love to see regulations for architecture that have to be about different species. So sky rises that have places for birds of prey to roost. The whole the whole idea of the urban, wild and urban ecosystems and suburban ecosystems and exurban ecosystems. Because, you know, as I as I drive around the whole metroplex with my son taking him to soccer games, it's horrifying. I mean, it's just horrifying to see the sprawl and the highways and more and more highway projects. And as we're covering everything over. I think we have to make those challenges extremely local because there really isn't any out there anymore. So the way that we the way that we tend to externalize the environment with notions of wilderness, that's it's I don't know. I mean, I think I think that that's one of the ways that we can not not put environmentalism someplace else because there is no someplace else. And I think that's the that's the lesson of the Anthropocene. There is no someplace else. Look at the whole Gulf Coast, you know, the entire Gulf Coast, the entire Gulf of Mexico. Where is the wilderness there? Where is anything that we would call nature in that way? So that possibility for reimagining spaces that we inhabit, that we drive through, that we use the places that humans use have to be habitats for other creatures, or there will be no habitats for other creatures.

Speaker2: [01:01:23] Yeah, that's. I beautifully put and Felix is trying to get a word in there, too.

Speaker1: [01:01:28] Yes, I feel like I really feel like Felix really wants to participate. We should give him a chance to.

Speaker3: [01:01:33] Yes. Yes, the mail man.

Speaker1: [01:01:38] Oh, the mail man.

Speaker3: [01:01:39] Yes. He's going to go and market the mail man. I had to let him out for that.

Speaker2: [01:01:44] That's that's a that's a very wholesome dog thing to do.

Speaker1: [01:01:47] Yeah. But I mean, of course, living in Houston, we couldn't agree with you more about concerns about sprawl and toxicity. And we live very close to the Gulf Coast. And, you know, it's like the bird sanctuaries are all next to like refineries and things like that.

Speaker3: [01:02:04] But you know, it's insane. Know it's I remember when when the BP oil disaster was going on and every, every moment I just kept thinking about all the dolphins that were in that disaster, that were in all of those chemicals and all of the fish that were in the chemicals and the birds. And that was just so horrifying and disturbing. And still, of course, the effects still go on. How long will will the Gulf be affected by the BP disaster? I don't know. Thousands of years forever. I mean, who knows what, what, what all the results were, whether they'll ever be studied adequately? There's so much that we don't know. And I think that that's that's one of the most important things to me in terms of environmental ethics is to always emphasize how the epistemological and the ethical are intertwined here and what we can and can't know is such a political matter.

Speaker2: [01:03:07] Yeah. And I love the way you put it earlier. There is no someplace else, you know, it's all. It's all leaking into us and out of us all the time.

Speaker1: [01:03:15] Exactly, exactly. So if not, if not a call to hope, because we're not we're not expecting you to be a hope vendor. We have other 12 other people on the podcast who will

Speaker2: [01:03:24] Peddle that

Speaker1: [01:03:25] Pedal hope to us. But but I think I think you're one of the things you you are, you are instead helping to bring forth is is an exquisite attentiveness to the world around us and our trans corporeal relations and being so that, you know, maybe it's not so much about hoping for the future in some abstract way, but being much more present and invested where we are right now. Mm hmm. And taking that more seriously?

Speaker2: [01:03:54] Yeah, that's great.

Speaker3: [01:03:55] Thank you. I love that. Thank you. I wish you could just speak for me all the time. No, that was just a beautiful, beautiful way of putting it. I really like that.

Speaker1: [01:04:06] Well, in that case, maybe, maybe that's a good place to stop.

Speaker2: [01:04:09] Okay. Stacy Dominick is famous for his synthetic final words. It's something that he's perfected at conferences over the years, and it's his favorite role as to do the synthetic at the end. But yes, it was nicely done.

Speaker3: [01:04:24] Yes, I love it.

Speaker2: [01:04:25] And it'll be in the digital sphere as long as whenever you want to go

Speaker1: [01:04:28] Back to it. But let's let's make sure we also cycle back to where we started and say your new book coming out is called exposed and we're going to we're going to put a link to that up on the liner notes to this episode so people can directly go and get their hands on it. I don't know if Felix has anything he wants to plug. Does he have a podcast yet or anything like that? I think he might

Speaker3: [01:04:48] Have no podcast.

Speaker1: [01:04:49] Well, that might be. You could be the first trans corporeal podcasting team if, yeah, if we want to go,

Speaker3: [01:04:56] It tends to be very shy. He's a very shy German shepherd. He's terrified of Chihuahuas, so that's cute. That's that's very sweet. And to me,

Speaker2: [01:05:06] That's very sweet

Speaker1: [01:05:07] But sassy. Thank you so much for taking the time. We know how busy you are, and we're sorry we couldn't do this together and hope we can get together sometime soon, whether in Dallas, in Houston or or somewhere that may be less damaged. Environment contact

Speaker3: [01:05:20] Somewhere. Yes, I hope so, too. I hope we can get together sometime too. I really enjoy this and thank you so much. You both. You ask such great questions. It was it was a really challenging and I think really fruitful conversation. It was wonderful.

Speaker2: [01:05:35] Thank you. Really, really good, Stacy. Thank you. And we'll we'll meet up in the Mariana Trench later.

Speaker3: [01:05:40] Yes, yes. And write new tales. Yeah. Right? Okay. Ok, bye. Bye bye. Look.