Table of Contents for Environmental Humanities on the Brink
Prologue: Of Skulls and Shells
The Prologue introduces the notion of the Vanitas hypothesis as a response to the Anthropocene hypothesis. A vanitas image is the pictorial equivalent of an open landfill where heaps of meaningless and yet valuable things are laid to rest along with the worldly values attached to them for everyone to see. It is a mode of depositing value that turns displayed riches into a layer of stuff. Like the Anthropocene hypothesis in that regard, a vanitas image threatens the historical and visual record with indifference, but unlike a geological projection, it is designed to pay tribute to the day-to-day erasure of the world. The Vanitas hypothesis is about the feeling for a disappointing relation to images and other representations of the world. It is a feeling whose admission to pointlessness constitutes an ecocritical achievement in the Anthropocene present.
1.Canvas
Chapter 1 locates a desire for non-indifference toward the historical record in an attempt to think differently about the omniscience of projection models that let the future into the present while generating as their by-product a past that never was and thus cannot be remembered. Thus, difference will be recovered in the form of memories of the world. That is, as projections from the past with temporal ambitions of their own—starting with a seventeenth-century canvas painted by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts to give the illusion that the image is about to peel away from the frame underneath and eventually self-destroy.
2.Debris
Chapter 2 focuses on the notion of environmental memory, which I understand as a way of letting planetary time enter the historical record. Environmental memory hypothesizes that in its stillness landscape painting, for instance, bears witness to something it did not know it witnessed. If the belated negative knowledge that comes with this postulate can be retrieved as information by historians and ethnographers, it can also bring to the fore temporal relations and debris that will not be fully reabsorbed by environmental history but lend themselves to unanticipated interpretive articulations extending the reach of early modern landscapes—and icescapes—in the Anthropocene present.
3.Toxics
The emergent temporal relations Chapter 3 grapples with are mostly toxic. The toxicity it seeks to describe is at once chemical and affective, anecdotal and systemic, spectacular and hard to assess, forensic and fabulous, measurable in soils and bodies contaminated by a banned pesticide and deposited in their stories and the stories of other bodies before them. It is a toxicity whose future needs to be written by litigation and practices of environmental remediation, but whose past I reclaim in the early French Caribbean chronicles written by Jean-Baptiste Labat outside the purview of modern toxicology.
4.Paper
Interpretation and conservation are usually kept separate so as to let interpretive practices invest objects and stories with full confidence that they will be available to interpretation at any given future point in time. Chapter 4 turns to texts by Jean de Léry and François Rabelais that may not be so confident in matters of continuity and durability and recovers their lack of confidence as a mode of engagement with a different relation to the historical record and its medium. With this stretching exercise, I argue that it is not only possible but somewhat urgent in the Anthropocene present to consider what an old media—early print culture—has to say about a temporality of the trace that is not necessarily the one humanistic inquiry has traditionally envisioned in philological terms.
5.Ark
Chapter 5 solicits memories of fragility and thriving deposited in a fairy tale—Charles Perrault's version of "Puss in Boots" (1697)—in an attempt to read the geoengineering manifesto behind the Pleistocene Park project in Siberia as an experiment in storytelling. The point is neither to aggrandize a fairy tale nor to belittle the ambition of a geoscientist. Rather, it is to challenge what it means for scholars of the premodern past to engage with ecology and environmental discourse as something other than a gateway to modernity for stranded knowledge retrieved just in time to achieve relevance to save the future.
6.Meat
In vitro meat (IVM) is meat in every respect but for its memory of animal death. It is consumable flesh reduced to its protein structure. For now, IVM exists mostly as an image and is consumed as an image or as a prototype. It projects a future where meat could be consumed without afterthoughts, consumed like an image but outside the history of its representation. The ambition of Chapter 6 is to trade IVM claims to futurity for memories of painted flesh offered to image theory in the form of trompe l'oeil painting and Netherlandish still lifes featuring meat and butchered animals next to living counterparts.
Epilogue: Light
The Epilogue brings the book to a flickering end by soliciting memories of extinction deposited in crepuscular tableaus of candle extinguishment painted by French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Early modern extinction is neither a paleontological event nor an evolutionary concept. It pertains to light and affects rather than to forms of collective existence on the brink of collapse—be it a species, a language, or a way of life. It designates a volatile response to the world that hurts. What does this mean to extinction studies? The book concludes with the idea that if the Anthropocene hypothesis threatens the historical record with indifference, it is only to the extent that humanistic inquiry cannot take the responsivity that the emergence of a planetary archive made of temperature charts, generalized social inequalities, crop monoculture, and sprawling landfills demands from the present.