This quarter, The Environmental Studies Workshop will meet on various Fridays. Please notice that the locations and dates are inconsistent throughout the quarter!
Spring ’23 Schedule
April 14th in Wieboldt Hall 103 at 12pm
-Jarrod Hore, University of New South Wales, Australia:
Carboniferous Imaginaries in the South: Colonial Surveying and the Fate of Fossil Energy
Geoscientists now routinely examine the movement of continental blocks over deep time to glean information about the possible location of valuable resources. This practice was initially developed and perfected in the nineteenth century through engagements with fossil deposits – coal, gas, and petroleum reserves – and scaled up to global proportions by surveyors working in the southern hemisphere. In this period geologists identified conformities that link fossil fuels in the Paraná basin in Brazil to the Bowen basin of Queensland, through the Karoo basin of South Africa and the original Gondwana coal measures of India. Defined by the distinguishable Glossopteris fossil leaf, southern coal deposits are an energy network in deep time, latterly reinvented as a resource for imperialism, colonialism, and modernization from the nineteenth century.
This paper examines how these resources were conceived during this initial moment of reinvention and begins to map the uses to which they were put. Starting in the late nineteenth century, when colonial geological surveys first began to quantify the extent and value of these southern hemisphere coal basins, the paper explores the interests that surveyors and geologists pursued in the strata and the cultures of exploitation and extraction that developed in the wake of their study. Geologists in India, Australia, Southern Africa, and South America all worked intimately with related carboniferous stratigraphies. By the early twentieth century geologists had concluded, in the terms of Lewis Leigh Fermor (1880-1954), that the key difference between south and north was the considerable fossil energy wealth that the former presented to the latter. These geologists and their patrons in government and business therefore framed the remnants of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland as a vast energy source for various imperial projects.
During the late nineteenth century the resources of the former supercontinent energized imaginations but in the twentieth century they began to support economies. At least in its Permian permutations, ‘Gondwanaland’ came to be associated with coal, and therefore to modernity, wealth production, energy transitions, and to a modern geological south. According to a recent BP report, southern hemisphere deposits still make up about 24.4% of known reserves of high-grade anthracite. In India the Gondwana coalfields make up about 98% of remaining coal reserves. These deposits have been highly significant to industrial and economic development across the global south. By elaborating on this modern history, this paper challenges a (north) Atlantic-oriented history of fossil-fueled industrialization. An antipodean focus on Gondwanaland helps us consider the place of southern sources of fossil energy in nineteenth and twentieth-century growth trends. This offers up the possibility of a new history of fossil energy, coal, and global capitalism rooted firmly in southern geographies, temporalities, and political economies.
Jarrod Hore is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and Co-Director of the New Earth Histories Research Group. He is a historian of environments, geologies, and photographies and the author of Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (University of California Press, 2022). His current project investigates the underpinnings of modern earth science in a series of geological surveys in late nineteenth century India, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina.
May 12th in Wieboldt Hall 103 at 12pm
-Andrew Seber, University of Chicago:
A Changing Region: Rural Health, Land Loss, and the Price of Biosecurity
(Swine Development Center, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 1972)
By 1990, North Carolina contained the largest hog farms in the United States. While Iowa remained King Hog, the top producing firms (Murphy, Smithfield, Carroll’s) quickly focused their expansion into eastern North Carolina, where the state owned and operated a factory farm and renowned demonstration site. The third chapter of my dissertation, Factory/Farm: Industrial Animals and the Other Environmental Movement, prompts a reckoning with competing hierarchies of rural health when and where humans are compelled into relation with mass animal life. While the state invested heavily in animal health, scientific and extension service personnel, and land to develop a “total swine program”, Black farmers experienced especially devastating credit and land loss crises. As scientists aspired to control the viral, pestilent, and bacterial worlds of hog confinements, small landowners and low-wage workers charged that industrialization threatened the health and survival of their communities. This and the following chapter demonstrate the centrality of animal breeding, waste, and processing facilities in early economic and environmental justice organizing in the South (and Midwest).
Andrew Seber is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Chicago
May 19th in Wieboldt Hall 103 at 12pm
-Julia Mead, University of Chicago:
Frozen Assets: Czechoslovakia’s 1979 Mega-Blizzard and the Energetic Social Contract of Late Socialism
This chapter of my dissertation, Socialist Rust Belt: Energy, Masculinity, and the End of Czechoslovak Socialism, tells the story of Czechoslovakia’s “coal vacation” during the winter of 1979. It argues that the socialist state–especially after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–made a Faustian bargain in which it derived political legitimacy by providing its citizens with an ever-increasing standard of living predicated on ready access to cheap coal. The winter of 1979 was historically cold and snowy in central Europe, and Czechoslovak society ground to a halt for a month because coal froze in the ground and railways froze over, drying up the country’s energy supply. Schools, non-essential workplaces, restaurants, pubs, and cinemas were closed to conserve fuel, hence the name “coal vacations.” The chapter explores how geopolitics in the wake of the 1970s oil shocks, national politics, and the natural world collided to reveal the fragility of energy-intensive socialism.
Julia Mead is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Chicago.
May 26th in SSRC 340 (and on Zoom) at 10:30am
-Kristi Del Vecchio, University of Chicago:
“Kinnovation”: Alternative Methods and Moral Responses to Eco-Reproductive Concerns
This chapter examines moral responses to eco-reproductive concerns: those that deal with having and raising children in an era shaped by anthropogenic environmental threats. I begin by analyzing recent moral philosophical debates about human reproduction and overpopulation, problematizing the ethical methods and subsequent moral interventions that shape this literature. That is, moral philosophers who engage this topic utilize a method of abstract moral reasoning, arguing that affluent Westerns ought to avoid undue harm and injustice by having fewer biological children. However, by employing an alternative method – one that is more contextual and experiential in approach – I argue that these are not the only moral interventions that warrant our attention. I make this case by conducting a qualitative analysis of more than 80 digital testimonies from adults who are grappling with eco-reproductive moral concerns. I find that my informants often strive to “make kin” beyond the context of the biologically related nuclear family in various ways: by considering adoption and foster parenting, taking up substantial caring roles as “chosen family,” and pursuing professions that serve young people. Drawing upon a concept developed by Donna J. Haraway, I refer to these moral responses as kinnovation. I conclude by suggesting that kinnovation is a compelling eco-reproductive moral response in light of its constructive potential. Rather than focusing primarily on moral limitations (i.e., having fewer biological children as philosophers suggest), kinnovation instead gestures toward more capacious alternatives (i.e., creating and sustaining broader networks of care and responsibility).
Kristi Del Vecchio (she/hers) is a PhD Candidate at The University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation investigates how environmental threats are impacting reproduction and kinship in the U.S., and uses frameworks from both environmental ethics and religious ethics to explore these developments.