Trigger

In 2007 and 2008, I worked as a researcher for Paradox (a Dutch producer of multiplatform photography and film projects) on a large-scale documentary. The Last Days of Shishmaref comprised a feature-length documentary by director Jan Louter and an extensive photo series by photographer Dana Lixenberg. A team compiled by Paradox mainly worked on turning Lixenberg’s photographs into a photobook, an exhibition, a project website and, later, a web documentary (released in 2010). Louter’s documentary, which had a limited release in cinemas and was screened at international film festivals, focuses on how a few families in Shishmaref, Alaska, view changing environmental conditions and their foreseeable consequences for the village.

Along with thirteen other Alaskan coastal villages, Shishmaref has been severely threatened with erosion since the beginning of this century. During a series of November storms over the past two decades, Shishmaref, which sits on a barrier island off the coast of the Seward Peninsula, near the Bering Strait, has lost at least fourteen homes to the sea. In 2008, the United States Army Corps of Engineers started construction on a storm surge barrier consisting of basalt blocks, but this solution can only be temporary. Within one or two generations, all of the approximately 600 inhabitants will have to move to higher ground on the mainland.

Louter referred to the villagers as belonging to the first generation of ‘climate refugees’ right at the time when the news broke that several small islands in the Pacific had sunk below sea level. For some Polynesian nations, the situation was already direr than that of Alaskan villages, although it’s true that global warming conditions proceed much more quickly in the polar regions. This year, for example, Alaska experienced unprecedented heat waves and multiple forest fires.

Without much environmental concern, I booked flights to the United States in the spring of 2008 for my research in museums and archives in New York City and Washington D.C., in the Alaskan cities of Fairbanks and Anchorage, and subsequent fieldwork in Shishmaref. Strangely, I had no qualms about my carbon footprint while I participated in an endeavour aimed at raising awareness of the grave consequences of excessive release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. I had vague memories of a 1980s public campaign in the Netherlands, including the slogan ‘A better environment begins with you.’ However, I was too immersed in studying the Inupiaq-Eskimo^{The exonym Eskimo is controversial. Most indigenous people in the circumpolar regions nowadays refer to themselves using indigenous names. In Alaska, the southwestern Yup’ik and northwestern Inupiaq still tag Eskimo onto the endonym or refer to themselves more broadly as Alaskan Eskimos.}culture and history and searching for any historical documents related to Shishmaref that I could lay my hands on. Any worries about my own climatic impact were secondary.

A decade later, environmental concerns have risen on the global political agenda, and rightfully so, as the situation for vulnerable populations has only worsened. Despite the many conferences and international agreements, both binding and non-binding, the human consumption of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gasses have continued to increase. Awareness is one thing, swift political change another. It seems that, for the time being, we’ll remain trapped within a political-economic system based on limitless growth at the expense of ecological resilience and sustainability. For a long time, we (most of all people whose demand on natural resources exceeds the biocapacity per person) behaved as if no outside force could ever stop the march of progress.

On a return flight from Alaska, I began reading a 2007 reissue of The Weather Makers (2005), Tim Flannery’s popular science book about humanity’s influence on climate change, and James Lovelock’s poignant The Revenge of Gaia (2006), a plea for the rapid decarbonisation of society. I felt I needed to learn at least a minimum of background while working on a project in which global warming was a major theme. And while the term ‘Anthropocene’ was already there in Flannery’s book, I barely took notice.

Many years later, in 2015, when the increasingly urgent topic of global warming was becoming impossible to ignore, I attended a lecture by Bruno Latour in a theatre in Utrecht, and the term ‘Anthropocene’ resurfaced.^{Latour, Bruno. 2015. How to Sort Out the Many Ambiguities of the Concept of the Anthropocene. Lecture given at Stadsschouwburg, Utrecht, 15 April 2015. A revised version of this lecture was later included as a chapter in Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press.} Latour spoke like an eloquent prophet of doom, and his words were supported by his four decades of deep reading and thinking about exchanges between science and society since the seventeenth century. Latour opened my eyes in that I began to understand that the problems posed by the Earth’s warming shouldn’t only be interpreted technologically; rather, they’re fundamentally of a religious and ethical nature. In Latour’s terms, we must feel the Earth trembling as if the apocalypse is happening right now and not in some mythical past or ominous future. In another telling metaphor, he spoke of how modernists tend to assume nature to be a passive backdrop to their activities but that we’re now rediscovering it happens to have a will of its own. Through all sorts of unpredictable and uncontrollable acts, nature claims an important role on the stage of human activities.