Review of Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, eds

Banting, Pamela

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 16 | No. 2 Article 182-1-2018Environmental Humanities: Voices from theAnthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and SerenellaIovinoPamela BantingUniversity of CalgaryPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons,Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Nature and Society Relations CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeBanting, Pamela. "Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino." The Goose,vol. 16 , no. 2 , article 18, 2018,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/18.Thinking about and Thinking with the Environmental Humanities  Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by SERPIL OPPERMANN and SERENELLA IOVINO Rowman and Littlefield, 2017 $57.95    Reviewed by PAMELA BANTING   I offered to review this anthology of primarily critical-theoretical essays in the hope of learning what European ecocritics were thinking about the Anthropocene, compared with their Canadian counterparts in such anthologies as Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones’ Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments, Rob Boschman and Mario Trono’s Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene, and Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman’s Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss & Grief. The co-editors, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino—from Turkey and Italy, respectively—are very active voices in European and material ecocriticism. To my surprise, though, most of the contributors to Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene live in the United States, the UK, Europe, and Australia. Given the predominance of the North American presence in the book, the fact that there are no Canadian voices in it is a bit odd, overlooking as it does the important contribution Canadian bitumen makes to the world’s carbon budget; our internationally-prominent activist-writers, such as David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Maude Barlowe, Andrew Nikiforuk, and Margaret Atwood, and the scholarship of the editors and contributors to the three Canadian anthologies listed above; as well as those published in related scholarly and literary anthologies. Fair enough, though: there can be only so many pages in a book, and editors are free to make their selections as they see fit.  As the title suggests, Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene is roughly divided between articles on the discipline of the environmental humanities and articles more particularly about responding to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Scott Slovic’s thoughtful meta-reflection, “Seasick among the Waves of Ecocriticism: An Inquiry into Alternative Historiographic Metaphors,” usefully charts the stages of development of the field of environmental humanities while simultaneously self-reflexively interrogating the metaphors—stages, phases, waves, palimpsests, fractals, and (my personal favourite) “a vast intellectual drainage system or watershed” (109)—by which academics tend to set up such chronologies and trendlines. His essay, one of five in “Part I: Re-Mapping the Humanities,” exemplifies what this anthology does best, mapping orientation points and networks of scholarly advance: how far have we come, where are we now, and from where are the voices coming? Greta Gaard reminds us that ‘the personal is the political’ and that ecocritics, feminists, and ecofeminists alike must keep a bead on the risk inherent in the universalizing tendencies of Anthropocene scholarship, namely, of losing sight of the activist work of constituencies such as the Black Lives Matter and the #IdleNoMore movements. She also draws attention to the investments of institutional environments in suppressing or even eradicating powerful alternative voices; Gaard admirably interweaves into her essay her own personal experience of persecution in the 1Banting: Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella IovinoPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018academy, a situation in which an important, hardworking, politically engaged ecofeminist voice very nearly got eliminated from the academic chorus.   The chart and the testimonial, however, are not our only modes of self-expression in these times. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, carbon is “our newest mode of autobiography” (25), our Anthropocene signature. In order for the earth and us to have half a chance, we need to shift our awareness away from our selves and toward a posthuman ecomateriality by attending to the agency of what we normally regard as merely inert objects or things. In “Posthuman Environs,” Cohen persuades us to reawaken to the materiality and agency of stone, because “[w]ithin its native temporality the geological is just as restless as the arboreal” (29). The impress of the material world upon us is also in play in Stefan Helmreich’s lovely essay on “Nature/Culture/Seawater: Theory Machines, Anthropology, Oceanization,” in which, as he argues, culture is “often imagined in a land-based idiom” (217), leaving water and the global ocean adrift as mere floating abstractions. His interest is in how to “employ water as a theory machine, when useful, and to treat both water and theories as things in the world” (227), how to submerge water into the world again. In addition to these essays, I am also grateful for the inclusion of geologist and Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, Jan Zalasiewicz’s essay on “The Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene,” for his overview of what is at stake in the deliberations of the Working Group.    Within the pages of this anthology, though, one place from which Anthropocene voices are not coming is indigenous scholars, artists, or activists. Indigenous people everywhere are on the front lines, resisting environmental racism and heading up environmental justice movements—trying to halt the construction of mega-dams or have old dams removed, to stop gold mining and nuclear dumping, to revive indigenous agriculture and food-ways, to slow down further tar-sands contamination of air, water, and soil, and prevent the construction of yet more pipelines. So, it is pretty odd that, to the best of my knowledge, not one of the twenty-four contributors is Indigenous. I realize that the work of indigenous scholars is in high demand; that they may choose not to publish in such an anthology; and that the Anthropocene, as we now commonly deploy the term, began for indigenous people not in the mid-twentieth century, which seems to be the best candidate for the commencement date (127), but 400-500+ years ago with the arrival in the Americas of Europeans. Nevertheless, if the anthology consisted solely of European contributors writing about the Anthropocene in Europe, I would understand such an omission, but the fact that there are contributors from the US and Australia, where there are many indigenous scholars publishing insightful books and articles, the absence of indigenous work reads like a colonial blind-spot and seriously lessens the value of the book for research and teaching purposes. This is not to say that indigenous influence is not lovingly incorporated in Juan Carlos Galeano’s writerly “On Rivers” or Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s richly evocative “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds,” in which they delineate the notion of ecological animism as “an opening into a mode of encounter” (259) with a multiplicity of perceiving, striving, desiring, 2The Goose, Vol. 16, No. 2 [2018], Art. 18https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/18sensing, adapting, and responding Others (258). However, the conspicuous absence of indigenous contributors in person only proves that there can be no averting the effects of the Anthropocene without simultaneous decolonization.   I read the essays in Environmental Humanities gradually over a few months, ranging in no particular order across the table of contents. This was, in part, an attempt to avoid the typographical errors and, in one case, the translation effects that plague this text like mosquitoes. After being assailed by veritable clouds of typos (often in prepositions), in so many of the essays, I came to feel as if the editors and publisher were not dealing in good faith with readers, as if the exigencies of the Anthropocene had taken a back seat to the economy of the neoliberal academy’s incentives to rush work into print. Maybe the publisher’s or printer’s software ran amok at the last minute and created all these typos after it had been assiduously proofread. Whatever the reason for their preponderance, the overall effect on this reader is to shift the focus away from the ‘wicked problem’ of the Anthropocene and toward the necessity of wading through a wicked thicket of poorly edited, albeit often insightful, scholarship. Art, literature, and scholarship in the environmental humanities have a crucial role to play in thinking about and thinking with, for example, seawater, dogs, fungi, grandfather stones, sediments and strata, plastic, bacteria, and much more, and forestalling or coping with the kinds of problems and catastrophes we are witnessing and experiencing, as the stronger essays in this book illustrate.  PAMELA BANTING’s recent teaching and publications are in the areas of petrocultural studies, geopoetics, literature of the Anthropocene, psychogeography, and animality. Recent articles include “Ecocriticism in Canada” in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature (2016); “Walking Through Lightning: A Peripatetic Bioregional Reading of a Novel,” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature  (2016); and “Anim-Oils: Wild Animals in Petrocultural Landscapes,” On Active Grounds, Rob Boschman and Mario Trono, eds., WLUP, in press. 3Banting: Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella IovinoPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018

Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 16 | No. 2 Article 18
2-1-2018
Environmental Humanities: Voices from the
Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella
Iovino
Pamela Banting
University of Calgary
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons,
Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Nature and Society Relations Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Banting, Pamela. "Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino." The Goose,
vol. 16 , no. 2 , article 18, 2018,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/18.
Thinking about and Thinking with the 
Environmental Humanities 
 
Environmental Humanities: Voices from 
the Anthropocene by SERPIL OPPERMANN 
and SERENELLA IOVINO 
Rowman and Littlefield, 2017 $57.95   
 
Reviewed by PAMELA BANTING  
 
I offered to review this anthology of 
primarily critical-theoretical essays in the 
hope of learning what European ecocritics 
were thinking about the Anthropocene, 
compared with their Canadian counterparts 
in such anthologies as Liza Piper and Lisa 
Szabo-Jones’ Sustaining the West: Cultural 
Responses to Canadian Environments, Rob 
Boschman and Mario Trono’s Found in 
Alberta: Environmental Themes for the 
Anthropocene, and Ashlee Cunsolo and 
Karen Landman’s Mourning Nature: Hope at 
the Heart of Ecological Loss & Grief. The co-
editors, Serpil Oppermann and Serenella 
Iovino—from Turkey and Italy, 
respectively—are very active voices in 
European and material ecocriticism. To my 
surprise, though, most of the contributors 
to Environmental Humanities: Voices from 
the Anthropocene live in the United States, 
the UK, Europe, and Australia. 
Given the predominance of the 
North American presence in the book, the 
fact that there are no Canadian voices in it 
is a bit odd, overlooking as it does the 
important contribution Canadian bitumen 
makes to the world’s carbon budget; our 
internationally-prominent activist-writers, 
such as David Suzuki, Naomi Klein, Maude 
Barlowe, Andrew Nikiforuk, and Margaret 
Atwood, and the scholarship of the editors 
and contributors to the three Canadian 
anthologies listed above; as well as those 
published in related scholarly and literary 
anthologies. Fair enough, though: there can 
be only so many pages in a book, and 
editors are free to make their selections as 
they see fit. 
 As the title suggests, Environmental 
Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene 
is roughly divided between articles on the 
discipline of the environmental humanities 
and articles more particularly about 
responding to the challenges of the 
Anthropocene. 
Scott Slovic’s thoughtful meta-
reflection, “Seasick among the Waves of 
Ecocriticism: An Inquiry into Alternative 
Historiographic Metaphors,” usefully charts 
the stages of development of the field of 
environmental humanities while 
simultaneously self-reflexively interrogating 
the metaphors—stages, phases, waves, 
palimpsests, fractals, and (my personal 
favourite) “a vast intellectual drainage 
system or watershed” (109)—by which 
academics tend to set up such chronologies 
and trendlines. His essay, one of five in 
“Part I: Re-Mapping the Humanities,” 
exemplifies what this anthology does best, 
mapping orientation points and networks of 
scholarly advance: how far have we come, 
where are we now, and from where are the 
voices coming? 
Greta Gaard reminds us that ‘the 
personal is the political’ and that ecocritics, 
feminists, and ecofeminists alike must keep 
a bead on the risk inherent in the 
universalizing tendencies of Anthropocene 
scholarship, namely, of losing sight of the 
activist work of constituencies such as the 
Black Lives Matter and the #IdleNoMore 
movements. She also draws attention to the 
investments of institutional environments in 
suppressing or even eradicating powerful 
alternative voices; Gaard admirably 
interweaves into her essay her own 
personal experience of persecution in the 
1
Banting: Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018
academy, a situation in which an important, 
hardworking, politically engaged 
ecofeminist voice very nearly got eliminated 
from the academic chorus.  
 The chart and the testimonial, 
however, are not our only modes of self-
expression in these times. As Jeffrey Jerome 
Cohen writes, carbon is “our newest mode 
of autobiography” (25), our Anthropocene 
signature. In order for the earth and us to 
have half a chance, we need to shift our 
awareness away from our selves and 
toward a posthuman ecomateriality by 
attending to the agency of what we 
normally regard as merely inert objects or 
things. In “Posthuman Environs,” Cohen 
persuades us to reawaken to the materiality 
and agency of stone, because “[w]ithin its 
native temporality the geological is just as 
restless as the arboreal” (29). 
The impress of the material world 
upon us is also in play in Stefan Helmreich’s 
lovely essay on “Nature/Culture/Seawater: 
Theory Machines, Anthropology, 
Oceanization,” in which, as he argues, 
culture is “often imagined in a land-based 
idiom” (217), leaving water and the global 
ocean adrift as mere floating abstractions. 
His interest is in how to “employ water as a 
theory machine, when useful, and to treat 
both water and theories as things in the 
world” (227), how to submerge water into 
the world again. 
In addition to these essays, I am also 
grateful for the inclusion of geologist and 
Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, 
Jan Zalasiewicz’s essay on “The 
Extraordinary Strata of the Anthropocene,” 
for his overview of what is at stake in the 
deliberations of the Working Group.   
 Within the pages of this anthology, 
though, one place from which 
Anthropocene voices are not coming is 
indigenous scholars, artists, or activists. 
Indigenous people everywhere are on the 
front lines, resisting environmental racism 
and heading up environmental justice 
movements—trying to halt the construction 
of mega-dams or have old dams removed, 
to stop gold mining and nuclear dumping, 
to revive indigenous agriculture and food-
ways, to slow down further tar-sands 
contamination of air, water, and soil, and 
prevent the construction of yet more 
pipelines. 
So, it is pretty odd that, to the best 
of my knowledge, not one of the twenty-
four contributors is Indigenous. I realize 
that the work of indigenous scholars is in 
high demand; that they may choose not to 
publish in such an anthology; and that the 
Anthropocene, as we now commonly 
deploy the term, began for indigenous 
people not in the mid-twentieth century, 
which seems to be the best candidate for 
the commencement date (127), but 400-
500+ years ago with the arrival in the 
Americas of Europeans. Nevertheless, if the 
anthology consisted solely of European 
contributors writing about the 
Anthropocene in Europe, I would 
understand such an omission, but the fact 
that there are contributors from the US and 
Australia, where there are many indigenous 
scholars publishing insightful books and 
articles, the absence of indigenous work 
reads like a colonial blind-spot and seriously 
lessens the value of the book for research 
and teaching purposes. This is not to say 
that indigenous influence is not lovingly 
incorporated in Juan Carlos Galeano’s 
writerly “On Rivers” or Thom van Dooren 
and Deborah Bird Rose’s richly evocative 
“Lively Ethography: Storying Animist 
Worlds,” in which they delineate the notion 
of ecological animism as “an opening into a 
mode of encounter” (259) with a 
multiplicity of perceiving, striving, desiring, 
2
The Goose, Vol. 16, No. 2 [2018], Art. 18
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss2/18
sensing, adapting, and responding Others 
(258). However, the conspicuous absence of 
indigenous contributors in person only 
proves that there can be no averting the 
effects of the Anthropocene without 
simultaneous decolonization.  
 I read the essays in Environmental 
Humanities gradually over a few months, 
ranging in no particular order across the 
table of contents. This was, in part, an 
attempt to avoid the typographical errors 
and, in one case, the translation effects that 
plague this text like mosquitoes. After being 
assailed by veritable clouds of typos (often 
in prepositions), in so many of the essays, I 
came to feel as if the editors and publisher 
were not dealing in good faith with readers, 
as if the exigencies of the Anthropocene 
had taken a back seat to the economy of 
the neoliberal academy’s incentives to rush 
work into print. Maybe the publisher’s or 
printer’s software ran amok at the last 
minute and created all these typos after it 
had been assiduously proofread. Whatever 
the reason for their preponderance, the 
overall effect on this reader is to shift the 
focus away from the ‘wicked problem’ of 
the Anthropocene and toward the necessity 
of wading through a wicked thicket of 
poorly edited, albeit often insightful, 
scholarship. 
Art, literature, and scholarship in the 
environmental humanities have a crucial 
role to play in thinking about and thinking 
with, for example, seawater, dogs, fungi, 
grandfather stones, sediments and strata, 
plastic, bacteria, and much more, and 
forestalling or coping with the kinds of 
problems and catastrophes we are 
witnessing and experiencing, as the 
stronger essays in this book illustrate. 
 
PAMELA BANTING’s recent teaching and 
publications are in the areas of 
petrocultural studies, geopoetics, literature 
of the Anthropocene, psychogeography, 
and animality. Recent articles include 
“Ecocriticism in Canada” in The Oxford 
Handbook of Canadian Literature (2016); 
“Walking Through Lightning: A Peripatetic 
Bioregional Reading of a Novel,” PAN: 
Philosophy, Activism, Nature  (2016); 
and “Anim-Oils: Wild Animals in 
Petrocultural Landscapes,” On Active 
Grounds, Rob Boschman and Mario Trono, 
eds., WLUP, in press. 
3
Banting: Environmental Humanities by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2018


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Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino

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