A popular critique of the environmental movement is that it fails to connect its activism to aspects of life other than consumer-focused recycling and dietary restrictions, att least when it comes to the Global North and its white middle class. But the climate crisis is everything: it is water, housing, and health care. How did the climate crisis come to exist as a separate cause, severed from abolitionism, independence movements, labor rights, and many other struggles for freedom?
Perhaps it was not always like this, Dehlia Hannah speculates, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics at Copenhagen University. For a brief moment in the 2010s, art and science worked together to highlight environmental violence as a corporation and policy driven project with ties to colonialism. The concept of the Anthropocene emerged at the time. It had its roots in the discipline of geology but offered itself to synthesize art and science and explain the contemporary moment. By 2016, the Anthropocene had migrated to the humanities and was everywhere to be found in architecture schools, culture studies syllabi, and exhibitions.
The Anthropocene concept entangled all struggles and gave birth to a set of environmental aesthetics that invited the viewer to look at politics and ethics through climate art. “The point was to connect geophysical history to political history; power and money structures occur in our genes, in our social experience, in our economy. Up until the Anthropocene conversation started, you couldn’t use science to explain culture,” says Dehlia Hannah. The Anthropocene encouraged a long duree understanding of planetary violence that began with the first slave ships and European sea treatises, and advanced the idea that this violence was mirrored in the European cultural canon, although there were few efforts to highlight this evidence.
Dehlia Hannah offers an example.
In 1815, the Tambora volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia. The British empire was fighting against the Dutch over control of the colony of Netherlands East Indies. At first, the smoke and noise made the British officials register the lava explosions as cannon fire and the outbreak of war. But slowly the smoke cloud emerged as a geological phenomenon. The following year became known as the year without a summer, the inspiration for the title of Dehlia Hannah’s book A Year Without a Winter (2018). It was the biggest eruption in human history, and it was felt across the Northern Hemisphere as sulfur aerosol particles in the atmosphere reflected sunlight, causing global cooling and impacting livestock and harvests. There were no communications or predictive technologies that could have helped identify the seismic waves or understand the weather change at that time. Instead, Enlightenment Europe experienced religious revivals and spiritual speculations, and scientists theorized on the possibility of a new ice age.
The cold weather was also experienced by Mary Shelley, who was visiting Lake Geneva with poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. There, inspired by the incessant thunderstorms, she began to write her novel Frankenstein (1818).
It was only in the early 1990s that the connection between Frankenstein and the eruption of Mount Tambora was made. The news excited an Icelandic archaeologist who dreamed of excavating “the Pompeii of the East.” He traveled to Indonesia, an independent country since 1945, but he did not find much on the slopes of the volcano, one third of which was blown into the sky.
Researching this historical episode, Dehlia Hannah also visited Tambora. Upon arrival with the artist Julian Charriere, she was surprised to find the town devoid of tourism. There was nothing locally that signified the importance that the eruption had had globally. Only a small office with a seismograph hinted at the island’s volcanic activity.
While in Indonesia, Dehlia Hannah recalled Kant’s canonical work on aesthetics, the Critique of of Judgement (1790). There is a brief mention of a pepper garden in Sumatra, derived from the Irish ‘orientalist’ William Mardsen’s History of Sumatran (1783). Pepper was an essential colonial cash crop at the time. In his Critique, Kant discusses beauty as the perfect balance between wild and orderly. A pepper garden in Sumatra comes close to the ideal but because it is too regular, its beauty is “unfree.” Ultimately, wild nature offers greater aesthetic value than cultivated gardens, Kant concludes.
Botanical drawing of pepper plant in The History of Sumatra by W. Marsden (1811). File:Marsden – Pl. XXII – The Pepper Plant.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
In that way, long before Frankenstein, Indonesia had served as an imaginative playground for European culture and philosophy. The nature of colonized Indonesia yielded profit and sustained the Dutch and British empires while also offering itself as a speculative tool, culturally and philosophically. Behind explorations of beauty and contemplations of perfection was an imperial control over land and resources.
Dehlia Hannah reflects back on her research travels and how ingrained colonial fantasies of nature saturate Western imaginaries. When she travelled to Sumbawa as part of her research, she too harbored dreams of a paradise (or apocalypse) island, perhaps not unlike wild Kantian nature. She had hoped to hire a guide who could take her on the hike to contemplate the sublime from Tambora’s crater and buy a postcard at the top. But what she found was a small village of 600 who went about their daily life with little interest in the history of Frankenstein, Shelley and international researchers–and slopes covered with oil palm and rubber plantations.
Dehlia Hannah reflects on her failed tourist dreams: the reality of the island was not something perfect to be consumed or a cherry on top of a research project that tied together everything neatly. As an eerie echo of the volcanic eruption, Dehlia Hannah was struck by the huge clouds of smoke coming from forest fires that were particularly intense in the years of 2012-2014. The jungle was being cleared to make space for palm oil and meet the industrial demands of multinational companies.
The discrepancy between tourist desire and native reality is a reminder that colonized nature has always been imagined within a European urge to extract and exploit. Dehlia Hannah points to this power and control as something inherent to historical paintings of nature. Nature’s spectacle of beauty is inherently tied to colonial endeavours. For example Dehlia Hannah says,
19th century romantic sunsets are beautiful because of the pollution particles that render the sun red; well-trimmed grand landscapes are well-trimmed because of unprotected laborers; and farms are abundant because of slavery. Today, fantasies of tropical vacations and white sandy beaches provide a smokescreen for burning forests and monoculture plantations meeting global demands for the cash crops of the 21st century: palm oil, soy, coffee, cocaine.
The story of Tambora and Shelley presents the volcano as the catalyst for the Gothic Frankenstein, but the connection between today’s Indonesia and European colonial empires had long been established. The British East India Company had operated in Indonesia for centuries and engaged in the trade of pepper and many other commodities. The environmental crisis made numerous appearances in the European canon but little attention to colonial violence was given to it. It took the Anthropocene to create an aesthetic of the environmental crisis and self-reflection in the cultural canon. And it sparked a long process of going back over famous works that had been taken for granted as artworks devoid of environmental violence. European knowledge production was always tied to the routes of the empire and Western researchers continue to embody their desire for something pure and beautiful. But for a brief moment in the 2010s, the Anthropocene debate allowed for a deeper understanding of the environmental crisis and the many loose ends to come together.
This article is based on an interview with Dehlia Hannah, Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics at Copenhagen University. It is part of a series published by the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking at the University of Copenhagen.
Teaser photo credit: Panorama of the caldera of Mount Tambora, July 2017. By Tisquesusa – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69724625