• About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
  • About Us
    • About the platform
    • Editorial Collective
  • Essays
    • Short Essays
    • Longer Reads
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Series
    • Italian Political Ecologies
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
    • Green inequalities in the city
    • Political Ecologies of Pesticides
    • Political Ecologies of the Far Right
    • Political Ecology for Civil Society
    • Ecomodernist socialism and comunist futurism
    • World Press Photography Awards
    • Ecology after Capitalism
    • Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
Forest Defenders Conference, June 2017, UK
April 11, 2017
Fault Lines – Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy
April 18, 2017

The Banality of the Anthropocene

Published by Undisciplined Environments on April 14, 2017

Highway 1, south of Fairfield, Iowa. Photo by Ken K.

By Heather Anne Swanson*

There are plenty of troubling things about the Anthropocene, but one of its most troubling dimensions is the sheer number of people it fails to trouble. In response, we need to trouble the Anthropocene’s banality, argues Heather Ann Swanson.

Iowa is known for its large-size corn. Source: fritzhaeg.com

I want to propose an Anthropocene territorialization and a subject-making project in which anthropologists might want to engage. The territory of which I write is a place called Iowa.

There are plenty of troubling things about the Anthropocene. But to my mind, one of its most troubling dimensions is the sheer number of people it fails to trouble.

For many living in precarious situations, the Anthropocene is already life-altering, life-threatening, and even deadly. It comes in the form of a massive flood or a rising tide that takes their homes away. Or as an oil well that poisons the river on which they depend.

But for others, especially the white and middle-class of the global North, the Anthropocene is so banal that they do not even notice it. It is the green front lawn, the strip-mall parking lot, the drainage ditch where only bullfrog tadpoles remain.

Iowa lies at the heart of this banal Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, here, is wholesome. It is the cornfield and the industrial pig farm. It is the 4-H county fair and eating hot dogs on the Fourth of July. It is precisely this banality, this routinized everydayness (see Arendt 1963), that makes the Iowa Anthropocene so terrifying.

Barn along Highway 1, south of Fairfield, Iowa. Photo by Ken K.

I write of Iowa not from the outside, but from a place of connection. I, too, am Iowa. Without it, I would not be where I am. My mother and father were born and raised in Iowa, and its mid-twentieth-century agricultural modernization and postwar dreams for better futures propelled their upward mobility. It allowed them to get off the farm and become the first people in their families to go to college. Iowa’s industrial agriculture and its surpluses thus made my own scholarly career possible.

Indeed, we are all implicated in Iowa. We are all entangled with the everyday violences of industrial agriculture and nationalist projects in a way that substituting an organic latte for the hot dog or shopping at Whole Foods won’t solve. We cannot make ourselves clean. The urbanized coasts are made possible by the production of the heartland. New York is standing on Iowa (see Moore 2010).

How is it that Americans, especially white middle-class ones, learn not to notice such entanglements, to not be affected? How do we learn not to see the damage around us?

Iowa is objectively one of the most ruined landscapes in the United States, but its ruination garners surprisingly little notice. Less than 0.1 percent of the tallgrass prairie that once covered much of the state remains. You’ve seen the Anthropocene J-curves: the rise of atmospheric CO2, human population growth, and dammed rivers, to name a few (Steffen et al. 2015). The decline in Iowa prairie makes a reverse J. Between 1830 and 1910, Iowa lost a whopping 97 percent of its prairie acreage.

At one time 85% of Iowa was covered by tallgrass prairie. Source: iowapublicradio.org.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The reorientation of Iowa’s landscape toward capitalist agricultural production has resulted in the obliteration of worlds that once occupied it. The American Indians who carefully tended the prairie through burning and bison management have been forced out of the state. Nearly every acre has been privatized. Today Iowa ranks forty-ninth out of the fifty U.S. states in public land holdings.

Ninety-nine percent of its marshes are gone. The level of its main aquifer has dropped by as much as three hundred feet since the nineteenth century, largely due to the extraction of irrigation water. Water quality is a mess, too. Between 2010 and 2015 more than sixty Iowa cities and towns had high nitrate levels in drinking water due to the leaching and run-off of agricultural fertilizers. And those same fertilizers wash down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, where they have created an aquatic dead zone the size of Connecticut.

Few people, either within or beyond Iowa, notice the profundity of these changes. When my uncle, a farmer in northeast Iowa, gazes out at his cornfields, he does not see the annihilation of the prairie, the loss of the bison, or the displacement of American Indian communities. He does not notice the contamination of groundwater, even though he had to redig his well a few years ago due to bacterial seepage from a nearby pig farm. He simply shrugs off such things and wonders what the crop prices will be next year.

Iowa corn harvest. Source: AP Photo/ Steve Pope.

Blindness proliferates: when my uncle becomes blind to the violence of his own corn, he becomes blind to others in neighboring farmhouses, in the neighboring towns, in neighboring states. He cannot see Standing Rock, and he cannot see why Black Lives Matter might matter to him.

It isn’t exactly his fault that he doesn’t notice. White middle-class American subjectivities are predicated on not noticing. They are predicated on structural blindness: on a refusal to acknowledge the histories we inherit. As Deborah Bird Rose (2004) has shown in the case of Australian settler colonialism, dreaming of futures requires blindness to the past.

Michel Foucault’s work reminds us that the discourses that shape our subjectivities are not just words; they are also the bricks of the prison, the institutional form of the clinic (see Hirst 1995). But we have failed to see that they are also the monocrop cornfield. Iowa’s landscape infrastructure produces us and the Anthropocene. The cornfield is an assemblage that brings the so-called common good of progress and nationalist growth into being. It produces grain futures markets and cheap hamburgers. How can we better see its terrors and erasures?

Corn Belt, Iowa agricultural landscape. Photo by R. Corry.

One of these terrors is that there are countless Iowas beyond Iowa. I currently live in Denmark, where I am a member of a research project called Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). One of my colleagues, Nathalia Brichet, uses the term “mild apocalypse” to draw attention to the normalized degradation of Danish landscapes. In the midst of Denmark’s rolling fields and highly managed forests, the Anthropocene continues to be stubbornly hard to see.

Donna Haraway has called for curiosity as both scholarly method and political practice, as an antidote to these learned blindnesses. In her book When Species Meet, she becomes curious about who and what she touches when she reaches out to pet her dog. That curiosity becomes a radical practice of tracing and inheriting histories, such as the dog-herding practices of livestock-based Australian colonization efforts and the making of purebred dogs. But in a world of structural blindness, such kinds of curiosity do not come naturally. They must be cultivated. But how? How, in the words of Joseph Dumit (2014), do we wake up to connections?

Can we imagine corollaries to Bible study meetings or consciousness-raising groups in which people would be encouraged to trace the histories of the landscapes they inhabit, a process that might draw them into new ways of seeing themselves and their worlds? I imagine such practices as a multispecies analogue to Foucauldian genealogy. Might exploring the genealogies of Iowa cornfields, for example, denaturalize them and counter the power of their banality? Might they enable Iowans and all of us to become more curious about the conditions of our own subjectivities and, in turn, how we might transform the landscapes with which they are entangled? This is the important work of making curiosity more common, of troubling the Anthropocene.

* Heather Anne Swanson is Assistant Professor at the School of Culture and Society – Department of Anthropology of Aarhus University in Denmark. This article was originally posted in Cultural Anthropology.

Share
Undisciplined Environments
Undisciplined Environments

Related posts

January 10, 2023

Biodiversity breakthrough or time to stop global environmental meetings altogether?


Read more
December 13, 2022

Formulating poisons: racism, agrochemicals, and cotton


Read more
November 1, 2022

Ocean Mourning – R.I.P. Mar


Read more

0 Comments

  1. smileyatomadmin says:
    April 15, 2017 at 4:35 pm

    Why use “blindness” in this way? Is it not ableist and therefore malignant on political and humanistic levels? It’s clear the author is quite capable of and interested in the thorough practice and study of just and intellectually sound principles. I hope this point of friction between her rhetoric and her [insert political, ethos, etc.] draws her critical attention.

    Reply
  2. discordion says:
    April 17, 2017 at 2:15 pm

    Reblogged this on discordion {Artist Ian Pritchard} and commented:
    Interesting article that has something to say about – and to – us all (even if the publishers have moved Aarhus from Denmark to Norway)

    Reply
  3. Whewell’s Gazette: Year 3, Vol. #35 | Whewell's Ghost says:
    April 19, 2017 at 5:37 pm

    […] Entitle Blog: The Banality of the Anthropocene […]

    Reply
  4. matthew says:
    May 1, 2017 at 9:44 pm

    aarhus is in denmark…

    Reply
  5. The banality of landscape change | desalpes says:
    May 2, 2017 at 9:38 pm

    […] this strikingly insightful blogpost called “The Banality of the Anthropocene“, Heather Anne Swanson discusses what she refers to as one of the most troublesome and […]

    Reply
  6. La Banalidad del Antropoceno | blog no oficial says:
    May 6, 2017 at 3:02 am

    […] Entitle Blog […]

    Reply
  7. katrinkavt says:
    May 15, 2017 at 9:41 pm

    I appreciate the intelligence of this article….and am also dumfounded at how some lose their senses, literally, when they look at the landscape without curiosity about what preceded it. I have been aware of prairie history…but this fills out the autopsy.

    Reply
  8. dermymcnally says:
    May 15, 2017 at 10:42 pm

    Reblogged this on DermyMcNally.

    Reply
  9. Dave Woods says:
    May 17, 2017 at 11:12 pm

    When we decided to become domesticated we lost our instincts as hunters and gatherers who could have agreed to permaculture and no borders. A tribe that could live within it’s means and not create pollution. Domestication, ownership of land and resources, organized religion and abandonment of our natural instincts have all contributed to the lifestyles of today. The result being greed and fear and continuous war.

    Reply
  10. CS Albrecht says:
    May 27, 2017 at 7:03 am

    I can identify with many of the author’s observations. I grew up very poor in Nebraska on an eroded family farm, and when I went back for a visit a few years ago i was astonished and depressed at the Roundup-ready, Monsanto hybrid corn fields that had overtaken former pastures and even roads. My relatives care for their children but are oblivious to the dangers in renting out their farm land, in some cases adjacent to their homes, for such practices. Greed at work. They also disparage nearby tribal people and think climate change is some leftist lunatic fantasy.

    Reply
  11. ENTITLE blog: 2018 so far and what’s in store – ENTITLE blog – a collaborative writing project on Political Ecology says:
    August 9, 2018 at 5:11 pm

    […] The Banality of the Anthropocene, by Heather Anne Swanson […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search this site

✕

Subscribe to our Newsfeed

We keep your data private and share your data only with third parties that make this service possible. See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Visit WEGO

wegoint.org
This website is co-funded by WEGO

Popular Posts

  • Biodiversity breakthrough or time to stop global environmental meetings altogether? 591 views
  • The trouble with rewilding… 273 views
  • About refrigerators 158 views
  • What does virtual water conceal? 127 views
  • Against the misrepresentation of climate activism in Lützerath aka the ZAD Rhineland 121 views
  • Indigenous Science 103 views

Recent Comments

  • January 4, 2023

    Timo commented on Against the misrepresentation of climate activism in Lützerath aka the ZAD Rhineland

  • November 15, 2022

    Connecting academic (air) mobility with carbon inequality: Perspectives from a Global South scholar - Bliss commented on Connecting academic (air) mobility with carbon inequality: Perspectives from a Global South scholar

  • November 8, 2022

    On the Racist Humanism of Climate Action - Bliss commented on Challenging extractivism

  • November 8, 2022

    On the Racist Humanism of Climate Action - Bliss commented on How new is the Green New Deal for the Global South?

  • November 7, 2022

    Summer break note 2022 – Undisciplined Environments commented on Reconceptualising boundaries *

  • November 4, 2022

    Undisciplined Environments commented on Environmental Inequalities in Cairo’s Urban Housing Sector

✕

Tags

Agriculture Alternatives Anthropocene Art Brazil Capitalism Cities Climate change Climate crisis Climate justice Colonialism, Post-colonialism & Decolonization Commoning Commons Conflicts Conservation & Biodiversity COVID-19 Culture Decolonial Political Ecologies Degrowth Democracy Development Disaster Energy Environmental Change Environmental History Environmental Justice Environmental movements Extractivism Food Forests Green inequalities Indigenous Peoples Land Methodologies Mining & Extractivism Movements & Resistance Neoliberalism Post-colonialism Post-colonialism & Decolonization Social Movements & Resistance Urban Violence Waste Water water governance

Follow us

facebook       twitter
E-Mail Us : undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com

Contribute

If you want to contribute send us your text at undisciplinedenvironments@gmail.com
Find our posting guide here

About Us

We are a collective of scholars and activists oriented towards a common horizon of emancipatory social and ecological transformation. With this platform, we aim to animate a space to share, debate and critically reflect on research and activist experiences, observations, methodologies, news, events, publications, art, music and other themes and objects related to political ecology.
powered by andromedia
  • About Us
  • Essays
  • Series
  • Resources
  • Events and Calls
  • Art & multimedia
  • Contribute
go