Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 86: Ecosystems and the Cultural Imaginary — with Derek Woods
Speakers: Paige Smith, Am Johal, Derek Woods
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Paige Smith 0:06
Hey everyone, I'm Paige Smith with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar. Our host Am Johal is joined by Derek Woods, an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. Today the two discuss Derek's intersecting expertise in Media Studies and eco technology, examining what he deems the three defining characteristics of eco technology are artificial ecosystems, media archaeology, and the cultural imaginary through science fiction. I hope you enjoy this episode.
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Am Johal 0:52
Welcome to Below the Radar. We're really excited to have Derek Woods with us today. Welcome, Derek.
Derek Woods 0:59
Thank you. And thanks so much for having me. I also really appreciate the work that Am Johal does in Vancouver to build intellectual community and make space for ideas that have a lot of political relevance.
Am Johal 0:59
I'm going to slip you 100 bucks under the table right now. Thank you for the props. [laughs]
Derek Woods 1:16
Heartfelt. I've been watching it from a distance. I am from Vancouver. I lived here. I grew up on Vancouver Island, lived in Vancouver for 10 years and then moved to the States, Texas, New England. So I haven't been able to attend as many things as I'd like, but I've been seeing you from afar.
Am Johal 1:31
Is it Duncan where you grew up?
Derek Woods 1:32
That's right. Yeah, Duncan.
Am Johal 1:33
The pride and joy of Duncan BC.
Derek Woods 1:35
That's right.
Am Johal 1:36
Well, Derek, you're going to be doing a postdoc right now. We're just finishing one up at Dartmouth College as a postdoctoral fellow. But we'll be moving into a role as assistant professor of Media Studies at UBC, wondering if you can talk a little bit about the work that you're doing on your doctoral research?
Derek Woods 1:55
Sure, absolutely and I'm writing a book now coming out of that dissertation project. I've been revising it over the course of this postdoctoral fellowship. It's been a nice one, it's given me a lot of time to write and sit alone in small town, New Hampshire, which is where Dartmouth College is located. So yeah, this work initially, I guess, came out of the fact that I started my undergrad studies in forestry. So I was always interested in environmentalism, ecological questions. You know, I even worked for logging companies around Williams Lake where you're from. And over time, I was interested in going into the sciences, but it sort of didn't work out for the kind of writing I wanted to do. More qualitative, more philosophical. So I transitioned into English departments and ended up working on this project about eco technology or green technology. That's really kind of involved with three meanings of that term. And the first meaning is eco technology in the sense of artificial ecosystems. And the Earth's climate is now something that's become artificial. And that's fairly standard for anyone who's been following climate change, or this debate about the Anthropocene concept. The idea that now there's nothing purely natural, left and avant, on planet Earth and the biosphere. So the first sense of eco technology is to try to figure out what we mean when we describe these kinds of small-scale ecosystems or large-scale the climate as artificial. And what kind of technology is that?
Am Johal 3:32
It's interesting as you move from the sciences into English, or media studies, or what some people call the energy, humanities, to some degree, there's distinctions these various disciplines have as they try to think through these questions. I have done work in media philosophy. I'm wondering how you would nuance sort of these perspectives, you know, coming out of English or rhetoric and into media theory and how these disciplines look at it slightly differently?
Derek Woods 4:00
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think that media theory, if you look at figures, like Marshall McLuhan, even really started from literary studies, and a lot of the major media theorists were trained at some point as literary critics. So that background is always there. And I find my literary training helpful, even when I talk about technologies that have nothing to do with fiction or poetry. But the way I've been, I've been kind of nuancing it for myself is really to say that, okay, there's a topic, which is a general topic that's of concern to everyone. And that is environmental questions, right? Climate change. But then there's a set of methods. And one of the methods comes out of Media Studies called Media Archaeology, right. And it's about looking at the conceptual frameworks, and the technologies that have influenced them, and how those conceptual frameworks which are never completely abstract, they're kind of embedded in the technologies we use.
Derek Woods 5:00
How those become conditions of possibility for later scientific discourses. That's part of what I'm going to talk about today when it comes to cybernetics as a background for Earth System Science.
Am Johal 5:12
So in the realm of Media Archaeology that you mentioned, who have you been influenced by in your own thinking?
Derek Woods 5:21
Oh, in the realm of media.
Am Johal 5:23
In terms of media, archaeology approaches to ecological questions, in that history and tradition, are there particular thinkers that you've been inspired or interested by? Or are in sort of conversation or combating in some way?
Derek Woods 5:38
Absolutely. Yeah. So it's a long history. I've learned a lot from the work of Katherine Hayles, and other people who've worked on cybernetics Hayles. And then also scholars like Lilly Kay and Evelyn Fox Keller, scholars coming out of feminist science studies, who have been interested in showing just how influential cybernetics and information theory, those things are intertwined. Or on biology as a science, even just on the notion that DNA is information. So some of their work on cybernetics, which was kind of going on in the 80s and 90s, is really important, and really important for me to be in dialogue with, as I start to write about a different object of study, which is not so much organisms and genes, but ecosystems and the climate.
Am Johal 6:28
So in terms of the book that you're working on, that will be coming out soon. And I assume it began, at least with the dissertation and wondering what you were attempting to do with the project?
Derek Woods 6:40
Yeah, so I'm planning to publish this as a book. Still in the works, however. So we'll see when it comes out. Exactly. I'm trying to finish it this year.
Am Johal 6:49
Yeah.
Derek Woods 6:50
Yeah a book called, What is Eco Technology? That's the title I'm using right now. Because to go back to this earlier point, to answer that question, you kind of need three meanings. Right. So the first one is artificial ecosystems and the Earth system. The second one is archaeological, it's about the conditions of possibility for some of these scientific concepts, especially going back to cybernetics. And then the third one is, has to do with the cultural imaginary, right. And for me, that's mostly in science fiction, the work of writers like Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others who are less well known. And then the filmmakers as well. For example, I've been writing about the Bong Joon-ho film Snowpiercer, because it represents a kind of a closed artificial ecosystem. And so it's in these texts that you see the kind of flesh put on the bones of this ecological worldview that we really get from ecology's engagement with cybernetics in the 20th century.
Am Johal 7:49
And how would you sort of walk through these different kinds of worldviews of people who are approaching the ecological question within these fields?
Derek Woods 7:58
It's a difficult question. It's a big one. But I'd like to go back to Arthur G. Tansley, who coined the term ecosystem in 1935. And if it's a question of worldview, then he was trying to critique the work of a series of organassist ecologists, Frederick Clements, in the United States was very influential in the early 20th century. And then also Jan Smuts in South Africa and some of his students. These were organassists in the sense that they saw the form of order that say, a forest has, you know, a forest as what we would now call an ecosystem, they saw that order as basically just an organism at another scale. So the trees are organs in the body of the forest, which is also an organism, right, a super organism. That was a very influential idea, then, and in some ways it continues to be now. But when Tansley coined the term ecosystem, he was saying, Okay, we've gone too far with this metaphor, organism imagines that even the kind of nonliving processes of the atmosphere of rock weathering and so forth, are organic in some way. And the inorganic needs to be incorporated into our idea of how these systems work. So that was where he was going with that critique, at risk of continuing to go on about, on and on about that I'll kind of stop. But you can say that the ecosystem concept which later influences the Earth system, Gaia theory, has always been intended with this notion of the superorganism, trying to do away with it, but then it comes back as the return of the repressed over and over.
Am Johal 9:39
Now, there are these terms that come up through different fields that are part of kind of sensemaking of the type of crisis that we're trying to grapple with. And in many ways, it can be viewed as an existential crisis, but there have been others in human civilization. Nuclear weapons was a big one post second world war in terms of how to address and deal with something that could possibly bring up the end of humanity, or asteroids hitting the Earth or something of that nature, and there's the question of duration that comes up around the ecological crisis. So in as much as we may be in a crisis, or some of us think that we're in a crisis, the impacts and effects happen over a slower period of time or the release of carbon lasts beyond our own lifetimes, that kind of disconnection between the human body and its impacts and its relation to technologies and terms come up like the Anthropocene is a very popular one. There have been a lot of critiques of it from various places. And I'm wondering how you approach the term of, the problematic term, I guess, of the Anthropocene.
Derek Woods 10:47
That's a good one. I like that.
Derek Woods 10:49
I do think a lot about this. This actually goes back well to Tansley, and the ecosystem in a certain way, because with any ecological concept, like with the Anthropocene, the way I see it is that you have to have that kind of built in critique focused on, especially the politics of race, right? So if you go back to Jan Smuts in South Africa, who actually coined the term holism, they're important for the history of ecological thought is Smuts was also one of the architects of apartheid. Now, he was a South African general who waged war in South Africa in the early 20th century, and who thought that his idea of the kind of perfectly balanced organic community suggested that black and white people had to live separately. So this segregation has policy for him, flowed from his ideas about the superorganism. There has been some work about that, kind of the history of science, which I think is really important. And some of these critiques kind of continue into the present. So with the Anthropocene, the biggest problem that people have with the concept is that it kind of universalize is the human species and, and rather than think, what we mean by species, in a more complex way, it just kind of re asserts, a kind of liberal humanism, everyone's the same. But it reasserts that kind of liberal humanism, where we all kind of exist on a level playing field as humans, in the form of this claim that humans have become a geological force. And so most of the critiques have wanted to ask like, which humans, wasn't it colonialism that really drove the transformation of the Earth system, by bringing plants and animals from Europe to America and back to Europe as well, by kind of driving the plantation system that fed into the industrial factory system and released massive amounts of fossil fuels. It's not like everyone has equal responsibility for that.
Am Johal 12:54
And people have come up with terms like capital oil scene to billionaire Oh, scene to recent book Billion Black Anthropocenes that look at the disproportionate roles that particular people have played in the release of co2 emissions that have caused the situation that we're in, both from colonial point of view, but also a capitalist point of view, certain modes of production, particular areas, particular companies, as well, and
Derek Woods 13:22
Exxon.
Am Johal 13:24
And some of these companies have larger GDPs than some nation states. So I think, in some sense, though, it comes out of a particular scientific naming that certainly caused a major debate in the humanities around the name because I guess, this question of like, who does what in the naming and how does it roll out? Who does it leave out? And how does it attempt to reorder in some ways, which brings up questions of power, I suppose.
Derek Woods 13:47
Right. And questions of narrative related to those questions of power because the Anthropocene provides us with really a grand narrative in the sense that leotard used to have, you know, a narrative that purports to explain everything about human history in a way, and a narrative that is difficult to get outside of, because it's form of meaning is so close, I mean, leotard would also have said that about Marxism as well, right? All of history can be explained in terms of class struggle. In the Anthropocene, human history is explained in terms of the evolution of this particular primate species, which then gradually takes on the ability to reshape the Earth's system. And then in a moment of epical, rupture suddenly becomes able to recognize that it's doing that and perhaps even to guide that process so that we come to master the climate and the Earth system. These are all components, not things I'm making up but components of the scientific and engineering literature around the Anthropocene.
Am Johal 14:50
Now, in many ecological questions, there seems to be these themes around the need or the desire to dissenter the human subject in some type of way. And I'm wondering how you approach the question of the more than human world, that if we're talking about world systems and science systems and various types of living organisms, how do we think the more than human related to this question of ecological crisis?
Derek Woods 15:22
Yeah, it's a big one, I can tie it back into kind of how I specifically deal with the Anthropocene concept of my work. And it's changed a bit over time, say over the last six years since I first started publishing about it. And I think interestingly, you know, you, you can say that the, the subject of the Anthropocene like the the anthropos who's driving these changes, is not recognizably human in a certain way, you can say that it's an assemblage to draw on the language of Deleuze and Guattari as kind of social theorists, that it's an assemblage of created by relations among many different entities, that emerges as its own level of complexity, and that that assemblage has particular agency. So I think you can include cows and corn and species that humans have kind of coevolved with or manipulated agriculturally in this subject. So to imagine that the subject of the Anthropocene looks like a human being at our scale. And you know, in the way that I recognize you, as a human sitting across from me, doesn't really get at this kind of agro industrial cybernetic, large scale assemblage, which we don't seem to have very much control over. Sometimes I think of it in terms of the famous opening scene from the War of the Worlds from that HG Wells novel, around the idea was that, you know, humans had been developing modern science, and looking at microbes through microscopes, realizing that there was this smaller world and placing ourselves at the top of the great chain of being, but then little did we know that these aliens were looking at us just the way we look at the microbes. So there's a scale shift there. And I think you could read that kind of terraforming novel in Anthropocene terms as a sort of misrecognition. You know, we see ourselves gazing down from that larger scale, but we can't recognize ourselves in this assemblage.
Am Johal 17:24
Now, in terms of what you call the kind of political imaginary, and sort of the role of science fiction or trying to read through popular culture and literature, these types of questions you referenced a few of these authors Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that part of your project?
Derek Woods 17:44
Sure. Absolutely. Butler's a good example. You know, I think her work is uniquely bio-political, especially in the sense that it's ambivalent. It doesn't give us an easy choice in this novel about you know alien species that comes to rescue humans from an earth that's been destroyed by nuclear war. It doesn't give you an easy choice, whether it's better to resist those aliens, or to go along with them and ultimately, hybridize with them, kind of a novel about symbiosis. And so just as kind of initial points about it, I like that ambivalence, and also the fact that a lot of science studies scholars have read it over the years. So like, actually, most famously, Donna Haraway. For her, this kind of hybridity of the humans mixing symbiotically with the aliens, in Butler's work gets at the problems within politics of purity in the post colonial era, and for her writing in the 80s and 90s. It was a way of talking about kind of ethnic and racial hybridity as well, and then valuing that over racial purity. But then when you shift from reading it as a novel about organisms to one about kind of ecosystems, the setting of this novel is often this kind of organic spaceship that the aliens come in on and that they nurture the humans they've rescued on, before sending them back to Earth. And what interests me about this is the way she writes about it as something that's absolutely closed as a kind of organism or system that actually often doesn't seem organic at all, which is completely close to the outside. That's how it's able to move through space. And so I think like in a time when we get really used to hearing that ecological thought is about openness, and relationality with other species, that ecology means that everything is connected. You also have these literature's where people are writers like Butler, really articulating a limit case of ecological thought, which I think is super important to it, and also to eco politics, which is based on this absolute closure. So I've been interested in trying to figure out what that means.
Am Johal 20:01
Yeah, what to use sort of extract and pull out of the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, because he's been writing over such a long period of time in various ways from Terraforming Mars to his more recent work, but how do you read into it?
Derek Woods 20:16
Yeah, well, a couple different things. One thing is that in science fiction, and especially in his work, and it's very clear in his work, there is a dynamic relationship between two eco technologies is what I like to call them. And one is an if the terrarium or sort of artificial, closed ecosystem. That's the term Kim Stanley Robinson likes to use when he talks about humans living inside asteroids in some kind of post capitalist Solar System future like in 2312, a more recent novel, so you have the terrarium as an enclosed ecological space. But then you also have terraforming as something that's exposed, something that is an entire artificial biosphere wrapped around a planet that didn't have one before. Whereas the terraforming is about closure balance, maintaining equilibrium, which comes with its own set of politics. terraforming is much more chaotic, dynamic. And yet, despite the difference between them, they often figure one another, not just in science fiction, but elsewhere. So biosphere two, for example, in Arizona, five acre a gigantic, closed ecosystem project that was actually built. Biosphere two is meant to be a model for the Earth system. It's meant to be a kind of Gyan experimental lab that scientists can manipulate. Even though it exists at such a small scale, relative to.
Am Johal 21:44
Now you are also in your work, you're considering some films as well?
Derek Woods 21:48
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So especially these closed ecosystem films, you've got Logan's Run as a famous one, right? Silent Running is another 70s sci fi, where you have a few astronauts tending to the earth's last biodiversity in these floating spaceship domes. One of whom decides that it's better to preserve the plants than the other humans. And then Bong Joon Ho Snowpiercer, which I mentioned earlier, has been a really important one.
Am Johal 22:18
Does your work now that you can be teaching in media theory as well as your work engage with some German media theorists as well related to questions of ecology?
Derek Woods 22:28
It does? Absolutely. Yeah, quite a few. So Eric Horrell is one who I've been reading. An interesting collection for people who like this kind of intersection of ecology and media theory is a book called General Ecology by Erich Hörl. You know, I have some hesitations about it because his idea of ecology is very much focused on the kind of relational everything is connected model.
Am Johal 22:52
Yeah. I have hesitations on Kitler too.
Derek Woods 22:55
Kitler. Yeah. So we've got Kitler.
[both laugh]
Derek Woods 22:59
Kitler’s hard to avoid if you read German media theory.
Derek Woods 23:03
And yeah, his work's interesting. But it's hard not to think that what Kitler envisions is technology kind of taking over and just casting humans aside. So politically, I'm not sure he gives us very much to latch on to, even if he was really innovative in the way that he kind of combined Foucault and McLuhan, in a sense.
Am Johal 23:26
Do you at all go through the work of Peter Sloterdijk at all?
Derek Woods 23:31
I do. I read some of his work as well, especially when it comes to the terrarium. And he is one of the few people who's interested in these kind of artificial atmospheres. He doesn't talk very much about the history of ecology as a science, but he understands the importance of something like biosphere two for illustrating; he calls it an absolute island for illustrating kind of a limit case of ecological closure. He talks about that in phone.
Am Johal 23:59
Do you in your work ever go through this would have been four or five years ago, it was kind of a thing for maybe 18 or 20 months around the accelerationism sort of discussions predominantly in the art world as where it really circulated, but involved a number of theorists that you're kind of read on some of that writing?
Derek Woods 24:17
Yeah, I've read some Nick land and Nick Serna check.
Derek Woods 24:22
I can't figure out how to pronounce his name properly, but I'm against it. I mean, I'm against accelerationism. That's sort of the short answer. I'm the kind of environmentalist who does think that degrowth and deceleration might be possible, even kind of inevitable at some point and I also think that accelerationism is very wedded to the idea that history has a direction and in that sense it remains very high Galleon and it's Marxism.
Derek Woods 24:53
We are moving towards a necessary shift away from capitalist social relations. That could be global and that's why we need to accelerate capitalism. It's deterritorialization of everything local, everything slow, forms of production that remain outside of the abstraction of exchange, the global financial markets, their ideas to push past those forms of resistance. But I, it seems too close to me to a sort of end of history model.
Am Johal 25:27
I'm wondering if you can let us know when you think that your book will be coming out?
Derek Woods 25:32
Oh, it should be... I'm guessing 2021.
Am Johal 25:36
Okay.
Derek Woods 25:36
That's kind of my goal. You know, I'm finishing it now during this postdoc before I start working at UBC and teaching, going to meetings, all of which will be exciting, but leave less writing time.
Am Johal 25:49
Yeah.
Derek Woods 25:49
So finish that manuscript, started circulating it, but then it really depends on the reviewers and how much they love or hate it, so..
Am Johal 25:57
Yeah you'll get through it. Thank you so much for joining us, Derek.
Derek Woods 26:00
No problem. Thank you.
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Paige Smith 26:03
Thanks for tuning into Below the Radar to hear from our guest, Derek Woods. We've linked to some of Derek's writing in the show notes of today's episode. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time on Below the Radar.
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