Election Day felt like a catastrophe on the Lewis & Clark College campus. Conversation was muted. People wore black. People missed class. My peers and professors hadn’t slept. The functions of a normal day disappeared. In my research, catastrophe, disaster, and apocalypse are key terms. It didn’t quite feel like that on 11/9 to me, but it came close. To many of my friends, both near and far, 11/9 was all of those things.
In an attempt to work through the fears and emotions that come with the uncertain future of the progressive accomplishments of the Obama administration, I have compiled this post over the past few weeks to reflect the (scattered) places where I have attempted to see the results of the election through the lens of my current academic mindset.
- Relevance to Thesis and Research
Presidents and administrations cannot see the future and they have to make split-second decisions regarding employing governmental responses and resources in the wake of disaster. Much of the disaster discourse in the past decade has been in response to the failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, many of which were attributed to improper governmental response. In addition, there have been numerous studies about the disaster response the emerged after the attacks of 9/11, such as Wachtendorf’s study on improvisation and emergent behavior . Both of these events occurred during the Bush administration, a period of 8 years that people in my circle (including my classmate Frances Swanson regarding climate change civic engagement) are using as a potential model for what to expect in the next 4-8 years. My focus for the last six months has been heavily entrenched in the Cascadia Subduction Zone and the high risks involved for the major earthquake that will happen in the future. Between my ENVS 330 project that examined the risks posed by the Cascadia quake to the Bonneville Dam, my summer position as a research assistant to Dr. Safran’s project on creating earthquake culture through effective media, and my current thesis project comparing the earthquake cultures in the US and Japan through fiction, I have thought and read a lot about the role of government in disaster response. With a Cascadia event truly due at any moment, there is a chance that President-elect Trump will have to make decisions about responding to this potential catastrophe during his term. How will his policies and administration respond? How will the context of a polarized society (with Portland and the PNW perceived as a stronghold of liberal opposition to Trump’s politics) effect these disaster response decisions? How will the President-elect as Commander-in-Chief employ the National Guard and other military operations to disaster relief? How will his proposed and mysterious infrastructure bill effect the infrastructure updates needed in the PNW to create ‘resilience’ in the wake of earthquake hazards? While these questions are not directly related to my current thesis research, they are fundamental to much of the work people and institutions are doing to prepare on various levels, from the size of household earthquake kits to the governmental infrastructure that is destined to fail unless capital is invested to replace or update it.
- Summer BrennanIn ENVS 330 we read The Oyster War by Summer Brennan as a sort of environmental history of the hybrid object of the oyster as situated in Point Reyes National Seashore. While the book was well-written, detailed, and a fantastic text for examining some of the pillars of #LCENVS (situated research and hybrid objects), I took issue with some profound gaps in her research and the way her narrative voice treated the subjects of the book. You can read these critiques here. Despite my criticisms, I was impressed and inspired by Brennan as a talented writer and have since followed her Twitter account. Before writing The Oyster War, Brennan worked as a United Nations correspondent, as stated in her bio:
Ms. Brennan was also a longtime communications consultant at the United Nations, working on special political issues from 2008 to 2010—including decolonization, atomic radiation, space technologies, and the Middle East—and on disarmament and international security from 2011 to 2015. Other UN projects include work on the environment, gender, human rights, and the UN Global Ebola Response.
Her United Nations experience in international security, I believe, gives her a knowledge set regarding potential implications of a Trump presidency at this register. Her presence on Twitter, since the election, has changed drastically from discussing her books and other topics to a constant stream of alarm about the Putin-Trump relationship, the Cold War legacy that she claims is a cyber war between the US and Russia that may have hacked the US election to install Trump as “psychological warfare.” While we certainly need to be wary of getting information from Twitter (one lesson reinforced by this elections), I do feel compelled to listen to Brennan and even believe her. As someone intrigued and engaged with her since reading her book in ENVS 330, I will continue to follow her on Twitter and take her alarm seriously.
- Environmental History
The first class I went to after the election was Andy Bernstein’s Global Environmental History. We were reading Richard White’s The Organic Machine at the time. In an effort to salvage the educational environmental in the wake of the election, Andy encouraged us to use our studies and analysis as a way both to cope with the emotional results of the election and engage with history as a way of preparing to do the civic work that lies ahead. Here is a portion of my response from 11/9:
In reading the second half of Richard White’s The Organic Machine, I found myself circling back to two of my main concerns in light of the devastating outcome of the election. As you mentioned in class yesterday, much of the content of White’s history is especially relevant and I found that true of his discussion of the metaphor of rape in regards to the river and his history of Hanford nuclear facility.
Regarding the metaphor of rape, White writes: “Nor have we raped the river. As a metaphor, rape replicates the very cultural categories of feminine nature/masculine culture that block understanding” (White 1996, p. 60) and “rape depersonalizes its victim, but it is the workers who becomes oddly depersonalized in even sympathetic accounts of the dams” (White 1996, p. 63). In this section, White details why the rape metaphor invokes something both disturbing and fundamentally inaccurate. By exploring the actors and processes of Columbia dam building, he is careful to explain just how the rape metaphor fails to accurately render the intentions, rhetoric, reception, and labor relationships in the building of the Columbia Basin Project. More broadly, I think White challenges us to carefully and critically rethink the “cultural categories,” assumptions, and implications for using sexual violence as a trope in describing human alterations of landscapes in environmental discourse. The feminization of nature, as we have seen throughout this course, runs deep in this field. I have the instinct that rape metaphors are not useful linguistic tools for writing environmental history (or other environmental literature) and White argues the same by rejecting the very common application of rape language to dams. Language, while more subtle than explicit denials of climate change or pipelines through native land, is incredibly important to the future of environmental academia and activism. By refusing to replicate these metaphors of sexual violence and rape in our work on environmental history, as White demonstrates, perhaps we can reject the horrific normalization of sexual assault that the current political climate apparently condones.
On Tuesday night, I called my mother. We talked about a few slivers of hope that we discussed in class: the cyclical quality of binary politics, the temporariness of seemingly permanent decisions. However, while many things about a Trump presidency may indeed be temporary from a historical standpoint, my mother pointed to one thing that is truly permanent: nuclear war. When I think about the Columbia Basin Project, one of my first thoughts is the war-machine enabled by Grand Coulee Dam to power aluminum factories and create Hanford. In White’s section on Hanford, he writes: “During World War II, electricity from the dams went almost totally to defense… The dams powered the shipyards of Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle, the aluminum mills the Defense Plant Corporation built across the Northwest, and the factories that turned aluminum into airplanes. They supplied power to the top secret project at Hanford which was producing plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” (White 1996, p. 72). The connection between the river and the war is paramount to understanding why the Columbia River exists today as a machine. When we talk about the Columbia River being a violent space in regards to labor or human technology, we must acknowledge that this is fundamentally linked to the mass organized violence of World War II and the most devastating weapons in existence that were actually used.
In regards to temporal permanence, even dams are temporary especially when compared to plutonium as White demonstrates on page 81. I am at a loss for words, but I feel strongly that when we think about the long-term effects that this election might have for people and for the environment, we must pay attention to nuclear, both peaceful and not. Energy, as McNeill points out in Something New Under the Sun, poses the challenge to humans “to get energy in a useful form in the right place and the right time, for whatever we might wish to do” (McNiell 2000, p. 10). In his claim, the use, location, purpose of energy are left wide open. In light of the forthcoming transition of power, “whatever we might wish to do” will be controlled by scary interests. Paying close attention to how kinetic energy from a river might be converted into weaponized energy for the purpose of war in our history is necessary for our task of being nuclear watch-dogs now and into the future.