Unpacking Emotions and the Environment: An Emotional Ecologies Conclusion

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This post by Daniel Macfarlane concludes the Emotional Ecologies series edited by Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt. In this series, contributors were asked to reflect on what role emotion plays in connecting humans to their environment and more-than-human beings.

More than a half decade ago, while working on a book about the modern environmental and energy history of Niagara Falls, I realized that the subject intersected with the history of emotions. I set out to reconnaissance what had been published on emotions from an environmental history perspective (I wrote a NiCHE post about it in 2017). It turned out that, while the history of emotions was already well developed as a stand-alone field, there wasn’t a whole lot that was also done from an environmental history perspective.

Fast forward to today and it is apparent that there is now a wealth of writing and research that considers the place of emotions in understanding human connections to the natural world. Just look at the number—12 posts—and range of contributions to this Emotional Ecologies series. Taken as a whole, these posts provide intriguing answers to the framing questions and themes proposed by the series editors Sarah York-Bertram and Jessica DeWitt. How has environment shaped emotion? How has emotion been mobilized to shape environments? What role does emotion have in connecting us to our environment? In what ways does emotion shape interspecies relationships?

Bent trees in a forest.
Photo courtesy of Daniel Macfarlane.

As the editors’ made clear in their call for contributions and introductory post, the emphasis of the Emotional Ecologies series was not exclusively on history. Indeed, only a few of the contributors to this series are historians, and many of the dozen posts do not focus on the past. Emotional Ecologies is populated by scholars from a variety of fields spanning the humanities, social sciences, and beyond: ecocriticism and literature, environmental humanities, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, science and technology studies, etc. The geographical ambit of the series also ranged widely. While some contributions didn’t identify a specific locale, there were several posts about South Asia and North America, and others on South America, Central Europe, and Australia.

Several posts fit squarely in, or at least adjacent to, the realm of environmental history. Kera Lovell kicked off the series by connecting park protests in the past and present, in Berkeley and Atlanta, embedding emotions within activist environmental ecologies. Jose Gabriel Dávila examines the ways that ecological knowledge of non-human subjects—specifically, plants used for salts—is mediated through an assemblage of affective vectors. The penultimate post in the series, by Bikash K. Bhattacharya, is about the thylacine (also known as the Tasmanian tiger) and how settler emotions cast this creature as dangerous vermin, contributing to its extinction.

A number of the efforts in this series adopted unique approaches: poetry, photojournal, literary nonfiction. Lauren Michelle Levesque’s verses unpack anxiety, uncertainty, and hope in a wintry Ontario setting. A group of scholars furnish a pictorial meditation on engagement with place in Australia. Two different contributors in back-to back posts each considered a book, one fiction and one nonfiction: Julia Ludewig delves into Erich Fromm’s Biophilia and Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim uses an Orhan Pamuk novel to interrogate ruins, memory, and emotions. Aadita Chaudhury and Amuyla B both craft creative nonfiction narratives about India in the Anthropocene: the latter explores the idea of waste (and people as waste) while the former surveys emotive imaginaries of a particular landscape that some term a wasteland.

Many of the contributions are personal, embodied, and place-based, attending to the ways that ecologies shape their own affective responses. Some delve into personal and familial histories. To wit, Andi Schwartz interweaves Anna Brownell Jameson’s writing with her personal experiences around her hometown and tamarack trees, juxtaposing her family’s settler background with her own queerness. Caroline Abbott probes the porous boundaries between the human and the other-than-human—literally, in the case of her mother’s cow heart—and reflects on how this informs her own roles as carer and thinker.

We might see the writings in this series as ranging across a spectrum that moves from discussing one’s own emotions to the emotions of others to other-than-human feelings.

We might see the writings in this series as ranging across a spectrum that moves from discussing one’s own emotions to the emotions of others to other-than-human feelings. Responding to the editors’ prompts, several authors took up the challenge of considering the latter end of this spectrum. I have already mentioned posts that involve bovines and plants—perhaps the most distinctive contribution to this series involves three authors (Darcie DeAngelo, Shimpei Ishiyama, and Julianne Yip) presenting explorations of the emotional lives of three rodents.

A child sits looking at a beluga whale swimming in an aquarium.
Photo courtesy of Daniel Macfarlane.

Collectively, the reader of Emotional Ecologies is treated to a smorgasbord of emotions as well as different ways of accessing and representing those feelings. We find positive, negative, and ambivalent emotions, running the gamut from joy and enthrallment to grief and anger. Anguish and anxiety at ecological loss and devastation was a recurring theme in this series; but so was care and hope. People are motivated to act by both love and rage. How we feel about place motivates how we treat that place.

To access mice humiliation, trees shaping sexuality, or vegetables representing bodily affects requires the mobilization of unique sources: infrastructure, landscape, photographs, stories, flora, and fauna. Elucidating sensory histories also requires different methodologies. To be sure, this series identifies techniques, ideas, and approaches that others may want to add to their analytical, and sensory, toolkit.

These posts challenge us to think in new ways about not only the ecological past, but the present and the future. They help us appreciate the entanglements between the more-than-human world and ourselves, realizing that the borders we imagine are not so stable, prodding us to recognize or reconceive how humans actually relate to the nonhuman (and vice versa). Might affect theory posit alternatives to the rational-actor theories that still often underpin not only narratives in the social sciences and humanities but also the economic practices that are devastating the earth?

These posts help us appreciate the entanglements between the more-than-human world and ourselves, realizing that the borders we imagine are not so stable, prodding us to recognize or reconceive how humans actually relate to the nonhuman (and vice versa).

This series also led me to again reflect on some of the challenges of bringing emotive elements into scholarly discourse, particularly the joining of environment and emotional history. As this series attests, scholars from the environmental humanities (ecocriticism, arts, gender studies, etc.) are clearly comfortable engaging with feelings and the senses. Are environmental historians less comfortable? Though there are already environmental historians doing the history of emotions, are others going to follow their lead? After all, environmental history as a discipline is renowned for drawing on the objective and quantitative methodologies of the natural sciences – ecology, for instance. Are the subjective and qualitative approaches of emotional history a bridge too far for some? And there’s another elephant in the room: considering that most of the sole-authored posts, judging from their bios, identify as non cis males, is there a tendency for affective history to be gendered?

Unpacking emotions can lead us to bigger truths that aren’t always accessible in an archive or under a microscope.

I land on the side that sees the potential for bridging environmental and emotional history. I’m pretty sure many others do as well. Unpacking emotions can lead us to bigger truths that aren’t always accessible in an archive or under a microscope. Moreover, the dozen posts that constitute this Emotional Ecologies series don’t just suggest alternatives approaches to academic research, but alternative ways of living our lives in relation with the more-than-human world.

Feature Image: Lake Huron shoreline. Photo by Daniel Macfarlane
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Daniel Macfarlane

Daniel is an Associate Professor in the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of five books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" was published in summer 2023. His newest book, an environmental history of Lake Ontario, will be released in 2024. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com Twitter: @Danny__Mac__

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