This is the tenth and final post in the Succession III: Queering the Environment series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Estraven Lupino-Smith, and Addie Hopes. For this series, contributors were invited to explore ideas of queer rebellion as interruption and resistance.

Starting my postgraduate research into artificial fertiliser’s role in the industrialisation of Ireland’s pasture-dominated agroecosystem, I understood my work as a kind of revelatory investigation. I was to spend four years sifting through archival material from the past 70 years in order to dredge up tendrils of fossil energy and legacies of colonial destruction. The work mattered to me because I believed those truths, once revealed, would empower and maybe even compel people to act.

In her book Touching Feeling, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes this impulse to critique and reveal as a ‘paranoid’ position, part of the legacy of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ which infuses much of today’s humanities research. Sedgwick appreciates the power of critical thought and counts herself among the descendants of this suspicious tradition. But Sedgwick also cautions that when the act of revealing, whether it be the machinations of capital or the construction of gender, is seen as a revolutionary act in itself, that critical position becomes a paranoid one:

“[Paranoia’s] cruel and contemptuous assumption that the one thing lacking for global revolution, explosion of gender roles, or whatever, is people’s (that is other people’s) having the painful effects of their oppression, poverty, or deludedness sufficiently exacerbated to make the pain conscious (as if otherwise it wouldn’t have been) and intolerable (as if intolerable situations were famous for generating excellent solutions).”¹

The paranoid position is the engine of Roger Hallam-style popular climate movements like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. Confronting the public with knowledge of climate change, often through disruptions like blocking bridges and painting Stonehenge is meant to ‘wake people up,’ rouse to action through a kind of exposure to some underlying truth – making the pain of the climate catastrophe ‘conscious and intolerable’ as Sedgwick puts it.

In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm criticises this type of activism as ineffective due to its strict adherence to nonviolence. Sedgwick asks us to look deeper, to see this nonviolent tendency as the result of the movement’s paranoid faith in the revolutionary quality of knowledge. This belief that exposure to the reality of the climate crisis is enough to foster revolutionary change leads the movement to deemphasises the need to disrupt the material infrastructure of the fossil industry whose ubiquity continuously creates the climate crisis. As Malm writes:

“A few years down the road, the kids of the Thunberg generation and the rest of us wake up one morning and realise that business-as-usual is still on, regardless of all the strikes, the science, the please, the millions with colourful outfits and banners – not beyond the realm of the thinkable. Imagine the greasy wheels roll as fast as ever. What do we do then?”²

There is a personal danger to this paranoid form of activism. When an activist sees themself as the bearer of terrible truth, one their friends and family seem to brush off and their government systematically ignores, paranoia evolves into desperation. I think often about the young faces of the Just Stop Oil activists glued to Van Gogh’s sunflowers, how much they need to believe their cans of tomato soup will change things. I think also of the two men in Brooklyn and DC, so desperate for a spark of change that they burned themselves alive in 2018 and 2022. Desperation is to some extent a natural outgrowth of living in the age of climate crisis, but the paranoid frame of popular climateaction weaponizes that desperation, refining it into the evangelising fuel that propels the movement at the expense of the individual.

Sedgwick’s argument is for a ‘reparative’ position: using the research process to seek pleasure and surprise . The reparative reader embraces hope – not as an unyielding blind optimism but a “fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience.”³ From a reparative position, the other, whether the research subject or the audience, is not seen as blind to truth or vindictively dismissive but as “once good, damaged, integral, and requiring and eliciting love and care” rooted in the reader’s care for themself.⁴ In order to find a reparative alternative for climate action and my own research, I have been looking to the way Irish artists approach environmental issues from a reparative position.

Eimear Walshe opens their film The Land Question with the prompt: “What three conditions would need to be met for me to be comfortable having sex exclusively outdoors.”⁵ Shot against a backdrop of hedgerows, stone walls, and fields, Walshe’s connection of 19^th century tenants’ rights and land redistribution efforts to the present-day housing crisis and struggle for queer liberation, is both deeply silly and deadly serious. Their camp appropriation of Irish revolutionary history, including The Land Question itself, which is recast in the film’s title as “Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?,” embodies the reparative practice of camp, which Sedgwick describes as “extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture… whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”⁶ The film critically unmasks the fallacy of Irish decolonisation, but by failing purposefully to ask the right questions or to take its historical subjects seriously, Walshe creates a much more earnest and beautiful picture of queer Irish and rural relationships with land.

Distillation, a play by Luke Casserly, is a meditation on the landscape of Irish peatlands, specifically the bog near his family home in Co. Longford which had been industrially extracted by the state owned Bord na Móna before Ireland’s bogs were designated Special Areas of Conservation under the European Union.⁷ Casserly’s play invites audiences to listen to, smell, and touch, and carefully observe the broken pieces of Earth that make up this post-industrial landscape. During the play, one member of the audience is invited to inhabit the role of Casserly’s father in a transcribed conversation about his work extracting peat for Bord na Móna. Later, he shares a mug of tea with another participant, reenactingthe sharing of tea and sandwiches during seasonal community turbary cutting.

In Distillation, landscapes categorised as wasteland both before and after their industrial extraction are revealed as sources of pleasure and community. The actors of their destruction, both the turbary cutters and the industrial workers are not portrayed as enemies of the environment but complex beings worthy of care. Distillation is an attempt to love the brokenness of the peatlands landscape and as Sedgwick puts it “to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole… not necessarily like any preexisting whole.”⁸

In the way drag not only deconstructs gender as performance, but celebrates the beauty of that performance, both Walshe and Casserly take the tragedy and brokenness of this island and show it to be beautiful and worthy of care. That Distillation and The Land Question both come to us as creative works is instructive. Unbound by the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that shape most humanities research, Walshe and Casserly are able to pull together a broader set of theoretical tools, making environmental work that feels different and, I would argue, does more than we’re used to from environmental research.

Historians often justify our work through a paranoid frame, claiming that the act of revealing, of ‘knowing one’s history,’ is what allows present actors to not repeat it. But the work of history also requires a kind of reparative reading, seeing our subjects not as heroes or villains but as complicated actors entangled within social, political, economic, and environmental networks. Even as I feel the need to reveal the contribution of Ireland’s defunct state-owned fertiliser manufacturer NET to the destruction of the island’s biodiversity, I also find myself in the archives rooting for the success of this hubristic underdog, laden with debt but central to the project of bringing Ireland into the company of modern European nations. These actors and institutions are more than good or evil, they are gorgeous in their complexity.

Sedgwick’s reparative framework gives me permission to both see the harm wrought on the land and people of Ireland through the industrialisation of its agricultural ecosystem and labour, and to be open to the surprising nuance and pathos contained within the lives and actions of those party to that harm. I want to use this reparative lens to lean in to loving the brokenness of this place and these people. This perspective is especially fundamental to environmental history: reconstructing broken pieces of Earth not to despair in their destruction or find ways to ‘not repeat history,’ but truly understanding these places and structures as they are, so we can imagine how they may be.

Featured image: Girley Bog, Co. Meath, 2023. Photo by Benjamin Malcolmson. Used with Permission.

Notes

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Gabriel Coleman

Gabriel Coleman (they/them) is an environmental historian, artist, and musician interested in water, food, and place. They grew up on Wahpekute Dakota land and are currently living in Dublin completing postgraduate research into the history of fertiliser use, industrialisation, and pollution in postwar Irish pasture farming.

Latest posts by Gabriel Coleman (see all)

• Broken Pieces of Earth - September 19, 2024