Introduction
This project is a series of photo essays that each aim to destabilize the way we frame a word in relation to the environment or the non-human world. The essays use storytelling and auto-ethnography to explore different uses of the word across many rhetorical frameworks.
Rhetorical and neurological evidence shows that facts are not persuasive. To convince people not only that climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinction are real threats, but to act against these threats, we must engage their existing frameworks of understanding the world. Humans are predisposed to understand language differently depending on their predetermined frameworks, making communication and language unstable. One goal of this project, therefore, is to expose and explore this instability, because if it is understood, perhaps it can be used for good rather than impeding our communication about the environment.
So I organized environmentalism into five common frameworks for how humans relate to nature: progression, Darwinism, stewardship, multispecies, and networked. The frameworks take varying stances on whether humans are equal to nature or higher than nature in a hierarchy, and on what our respective duties are within that hierarchy. The five frameworks I’ve chosen to work with are as follows:
Progression — Humans are higher than nature and nature is ours to use for our benefit.
Darwinian — Humans are an equal part of nature, and therefore our dominance is an extension of natural selection and the impulse to improve and continue the species.
Multispecies — Humans are an equal part of nature, which has no hierarchy, and should live in mutually-beneficial harmony with other species and systems.
Stewardship — Humans are higher than nature and have used this power for evil, destroying the environment, so we should strive to reverse this damage and live in harmony with nature.
Network — Humans are a part of nature, existing as unique organisms within an endless network of nature, and the worth of each organism can be determined by its usefulness to and interactions with others. Value is created in community. Humans have unique value rather than higher value.
These frameworks are by no means exhaustive or universal, and each one offers differs advantages and disadvantages. For example, we’ve seen how the progression narrative and its emphasis on profit have allowed for the mass oppressions of human beings and destruction of the non-human life on our planet. But we’ve also seen how progress has, although unevenly, gradually improved human quality of life and coincided with valuable progress in knowledge production and artistic production. However, the frameworks do offer us a starting place from which to discuss how our language and frameworks interact, create miscommunication and division, and determine how we react to environmental issues like climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinction.
Each of the following chapters focuses on one of nine words, which popped up repeatedly in my research and inspired evocative thought and work in my own life. I rewrote the definitions for each of these words based on the rhetorical frameworks (using OED and Merriam-Webster definitions for the progression narrative, as I believe it is the prominent framework in Western society at this time) and used prose, poetry, essays, and photography to further destabilize and explore these definitions. My goals in this effort are to tease out the allowances and constraints of these frameworks, contribute to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s project of new forms of storytelling for life in capitalist ruins, and begin the important work of imagining what an ecotopia may look like.
Imagining ecotopias is not a project that I take on for practicality. I know that my ecotopias will never be realized. But the act of imagining beyond what is possible creates a dramatized space for shifting these frameworks, imagining them in new contexts, and deciding what may be possible in our own lives, communities, and planet.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Creating this work has been one of the greatest joys, as well as the most intellectually and creatively stimulating, projects of my life. Most of the writing and photography in the following pages was produced between May of 2019 and April of 2020, though not all of it. As I began to piece this work together, it became clear that my art and my values over the last eight or so years have all been leading to this point. I also gathered some photos from my family archives, and I am grateful to my father, Martin Breland, for compiling and digitally scanning these archives over the years.
Before you continue, I’d like to mention some things. In the essays that follow, I tell a lot of stories about my life. I practice auto-ethnography, the act of storytelling about the self in order to reveal a truth about the collective. And because I do not live my life in isolation, I have written about family, friends, and loved ones who have helped me come to the conclusions about environmentalism and feminism that I have come to. To those people, I say: if you find yourself in this work, and feel offended or confused by my depiction of you or the events in question, please know that I am sincerely sorry and I care for you deeply. I have not included anyone who does not have my endless love and support. But my perspective is, unfortunately, limited to my own experience, and I have tried to stay true to it.
I would also like to apologize that the vast majority of the bodies depicted in this work — especially in the chapter titled “Body” — are white and cisgender. I know that issues which concern environmental-feminists are not limited to white female bodies, and in fact that white females like myself experience immense privilege in comparison to bodies of color, transgender bodies, and non-binary bodies. But very few of the photographs which appear here were pre-meditated for their place among the essays, and though I should have given extra attention to diversity of bodies and stories, I was not able to within the time constraints. From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely apologize and pledge to do better. I hope that someday there will be another edition of this work, and that I will have the time and space to expand “Body” and other chapters to provide more attention to all bodies with female reproductive organs and all bodies who experience discrimination through presenting themselves as feminine.
I will also use this space to mention that though this work includes very few quotes from other thinkers and writers (because I wanted to emphasize personal storytelling as a mode of academic contribution which shifts the narrative from hierarchal to relational) the following pages are heavily influenced by the work of others. Therefore, I have included a full bibliography at the end of the project and offer my special thanks to Terry Tempest Williams and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Their work has transformed not only my academic pursuits, but also my personal life, and I am immensely grateful.
I would like to thank Georgetown University — and the incredible intellectual community I’ve found there — for making this work possible. Specifically, I offer gratitude to Dr. Karen Shaup, Dr. Nathan Hensley, Dr. Christine So, Dr. Matthew Pavesich, and my advisor Dr. Lori Merish for their interest in my work and their contributions to my bibliography, scholarly development, and public-facing goals. I’d also like to thank Jacob Cecil, Paige Critcher, and my own father for how they have helped me grow as a photographer over the years, and Lily Vogelsong, Mallory Ivy, Dr. Karen Shaup, and the whole team at Earth Day Network for how they have helped me grow as an environmentalist. Last, I have endless gratitude to my community of female friends and family — Melissa Mahon, Abby Scheetz, Lily Vogelsong, Taylor Lawrence, Kim Moseman, Kayla Blasher, and my mother Constance Breland — for their support and encouragement throughout my time at Georgetown.
Finally, I would like to thank you, reader, for your interest in our non-human planetary environment, in femaleness, and in the systems of domination which have damaged both. I ask for your open mind and your grace in the pages that follow, and I hope that you find something useful or powerful.
All my gratefulness,
Kalen Breland