Abstract
Environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like ecological disasters usually recognised by the general public, and ‘slow violence’, a type of violence that occurs gradually, out of sight and on a long-term scale. Planetary seas and oceans, loaded with cultural meanings of that which ‘hides’ and ‘allows to forget’, are the spaces where such attritional violence unfolds unseen and ‘out of mind’. Simultaneously, conventional concepts of nature and culture, as dichotomous entities, become obsolete. We all inhabit and embody the world differently, as variously situated people, divided by national, sexual, bodily and economic status, and as very variously situated nonhumans in an increasingly anthropogenic world. This chapter focuses on subtle ‘slow violence’ unfolding through the instances of submerged chemical weapons, so-called dead zones, invasive species and high- and low-trophic mariculture in the Baltic and North Sea regions. It zooms in on the select cases of such ‘environed bodies’, their stories of excruciating slow violence and yet also on unexpected encounters with care and hospitality. The aim is to unfold a low-trophic theory for the naturecultural research on violence and care within environmental humanities, and to engage a coexistential ethics of environmental adaptability informed by feminist posthumanities.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Alaimo, S. (2012). States of suspension: Trans-corporeality at sea. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19(3), 476–493.
Alaimo, S. (2016). Exposed: Environmental politics and pleasure in posthuman times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Alexandratos, N., & Bruinsma, J. (2012). World agriculture towards 2030/2050: The 2012 revision (ESA Working Paper No. 12-03). Rome: FAO.
Åsberg, C. (2014). Imagining posthumanities, enlivening feminisms. In B. Blaagaard & I. van der Tuin (Eds.), The subject of Rosi Braidotti: politics and concepts (pp. 56–64). Bloomsbury Academic.
Åsberg, C. (2018). Feminist posthumanities in the anthropocene: Forays into the postnatural. Journal of Posthuman Studies: Philosophy, Technology, Media, 1(2), 185–204.
Åsberg, C., & Braidotti, R. (2018). A Feminist companion to the posthumanities. Dordrecht: Springer.
Åsberg, C., Holmstedt, J., & Radomska, M. (2020). Methodologies of kelp: Transversal knowledge production and multispecies ethics in an age of entanglement. In N. Cahoon, H. Mehti, & A. Wolfsberger (Eds.), The kelp congress. The North Norwegian Art Centre: Svolvær.
Bladow, K., & Ladino, J. (2018). Affective ecocriticism: Emotion, embodiment, environment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Bryld, M., & Lykke, N. (2000). Cosmodolphins: Feminist cultural studies of technology, animals and the sacred. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Buchanan, B., Bastian, M., & Chrulew, M. (2018). Introduction: Field philosophy and other experiments. Parallax, 24(4), 383–391.
Butt, N., Lambrick, F., Menton, M., & Renwick, A. (2019). The supply chain of violence. Nature Sustainability, 2, 742–747.
CHEMSEA. (2014). CHEMSEA Findings: Results from the CHEMSEA Project—Chemical munitions search and assessment. Gdansk: Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences.
Cunsolo, A., & Landman, K. (Eds.). (2017). Mourning nature: Hope at the heart of ecological loss and grief. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008). Spreading dead zones and consequences for marine ecosystems. Science, 321(5891), 926–929 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1156401.
Doka, K. (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington: Lexington Press.
EASAC. (2017). Opportunities and challenges for research on food and nutrition security and agriculture in Europe. European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC).
EC Communication. (2009). Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, 10.6.2009 Sec (2009) 712. Commission Staff Working Document.
European Environment Agency (EEA). (2015). Regulation on invasive alien species (Document number: 1143/2014/EU).
European Geosciences Union. (2018, July 5). New study: Oxygen loss in the coastal Baltic Sea is ‘unprecedentedly severe’ | EurekAlert! Science News. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-07/egu-nso070318.php. Accessed 1 May 2020.
Filbee-Dexter, K., Feehan, C. J., & Scheibling, R. E. (2016). Large-scale degradation of a kelp ecosystem in an ocean warming hotspot. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 543, 141–152.
Filbee-Dexter, K., & Wernberg, T. (2018). Rise of Turfs: A new battlefront for globally declining kelp forests. BioScience, 68(2), 64–76.
Giraud, E. H. (2019). What comes after entanglement? Activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). When the species meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harper, D. (n.d.). Trophic. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/trophic#etymonline_v_39458. Accessed 1 May 2020.
HELCOM. (2012). Observed non-indigenous and cryptogenic species in the Baltic Sea. HELCOM Baltic Sea Environment Fact Sheets. http://www.helcom.fi/baltic-sea-trends/environment-fact-sheets/. Accessed 1 May 2020.
HELCOM. (2018). State of the Baltic Sea—Second HELCOM holistic assessment 2011–2016. Baltic Sea Environment Proceedings 155.
Jokinen, S. A., Virtasalo, J. J., Jilbert, T., Kaiser, J., Dellwig, O., Arz, H. W., et al. (2018). A 1500-year multiproxy record of coastal hypoxia from the northern Baltic Sea indicates unprecedented deoxygenation over the 20th century. Biogeosciences, 15, 3975–4001.
Littfass, D. (2019). Biofouling: Aliens in the Baltic Sea. Research & Innovation News. Open Access Government. https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/aliens-in-the-baltic/67537/. Accessed 1 May 2020.
MacCormack, P. (2020). The Ahuman Manifesto. London: Bloomsbury.
Missiaen, T., & Henriet, J. (2002). Chemical munition dump sites in coastal environments. Brussels: Federal Office for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs.
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury.
Neimanis, A., Åsberg, C., & Hedrén, J. (2015). Four problems, four directions for environmental humanities: Toward critical posthumanities for the Anthropocene. Ethics & the Environment, 20(1), 67–97.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence: Environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ojaveer, H., Jaanus, A., MacKenzie, B. R., Martin, G., Olenin, S., Radziejewska, T., et al. (2010). Status of biodiversity in the Baltic Sea. PLoS ONE. 5(9), e12467 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012467.
Olenin, S., & Leppäkoski, E. (1999). Non-native animals in the Baltic Sea: alteration of benthic habitats in coastal inlets and lagoons. Hydrobiologia, 393, 233–243 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1003511003766.
Peterson, J. (2018). Are dead zones dead? Environmental collapse in popular media about eutrophication. In A. Vogelaar, B. Hale, & A. Peat (Eds.), The discourses of environmental collapse: Imagining the end. London: Routledge.
Radomska, M. (2020). Deterritorialising Death: Queerfeminist Biophilosophy and Ecologies of the Non/Living in Contemporary Art. Australian Feminist Studies, 35(104), 116–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1802697.
Radomska, M., & Åsberg, C. (2020). Doing away with life: On biophilosophy, the non/living, toxic embodiment, and reimagining ethics. In E. Berger, K. Mäki-Reinikka, K. O’Reilly, & H. Sederholm (Eds.), Art as we don’t know it (pp. 54–63). Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books.
Radomska, M., Mehrabi, T., Lykke, N. (2019). Queer death studies: Coming to terms with death, dying and mourning differently. An introduction. Women, Gender & Research (3–4), 3–11.
Rose, D. B. (2006). “Moral friends” in the zone of disaster. Tamkang Review, 37(1), 77–97.
Rose, D. B. (2012). Multispecies knots of ethical time. Environmental Philosophy, 9(1), 127–140.
Rose, D. B., van Doorenb, T., Chrulewb, M., Cookec, S., Kearnesb, M., & O’Gormand, E. (2012). Thinking through the environment, unsettling the humanities. Environmental Humanities, 1, 1–5.
Sapea. (2017). Food from the Oceans—How can more food and biomass be obtained from the oceans in a way that does not deprive future generations of their benefits? (SAPEA Evidence Review Report No. 1). Berlin: SAPEA.
Schiermeier, Q. (2003). Fish farms’ threat to salmon stocks exposed. Nature, 425, 753 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/425753a.
Stigebrandt, A. (2012). Evaluating geoengineering as a method to revive Baltic Sea dead zones. Sea Technology, 2012(12), 89.
Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of the living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Zhang, J., Cowie, G., Naqvi, S. W. A. (2013). Hypoxia in a changing marine environment. Environmental Research Letters, 8, 015025 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015025.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Åsberg, C., Radomska, M. (2021). Environmental Violence and Postnatural Oceans: Low-Trophic Theory in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities. In: Husso, M., Karkulehto, S., Saresma, T., Laitila, A., Eilola, J., Siltala, H. (eds) Violence, Gender and Affect . Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56930-3_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-56929-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-56930-3
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)