Weathering the Storm
An Exploratory Intertwining of the Technocene, Plasticene, and Planthropocene, Through the Lifecycle of Birds and the Ecosystem-Human Interactions They Reveal.
By Ariana Garcia, Felix Ramin, and Silvana Montagu
Introduction
An exploratory intertwining of the Technocene, Plasticene, and Planthropocene exposes complex ecosystem-human interactions. We are specifically using birds as an intermediary agent to closely examine the effects of humans on their life cycles and how their navigation of the world has been impacted as a result. Birds are a profound case study that deny the Anthropogenic assumption that humans are simply antagonists that colonize, raid, and destroy natural spaces while non-human plants and creatures are passive agents that receive human attacks and are destroyed. Birds fly past our human-delineated borders. They hatch eggs on our AC units. They eat the strawberries from my mother’s garden. They are a symbol of radical freedom, of life that continues despite, and the tenacity needed to establish nests in a human-centric world. Further, our bird-centered perspective is centered on the life of birds, it is a bird-world that humans are living in, and in itself gives birds their own agency.
A byproduct of the Technocene, which we define as the sphere of human influence and ingenuity, is the creation of expansive networks that support human activity. From Gregory Simon’s “Vulnerability-in-Production: A Spatial History of Nature, Affluence, and Fire in Oakland, California” emerges a useful discussion of vulnerable spatialities, which “connotes the social, political, and economic processes through which people and places become exposed to shifting states of vulnerability over time. Collectively, these studies have shown that effective vulnerability mitigation will entail studying what Mustafa (2005) labeled dynamic ‘hazardscapes,’ through robust assessment of ‘the cumulative progression of vulnerability, from root causes through to local geography and social differentiation’” (Simon 2014). In the context of our overarching project, these areas of vulnerability encompass the sites where the Technocene and the sphere of birdlife intersect and where complex interactions (that can’t be flattened to just aggressor and aggressee) can take place.
The second piece of our epochal puzzle is the Plasticene, the agglomeration of plastic material that pervades the surface of the Earth and everyday life. As an epochal term, it gives weight to the sheer amount of plastic that accumulates both through manufacturing processes and daily use and how it has begun to make its mark on our fossil record, biological makeup, and ecosystemic relations. Through our atlas, we aim to re-delineate the narrative of plastic as solely a human waste. Instead, the Atlas emphasizes how plastic disrupts the balance of sensitive systems and processes, as a disregarded byproduct, but also as a material that is actively wielded to control and optimize aspects of nonhuman life like procreation, touching different parts of a bird’s life in the process.
The sphere of the Planthropocene evoked the argument of our Midterm epochal constellation that we have extended for this project. We find that their involvement in the ecological system is profound, in that they are the bottom of the foodchain, grow oxygen, and are carbon sinks. Plants occupy many roles both for and otherwise of humans. Through our atlas project, we trace their lineage in spaces of conservation and habitat, farming, and in the context of the lifecycles that they support. The planthropocene framework also importantly helps to frame this Altas’ understanding of human interimplication with the non-human, which extends to birds as well as plant species. By foregrounding the life of birds, this Atlas also calls for a similar sensitivity to the nonhuman that Natasha Myers views as necessary to embrace the “more-than-human world” (Myers 2017, 77) we inhabit.
Using the lifecycle of a bird, we spotlight nonhuman timelines and how they are touched by human activity, by moving through the various epochs of our constellation. Different birds interact in human-centric systems in roles of subjugation, of preserval, and of reciprocality. Donna Haraway quotes Judith Butler “there are only ‘contingent foundations;’ bodies that matter are the result. A bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of time trump the imagining of even the most baroque cosmologists. For me, that is what companion species signifies” (Haraway 2003). This companion species framework opens up ideas of freedom, authority, and conversation in reciprocal relations with animal actors, like birds.
Point of Life Diagram: Bird Link
The Point of Life diagram connecting our three ‘cenes serves as a grounding point for our Atlas. The diagram explores the centrality of birds to each ‘cene as well as the relationships between spaces and processes defined by humans and the birds who ignore and interact with them. My diagram attempts to map the ways that these processes influence and are influenced by the birds around us.
The most major change from my previous iteration of the Point of Life, the core of the diagram, is now filled with birds who are not confined to the digital space allotted for them. The 17 bird species pictured are a mix of endangered species whose habitats or lives have been devastated as a result of human actions and species who have become common neighbors and inhabitants of constructed, urban spaces that were not built with them in mind. Varied experiences across bird species remind us that we are not always in charge, that humans do not always dictate where life prevails or falls. And yet, there are many instances where birds serve as an allegory for what humans will face.
In the mining industry, the canary was a sentinel species used to warn miners of carbon monoxide deeper in the mine. The small birds would appear visibly ill when exposed to small amounts of toxic gas, warning humans to turn back. Cristal Pollock describes the ideal sentinel animal as one that “serves as a sensitive indicator of an environmental hazard” (Pollock 2016, 389). It is not just canaries that serve to warn us of danger to come anymore. Birds have become the target of conservation efforts, the case studies of climate change, and a marker of healthy habitats around the world. They are a poster child of biodiversity and their absence is a signal of deep environmental damage.
When thinking about birds as a sacrificial sentinel for human well-being, I was struck by Walton Ford’s painting “Visitation”, depicting a flock of extinct passenger pigeons gorging themselves on food.
The endless sea of birds brawling for food may be a reflection of human exploitation, one of the processes that eventually caused passenger pigeons’ extinction. The idea of human spaces where birds are sacrificed or disregarded in favor of human benefit is also a theme reflected in my updated diagram.
While most of the rings remained the same, the outer ring of the Planthropocene cycle now shows a map of bird conservation regions in the US developed by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative. These regions were defined to help conservation efforts focus strategies on areas of similar bird residence or habitat. The middle ring of the Technocene cycle contains a map of agricultural expansion threat levels. Areas at a higher risk of agricultural expansion are darker, while areas with less risk are lighter. With this ring, I wanted to highlight the massive destruction to bird habitat that results from agricultural practices. Finally, I added labels to each ring in the diagram to increase readability of the graphic as a whole without the need for extensive description.
Systems Diagram: Plastiglomerate-Ecosystemic Relations
The system diagram, “Plastiglomerate-Ecosytemic Relations”, maps the movement of a plastic bag, broadly representative of plastic ephemera, through time and processes. After plastic becomes waste, it broadly falls into the recycle, landfill, or incineration destinations. However, there are extensive gaps in the waste management system where plastic can “leak” and enter other systems, thereby affecting other species and environments. The intricacies of the movement are extremely dense and difficult to predict. Thus, my system drawing tries to map as many of these pathways as possible.
Going forward from my midterm drawing, I added axes to reorganize the pathway content. Going downwards through the diagram is a timescale with varying speeds and intensities. Formally this invokes the fact that plastic has a very long degradation cycle and can be dispersed throughout the system fluidly. Along the x-axis, I simulated a ruler to partition where macroplastic, microplastic, and nanoplastic (from left to right, decreasing in relative size) interact and are more closely related to processes. Temporal and scalar considerations (as well as toxicological, physical, and gas) helped me ground this swirl of action in specific, hidden realms of the Plasticene.
Furthermore, I increased line weights so that the gradients, representing the intersections of the Planthropocene, Technocene, and Plasticene, are more legible. I also put more curves into the lines to mimic slowness vs directness. The effect is a gyre-like / ocean-like / fluid perspective of plastic migration. It reminded me of the etching “Bird’s Eye View of the Sea (L’eau à vue d’oeil d’oiseau)” by Pierre Alechinsky, which similarly zooms out and shows movement from an abstract aerial perspective through lines.
The systems diagram, in this new atlas setting, serves as a background roadmap. It is no longer asking in what ways does the plastiglomerate affect ecosystems?. It is, rather starkly, implying an answer to it, at the timescale of plastic’s lifetime and at the sizescale of the plasticbody.
Scenographic Map: Life of Birds Triptych
Triptych, part i: Early life
he first part of the triptych depicts the early stages of life for the Sandhill Crane and Whooping Crane from their conception to first migration. From the perspective of these birds, we can see how their lives have been invaded and manipulated in the name of conservation and science. In the US, habitat destruction forced scientists to intervene to repopulate species like the Whooping Crane and Sandhill Crane in the 1950s. For the Whooping Crane this entailed artificial insemination and captive breeding programs, for the Sandhill Crane this meant using heavy machinery to maintain their roosting spot on Nebraska’s Platte River. For both species, it meant crafting environments to meet singular goals, using economic modes of production that reflect wider Technocene logics of accumulation and employing technology and staging particular relationships with the non-human.
The left-most portion of the triptych shows the captive environment that forms the habitat for most Whooping Cranes early in their life. While the goal of conservationists is honorable, to allow this species to continue to persevere in the wild, their breeding and rearing shows similarities to plantation logics “with their emphasis on scale, precision, and extraction” (Wolford 2021, 11) and the resulting methods wield technology to intrusive, disturbing, and complex ends. Whooping Crane conception often involves artificial insemination, and even in instances where their offspring are conceived naturally, “high-volume approach[es]” (Van Dooren 2014, 165) are employed which can involve removing eggs from the crane’s usual clutch of two, so that the mother believes she has mistakenly laid one and continues to lay more. This method produces more eggs for the conservationists, but also leaves these removed eggs now permanently separated from their parents and having to be “incubated, hatched, and reared” (Van Dooren 2014, 164) instead by the breeders. The complexity of scientific interventions that are well intentioned but also violent is similarly captured by Terry Evans’s Trumpeter Swan photograph. She said that she was “extremely sad to realize that the swan had to be killed in order to study it, but was moved by the care in the way it was prepared.” (Shackelford 2011). This section of the triptych shows the two eggs that make up the clutch of a Whooping Crane, along with measurements from a medical study on egg incubation behind a pair of Whooping Cranes.
Moving to the right the triptych then show an egg incubator and a worker in a crane puppet suit, which is used on captive breeding sites to prevent the human-reared birds from imprinting on workers. Imprinting would result in these hatchlings recognizing these people as “their parents, or indeed others of their own species”(Van Dooren 2014, 166), impacting their entire future life-cycle. In the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership’s sites, and others, during the rearing process staff also attempt to emulate the optimal natural environment for these crane species, subject to the real economic and resource constraints that they face. This includes making sure the chicks can “forage for natural food items, have access to water for roosting and have the ability to take short flights in specially designed pens” (ICF, 2022), and shows how particular relationships with the surrounding environment, including plants, are staged to achieve the goal of mass bird production and rehabituation into the wild. Artists like Björn Braun have sought to challenge the control that humans have in crafting environments with the nonhuman, by “collaborat[ing] with birds, mice, or bees, turning the remnants of their activities — nests, burrows, abandoned eggs, and feathers — into sculptures.” (Marianne Boesky Gallery 2022) as is visible in his work untitled, 2016 which was made with the help of two Zebra Finches he raises and uses plastics along with natural materials.
This triptych then shows the Platte River in Nebraska where half a million Sandhill Cranes gather as part of their annual migration. With land use change and the lack of “fast-moving icy spring flows to scythe vegetation off islands, heavy machinery must clear room for the cranes […] now squeezed onto a much smaller stretch of the river” (Marris, 169). In the background of the pictured river there is machinery that might be used to clear the islands, and a fossil of a Sandhill Crane to represent how the crane species has been migrating through the Platte for at least 2.5M years (Kearney 2022). To learn this ancient migration route, Whooping Cranes, and previously Sandhill Cranes, were trained to follow “ultralight aircraft[s]” (Van Dooren 2014, 158), one of which is pictured in this triptych.
Finally, the bottom right of this section of the triptych includes barbed wire to shine a light on the sacrificial crane populations that are forced to continue to breed and who’s lifecycle is contained to captivity. Thomas Van Dooren in Flight Ways writes that these cranes “live and die their deaths in the shadows, often unseen and unacknowledged, but making possible our hopes and dreams for the ongoing life of [the] species.” (Van Dooren 2014, 143).
Triptych, part ii: Living
The middle portion of the triptych explores the livelihood of birds because of, in spite of, and regardless of humans. Considering the effects of the Technocene on avian species, I aimed to ask: what are humans doing for and to birds? Why? Who is it for — us, them, or someone else? And is it working?
I began making this bricolage with a focus on the long-billed curlew, a North American shorebird whose grassland habitats have been declining due to agricultural land conversion. I discovered that curlews and other shorebirds have been the target of conservation studies in California where rice fields are kept in a flooded state longer than normal to provide habitat for water birds (Sesser et. al. 2018). The background images of the bricolage show aerial views of rice fields in Sacramento County and a picture of a flooded rice field studded with birds.
In the bottom left corner is a drawing of a bird trap design, symbolizing the human inflicted violence that has been the demise of many bird species. The signage in the middle of the section declaring “WAR” is a historical notice from the Audubon Society prohibiting the public from harming birds due to their beneficial nature as insect predators. Eating harmful bugs on agricultural plants leads to increased yields, thereby defining the importance of birds by their usefulness to humans.
Finally, I was intrigued by the many species of birds that thrive in urban environments. These birds may not be living in the ecosystems they once inhabited, but they are hardly victims. Among the many animals besides humans that live in the cities we build, they have adapted and thrived, reclaiming a landscape built for someone else. In this bricolage I included pigeons from a picture taken in London, gulls eating discarded french fries in the middle of a city square, and a Grey Heron walking down the street — one of many of its kind that have taken up residence in Amsterdam and can be observed living an urban life alongside human neighbors.
Triptych, part iii: Alterlife
The third and final part of our triptych shows the intertwined nature of the alterlife of birds, especially in conjunction with plastic. I used various iconic images of birds and put them in various imaginings; see: a hummingbird sipping ice nectar from polyethylene plastic bags, a six-pack plastic lining inching towards a crane’s neck, an imprint of an owl who had hit a window juxtaposed on a plastic NASA space balloon. The background of the image is a lithograph called “Bird Cages’’ by Allen Kubach that shows tightly packed birds in wireframe cages. To me, it conveys the fragility of the humanist structures we construct around wildness.
This idea also ties in with the emphasis on the Conservation Movement, seen through the background image of San Juan from 1872, before it was made a national park, and the image of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. I included these because I was interested in the tension of politicians valuing conservation and the preservation of natural spaces over displaced Indigenous people. The internal timeline of the river suggests a parallel link between White politicians’ Conservation Movement and new interest in space exploration. This might seem off-topic, but it represents an accelerating idea of growth through colonization, now that our naturalscapes are becoming increasingly filled with plastic.
Living in contaminated spaces is a fact of existence for much of life on this planet. This triptych offers an oppositional image to the pessimistic view above. Drawing specifically on the iconic photo of the albatross with its belly filled with macroplastic debris, Max Liboiron argues that “Albatross are all about Murphy’s alterlife, ‘the condition of being already co-constituted by material entanglements with water, chemicals, soil, atmospheres, microbes, and built environments, and also the condition of being open to ongoing becoming.’ … To use albatross bodies as tokens of damage instead of signs of alterlife is not only incorrect and a missed opportunity, it is rude. It misses the wider relations, the Land relations, of albatross and plastics, and turns them into a Resource for shock, awe, and charismatic academic presentations” (Liboiron 2021). Alterlife gestures at the environmental sensitivity between creatures and plastic. I think this is a fitting end to the triptych because it suggests a continued relationship beyond plastic-related deaths and pollution effects, that is instead built off of an appreciation for the resilience of non-human actors.
Works Cited
Alechinsky, Pierre. (1967). “Bird’s Eye View of the Sea (L’eau à vue d’oeil d’oiseau)”. Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/70963.
Antonelli, Paola. “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design.” The Museum of Modern Art, 1995, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_455_300063134.pdf
Archibald, George. Whooping Crane Eggs. Photograph. The Story of the Whooping Crane. September 2020. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/cde474fce6894560901fedf1ad2b9ade
Artificially Incubated Hatchling. Photograph. Hagen Avricultural Research Institute. https://hari.ca/hari/research-facility/hari-research-papers/artificial-incubation-applied-small-numbers-altricial-bird-eggs/
“Birds and Windows”. Portland Audubon, https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/being-a-good-wildlife-neighbor/birds-and-windows/.
Burt Glinn. 1965. USA. California. USA. California. 1965. Aerial view of rice fields near Sacramento.. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMAGNUMIG_10311524935
Clement, Brad. Sandhill cranes gather in the Platte River. Photograph. Enterprise. https://www.enterprise.com/en/inspiration/passions/finding-sandhill-cranes-in-nebraska.html
Dunn, Richard. Whooping Crane Egg Incubator. Photograph. Freeport McMoran Audubon Species Survival Center. February 2019. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3676842
Evans, Terry. Field Museum, Trumpeter Swan, North Dakota, 1891. Photograph. Art Institute Chicago, 2001. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/180593/field-museum-trumpeter-swan-north-dakota-1891
Ford, Walton. “Visitation.” Color etching, aquatint, spit bite, and drypoint on paper, 44 x 31in. . SAAM. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2004. Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/birds/online/walton-ford.
Gentry, Caroline, dir. Theodore Roosevelt, friend of the birds. (1924; United States; Roosevelt Memorial Association Film Library), https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/consrvbib:@field(SUBJ+@band(Royal+Tern++Ship++)).
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Hobson, Sam. Feeding Frenzy. n.d. Photograph.
Hrudová, Julie. Life of Grey Herons in Amsterdam. n.d. Photograph.
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Liboiron, Max. (2021). “Scale, Harm, Violence, Land”. Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press.
Marianne Boesky Gallery. “Björn Braun Biography”. 2022. https://marianneboeskygallery.com/artists/53-bjorn-braun/biography/
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National Association Of Audubon Societies. Shooting on this property is prohibited. War protect the birds as a war measure! The food destroyed in America by insects and small rodents would feed the people of Belgium! Birds are the great natural enemies of these pests … National Associa. New York, 1917. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.13202000/.
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Seelman, Pamela. Whooping Cranes in ICF Enclosure. Photograph. International Crane Foundation. March 2018. https://savingcranes.org/international-crane-foundation-captive-flock-grows-by-six-whooping-cranes/
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Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir on Glacier Point, Yosemite Valley, California. (1906). Stereograph. https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/consrvbib:@field(SUBJ+@band(Stereographs--1900-1910+))
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