Reimagining landscapes of loss
the expressive challenge of environmental violence
by María Faciolince Martina & Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik
Landscapes are an entry point to understand the bonds between bodies and territories. In this series, we’ll be looking into these links by exploring how landscapes are felt and imagined in mainstream narratives. We want to examine what brings us to look at nature through a prism of exploitation, and understand how legacies of colonial imagery have marked our relationships to territories.
To approach landscapes is to reckon with how human beings have interacted with the natures they are part of. Our current environmental crisis emerges from the imposition of one particular model of relating to landscapes: one of intense extraction that sees nature as a site of sacrifice, to be exploited and conquered. Nature narrates the devastating impacts of this model.
This ecological emergency poses a challenge of expression. To give form to the ungraspable impacts of a systemic unravelling, we need to look at the language of self-harm.
The fallout of disconnection
Extractive imaginaries create extractive realities. Historical chronicles, cinema, visual art and cartography have helped instil an exoticising and extractive gaze: a worldview that makes ecological violence distant, and therefore possible. In the 21st century, we are still bearing the visual legacy of the colonial expeditions of botanists, naturalists and geologists that sought to classify nature.
Their anatomical observations were magnified by the painters and writers of the time, who romanticized nature, camouflaging how it was being plundered.
Extractive imaginaries create extractive realities.
To this day, classification and romanticization have served as instruments of distancing. Both feature in mainstream narratives of ecology, which are saturated by a series of powerful simplistic stories: that we need to save the planet, avert a future apocalypse, and that humanity as a whole is equally responsible. What unifies these narratives is distance, in place, time and blame.
Both nature and the crisis related to it, are over ‘there’. Those bearing the brunt of environmental violence — communities in the frontlines of injustice — are rarely given authority beyond victimhood.
The imagery of absence
All ideas have corresponding representations. Today’s Western equivalents of the exoticist brush can be found in the dominant imagery of both environmental conservation and destruction: polar bears and pandas, stylised portraits of untouched nature, fields of tree stumps, heat maps and temperature graphs.
So what is hidden by mainstream imageries of a distant nature in need of saving?
The first consistent omission is human beings. Representations of the climate crisis tend to blot out the relationships between people and place. Safe natures are ‘virgin’ or ‘pristine’ natures, much like colonial representations of romantic landscapes.
This omission erases the historical exploitation of enslaved peoples, who were plundered and coerced into the work of dominating nature for colonisers. It also hides the role of many communities in territorial flourishing; it is no coincidence that the areas of the world with the highest levels of biodiversity overlap with the areas of highest human cultural and linguistic diversity. The omission also denies a basic truism: We are part of the environments that nourish us, not apart from them.
Representations of the climate crisis tend to blot out the relationships between people and place.
A second dangerous limitation is that loss of place is absent. Because humans make place, all the things that come with that place — such as identity, spirituality and community — are not made visible in the lexicon of loss. The visible disasters of the climate crisis are immediate, loud, stunning: super-storms, spills, hurricanes.
A third important blindspot in mainstream environmental storytelling is the tendency to revolve around the future. In doing so, stories of climate injustice often ignore a long history of colonial ecocide, and erase the threatening reality that many communities face.
For many, ecological ‘apocalypses’ are not on the horizon; they are past and present.
What these narratives exclude is the ‘slow violence’ of environmental grief, the complexity of in-situ dis(place)ment, or solastalgia — the gruelling dislocation of living in a land that becomes unrecognizable.
These different layers of time and loss need to feature more prominently in our understandings of the climate crisis.
Inverting the world to see it upright
The challenge for communicators, artists, and storytellers is to recast narratives that shake the seams of a normalised disconnection from nature. It is our task to expand the horizons for more pluralistic conversations, encapsulate the far-reaching impacts of ecological damage, and better account for the extractive economy.
These different layers of time and loss need to feature more prominently in our understandings of the climate crisis.
We live in a hyper-materialistic culture that silences and hides its material origins. That which sustains life — — the care work of others and ecosystems — is invisibilized and undervalued.
One powerful pedagogical and conceptual tool to counter this is inversion. After all, sometimes you have to look at the world upside down to see how it sits up.
The geologist Gray Brechin invites us to view cities as ‘inverted mines’. Similarly, we can see the intense emissions in the atmosphere as an inversion of fossil fuel deposits, and the productivity in the economy as an inversion of the reproductive care labour that makes it possible. There are inversions of visible and invisible violence, centres and peripheries, Norths and Souths.
Perhaps looking at the inversions of systemic harm, we can better recognize their true expression.
