Ben Hubbard, “Money flows with refugees, and life jackets fill the shops,” New York Times, September 26, 2015, ➝.
I explore what I call phantomogenic readings of photographs and landscapes in my essay “Ghostscapes from the Forever War,” in Nature’s Nation. American Art and Environment, eds. Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 272–288. I am indebted to Avery Gordon, Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, Jenny Sharpe, Marianne Hirsch, Gabriele Schwab, Russ Castronovo, and Renee Bergland for their explorations of ghostly matters.
Hubbard, ➝.
Arundhati Roy, Capitalism. A Ghost Story (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 7.
It is now generally agreed that in 2011, at the border city of Daraa, farmers were driven in desperation by a series of droughts to ignite the protests that marked the beginning of the Syrian civil war. Syria now has eight million displaced people. What is ghosted from much of the media is that the second largest foreign contingent fighting in support of Syria’s Al-Assad are Afghan refugees from the failed US war of occupation.
On militarization and environmental crises, see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Robert Marzec, Militarizing the Environment. Climate Change and the Secuiry State (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2013); Christian Parenti Tropic of Chaos (New York: The Nation, 2013); Winona LaDuke, The Militarization of Indian Country (East Lansing: Makwa Enewed, 2013).
Norwegian Refugee Council, ➝. For an extended account of forced displacements worldwide, see Global Trends. Forced Displacement in 2018, a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. ➝. Peter Beaumont, “Record 68.5 million people fleeing war or persecution worldwide,” The Guardian, June 19, 2018, ➝.
UNHCR, ➝.
Suzanne Goldenberg, “Greenland ice sheet melted at unprecedented rate during July,” The Guardian, July 24, 2012, ➝
Suzanne Goldenberg, “Artic lost record snow and ice last year as data shows changing climate,” The Guardian, December 5, 2012, ➝.
Goldenberg, “Greenland ice sheet,” ➝.
“Iceberg breaks off from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier,” BBC, July 19, 2012, ➝.
Goldenberg, “Artic lost record snow and ice,” ➝.
Christine Dell’Amore, “Polar Ice Sheets Shrinking Worldwide, Study Confirms” National Geographic, November 30, 2012, ➝
David Shukman, “Climate Change: Greenland’s Ice faces Melting Death Sentence,” BBC, September 3, 2019, ➝.
“Ice Sheet,” National Geographic, ➝.
Katrin Jakobsdottir “Iceland’s Prime Minister: ‘The Ice is Leaving,’” New York Times, August 17, 2019, ➝.
Jon Gertner, The Ice at the End of the World (New York: Random House, 2019), xiv. I am indebted to Gertner’s magisterial book.
Joseph Stromberg, “Confirmed: Both Antarctica and Greenland Are Losing Ice,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 29, 2012, ➝.
Gertner, xvii.
See Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (New York: Verso, 2017; Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come (New York: Little, Brown and Co, 2017); Mike Tidewell, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast (Knopf Doubleday, 2007).
See Naomi Oreskes and Erik. M Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is “one of the most powerful, secretive organizations in the United States. Heavily funded by the Koch and Sarah Scaife Foundations, ALEC operates by wining and dining corporate leaders and legislators behind closed doors to produce ‘model’ blueprint bills, which state legislators introduce in their states without ALEC’s visible imprimatur.” Anne McClintock, “Who’s Afraid of Title IX,” Jacobin Magazine, February 23, 2017, ➝.
Gertner, chapters 11 and 12.
“The name, pronounced TOO-lee, derived from the 330B.C voyage of Pytheas, who had sailed north from Greece and reached the pack ice and glimpsed land, the land of the furthest north, that he called Ultima Thule.” Gertner p. 159. And “In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin “farthermost Thule”) acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant place located beyond the ‘borders of the known world,’” ➝.
Gertner, 163. Thule Air Base became a small city that could house ten thousand personnel, sporting an airstrip, barracks, post office, baseball diamond, gymnasium, and churches. The reasons for Thule were, nominally, access to the rare mineral cryolite, potential for weather predictions and a strategic stopover. But as Gertner points out, Thule had nothing to do with science or exploration.
Gertner, 201.
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, (New York; Norton, 2019) 14.
Macfarlane, 329. Arundhati Roy, “What Have We Done to Democracy?,” Guernica, September 28, 2009, ➝.
One of the most authoritative accounts of the disaster is Peter Lehner with Bob Deans, In Deep Water. The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and how to End our Oil Addiction (New York: Or Books, 2010)
"bp.com," Wayback Machine, August 12, 2010, ➝.
See Anne McClintock “Slow Violence and the BP Oil Crisis in the Gulf of Mexico: Militarizing Environmental Catastrophe,” 9.1–9.2 On the Subject of the Archives 9, no. 1 and 2, 2012, ➝.
Scientific studies establish that the BP catastrophe has altered the very structure of molecules around the Macondo site. Oliver Milman, “Deepwater Horizon Disaster Altered the Building Blocks of Ocean Life,” June 28, 2018, ➝; Huan Chen, “4 Years after the Deepwater Horizon Spill: Molecular Transformation of Macondo Well Oil in Louisiana Salt Marsh Sediments Revealed by FT-ICR Mass Spectrometry,” Environmental Science and Technology 50, no. 17 (2016): 9061–9069; Oliver Millman, “I Pray to God It Never Happens Again,” The Guardian, April18, 2020, ➝; Emily Holden, “‘Of course it could happen again’: experts say little has changed since Deepwater Horizon,” The Guardian, April 20, 2020, ➝.
Edward Helmore, “Deepwater Horizon Disaster Had Much Worse Impact Than Believed, The Guardian, February 13, 2020, ➝.
One cannot overstate how pervasively the trope of “Indian Country” has been used by the United States military to characterize as yet unsubjugated territories in active war zones around the world. Throughout US history, to be “in Indian Country” was to be behind enemy lines, from the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and beyond. See McClintock, “Ghostscapes from the Forever War,” 281–282.
The CNA Corporation, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation), 17, ➝.
Goodell, The Water Will Come, 49–73.
Associated Press, “Artic has warmest winter on record: ‘It’s just crazy, crazy stuff,’” The Guardian, March 6, 2018, ➝.
“Report: Flooded Future: Global Vulnerability to Sea Level Rise Worse Than Previously Understood,” Climate Central, October 29, 2019, ➝. Added to which, in “19 countries, from Nigeria and Brazil to Egypt and the United Kingdom, land now home to at least one million people could fall permanently below the high tide line at the end of the century and become permanently inundated, in the absence of coastal defenses.”
Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle, “Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050,” New York Times, October 19, 2019, ➝.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2016), 37.
ibid, 35.
Elizabeth Kolbert, “Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2019.
“USGS: Louisiana’s Rate of Coastal Wetland Loss Continues to Slow,” USGS, July 12, 2017, ➝.
Carolyn van Houten, “The First Official Climate Refugees in the U.S. Race Against Time” National Geographic, May 25, 2016, ➝.
Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson, “Resettling the First American Climate Refugees,” The New York Times, 2May 2, 2016, ➝.
Julie Dermansky, “Louisiana and Isle de Jean Charles Tribe Seek to Resolve Differing Visions for Resettling ‘Climate Refugees,’” Desmogblog, February 5, 2019, ➝.
Tristan Baurick, “Retreating from rising sea, state completes purchase of Isle de Jean Charles relocation site,” The Times-Picayune, January 9, 2019, ➝.
Jamila Osman, “Colonialism, Explained,” Teen Vogue, November 22, 2017, ➝.
Anne McClintock,”The Last Teenagers on Isle de Jean Charles, An Island Climate Change Is Washing Away,” Teen Vogue, 12 February 2020. ➝.
On the #NoDAPL movement see Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi), “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice and US Colonialism,” Red Ink 19, no.1 (Spring 2017): 154–169; Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux), Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019.
Lee Fang, “Oil Lobbyist Touts Success in Effort to Criminalize Pipeline Protests,” The Intercept, August 19, 2019, ➝.
Nicolas Kusnetz, “How Energy Companies and Allies are Turning the Law Against Protestors” Inside Climate News, August 22, 2018, ➝.
Alexander Kaufman “Yet Another State Quietly Moves To Criminalize Fossil Fuel Protests Amid Coronavirus,” Huffington Post, August 5, 2020, ➝.
“Critical Infrastructure Protection Act,” ALEC, January 20, 2018, ➝.
Hillary Simon, “Alabama Environmental Group concerned over proposed drone bill,” CBS 42, March 9, 2020, ➝.
“Senate Bill no. 323,” The General Assembly of Pennsylvania, February 22, 2019, ➝.
Susie Cagle, “Protestors as Terrorists,” ➝.
Laura M. Holson, “Iceland Mourns Loss of a Glacier by Posting a Warning About Climate Change, New York Times, August 19, 2019, ➝.
Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, ➝.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 52.
Oceans in Transformation is a collaboration between TBA21–Academy and e-flux Architecture within the context of the eponymous exhibition at Ocean Space in Venice by Territorial Agency and its manifestation on Ocean Archive.