Jed O. Kaplan, Kristen M. Krumhardt, Niklaus Zimmermann, “The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe,” Quaternary Science Reviews, no. 28 (2009): 3016–3034.
For more on the reading of this image see Giorgio Agamben, Stasis, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
Paulo Tavares, On the Ruins of Amazonia, (London: Verso, forthcoming).
Haraway, Primate Visions, (New York and London: Routledge 1989), 10.
Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffin, Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan, (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), 57.
Wild Man from Borneo, opcit, 32.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Man and Animal, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 24.
Both Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo) and Gorilla (gorilla) are indigenous to the forests of central Africa. Pongo (orangutan) are indigenous to the forests of Sumatra and Borneo, and Homo, which has grown indigenous to the rest of the world.
Robert M. Yerkes, Almost Human, (New York and London: Century Co., 1925); Wild Man from Borneo, opcit, 46
In Forensic Architecture’s and m7red project for the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial—a project lead by Paulo Tavares, Samaneh Moafi, Christina Varvia, Mauricio Corbalan, Pio Torroja and Nabil Ahmed, and undertaken in cooperation with the office of Baltasar Garzon—we followed a case in which the female oranguatan “Sandra” pictured at the beginning of this essay was given something resembling human rights in Argentina.
Hugh Williamson was the first to have used the term “change of climate.” Williamson also proposed a programmatic change of climate by landscape modifications. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “In order then that we may be able to form an estimate of the heat of any country, we must not only consider the latitude of the place, but also the face and situation of the country, and the winds which generally prevail there, if any of these should alter, the climate must also be changed. The face of the country may be altered by cultivation, and a transient view of the general cause of winds will convince us, that their course may also be changed.” Eduardo Cadava, Emerson and the Climates of History, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Hugh Williamson, “An Attempt to Account for a Change in Climate which has been Observed in the Middle Colonies of North America,” read before the Society (American Philosophical Society), August 17, 1770; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Richard and Hall, 1785), 273. Noah Webster provided a rebuttal. Noah Webster, "On the Supposed Change in the Temperature of Winter," The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science, 1810. More the Webster/Jefferson debate see: Joshua Kendall, “America’s First Great Global Warming Debate”, smithsonian.com, July 14, 2011. Nineteenth century forest polices were based on “dessicationist” (extreme dryness) beliefs that deforestation caused local, regional and even continental drought. Note that none of these theories thought of the planet as a whole. J.R. Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Richard Grove, Ecology, Climate, and Empire (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997).
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. opcit. A discussion of this issue exists in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Jennifer Burton, Call and Response: Key Debates in African American Studies (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 17–24; see also Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163–168.
Today we know that these tree-top structures are used differently, that they are neither roofs for rain, but rather floors for nests, nor luxury, but necessity as a form of protection from predators.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1754/1992), 44.
Gilles Deleuze and Felíx Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1980/1987), 232–309.
Ibid., Rousseau.
Wild Man from Borneo, opcit, 43
Wild Man from Borneo, opcit, 43
One can also look at the same issue differently: The idea of “human exceptionalism” that saw humans uniquely distinct from animals, is echoed in the idea of the anthropocene, with exceptionalism this time articulated not as heroes but as villain-gods, alone in their ability to transform the material composition of the planet. The term “Anthropocene,” coined in the early 1980s by Eugene Stoermer, was popularized by Paul Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen proposed the emergence of the steam engine as the historical marker. Since 2008, The Anthropocene Working Group has proposed the scientific adoption and formal ratification of the Anthropocene epoch, the first step of which took place last month. Damian Carrington, "The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age," The Guardian, 29 August 2016 →.
Bernhardt Seigert, in a seminar at the IKKM in Weimar this spring, speculated that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the exclusion of the orangutan from humanity might be related in other ways too. Text forthcoming.
Thomas Keenan, "Claiming Human Rights," in Thinking Out Loud Lectures (Western Sydney University, April 2016). Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).
Dipesh Chakrabarty & Eyal Weizman, Forum, Dictionary of Now #2, Apr 11, 2016 →; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom At The End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, (Princeton: Princeton Press, 2015).
Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, is produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and the Ernst Schering Foundation.