“It is important to note that cartographers such as d’Anville significantly reduced not only the amount of speculative topography on the map, but also ethnographic information with which earlier mapmakers had filled Africa’s interior spaces, such as the names of tribal groups. The map that attracts the young Marlow is the product of this epistemological shift: purged of hypothesis and tentative accounts of population, it leaves inviting and evident gaps in the knowledge of South America, Africa, and Australia.” Alfred Hiatt, “The Blank Spaces of the Earth,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2002): 223–250.
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature, No. 519 (2015).
See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); William M. Denevan, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
In fact, only months earlier, in January 2015, another scientific paper converged on a related conclusion, but starting with a very different premise. While examining lake sediment in Peru and Bolivia, scientists discovered deposits of metals consistent with chemicals used in the industrialization of mining. Recall that it was from here, in the depths of the Cero Rico de Potosi mine, that a river of silver ran all the way to Spain. See Chiara Uglietti et al., “Widespread pollution of the South American atmosphere predates the industrial revolution by 240 y.,” Proceedings National Academy of Science PNAS, No. 112 (2015).
Simon Hales et al., Quantitative Risk Assessment of the effects of climate change on selected causes of death, 2030s and 2050s, World Health Organization (2014).
Only fifteen months earlier, in July 2008, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, had made a similar claim, albeit in a more familiar direction, when he issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for his role in the violence in Darfur. Some sections of the media tried to deny Di-Aping’s legitimacy as a spokesperson by virtue of his Sudanese heritage—and yet, is it not possible that it was precisely his intimate knowledge of events in a part of the world so affected by colonialism and its environmental legacies that lent his claim not only legitimacy but a visceral charge of reality?
See J. M. Prospero et al., “The Atmospheric Aerosol System: An Overview,” Review of Geophysics and Space Physics, Vol. 21, Issue 7 (1983); S. K. Satheesh and K. Kirshna Moorthy, “Radiative effects of natural aerosols: A Review,” Atmospheric Environment, Vol. 39 (2005).
Michela Biasutti and Alessandra Giannini, “Robust Sahel drying in response to late 20th century forcings,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33 (2006). For an overview see Alessandra Giannini et al., “A global perspective on African climate,” Climatic Change, Vol. 90 (2008); Alessandra Giannini et al., “A unifying view of climate change in the Sahel linking intra-seasonal, interannual and longer time scales,” Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 8 (2013).
Leon D. Rotstayn and Ulrike Lohmann, “Tropical Rainfall Trends and the Indirect Aerosol Effect,” Journal of Climate, Vol. 15 (2002).
C. S. Zerefos et al., “Atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions as seen by famous artists and depicted in their paintings,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol. 7 (2007).
See Adrian Lahoud, “Floating Bodies,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).
Richard Washington and Martin C. Todd, “Atmospheric controls on mineral dust emission from the Bodélé Depression, Chad: The role of the low level jet,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 32, No. 17 (2005). See also I. Tegen et al., “Modelling soil dust aerosol in the Bodélé depression during the BoDEx campaign,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, No. 6 (2006); Y. Ben Ami et al., “Transport of North African Dust from the Bodélé Depression to the Amazon Basin: A Case Study,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, No. 10 (2011); C. S. Bristow et al., “Fertilizing the Amazon and equatorial Atlantic with West African dust,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 37, No. 14 (2010).
See Adrian Lahoud, “The Bodélé Declaration,” in Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray, ed. Katrin Klingan et al. (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2014; Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2015).