The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis

Abstract

The history of British art abounds with an interest in the environmental, especially landscape paintings that embody the pastoral and the rural, cloud studies, and stormy skies. John Barrell’s Dark Side of the Landscape published forty years ago, convincingly argued that landscape paintings that we interpret almost immediately as idyllic, in fact emerge “from a world of social and economic relations that are anything but idyllic”. Writing about Gainsborough and Constable, among others, Barrell’s leftist critique of the English pastoral (following E.P. Thompson) urged viewers to see in the harmony that pastoral painting propagated between human and non-human, land and labour, the “evidence of the very conflict it seems to deny”. Beyond the English working class, the discipline of art history, especially British art history, is a product of the nineteenth century and thoroughly entangled with histories of colonialism and capitalism—and slavery. The art critic, John Ruskin’s interest in the geological sciences and his mineralogical collection used to teach design aesthetics, architecture, and geology is well known. In Modern Painters (1843–1860), Ruskin pressed artists to study geology. According to Ruskin, landscape possessed “vital truth” by which it simultaneously conveyed the past, the present, and the future. Metal mining in the UK and in the colonies were at its peak when Ruskin was writing. Kathryn Yusoff has recently updated what Ruskin called the “truth of the earth” by showing us how geology (and its fossil objects) is entwined with processes of racialization through speciation and notions of progress, and how it is a mode in which racial logics have been inscribed within the material politics of extraction, continuing to constitute lived forms of racism (from eugenics to environmental racism). Making the link between spatial dispossession of land (for extraction) and dispossessions of persons in chattel slavery (as another form of spatial extraction), Yusoff has argued that geology is historically situated as a transactional zone, in which mineral-as-property and person-as-property were one and the same. Conversations with the literary and gender studies scholar Katherine McKittrick have also taught me to think about how a direct line between the race thinking of slavery and our contemporary environmental predicament can end up mistreating the complexity of Black time by obscuring Black time. In privileging non-personhood as an origin story, we run the risk of undermining histories of rebellion, multiplicity, and Black life.