Cultural geographies II: In the critical zone? – Environments,landscapes and life

I The Critical Zone?

In 2001, Geoscientists based in the USA proposed the term The Critical Zone to describe, ‘the near-surface layer of the Earth where most living things reside’ (Gaillardet, 2020). Promoted as the science of the Anthropocene, spanning from bedrock to tree-top, and implicating processes that reach deep beneath the Earth’s crust and high into the atmosphere, Critical Zone Science foregrounds intersections of matter, forces and organisms which exceed any single scale or discipline. Integral to Critical Zone Science (hereafter CZS) is cross-scalar, cross-disciplinary scholarship, that, in the words of one of its developers, is akin to acting as a GP for the Earth rather than a medical specialist (Brantley, 2020: 140). Driven by observable differences between lab and field processes, and by a sense that intellectual fragmentation falls short of current environmental challenges, Earth Scientists proposed CZS as an innovative field and lab-based combinatory science, potentially including ‘social and human sciences’ (Brantley, 2020; Minor et al., 2020). The idea is gaining traction beyond science as demonstrated by Bruno Latour’s and Peter Weibel’s latest exhibition cum-thought experiment, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Latour and Weibel, 2020) and within geography by Martin Mahony’s (2022) discussion of the space-times of environmental science within this journal.

Cultural geographic research on the environment presents a dilemma for those of us tasked to produce Progress reviews: too voluminous and diverse to contain within a single review, but too important to be over-looked. Furthermore, for cultural geography, environmental research is an important site of experimentation and exchange within and beyond disciplines, including with the environmental humanities; it offers the chance to pause and reflect on who we research with, how and to what ends. It’s telling, too, of the wider significance and extent of geographical research on the environment that it merits a new journal, Progress in Environmental Geography. ¹ In what follows, I want to use the Critical Zone as a means to navigate recent cultural geographies of the environment. If the Critical Zone offers a geographic location for most (but by no means all) cultural geography scholarship, then CZS provides us with a series of critical frames through which to consider cultural geography’s environmental thinking. Three such frames are i) multi-scalar (temporal and spatial) considerations of matter, energy and forces; ii) biotic and abiotic relations; and, iii) a commitment to producing knowledge beyond disciplinary silos. What follows takes each frame in turn, before in the conclusion, considering what cultural geographers might add to the criticality of the critical zone.

II Into the Critical Zone 1: Geo – An aesthetics of/for the Earth?

Geo – or Earth – so often noted as our disciplinary origin is arguably the geographical imagination at the heart of CZS. This is an imagination that foregrounds the Earth’s surface as a ‘thin skin’ whose habitability and sustainability is premised on complex relations and interactions both within this zone, and with the depths and heights of bedrock, magma and atmosphere. It was this ‘grounded’ imagination of the Earth that attracted Latour and Weibel (2020) to CZS, who suggest that ‘landing on Earth’, might offer a valuable counter-point to the global ‘view from above’. The former offering them an environmentally aware corrective to the damage wrought by a more distanced view.

Intersections of the Earth’s surfaces, heights and depths have of late offered geographers, including cultural geographers, alternative lenses through which to view nature-culture, power, inequality and difference, and related questions of subjectivity, agency and aesthetics. In dialogue with the well-documented ‘vertical turn’ (Graham, 2016) across political and urban geography, cultural geography has considered its orientations and volumes. Whilst atmospheres have drawn increasing interest (Engelmann, 2020; McCormack, 2018), there’s a growing body of research turning down and within. Nigel Clark (2018), for example, has written of ‘an Earth turned inside out’, less an assertion of a gaze turned downward, than a volumetric reimagining of the world. This resonates with the litany of subsurface spaces drawing cultural geographers’ attention, from caves and bunkers, to magma chambers, volcanoes and active faults (Clark, 2019; Clark et al., 2018; Jaramillo, 2016; Pérez, 2016, 2021). Key to cultural geography’s orientation toward the subsurface has been the place of the geological imagination within the Anthropocene, not least Kathryn Yusoff’s (2019) attention to geology’s extractive and racialised grammars. ² Importantly, surfaces, heights and depths are rarely considered in isolation, instead a conceptual language is emerging for their intersections. Derek McCormack (2018), for example, writes of tethering and envelopment, whilst others think ‘beyond terra’, not as a forgetting of earth, but as a decentring of its ontologies and capacities (Peters, 2017; Peters et al., 2018). Veronica Della Dora’s (2021) intellectual history of the mantle as geographical metaphor exemplifies these intersections, weaving together deep molten geographies of the earth, with its metrological veils and intellectual shadows.

Taking, quite literally, another perspective, there has been an observable growth in cultural geographers turning their attention ‘off-earth’. While in 2019, Oliver Dunnett and colleagues observed ‘human geographers had been late to the space race’, the last few years offer somewhat of a corrective, exploring histories, imaginations and technologies of space – from rockets, to domes and junk (Bischel, 2020; Bosworth, 2017; Brookes, 2020; Dunnett, 2021; Dunnett et al., 2019; MacDonald, 2010; Squire et al., 2021). ³ Such off-earth foci, are interestingly paired with a renewed attention to the ‘geo’. For cultural geographers, this includes re-visiting ideas of geopoetics, their relationship with geopolitics as well as a wider attention to geoaesthetics, re-routing associated questions of power and difference away from aesthetics’ usual legacies as a Western Enlightenment concept (Jackson, 2016; Last, 2015; Magrane et al., 2020; Nassar, 2021; Till, 2020).

The elements have offered an important locus of attention within these questions of the geo, framing concerns with matter, processes and energies shared with CZS. Long a subject of concern for the humanities, the elements have been valued for their unruly and disruptive nature and resistance to the epistemological frames of the Modern project (Cohen and Duckert, 2015). As a recent article in this journal by Engelmann and McCormack (2021: 1423) observed, diverse elemental scholarship negotiates tensions between the elements as something specific (earth, air, fire, water or chemical elements, for example), and something excessive, something that ‘remains withdrawn from and exceeds’ epistemic habits of technoscientific or conceptual reductionism. As Engelmann and McCormack (2021) and others (e.g. Hawkins 2020) observe, future elemental geographies might do well to look elsewhere other than the Western pre-Socratic thinkers for their understandings of matter and life.

CSZ’s foregrounding of matter, forces and processes is of course not novel, but the scale of study – that of landform and landscape – is at the heart of the field’s claims to novelty. As such, CSZ origin stories tell of the folly realised in the field of too much focus – on either soil, or hydrology, or bedrock (Brantley, 2020). Landscapes rather than labscapes drive a renewed concern with the shapes of a ‘surface’ as a means to address intersections of matter, forces and energies (Gaillardet, 2020). What might this mean for cultural geographies? Interestingly, there has been a growing number of collaborations between cultural geographers and physical geographers, including an interest in art practice and collaborations (see collected examples in a special issue of Journal of Maps, edited by Stephen Tooth et al., 2016, 2019). Further, there has been, as Stephen Daniels (2017) and others explore, a revisiting of the representational scientific practice of topography. The remainder of this section will explore a reimagining of critical topographies occurring within cultural geographies of late. Here we witness a rewiring of the tensions between scientific fact, creativity and imagination long central to how topographic practices engaged landscape and place (see for example Jamieson, 2017, 2021). The result is a series of explorations of form, matter and process at a landform and landscape scale which views these as socio-political sites and forces that foreground ‘nature’s anti-capitalist and anticolonial capacities’ (Last, 2015; Wright, 2020).

One notable direction of this scholarship has been to challenge and supplant worldly epistemologies that unthinkingly reproduce settler colonialist grammars and logics of the Earth and its matter and forces (Country et al., 2015; Hunt, 2013). Angela Last (2015) and Aya Nassar (2018), following the examples of Katherine McKittrick (2006) and others, seek a disruptive aesthetics in alternative configurations of word, aesthetics and geophysical materiality. Cultural geographic explorations of landforms as diverse as swamps, rivers, bogs, shoals and caves, marshal-associated matter and forces such as mud, sand, ice, currents and tides to challenge what Willie Wright (2020: 1134) observes as the ‘centrality of landscapes to global projects of power’ (e.g. slavery, capitalism and colonialism (see for example Brigstocke, 2021; Dillon, 2022; Jamieson, 2017)). Wright 's (2020: 1136) studies of the ‘Morphology of Marronage’, for example, considers swampy topographies as ‘unruly environments which are often space [s] less fully subjugated to capital than others’. As he continues, ‘seen as untamed, uninhabitable, and valueless terrain, swamps were, for Maroons, areas of restive freedom—a space where they could escape a spatial and economic mode of production based on chattel slavery and its inherent exploitations (i.e., dehumanization, natal alienation, and gratuitous violence)’. Staying with unruly amphibious landscapes, Archie Davies (2021: 628) explores the counter-hegemonic aesthetics of mudflats and mangroves in Northeast Brazil as challenging colonial ways of seeing and forms of nature-culture, through their embodied, muddied and foreshortened perspectives. Thinking with Marilena Chauí’s ideas of the semaphore – here offering reconnections of the seen and the unseen – Davies explores how these perspectival forms bind together, ‘the visible, the bodily, the more-than-human, the oppressed and the emancipated’.

If land/water relations offer cultural geographers one site of topographic unruliness, then another emerges in surface-subsurface relations. Perez and Melo Zurita (2020) consider how the embodied subsurface practices of cavers exploring the subsurface spaces of Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico co-opt state and capitalist technologies to inhabit caves in ways that subvert dominant national imaginaries and capitalist projects. While Kai Bosworth (2021) argues for an ‘environmentalism after speleology’, premised on an attunement to the permeable matter encountered in the Wind and Jewel Caves in South Dakota. An embodied awareness of these subsurface spaces gained through exploring, drinking and hiding challenges subsurface knowledge claims made in the course of capitalist and state projects of extraction (see also Bosworth, 2017).

Questions of knowledge often come to the fore in appreciating these critical topographies. Historically, creativity and the imagination offered a critical counterpoint to topography’s scientised picturing of place, more recently we might find other ‘bodies of expertise’ (to use Jackman and colleagues’ phrase, Jackman et al., 2020) challenging the dominance of ‘technoscientifc epistemic habits’ (Engelmann and McCormack, 2021, McKittrick, 2021). In other words, within these critical topographies, it is the embodied knowledge of non-hegemonic subjects (cavers, maroons, indigenous communities, the colonised) and the forces of matter and energy which exceed technoscientific knowledge that are crucial. Integral too is an unsettling of clear distinctions and hierarchies between the imaginative and the so-called real. This is powerfully expressed in Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds (McKittrick, 2006: 13), wherein her imbrication of the material and imagined in the context of Black Geographies such as the abyss, the underground, the Black Atlantic, is an ‘envisioning an interpretative alterable world, rather than a transparent knowable one’. In her recent Dear Science and Other Stories, (McKittrick, 2021) McKittrick offers us further elaboration of the power of the imagination through a volume that is both rigorous and poetic, in its consideration and performance of Black storytelling. Here stories emerge as practices of imagination, collaboration and intervention that sit alongside, push back against and transform academic knowledge practices. Pat Noxolo’s (2016) study of Caribbean author and ex-hydrographic surveyor Wilson Harris and his ‘poetics of fractals’, offers a further example of this intersection of the material and imagined. Her account considers how this writer’s ‘living text landscape’ was shaped by aesthetic sensibilities, his training as a surveyor, and the spatial dynamism of the Caribbean – both human and physical. As Noxolo (2016: 374) writes, this ‘conjoining of expressions of the human imagination with the shaping of rocks caused by geomorphologic processes, alongside countless elemental and temporal affinities between the physical and the human, speaks of a universe in which spiritual and material “word and world”…are not separate but operate as repetitions or patterning within one shared dynamic’. Whilst knowledge forms remain integral to these studies, for others, these critical topographies offer a means to shift understandings of knowledge itself. Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) mobilises the topographic form of the shoal, and its shifting form as neither land nor sea, as method, mode of critique and metaphor for Black and Native studies. She considers their ‘shoaling’ of other forms of thought; a slowing down and banking up of unreflective grammars or knowledge, and the shifting, contentious grounds they meet and interact on. Setting Lethabo King’s work alongside wider humanities scholarship (e.g. DeLoughrey, 2007; Ferreira Da Silva, 2017), we find in the conjoining of geophysical materialities, words, aesthetics and epistemics powerful sites of critical thought.

III Into the Critical Zone 2: Life, Crisis and Loss

A dominant Critical Zone imagination is as the ‘Earth’s breathing skin: a life-supporting epidermis’ (Cohorover et al., 2020) not only critical to life, but also at ‘mission-critical status’ as the Earth approaches and overshoots various thresholds and tipping points (Gaillardet, 2020; Latour and Weibel, 2020). There are other interesting implications of the conjunction of questions of life and the criticality of the critical zone. As Physical Geographers recently reflected in the physical geography counterpart to this journal, ‘CZS represents a powerful confluence of research agendas, tools, and techniques for examining the complex interactions between biotic and abiotic factors located at the interface of the Earth’s surface and shallow subsurface’ (Minor et al., 2020: 51). This interest in biotic and abiotic interactions is shared with cultural geographers, for whom imaginations and understandings of life have offered a point of attention. This includes evolving creative and innovative methods to attend to microbial scales of life often overlooked (Roe and Buser, 2016), as well as enabling concepts such as rewilding to jump scale, from the landscape to the microbial. In Living on a Probiotic Planet (Lorimer, 2020), Jamie Lorimer explores the (re) introduction of microbes to manage ecologies and to secure health. This is a vision of life framed by appreciations of ecology and Gaia science (akin to CZS) and which foregrounds relational and unequal geographies of microbial life in an intersection of scales from the microbial to the organism, including the planetary organism.

Research on the scales of life presses us towards questions of living and non-living, boundaries and distinctions/in-distinctions. Animal geographies have gained new impetus, sadly, from questions of loss and extinction. Between apocalypse and technoscientific optimism, discussions of the ghostly and performances of loss are emerging as part of what Franklin Ginn and colleagues (2014: 5–6, see also McCorristine and Adams, 2020) describe as an ‘empirical repertoire and conceptual language that accounts for the vulnerable, absent, the unloved, and the (soon to be) disappeared’. Along these lines, Geographers have learned much from their dialogues with anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli (2016), and her focus on ordinary suffering, rather than flourishing or outright extinction. For Povinelli (2016 and Povinelli et al., 2017), a closer attention to ‘making live’ or ‘letting die’ challenges the maintenance of the difference between life/being (bios) and nonlife (geos) as a strategy of governance. Her concept of ‘geontologies’ not only unsettles distinctions between the biological, geological, metrological – between living and non-living, between different ‘existents’ – but also makes visible the ‘intellectual labour that often underpins and maintains these distinctions’ (Povinelli et al., 2017: 171). Diverse cultural geographical studies on everything from trees to stone, oil and soil, have drawn on Povinelli’s work to challenge the sorting of life and non-life inherited from settler colonialism, and build cosmologies through other means (Country et al., 2015; Krzywoszynska, 2019, 2020; Smith, 2020; Yeh, 2021).

IV Into the Critical Zone 3: Beyond Disciplinary Ways of Knowing?

For those who consider CZS as the Anthropocene Science, it is its insistence on thought and practice as excessive to a single discipline that is crucial; ‘individual disciples… limit the wider vision of our plant and distracts us from the richness of what can only be gained from the pooling of ideas, data and expertise from across the disciplines’ (Minor et al. 2020: 50). Historian of science, Simon Schaffer (2020), reminds us there’s nothing new under the sun in his brief intellectual history of critical zone thinking, situating it alongside other integrative interdisciplinary concepts such as biosphere and ecosystem, and cosmologies such as James Lovelock’s Gaia and Alexander Von Humboldt’s Kosmos. We might consider cultural geography itself as a form of combinatory analysis, exemplified in the new creative mediums through which cultural geographies take place (explored in my previous report). We find more explicit relations between geography and the critical zone in both scholarship on existing art-science practices, as well as in the work of geographers practicing these forms of environmental knowledge making. We can think for example, of Eric Magranes’ collaboration with Maria Johnson (Magrane and Johnson, 2017) on Bycatch, an art-science project that explored the shrimp trawling industry in the Gulf of California. We might also consider Leah Gibbs’s work with atmospheric scientists and creative practitioners to explore singing and song-writing as a means of doing multidisciplinary research on the Great Barrier Reef (Gibbs et al., 2020). In the realm of technoscience, and echoing CZS’s focus on monitoring, there is a growth in interest in environmental sensing practices, including Jennifer Gabrys’ citizen sensing of everything from lichen to fracking, ⁴ and Sasha Engelmann’s Open Weather collaboration. ⁵ The latter builds an international network through feminist, open-source creative atmospheric sensing, in collaboration with satellites and radio waves.

These collaborations open the way for closer attention to how it is we do cultural geography. Alongside lone scholars and collaborative pairings or small teams, cultural geographers working within larger team contexts are becoming increasingly visible. Perhaps driven by a sense that ‘wicked’ environmental problems require diverse disciplinary and epistemological perspectives, the intellectual labour of Arts and Humanities scholars and practitioners is no longer only situated downstream of knowledge making. In the place of only being valued as modes of community engagement, cultural geographers are increasingly working as collaborators within large teams of scholars and other stakeholders, addressing complex challenges. Research in this vein ranges from Hilary Geoghagen and colleagues’ work on tree health and biodiversity (Ferrando Jorge et al., 2021), to Gail Davies, Beth Greenhough and colleagues’ work on science, health and animal welfare (Davies et al., 2020). The work of Chile based ‘BioGeoArt’, GeoHumanities and Biogeography Group is an excellent cultural geography led example of the scale and potential of these ways of working. ⁶ Their team draws together cultural geographers, biologists, design researchers, sociologists, scholars and practitioners of social work, creative artists, philosophers, architects, writers and community activists around a series of sites to develop practices of co-conservation with local communities across Chile. Furthermore, they mobilise manifold understandings of the rhizome, from biology, ecology and philosophy, to reflect on shared learnings and methods that exceed any single discipline, and which ensure the inclusion of community partners in knowledge making. The spatialities of such collaborative team working have also emerged as important. In recent scoping work on Plant Humanities by Felix Driver and Caroline Cornish (Driver and Cornish, 2021), the value of scientific and cultural institutions (such as botanic gardens) as loci for the bringing together of a range of different disciplinary knowledge and practices was highlighted. ⁷ Interestingly, studies of how research beyond a single discipline is accomplished is often a feature of cultural geographical work produced in these ways. For example, Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald (Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015) offer an ethnography of doing interdisciplinary neuroscience, whilst a group of human and physical geographers reflect on the role of flood risk models in enabling co-produced knowledge (Landström et al., 2011).

As the scale and form of cultural geographers’ collaborations evolve, there’s work to do exploring the place of cultural geography/geographers within these knowledge making practices (see also Kanngieser and Todd, 2020). Importantly, cultural geographers bring with them not just another piece in a jigsaw puzzle of complete knowledge that is somehow up to the task of ‘wicked’ problems, but they should also question the very ways and means of knowing itself. As Kathrine McKittrick observes of the inspiration anticolonial thought and black studies has offered her interdisciplinary stories in Dear Science (McKittrick, 2021: 4), ‘within black studies and anticolonial studies, one can observe an ongoing method of gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives fictions, whispers, songs, grooves. The textures offer one way to challenge the primacy of evidentiary and insular normalcies, because they are allegedly incongruous’. In another reflection on interdisciplinary method, Aya Nassar (2021: 456) writes of her own position between politics and geography, ‘I rummage through the hesitancies of picking up and putting down theoretical companions, architects, spaces, and times that might inhabit different shelves of a library’. Working against a desire to ‘patch up a logic’ for relating to the city, Cairo, she is studying, Nassar counterposes an accumulative model of multi-disciplinary knowledge with the cracks and fragments of a disruptive aesthetics.

V Conclusion: What’s Critical About the Critical Zone?

In trying to navigate my way through the rich field of research that constitutes cultural geographical work on the environment, I have found the critical zone to be a generative idea and one which I hope finds broader purchase within geography’s environmental discussions. Not, I hasten to add, because I think it is a perfect concept, but more because I believe it offers a powerful tool through which to problematise the practices (and disciplines), the energies and perhaps the hesitancies, of cultural geography’s environmental knowledge making. To conclude, I want to draw out three aspects of cultural geographical work on the environment that I think the critical zone helps us reflect on. Firstly, cultural geography’s aesthetics of the Earth and its critical topographics offer an intriguing, and potentially provocative companion to the technoscientific forms of thought associated with Critical Zone Science (note it is Science not studies!). Intersecting the scale of landform and landscape with matter, forces and organisms seem to offer a site of significant potential. For cultural geographers, this offers a powerful frame through which to consider topography’s (and landscape’s) anti-capitalist and anticolonial possibilities. Secondly, a strengthening current of cultural geographic work is a diverse reframing, sometimes quite dramatically, of questions of life and liveliness, and an overturning of the intellectual contexts that hold these too stable. This entangles awareness of the criticality of tipping points and emergencies with those forms of criticality concerned with how knowledge and power structures (of science, of capitalism, of settler colonialism and so on) render stable divisions of life and non-life, of bios and geos. To unsettle these is a critical (in many senses of the word) task. Finally, CZS calls us to consider the excessiveness of the world beyond a single discipline. Cultural geography has long embraced combinatory knowledge, diverse communities of practice and non-hierarchical forms of knowledge. Indeed, it might seem that cultural geographers have never been more collaborative – working with creative practitioners, with scholars from a range of disciplines, with local communities and other stakeholders – yet never has it seemed more important to be critical of our place within these collaborations. Rather than an accumulative logic that seeks an ever richer admixture of disciplines to produce a more complete picture, there is instead a realisation of the need both to overturn the inherited intellectual grammars of the Modern project, and to guard against too easily installing in their place another form of knowledge that denies the excessive and the unknowable.