Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Tag: Extractivism

  • Commodified and Digital Airscapes: Reflections on sensing and breathing air in the 21st century

    Commodified and Digital Airscapes: Reflections on sensing and breathing air in the 21st century

    The LA fires that wreaked havoc in Hollywood earlier this year were only one instance of many over the past years when wildfires ravaged communities and polluted the air. Apart from catastrophic wildfires, industry and vehicle emissions are sources of pollution many people experience on an everyday basis. With increasing levels of air pollution in the world’s biggest cities, it is perhaps no surprise to see the emergence of commodified and digital air as a new frontier of commodification and extraction: air domes, air purifiers, bottled mountain air, and digital air quality index applications (AQI-apps) are only a few examples of the ways in which society has responded to worsening air quality. But what do these developments mean in terms of the ways we inhabit and sense air?  

    On a smog-infested January day in Beijing, a user on the social media platform Sina Weibo writes: “AQI app shows 400!!! I’m inside with the air purifier on.” In another time and part of the world, in a sweltering June, a Reddit user writes: “The smoke from the wildfires has reached New York. It is apocalyptic outside, and I’m blasting the air purifiers. Feels fine inside.”

    Although the fate of these two social media users with their air purifiers is unknown, we may safely assume they survived the apocalypse, which stands in stark contrast to William Delisle Hay’s science fiction novella, The Doom of the Great City, from 1880.1 Like the apocalyptic scenes described by the social media users’ of today, Hay’s fictional London is covered in a toxic soot blanket. But only a single person survives to tell the tragic story as the rest of Londoners suffocate to death. Needless to say, there are no air quality apps or air purifiers in this fictional London. And if there were – would it have made a difference? Can technology save us from air pollution? Probably not. But it can do a great deal of other things. 

    In fact, these two social media comments exemplify ways in which technological and digital equipment have entered our relationship with the air. Not only that, these devices also have profound effects on how air is experienced. In these short descriptions, the outdoor and indoor air become different entities due to the air purifiers, which create a secluded and, allegedly, pure airscape indoors, as opposed to the apocalyptic scenes outside that are physically sensed and mediated through the AQI-numbers. The notion of airscapes suggests the construction and conceptualizations of different forms of air that we come to inhabit. These airscapes can be conceptualized simply by our sensual understanding of air, the report of others, digital and other types of technical equipment, or a combination of all the above. The question is what happens to our understandings of air when our experiences of air are increasingly mediated by digital devices? 

    Bodily senses and airscapes

    Seventy years before Hay’s novel, the London air is also a topic that vexes Mr. Woodhouse, a character in Jane Austen’s Emma from 1816. When learning about the many colds his eldest daughter and grandchildren have recently experienced, Mr. Woodhouse immediately finds the villain of these ills – the London air. 

    “Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be. It is a dreadful thing to have you forced to live there! so far off!—and the air so bad!”2  

    In his assessments of the London air, Mr. Woodhouse is not in the wrong. Historical records estimate that the city experienced a rapid worsening of air quality from the beginning of the 19th century, the presumed time frame in which Emma is set.3 Yet, unlike us, Mr. Woodhouse couldn’t know this through sensors, satellite imaging, or AQI-apps, providing the latest updates and forecasts. No, he used his senses or relied on the sensual experiences of others. Presumably agreeing with Mr. Woodhouse’s assessment of the London air, the family doctor has prescribed another type of air as a remedy for the illness-prone family – sea air and its salty winds. In Emma, air is thus categorized as the healthy rural air, the healthy sea air, and the toxic London air, forming airscapes based on bodily and emotional sensations of the air. 

    Skip forward 200 years, and similar airscapes to the ones in Emma are artificially produced for consumption. There are air humidifiers and purifiers simulating sea-air for preserving health; there is bottled mountain air promising the consumer up to 160 breaths of fresh air, and let’s not forget about city air domes – a bubble like, inflatable structure of PVC fabric which pumps air into a designated area, protected from pollutants outside.4 These are artificially created micro-airscapes, presenting a controlled and limited airscape for those who can afford it. Moreover, they are formed regardless of our bodily sensations – they are based on someone else’s definition of air. The bottled air is proclaimed to be fresh and healthy; the air purifiers are certified to create beneficial sea air. In short, these artificial airscapes come with established ideas of air, and they are furthermore part of a larger invisible network of actors and their inbuilt understandings of air; notions which users may come to internalize. 

    Of course, our bodies have not disappeared in the 21st century, nor have they been replaced by technological devices. Indeed, understanding the air through our senses and experiences is not a practice isolated to the 19th century. Timothy Choy describes in his ethnography on contemporary environmentalism in Hong Kong how his interlocutors first and foremost speak of air in terms of feelings, experiences, and health, illustrating the centrality of the body in assessing air: foul air  smells, gives headaches, and irritates lungs. Air also carries other smells: of flowers, sea, autumn, and of afternoon tea in one’s favourite chair – perhaps comforting and healing properties in themselves.5 But in the Anthropocene, the body is a site where the terraforming of our environments by different means, including the employment of technological innovations, is manifested and negotiated.6 And in regard to air, digitally and technologically mediated experiences of air increasingly mix with our bodily perceptions. Simultaneously, this also shapes our conceptions of the environment. 

    Digitally mediated airscapes

    As we are encountering numerical, comparable, commodified, and artificially constructed air, it is not a surprise that our relation to nature has been described as increasingly mediated through digital technologies, influencing our perceptions of the environment and, by extension, our airscapes.7  Research of people’s interaction with AQI-apps in the US and China illustrates how the numbers and the bodily experiences sometimes diverge: the AQI-value proclaims decent air quality, but bodily reactions to the air indicate otherwise, creating confusion around what one experiences.8 This prompts the question of how one combines and makes sense of bodily sensations and the information of AQI-apps?

    The increasingly popular AQI-apps construct airscapes based on air quality scores (AQI-values), and not bodily sensations. Measured levels of nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, PM2.5 and PM10 generate a particular idea of air as constructed of mainly four gases and two particles deemed adverse to human health9. A specific understanding of air is manifest already in the chosen measured components; air is stripped of smell, sound, breeze, humidity, feelings, and of other scientific gases such as oxygen or carbon dioxide. Furthermore, the AQI-apps rank the best/worst air in the world, blending and connecting geographical areas, or sometimes separating them, based on the AQI-values of different locations. Some days, places like Beijing, New Delhi, Cairo, and Sarajevo share a common airscape, regardless of geographical boundaries, smells, breeze, or memories. Other days, neighbouring cities couldn’t be placed further apart, creating a sense among AQI-app users of air as comparable – a  competitive gaming entity.10

    As digital and artificially produced airscapes increasingly influence our experiences of air, how we live, feel, and create our airscapes emerge as central issues to explore. What kind of airscapes do we inhabit? Who gets to breathe what kind of air, and how is it constructed, simulated, and understood? Instead of succumbing to the dreariness of simulated sea air or caged air domes in lieu of the real air, the notion of airscapes provides a viewpoint from which we can critically ask who gets to breathe and inhabit a certain air and take measures to change the situation. Moreover, while toxins nowadays dominate narratives of air, Emma and Choy’s interlocutors remind us that air is composed of different atmospheric experiences and entities – smells, breeze, memories, power, feelings, and sounds. The multitude of contemporary airscapes can act as sites from which we learn and understand – the broken, the hopeful, the hidden, and not least, our more-than-human relationships. 

    Works cited

    1. Hay, W. D.  The Doom of the Great City. 2025 (1880) West Virginia University Press. ↩︎
    2. Austen, J. Emma. London: Penguin Classics, 2009 (1816) p.129. ↩︎
    3. Ritchie, H. “What the history of London’s air pollution can tell us about the future of today’s growing megacities”. 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-pollution ↩︎
    4. Li, Y. “Dome sweet dome.” 2014 https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/848220.shtml2014 ↩︎
    5. Choy, T. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ↩︎
    6. Fjalland, E. Terraforming. In Krogh, S. (Ed.) Connectedness: an incomplete encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Strandberg Publishing, Copenhagen. 2020, pp. 360-363. ↩︎
    7. Goldstein, J., & Nost, E. The nature of data: infrastructures, environments, politics. University of Nebraska Press, 2022. ↩︎
    8. Graminius C., & Haider J. (preprint) Anticipating airpocalypse: air quality apps and implicit modes of anticipatory practices. Futures. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4952462 ↩︎
    9. Graminius C., & Haider, J. (2018). Air pollution online: Everyday environmental information on the social media site Sina Weibo. Journal of Documentation. 74(4), pp.722-740.
      ↩︎
    10. Ibid. ↩︎

    About the author:
    Carin Graminius is a researcher in environmental communication who received her PhD in Information Studies from Lund University, Sweden, in 2023. Her interdisciplinary research spans the fields of environmental humanities, cultural studies, environmental communication, and sinology, with a particular focus on eco-aesthetics, climate fiction, affect, and practices of anticipation and datafication.

  • Waterwork: The Clash Between Social Rights and Fossil Capitalism in Norwegian Fiction

    by Karl Emil Rosenbæk Reetz

    Norway – a nation where oil production was born at sea – is by far the largest producer of fossil fuels in Europe. The second largest, the UK, is distanced by a factor of 2.3 according to the EIA (disregarding the Eurasian fossil mastodon of Russia).[1] To zoom in on Norway is therefore an obvious way to grab the question of the so-called green transition championed by Western and especially European nations by its horns and scrutinize the black, extractivist foundation on which it often stands. In this sense, the political discourse of sustainability can be boiled down to an unrealisable fantasy of a green transition without real transformation of any sorts. Here, I will show how ‘roustabout narratives’ from Norway – stories depicting the absurdly profitable offshore oil enterprise of this nation – display how the green paradox is closely related to a long socialist history of class struggle and worker rights.

              Focussing on two recent novels, I urent farvann (2020; In Muddy Waters) by Sidsel Mørck and Puslingar (2019; Mannikins) by Atle Berge, I showcase how they register aspects of offshore austerity related to a corporate trend of cutting expenses in a globalised economy. Cutbacks, untrained personnel working at a lower salary, postponements of regular safety reviews, and use of expired equipment as well as other sorts of measures to ‘trim the fat’ and push the limit, constitute what I term a North Sea peripheralisation of safety. In that sense, these Norwegian offshore petrofictions are best understood as additions to a long tradition of fossil fuel working-class literature from the Global North where issues of safety have surfaced repeatedly as a signifier of class struggle.

    “WE RUN A BUSINESS, NOT POLITICS”

    First, let us look at Sidsel Mørck’s novel I urent farvann. In this bildungsroman about social mobility and national oil development, we follow the protagonist Ole Viktor. Ole Viktor is the only child of a working-class family with firm connections to the labour union. In the beginning of the novel, his father works at a steel nail factory and often goes to after-hour meetings in the local trade union. Later, the father works as a roustabout on a drilling rig at the Ekofisk field in the North Sea, and the father’s background as a factory worker hired under collective agreement comes forth again. When he is onshore, he often talks about the ‘wild west’ security issues offshore and about how he and his fellow roustabout Lars are working on unionising the workforce. But before this ambition of oil labour organisation is ever materialised, he is involved in an accident that crushes his right shoulder. Following the accident, he receives some insurance money and then lives the rest of his life on cash benefits provided by the Norwegian state.

              The timespan of the novel – from the late-1960s onwards – corresponds to the development of Norwegian oil, and further, Ole Viktor’s adulthood, growing up to be an oil engineer, is organised as a tour de force through real Norwegian oil developments, incidents, and scandals both domestic and international. Following Ole Victor’s white-collar employments, I urent farvann, however, focusses on the management level rather than that of roustabouts employed on oil platforms. In this way, the novel registers a socioeconomic and cultural move away from a locally oriented working-class perspective to a globalist middle-class stance. In the novel, this shift is furthermore connected to a decreased social-democratic collectivist position replaced by a liberalistic individualised concern about career and self-fulfillment. “We [run] a business, not politics,” Ole Viktor says, whenever there are problems. Societal concerns and moral conundrums are simply outside the scope of multinational oil enterprises in the neoliberal zeitgeist, the novel asserts.

              Furthermore, as Ole Viktor grows up and gets involved in the oil industry as an engineer, his father functions as an idealistic figure calling him up whenever there is an oil-related accident urging Ole Viktor to do something. Invalidated, the father cannot live out his own ambition of unionising the offshore workforce and consequently the burden is put on his son to reform the oil business. Yet, Ole Viktor quickly begins to pivot towards another stance altogether. The father’s class struggle orthodoxy begins to feel burdensome to Ole Viktor and an instance of cultural patricide can be observed in his life choices. Slowly he turns away from the collectivist ideal and towards becoming what he himself terms “a company man” with a conservative, unapologetic slogan of capitalist reality: “That’s how the world is, take it or leave it.”

              The novel is driven forward by exactly this blue-collar/white-collar dichotomy. Central to the plot is the clash within the family constellation of two distinctive perspectives. On the one side; collectivism and social politics, and on the other side; individualism and capitalist necessity. As such, the novel takes shape as a small chamber play between father and son reflecting larger societal alterations in both the labour market and the national debate over the Norwegian offshore oil enterprise.

              I urent farvann is saturated by a defeatist ethos when it comes to believing in changing the oil enterprise substantially. However, this overall tone of capitalist surrender is suddenly upended on the very last pages of the novel. Throughout the novel, Ole Viktor’s daughter Vera has disarmingly been called “Vesla” (meaning ‘the little one’) by both father and grandfather. But now, instigating her own much more outspoken generational rebellion, Vera tells Ole Viktor that she will study “green economics.” With this rebellious choice and some harsh words against her father’s complicity in the emission of greenhouse gasses, Vera seems to personify the environmentalist aura of Greta Thunberg and the green youth movements more generally as she argues for an alternative study of economy. The ideology that has guided Ole Viktor’s life is confronted and his ‘apolitical’ self-image is being revealed as a highly political stance. Still very much in its infancy, then, the novel ends up suggesting that a new world order could be on the rise driven by the next generation. Just as Ole Viktor himself was part of a massive social, economic, cultural, and political transformation in his time.

    RURAL OIL

    Puslingar by Atle Berge is also structured as a bildungsroman following the child Marita from 1980 till 1991. Marita lives with her parents in a rural neighborhood adjacent to the port city of Bergen where the area’s oil-industry is centred. Throughout the novel an identity-conflict between the urban city and the rural surroundings emerges, but the main story of the book concerns the real Norwegian event of the offshore capsizing of the oil platform Alexander L. Kielland (March 27, 1980) and its traumatic influence on Marita’s teenage life. Her father, Jonny, is one of the victims of the accident leaving Marita alone with her mother Astrid. Some years after the accident she is suddenly approached by one of Jonny’s old friends, Trygve, who was with Jonny at Kielland. And with the help of Trygve as well as her bookish classmate called Settembrini, Marita slowly becomes more and more interested in the accident.

              As Marita and Trygve begins to dig deeper into the possible causes of the accident, the novel makes use of the still-existing distrust towards the official inquiries and reports that were made after the accident. The novel is filled with gestures towards these reports’ explanations as well as references to other mysterious circumstances omitted from the inquiries.

               With this general tone of distrust in the activities of the government, the novel registers a dialectic between rural workers and a seemingly clandestine ruling class. There is a visible animosity towards urbanity and all the connotations that go along with it – power, influence, higher education, capital. This dialectic is one of the defining features of fossil fuel working-class literature. Us, the authentic, down-to-earth working-class, versus them, the capitalist vultures who live withdrawn in their mansions and club houses. Consequently, the general tone of the novel is that the ‘strong forces in the society’ are less occupied with figuring out exactly what happened at Kielland then they are with ensuring that the North Sea region’s contribution to the world-systemic business of oil production carries on.

              As Marita continues to question the reports, we also see how she is finally reproached by her mother and her stepfather Einar in this somewhat timid fashion: “Sometimes you just have to let things go. People who don’t manage to forget and move on eventually becomes unbearable to be around” (223). It is okay, it seems, – even expected – to be critical and almost conspiratorial against the urbanites in the abstract, but it is best not to become too concrete in one’s criticism and skepticism. The emphatic conviction of elitist malpractice must not turn into real political agency. The very last page of the novel describes how Marita also draws this conclusion herself as she thinks: “People who can’t manage to forget are unbearable. People want to forget, need to forget, just as the nation needs to forget in order to live with itself” (247). Subtle, Atle Berge is not. The reader is firmly guided to draw a particular conclusion about the sincerity of the official inquiries on Kielland.

              And yet, it is rarely the oil and therefore also the oil-work itself that is being criticised in these roustabout narratives. An affinity towards the oil enterprise seems to linger on in the cultural unconscious as the energy workers can be said to forego their body to keep the nation both powered and proud: Ole Viktor’s father literally sacrifices his arm in the nation’s service. So, while the author of Puslingar has some critical comments on oil production as well as the comprehensive oil culture, it is interesting to note how adamantly the protagonist Marita defends the wonders of oil. Fittingly, the novel ends with her lifelong dream of enrolling as an oil engineer student being realised. For Marita, the problem is not the extraction of oil from the seabed, but the loose regulations and the corporate inclination to cut costs on behalf of the safety protocols.

              Marita is obviously haunted by the tragic loss of her father, yet, growing up in the rural outskirts of Bergen oil still constitutes the best and often only way to realise a prosperous (and aspiring) future. For these rural working-class families, the oil rig is tragic in a double sense then. It is the haunting accident of the past and still the only possible future.

    CONCLUSION

    To conclude, a clear tension is registered in these recent Norwegian roustabout narratives. On the one hand, they expose a neoliberal ideal about cost-efficient fossil fuel enterprises driven without organisationally imposed measures or governmental restrictions. On the other hand, they argue for worker-oriented oversight based on a moral sense of righteousness. Another way to frame this is to say that these working-class oil fictions illustrate an imperfect match between world-systemic fossil capitalism and the Nordic welfare state model.

              When thinking of the historical legacy of Norwegian oil revenue, this internal conflict is perhaps not that surprising. In Norway, a discussion of ownership and control has always been in the foreground. At the beginning of the Norwegian North Sea endeavour, environmental and industrial concerns went hand in hand at the governmental level. In 1971, the Government of Norway decided on ‘ten oil commands’ revolving around the management and control of this burgeoning industrial sector. In the mid-1970s, to avoid what is called the ‘Dutch Disease’ where rapid growth in one sector of the economy causes decline in other sectors and to prevent ecological depletion, the Government furthermore decreed a principle of ‘moderate extraction tempo.’ However, this principle was eventually overhauled by grand expansions to the Norwegian North Sea territory in the late 1980s. And then, the culminating success of developing the oil sector while preventing a sudden decline in other parts of the economy came in 1990 with the construction of a sovereign wealth fund – Statens pensjonsfond utland – internationally known as the Norwegian Oil Fund.

              The unique construction of the Oil Fund works to ensure that the revenue from offshore oil and gas extraction benefits the Norwegian public, but it has not entirely eliminated the tension between oil workers and managers. Thus, core class related questions of who benefits from who, how to secure right and proper distribution of wealth, and how the local and national history of offshore oil is to be told still saturates Norway.

              These contemporary Norwegian roustabout narratives, I argue, invoke a nostalgic longing for a strong welfare system of social security and worker rights – a thus another world possible – while showcasing how the reality of fossil capitalism’s neoliberal search for cost-cuts has played out in recent decades. As such, they extend to the waterscape the tradition of working-class fiction as they register and critically comment upon the offshore perspective of the continuing, deregulated fossil world economy in an era of havocking climate changes.

    Reworked paper presented at the EASCLE Symposium: Sea More Blue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Blue Ecopoetics, June 17-20, 2024.

    About the author:
    Karl Emil Rosenbæk Reetz, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark.

    [1] Visit https://www.eia.gov/international/rankings/world?pa=288&u=2&f=A&v=none&y=01%2F01%2F2022