Carbon: Three Observations on Life, Death, and Uncertainty in the Permafrost
Graph based on data from NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory on monthly mean atmospheric CO2 (ppm) from 2015-present. Photo: Val Muzik
Permafrost thaw is one of the world’s most pressing climate problems, already disrupting lifestyles, livelihoods, economies, and ecosystems in the north, and threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the Arctic as our planet continues to warm. To examine the effects of permafrost degradation, and increase our understanding of what this phenomenon means for the future of the region (and the world), The Arctic Institute’s new two-part permafrost series aims to analyze the topic from scientific, security, legal, and personal perspectives.
The Arctic Institute Permafrost Series 2020
- Permafrost Thaw in a Warming World: The Arctic Institute’s Permafrost Series Fall-Winter 2020
- Takeaways from the Arctic Tundra
- Dwindling Arctic Sea Ice and Impacts to Permafrost Health
- Frozen-Ground Cartoons: A Multiform Innovative Project for Permafrost Science Communication and Outreach
- The Intersection of U.S. Military Infrastructure & Alaskan Permafrost Through the 21st Century
- When ‘Perma’ Is No Longer ‘Perma’: Investigating Permafrost Degradation in Churchill, Manitoba
- A Blessing and a Curse: Melting Permafrost in the Russian Arctic
- Carbon: Three Observations on Life, Death, and Uncertainty in the Permafrost
- Translating Newfound Permafrost Knowledge into Climate Action
Well beyond the direct perceptibility of most individuals on Earth, at a pace that is blisteringly quick for geologic time, but nearly unremarkable from the perspective of average human lifespans, the land melts. If certainty is knowledge that is solid– a secure place upon which to moor the foundations of comprehension– then this unstable and rapid change in state is, ironically, a terra firma.
The permafrost is the land in which deep layers of time long past have remained in a literal sense frozen for centuries, or millennia. Locked in ice, the dead remains of mammoths, people, grasses, and pathogens alike have lain pressed together in ecological limbo: along with the bacteria that would, if warmed to reanimation, dissolve them back into the land, they await their deferred decay in perpetual suspension. But with each passing summer, this is less and less the case. As the land melts, the processes of time resume, past colliding upon present: long-paused cycles complete themselves, en masse, their byproducts exhaling into an atmosphere burgeoning with the accumulated molecular results of innumerable other completed cycles from other times and other places. Through all of this, that ubiquitous atomic backbone of life–carbon–through its myriad relationships, presides over the accretion of feedback loops that accelerate the present into an aleatory future, whose shape is but dimly outlined by the guideposts of margins of error.
Meanwhile, carbon as a signifier has achieved a conspicuous place within environmental and security discourses in recent years . Characterized by a flexibility and mutability that can at once refer to multiple kinds of molecules and chemical compounds, the word, like the element itself, proves versatile: ever in communion with the environment of signification within which it dwells, ‘carbon’, the word, when hailed by its discursive context, is capable of absorbing into its linguistic scaffolding adjacent reinforcing significations. One of the predominant examples of this is where carbon has come to function as a signifier of a diffuse and shapeshifting but persistent threat. A memorable recent article vividly illustrates: as a “ticking time bomb” buried in the Arctic permafrost, carbon transforms figuratively into plutonium, becoming capable of producing a “fallout” that could very well become distributed globally.1) Even as projected rates of Arctic warming in the coming decades threaten to exhume from the deep freeze Cold War-era military waste that includes radioactive materials2) as well as to nearly literally bury in the collapsing ground military defense infrastructures currently in use,3) the language of militarization used here is not otherwise accidental, either– for the reason that security, and insecurity, still remain largely imaginable to dominant modes of thinking by way of analogy to a Hobbesian struggle for survival. While using the imaginaries of inter-state conflict heuristically lends itself neatly to this, the allusions to global dispersion across local and personal frames of reference that these metaphors invoke also reveal, at the same time, a deeper anxiety that the state could, at any moment, become undermined from within. Whereas layered analogies such as this expose the unspoken recognition that the kind of order that states aspire to is fundamentally contingent and never something they can take fully for granted, on the other hand, where arriving at an adequate understanding of our existential status and the patterns that support it is concerned, they fall far short of the task. In turn, this gives rise to nothing less than one of the major predicaments of our time: fundamentally unable to grasp, in full, the sheer scope of what confronts us, we sink deeper into the unstable ground, derelict.
Meanwhile, time, and the processes that work through it, possess no such inertia. What was formerly solid continues to melt into the air, leaving few certainties in its wake, and a new age of complexity and shifting, contingent multivalence unfolds alongside the persistent, staid dichotomies of what seems like a bygone era: human/nature; past/present; local/global; living/non-living; order/disorder. What obstacles this presents towards not only comprehension, but as well, the exercise of ethical agency, can also be found intermingled among the deep entanglements between the permafrost and carbon.
Collapsing Webs
Complexity is a concept closely allied to the notion of the Anthropocene. The concept of a new era in geological time whose salient characteristic is that our species has affected planetary-scale change functions additionally as a claim to definitively putting an end to the modernist nature/culture dichotomy. By extension of this, threats to security cannot be viewed as an invasion of the ‘inside’ by the ‘outside’ any longer, but as an emergent property of social relations.4) But, this shift in orientation also coincides with the rise of correlational, rather than causative, models for understanding the relationships within this system, namely those involving Big Data.5) In a view of the Earth as a complex system of interlinked processes, climate change is comprehensible (if faintly) as an assemblage of stochastic processes rendered legible through computational power. Several implications follow from this, primary among them being that, with uncertainty seeming all but certain, the practical course of action would be to be resilient and adaptable to any number of potential futures. But as other critics of resilience narratives also point out, the normative implications of this do not offer much in the way of guidance for how to bring about a meaningful change in the underwriting conditions; in fact, they serve as obstacles for exactly this, in that they engender acceptance of the status quo, and the powers that be which benefit from maintaining it.6) A similar observation could be made that while the development of resilience and risk management strategies gives the appearance of an abundant imagination of various governance and technical options, it is also riddled by failures of imagination in another sense, as well, which concerns the hard limits to which all lives–but particularly the more vulnerable–are invariably subject to. Why should we invest in making the wealthy cities of the world ‘smart’, while at the same time expecting people such as the residents of the Inupiaq village of Qigiqtaq (Shishmaref), Alaska,7) to adapt to the fact that the island that is their ancestral home is melting and eroding into the rising seas by relocating?
At the same time, this complexity– the plurality of entangled connections between diverse life and non- (and former) life– is a precondition for life on Earth; in a broader appreciation of security, one could reasonably conclude that security, too, follows from the quality and quantity of these connections and relationships.8) However, that the Anthropocene as an idea aims to speak to this complex interrelatedness directly only reflects a particular state and kind of knowledge about our planet and our place in its systems: other knowledge systems, like those of the Arctic’s Indigenous peoples, have always held that life is sustained holistically through webs of relations.9) Climate change, in non-Indigenous eyes, has been viewed as a rupture of our knowledge of the world, but is it perhaps more the case that it has instead exposed our repeated attempts to paper over the faulty seams at the basis of our understanding with successive restatements of old dichotomies?
Hyperobject Knowledge
As a linguistic phenomenon, the many significations that ‘carbon’ is capable of referencing make it a conveniently portable device. Whereas in a literal sense, carbon is but an element on the periodic table, in practice, especially such as when discussing climate change, this is not exactly to which we really refer: in this discursive case, ‘carbon’ has a metonymic function, like ‘the Pentagon’ or ‘the White House’.
However, one difference here is that it’s possible to arrive at these places physically, and if you have never done so before, the encounter leaves a sensation somewhat like whiplash in the uncanny valley, as the pervasiveness of the metonym’s aura of meaning condenses suddenly into the mundane as a real building at a physical address.10) With carbon, its ‘address’ is reflected by its fixed site of residence on the periodic table: while as much a part of our reality as a building, and similarly locatable by its place relative to its neighbours on a spatial grid, as a singular, individual atom, carbon is not a thing that we can perceive directly through our (unaided) physical senses. Instead, the presence of the element is made apparent through its associations, en masse, with other elements (including itself: and the allotropes of carbon are as diverse as many of them are familiar, in the form of substances such as graphite and diamond). Carbon, as an individual atom, is undetectable to us without the aid of advanced scientific instruments, and especially in the absence of its association with other atoms to create molecules, with their own distinctive and identifiable properties. Being an essential building block of life on Earth, carbon is everywhere, but as a ’something’ that possesses its own, singular, phenomenological distinctness, it is imperceptible: nowhere to be found.
For carbon, what amounts to as a collapse of a multiplicity of signified molecules and compounds within the boundaries of a single signifier is also the same thing that mobilizes its availability to security discourses. Indeed, to use the word ‘carbon’ to indicate the condition of uncertainty and instability for which we must be on our guard is to refract the spectre of globalized insecurity entailed by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere across the full spectrum of carbon forms, and all else that it touches. What this reveals is that like climate change, carbon is also something that has such a degree of scope and scale that it lies beyond the grasp of comprehension: a hyperobject. With regard to hyperobjects, the philosopher Timothy Morton has argued that, heralded by the Anthropocene, they have brought us to the point where the world that we once knew, and indeed were able to know, exists no longer: and moreover, that the belief, instead, that we are on the cusp of destruction is paradoxically one of the major factors inhibiting us from taking action.11) What this means is that it is worthwhile considering the question: is our Information Age preoccupation with collecting and archiving exponentially more data and knowledge perhaps not only ultimately Sisyphean, but also necessarily important to the degree that we believe?
The Disorder of Things
What a discursive device offers in aid of our comprehension also, in complementary ways, restricts it. While the meaning of carbon is vast, as anchored firmly in the imaginary of security, it ultimately inhabits a dual position where this is concerned. As a signifier of a diffuse but pervasive threat to security and articulated with the language of militarization, it repeats the logic of the old modernist ontology that privileges the human actor and depicts the natural world as a place that is no more than the receptive vessel of human activities. While immediately at odds with an understanding of the world that is complex and fundamentally interrelational, these two claims regarding what constitutes the nature of being–either that human life is fundamentally and meaningfully distinct from all else, living and non-living, or that the phenomenal world is more like a web of vibrant matter wherein such distinctions matter not– still find their synthesis in the figure of carbon, each requiring and interacting with the other.
Implicit in all of this, however, is a preoccupation with order. The idea of the permafrost melting to release plumes of methane gas, along with the sheer unpredictability of the changes taking shape, is fear-inducing, as nature itself seems to step ever more dramatically into disorder. Remarking on the state’s contrapuntal identification of this sense of spiraling environmental chaos as a (spectral) security threat, Neel Ahuja observes that this then forms the background upon which life itself can be regulated and managed, all under the sign of risk assessment.12) While this process provisions for some semblance of epistemological mooring, as well, with the parameters of the ‘unknown’ at least approaching the form of something ‘known’ as calculable probabilities and correlations among masses of data, this dialectic of moves between different iterations of regulated order and dysregulated chaos in itself is, however, hardly a novelty of the Anthropocene. To the contrary, its own moorings stretch across the historical detritus left behind by centuries of colonizing and imperial projects, propelled and legitimized by a civilizationist anxiety of being overtaken by the forces of an uncivilized, racialized anarchy.13)
In September of this year, while peat fires in Siberia had already been burning for months on the heels of a permafrost-melting heat wave,14) the western fringe of the North American continent also became choked by smoke from massive wildfires.15) In Vancouver, the closest major fires were hundreds of kilometers away, and yet there were days when the smoke blowing in from the south was too thick to let in the sun. The birds, even, did not sing. This persisted seemingly with no end in sight, as the weather and particulate matter forecasts kept changing to keep hope of clearer skies a perpetual day and a half in the future.
Able to do little in the hazardous air, I mulled how the distant fires burning in other countries were sending up more carbon into international skies, and there was little to be done in the moment except to wait. It was striking, also, that the cry “I can’t breathe”, which earlier that summer had ignited a reinvigorated civil rights movement in the wake of the death of George Floyd, had another dimension of meaning brought forward by the smoke that now filled my airways in transcorporeal unison with those of billions of others not only on the western seaboard, but also in cities like Delhi and Beijing, whose residents endure oppressive levels of air pollution year-round. The skies here have since cleared, but the general conditions that brought us to this point surge on.
As ever, the task that remains is to grapple with reality– albeit with the understanding that articulating ‘carbon’ as the threat cannot be of such service here; in the final analysis, it is the wrong label, for the wrong thing. This is something related to language’s oft-cited tendency to fail at faithful representation, but it extends far beyond it, as well. Remarking that “[t]he melting of the permafrost is both danger sign and metaphor,” a similar point is made by James Bridle, in that it amounts to being and representing “an accelerating collapse of both our environmental and our cognitive infrastructure.”16) This may make for a situation that seems all but impossible: and to be completely certain, for many, not only in the Arctic, but globally, we have already reached the point of no return– in some cases, very literally: as it becomes no longer possible to live in one’s homeland, having no choice otherwise, people leave permanently for elsewhere. This story, too, is told in the permafrost. With the physical traces of memories millennia old of migrations across North America and Siberia during the last Ice Age held in embodied cold storage under the tundra, we are reminded that the flow of people– and all living things– across the land is a tradition older than historical time. And yet, as planetary warming continues to thaw ground that has been long frozen, we risk finding that what we are able to remember, too, begins to vanish.
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