Dr Rory du Plessis

Senior Lecturer in Visual Studies, School of the Arts

 

In April 2020, as a result of the national lockdown, the neighbourhoods of South Africa became uncannily similar to the television series, Life After People (2008–2010) that sought to imagine what would become of the world in the absence of humans. While we spent our days indoors, fauna roaming through the streets populated our neighbourhoods. Reports circulated of kudus being sighted in Pretoria, caracal were spotted in Cape Town, and the penguins of Boulders Beach gallivanted in the streets of Simon’s Town. The soundscape of our cities and neighbourhoods was awash with the sonorous songs of birds. Opening my window in the early morning was no longer unwelcomingly met by the uproarious and brassy noises of traffic and heavy machinery. Instead, I was swaddled by the melodic songs performed by finches, and found myself meditating over the staccato sounds chanted by doves. After several weeks, my favourite playlists on Spotify were no longer resounding in my study, as I was abuzz to listening to a choir of birds singing in my garden. 

 

While Level 5 of the lockdown resulted in our nation’s fauna reclaiming the spaces and the soundscape of the urban environment, this was only momentary. Every subsequent move to a lower level of lockdown restrictions resulted in the increasing retreat of fauna from the cities. To this end, the easing of the lockdown demonstrated the wide variety of fauna that were, and are now again, refugees from our neighbourhoods and our cities. This point is poignantly expounded by Donna Haraway (2015:160), who describes that in the Anthropocene, the earth is filled with fauna and flora refugees that are without refuge. The Anthropocene is the proposed geologic epoch for our current times in which humankind is the ‘major driver of planetary change’ (Holm and Brennan 2018:1) and has the ability to ‘endanger the entire planet’ (O’Gorman et al 2019:445). By burning fossil fuels, coupled with our population growth, as well as our extraction and exploitation of the natural environment, humans are said to ‘weigh on the earth in a manner that has profound consequences for all species’ (Adamson, LeMenager and Sandilands 2018:96). To substantiate, owing to our impact on the earth, we have witnessed the rapid decline of biodiversity, as well as the high number of species that have become either threatened, vulnerable or extinct. If the problem posed by the Anthropocene is the ‘destruction of life’ (Holm and Brennan 2018:1), Haraway (2015:160) points to a promising solution by calling for humankind to ‘make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge’. 

 

In heeding Haraway’s call, I recognised that it is only achievable if as many people as possible are ‘constructively involved in helping to shape better possibilities in these dark times’ (Rose et al 2012:3). To this end, I lectured a study unit on environmental humanities at the University of Pretoria for the BA Honours students in Visual Studies. The hallmark of the study unit was empowering the students to be thoughtful citizens – a citizen that is sensitive and aware of environmental problems and is committed to engaging in responsible actions to address the identified problems (see also Adamson, LeMenager and Sandilands 2018; Carter and Simmons 2010:13). One teaching strategy that seeks to activate a conception of thoughtful citizenry in students is place-based education. In general, place-based education can be defined as using a site as a basis for teaching (Smith 2015). By grounding the teaching and learning to a chosen site, students are provided with a real-world context, and are equipped and inspired to take action (Smith 2015:277). Stated differently, place-based education advocates that ‘by beginning with the local, educators give students a chance to base their learning upon their lived experience of the world. The local also provides a venue within which it is possible to make small, and sometimes larger, changes in that world’ (Smith 2015:277). Owing to the restrictions on movement posed by the lockdown, I encouraged the students to investigate their homes and their neighbourhood to identify environmental issues, propose suitable solutions, as well as come to an awareness of how these sites can harbour a refuge for fauna and flora. 

 

The study unit required the students to publish an online photo-essay on several themes of environmental humanities. The photo-essay offered the students a novel way to visualise their academic insights in experimental and experiential ways (Pauwels 2012). As the photo-essays were published online, the potential exists for the students to disseminate an awareness of environmental concerns to a wide audience who may be inspired to also become agents of change in their own homes and communities. 

 

One of the themes required the students to critically engage with Rob Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence. Unlike environmental disasters like drought, oil spills along the coast, and rhino poaching, where the devastation that has been wrought is immediately perceptible and generates spectacular and sensational news-coverage, Nixon (2011:2) urges us to turn our attention to ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space’. Examples of such forms of slow violence include climate change, acid mine drainage, and deforestation. As these examples of slow violence speak of ‘convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations’ (Nixon 2011:3), they seldom rouse prolonged public outcry or receive sustained attention from the media. Therefore, the challenge posed by slow violence is how to make its ‘stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention’ (Nixon 2011:3). One means to do so entails ‘devising iconic symbols’ (Nixon 2011:10) that bring to the public’s attention how slow violence has already resulted in substantial losses of nonhuman species (see also Carson 1962; Kolbert 2014; Whitehouse 2015). 

 

I tasked the students to consider how disappearing ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity may be regarded as a form of slow violence. In discussing this task with the students, I asked the students to reflect on their childhood memories to consider the fauna and flora species that they grew up with. I initiated the conversation by recounting how, as a young child in the early 1990s, I would eagerly await for the early evening to come so that I could frolic with fireflies (glowworms) that resided in a nearby piece of veld in Centurion. These evenings were akin to the mise-en-scène of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream with the fireflies dancing beneath the moonlight, bats circling like acrobats above my head, and the nearby stream contained a gargantuan army of frogs that filled our ears with their gutturalizing croaks. I would often leap into the sky to be caught in the light extravaganza produced by the fireflies. More often than not, this would result in me falling into the stream. Here, I was met by tadpoles wiggling around my feet. Lamentably, in my teenage years, these magnificent and magical evenings came to an abrupt end. The wide-open expanse of the veld was soon slashed to a pittance of its size owing to the rapid development of apartment complexes. Even more troubling, the stream that was teeming with tadpoles, frogs and other forms of aquatic life had become polluted by the drains of the apartment complexes. The stream now resembled the colour of ammonia and the veld was an illegal dumping site. Disturbingly, the critters that had found refuge in the veld were no longer present. 

 

By sharing my story, I was able to illustrate to the students how I am a witness to the loss of biodiversity from a site in Centurion. Alarmingly, my story was met by the students declaring that none of them had ever encountered fireflies while growing up in the early noughties. For many of the students, fireflies were thought to only occur in childhood storybooks – alongside narratives of fairies, unicorns and elves. Our shared storytelling of fireflies was complemented by reports identifying how globally over 2,000 species of fireflies are threatened by extinction from habitat loss and pesticides (SABC News 2020). Thus, by sharing our stories, it soon became apparent that fireflies can be regarded as one of the iconic symbols for the ‘staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties’ (Nixon 2011:2) of slow violence. 

 

In the subsequent class discussions, the students submitted their own iconic symbol of slow violence, the dragonfly. The students burst into excitement recounting how they had childhood memories of swimming pools in the summer months acting like airports for dragonflies. They told stories of sharing swimming pools with dragonflies that would dart above the water with choreographed precision. Their memories are now in stark contrast with their experiences of swimming pools today: dragonflies no longer visit pools in the number and frequency that they formerly did. By scrutinising scientific studies, it becomes apparent that several species of dragonflies in South Africa require our immediate conservation efforts to safeguard their survival (see de Moor 2017; Samways and Taylor 2004). 

 

In their photo-essays, the students testified to the degradation of biodiversity in their own homes and neighbourhoods. For example, Stirling Blunden (2020) offered a tender tale of the swallows that nested outside her home (Figure 1). Blunden witnessed the nest grow in size, and with every new year, the birth of a new generation of swallows. Sadly, in recent years, the swallows do not return on an annual basis. Blunden’s photo-essay continues by narrating memories of butterflies in her garden: ‘[on] coming home from school and finding our front lawn almost white, covered in the brown-veined white butterflies, I would eagerly jump out of the car and spend my afternoon in the company of the gentle creatures’. Her photo-essay captures the current startling absence of butterflies in her garden by resorting to an image of a butterfly on her cell phone (Figure 2). In sum, the storytelling shared in the class discussions and presented in the students’ photo-essays, provided arresting evidence of the loss of biodiversity, and provided a platform to identify and mourn the species and sites that have become casualties of slow violence. 

Figure 1: Swallow nests (Blunden 2020)

 

Figure 2: The absence of butterflies in Blunden’s garden (Blunden 2020)

 

A further theme in the study unit required the students to consider how their homes may provide a refuge for fauna and flora. Central to this theme was Haraway’s theorisation that as the earth is teeming with refugees, it is our responsibility to ‘join forces to reconstitute refuges’ (2015:160). In addressing this topic in their photo-essays, the students were asked to draw their attention to overlooked species, namely plants and animals that are ‘under the radar of everyday human attention’ (Adamson, LeMenager and Sandilands 2018:97). The goal was for the students to develop an ‘affective relationship’ (Adamson, LeMenager and Sandilands 2018:98) with the identified species, and consider how to create safe harbours for them in their homes to thrive and replenish as a species. Nomvuyo Nxele (2020) provided a profound portrait of moss by underscoring its importance in ecosystems, and how it acts as ‘natural guardians of soil’ in gardens, and thus promote the health of all species that grow from the soil. Kimberley Moolman’s (2020) photo-essay underscored how creating a refuge for earthworms and red worms provides a compost source for one’s garden. The added benefit of placing food scraps in a compost bin for the worms to eat, is that it ‘keeps out unnecessary waste from bins which end up in landfills’. Stirling Blunden (2020) outlined how wasps and hornets play an important role in our gardens: 

 

wasps/hornets naturally control the amount of ‘pest’ insects that visit my garden. These wasps/hornets also play a role in transferring pollen when they drink nectar from the flowers in my garden ... Getting rid of these nests by means of harmful chemicals runs the risk of wasps and hornets becoming endangered, like their fellow fuzzy bee pollen-partner. Although wasps and hornets appear to be intimidating, they do a lot of good for my ecosystem: I recall seeing them pollinating amongst a few bees when spring came, and I am happy to know that they are they to protect my vegetable gardens from unwanted ‘pests’.

 

In the first few months of lockdown, we were provided with a tangible illustration of how our cities, urban spaces, and neighbourhoods can offer a refuge for multispecies. This illustration offers a springboard to envisage the possibility of living a future in which the fauna and flora species that have vanished from our neighbourhoods are able to return in abundance. Such a possibility is achievable by mobilising people to take responsibility for their local environment. In this article, I highlighted how my students were activated as ambassadors for the multispecies living in their immediate surrounds, and how they sought to sustain a thriving population of multispecies in their homes by creating and cultivating a refuge for them.

 

References

 

Adamson, J, S LeMenager and C Sandilands (2018) ‘Citizen humanities: Teaching Life Overlooked as interdisciplinary ecology’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 5(2).

 

Blunden, S (2020) ‘Digital environmental humanities’. Available at: https://u17199884.wixsite.com/photoessay [accessed November 1, 2020]

 

Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring. London: Penguin.

 

Carter, RL and B Simmons (2010) ‘The history and philosophy of environmental education’, in AM Bodzin, BS Klein and S Weaver (eds) The Inclusion of Environmental Education in Science Teacher Education. London: Springer.

 

De Moor, FC (2017) ‘Dragonflies as indicators of aquatic ecosystem health’, South African Journal of Science 113(3/4).

 

Haraway, D (2015) ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin’, Environmental Humanities6.

 

Holm, P and R Brennan (2018) ‘Humanities for the Environment 2018 Report — Ways to here, ways forward’, Humanities 7(3).

 

Kolbert, E (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history. New York: Henry Holt. 

 

Moolman, K (2020) ‘Digital environmental humanities’. Available at: https://kmoolman27.wixsite.com/environmentalh/post/how-blogging-is-turning-into-the-new-online-magazine [accessed November 1, 2020]

 

Nixon, R (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 

 

Nxele, N (2020) ‘Digital environmental humanities’. Available at: https://nxelen29.wixsite.com/environmentalnxele/life-overlooked [accessed November 1, 2020]

 

O’Gorman, E, T van Dooren, U Münster, J Adamson, C Mauch, S Sörlin, M Armiero, K Lindström, D Houston, JA Pádua, K Rigby, O Jones, J Motion, S Muecke, C Chang, S Lu, C Jones, L Green, F Matose, H Twidle, M Schneider-Mayerson, B Wiggin, D Jørgensen (2019) ‘Teaching the environmental humanities: International perspectives and practices,’ Environmental Humanities 11(2).

 

Pauwels, L (2012) ‘Conceptualising the 'Visual Essay' as a way of generating and imparting sociological insight: Issues, formats and realisations’, Sociological Research Online 17(1).

 

Rose, DB, T van Dooren, M Chrulew, S Cooke, M Kearnes and E O’Gorman (2012) ‘Thinking through the environment, unsettling the humanities’, Environmental Humanities 1(1). 

 

SABC News (2020) ‘Fireflies threatened globally’. Available at: 

https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/fireflies-threatened-globally-with-light-pollution-a-glaring-problem/ [accessed November 1, 2020]

 

Samways, MJ and S Taylor (2004) ‘Impacts of invasive alien plants on Red-Listed South African dragonflies (Odonata)’, South African Journal of Science 100.

 

Smith, G (2015) ‘Cultivating citizen stewards: Lessons from formal and non-formal educators’, in LA Sandberg, A Bardekjian and S Butt (eds) Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace: A Political Ecology Perspective. London: Routledge.

 

Whitehouse, A (2015) ‘Listening to birds in the Anthropocene: The anxious semiotics of sound in a human-dominated world’, Environmental Humanities 6(1).