Author Archives: Lala St. Fleur

Earth & Fire

Earth and Fire: Environmentalism and the Fall of Man

A class project, by Lala St. Fleur

Summary

In arguments over the technical terminology of referring to climate change, and its associated social and environmental crises, as anthropogenic (the fault of all mankind) or capitalogenic (the fault of modern industrial-capitalist institutions), my reflexive 21st century instinct is to blame capitalism for all of the problems of modern-day society, including environmental degradation. However, it also cannot be denied that there have been grave mistakes of the distant past that peoples of the immediate present and potential future are still paying for. I stand with paleoclimatologist William F. Ruddiman’s understanding of the Anthropocene as having started over 10,000 years ago, during the Agricultural Revolution, when mankind moved from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to sedentary agrarianism (Ruddiman, 2003: 261). I disagree with the notion that the Anthropocene having started during the Industrial Revolution, as Paul J. Crutzen more popularly defined it.

Agricultural Revolution

Around the world, there are longstanding religious beliefs that the natural forces — or rather, nature spirits — of the earth itself are acting out in warning, protest or punishment against the decay of societies that have lost faith and not kept to the old ways of their forebearers. My research paper analyzes etiological and eschatological stories from ancient Greek and Abrahamic religions, that see certain elemental forces (Fire and Earth) and geological events (natural disasters) as manifestations of divine punishment against the wrongdoings of mankind. These stories are directly tied to the Agricultural Revolution.

Earth: The Agricultural Revolution

In the Book of Genesis’ story of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman were expelled from the Garden of Eden after eating the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As punishment, God exiled Adam and Eve from Paradise, and so, stuck on earth, they had to work the land as farmers, toiling by the sweat of their brow for everything they ate. But the earth was now cursed, and by extension, so were the fruits of all their labor. This story can be seen as reflecting mankind’s transition from hunter-gatherers to agrarian societies.

Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.

Genesis 3:17

The story of Adam and Eve’s sons, Cain and Abel, are also interpreted in my paper as allegorical, with Cain representing agrarianism and Abel representing pastoralism. In both Genesis stories, agriculture is directly tied to the sin of hubris. Adam and Eve sought forbidden knowledge. Cain thought his sacrifice of grain was better than Abel’s blood sacrifice of his first flock. In both stories, humans act against the will of God, and both mankind and the land itself suffer for it.

Cain and Abel, by Robert T. Barrett.

My paper connects these biblical stories with archaeological scholarship on Neolithic societies in the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. Scholars either support or reject the notion that the Agricultural Revolution directly led to not only the formation of sedentary societies and the first cities, but also socio-economic inequality, and anthropogenic environmental degradation (Marcus and Sabloff 2008; Watkins 2006).

Fire: The Industrial Revolution

Rather than examining the Anthropocene through the modern Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, as Crutzen does, instead, my paper looks to ancient stories that describe the Fall of Man, related to technology, industry, and modernity.

In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, heavenly angels described as the Watchers descend to earth to breed giants with humans. They also taught humanity various corruptible knowledge, including, but not limited to warfare. Chief amongst them is Azazel, the Scapegoat.

Heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons. And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azâzêl: to him ascribe all sin.

Book of Enoch, 10:7-9

This apocryphal Abrahamic story serves as the segue into my segment on Greek mythology, which features another major etiological figure connected to human progress and punishment, the Titan Prometheus.

Prometheus’ punishment for stealing fire for mankind. 6th century BC, Vatican Museum.

My paper uses myths from the poets Hesiod and Aeschylus to highlight the ways that the mastery of fire, technological advancement and human innovation were considered the very foundations of civilized society, as early as the 8th-5th centuries B.C.

Hearken to the miseries that beset mankind how that they were witless before and I [Prometheus] made them to have sense and be endowed with reason.… Knowledge had they neither of houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun, nor yet of work in wood; but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves.

Hesiod, Works and Days, 42-50.

Prometheus bestowed fire to cavemen, teaching them how to master it, and thereby inspiring the development of everything from architecture to art and science. However, Zeus, king of the gods, was angered at humanity gaining access to heavenly fire. As punishment, Prometheus was imprisoned, to be tortured for all eternity, and mankind was given the all-gifted woman, Pandora, of “Pandora’s Box” infamy. Upon opening her jar or box, Pandora unleashed all evils upon the world, including disease, poverty, and warfare.

Up to the present day, Prometheus has been perceived as either a savior god of industrial creativity, or as the corrupting demiurge of industrial destruction (Beller 1984).

Prometheus sculpture at Rockefeller Center, NYC. Behind him is an inscription paraphrased from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: “”Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.”

By synthesizing the lessons to be gleaned from the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Azazel, and Prometheus, and analyzing their parallels with archaeological research, my class project attempts to stimulate an alternate way of thinking about certain things we take for granted: What does it mean for humanity to have evolved, developed, and progressed–even at the expense of the natural environment, and our own societal well-being?

World religions have long held people’s moral decay accountable for environmental decay. Regardless of whether or not climate change is the result of man’s faults in the anthropogenic past or capitalogenic present, the record still shows that it is essentially, fundamentally and ultimately humanity’s fault. The only arguments should be grounded in what we are going to do about it now, to save both the planet, and ourselves.

Resources

  • Aeschylus. Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. in two volumes. 1. Prometheus Bound. Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1926.
  • Anonymous. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Homeric Hymns. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.
  • Beller, Manfred. “The Fire of Prometheus and the Theme of Progress in Goethe, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Canetti.” Colloquia Germanica 17, no. 1/2 (1984): 1-13.
  • Charles, Robert Henry. Book of Enoch: Spck Classic. SPCK, 2013.
  • Crutzen, Paul J. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” In Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, pp. 13-18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006.
  • Demos, Thomas J. “Against the Anthropocene.” Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017): 132.
  • Marcus, Joyce, and Jeremy A. Sabloff, eds. The Ancient City: New Perspectives on Urbanism in the Old and New World. School for Advanced Research, 2008.
  • Ruddiman, William F. “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261-293.
  • Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature.” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614-621.
  • Stoekl, Allan. “Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy.” In Materialism and the Critique of Energy,” edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 1-29. MCM, 2018.
  • Watkins, Trevor. “Neolithisation in Southwest Asia—The Path to Modernity.” Documenta Praehistorica 33 (2006): 71-88.

Discussion Questions

  • Why is it that more often than not, popular culture props Prometheus the Titan up, while castigating Azazel the Scapegoat, Eve (moreso than Adam), and Cain?
  • What is “progress”? Has humanity evolved, or devolved?
  • Is hunter-gathering or agriculture better for the environment? To what extent could modern man ever return to either model?
  • Is technology/industry worth moral & environmental decay?
  • What are we willing to sacrifice to make things right?

Against the Anthropocene

Against the Anthropocene, by Thomas.J. Demos

An annotated bibliography, by Lala St. Fleur.

Core Text

Demos, Thomas J. “Against the Anthropocene.” Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017): 132.

Summary

Demos’ 2017 book is firmly against using the term “Anthropocene” in reference to the ongoing concerns around climate change. In Demos’ view, it only foists the blame of the military-state-corporate interests off onto universal accountability held by all of humanity, rather than to those truly at fault or most responsible for the world’s mounting eco-catastrophes (Demos, 2017: 19). He also challenges the emphasis put on geoengineering projects as solutions to environmental problems. Because the authority to conduct such experiments inevitably favors an imbalance of power between individuals, governments and corporations, Demos is skeptical of anthropocenologists (i.e.: military-state-corporate agents) having the final say as to what measures should be taken to see positive change and real environmental improvement.

Because the “Anthropocene” holds all humans accountable for global climate change, Demos argues that it disavows the unequal distribution of resources, aid, and responsibility between parties who either suffer or benefit the most from its causes and effects. It is the “underlying heteropatriarchal and white supremacist structures” whose fossil fuel industries are the worst perpetrators of environmental abuse, (Demos, 2017: 53). Meanwhile, disenfranchized and poor minorities are most severely affected by the slow violence of government policy, corporate interests, and climate impact. But the consolidated efforts of grassroots activism inside those very communities are also in a position to resist such pressures and hold corporations accountable for their harmful operations. In place of “Anthropocene,” Demos proposes the adoption of the term “Capitalocene” instead. Demos sees this as a “more accurate and politically enabling geological descriptor” for more precisely putting the blame on corporate globalization and industrialization as the main culprits of unchecked climate change (Demos, 2017: 54).

Demos’s methodology involves looking at the utilization of photo imagery circulated by the media and academia, as visualizations that either help shed light on climate crises that corporations would otherwise see silenced (local activism against fracking or development in communities; the victims of marine pollution and oil spills); or help divert attention away from environmental concerns by glorifying mankind’s dominion over nature (incredible mines seen from space; the downplay of the effect of said oil spills; etc.).

Teaching Resources

  • Crutzen, Paul J. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” In Earth system science in the anthropocene, pp. 13-18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen is the scholar who popularized the use of the term “Anthropocene,” in 2000. In this 2006 article, he doubles down on his notions that the current Anthropocene age (starting with the Industrial Revolution) is distinct from the Holocene’s epoch of pre-industrial human activity. Despite Earth’s cycles and systems of global change, Crutzen argues that anthropogenic activity has gone far beyond the bounds of natural atmospheric, chemical, and geological fluctuations.  
  • Stengers, Isabelle. In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015. In this rapidly changing epoch, Stengers’ book acknowledges the sense of impotency that the climate crisis can often put in the mindset of people today, who can be informed and educated about the causes of and effects of climate change (and capitalism) yet still participate in overbearing systems that perpetuate it. Stengers challenges the notions of progress and barbarism in the context of modern capitalist structures.
  • Stoekl, Allan. “Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy.” In Materialism and the Critique of Energy,” edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 1-29. MCM, 2018. Though Stoekl’s article focuses on Marxist concerns of capitalist fetishism that turns both people and nature alike into commodities, he ultimately argues that “merely changing the name of the Anthropocene (to Capitolocene or whatever) would not solve the underlying social and material contradictions” of today’s climate crises (Stoekl, 2018: 55). Market-based approaches to environmental issues only serve to abstract, invert, obscure, and detract from the root problems inherent within fossil duel industries and corporate interests. Geoengineering solutions, therefore will only be protracted over millennia, “effectively implicating dozens of future generations” in an ongoing climate crisis that might never be resolved (Stoekl, 2018: 59).

Discussion Questions

  1. Beyond Crutzen’s interpretation, there are various other understandings of when the Anthropocene began, and what its catalysts were. Is the Anthropocene indeed the product of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, or is it instead a far older culture we inherited from the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of the first major civilizations, over 10,000 years ago?
  2. Stengers’ book focuses a light on the issue of capitalism not being all that is was cracked up to be. In the face of the various problems of modernity (climate change being only one crisis of many), what is progress, and what is barbarism? Is it progressive or barbaric to keep pushing forward with technological advancement, even at the cost of environmental decay? Or, is it progress or barbarous to actively try to dismantle institutional systems that have proved ineffective, and even dangerous to humanity and Gaia’s (the very world’s) well-being?
  3. What does a world without capitalism look like, and is it at all possible as long as people continue to be reliant on carbon-based technology? To what ends would any geoengineering models benefit the environment, so long as the earth’s natural resources are commodified and exploited for fuel?
Seneca Village Teapot

When Environmentalism Goes Too Far

A reading response, by Lala St. Fleur

The social consequences of putting deep ecology into practice on a worldwide basis (what its practitioners are aiming for) are very grave indeed.

Ramachandra Guha, Environmental Ethics, 1989.

Environmentalist Subhankar Banerjee’s 2016 paper, “Long Environmentalism: After the Listening Session,” demonstrates how indigenous resistance movements inadvertently highlight the pitfalls of certain conservationist issues that prioritize nature over human beings. Banerjee coined the term “long environmentalism” in reference to ongoing environmental engagements that create their own histories and cultures of environmentalism (2016: 62). According to Banerjee, long environmentalism can foster coalitional relationships between indigenous people and government institutions, by doing four things: (2016: 62-63)

  • illuminating past injustices
  • highlighting the significance of resistance movements to avert potential social-environmental violence (fast and/or slow)
  • showing how communities respond to slow violence, and
  • pointing towards social-ecological renewal after devastation 

This is especially important in the face of biocentrism, or deep ecology, where nature is given “ethical status at least equal to that of humans,” to the point that the preservation of nonhuman biotic life and biospheres becomes is served to the detriment of preserving indigenous ways of life, (2016: 63).

Banerjee’s paper uses the plight of the Gwich’in and Iñupiat Alaskan natives as case studies for examining ways that environmental conservationist concerns need to be reconciled with the protection of human rights. For decades, Alaska’s indigenous tribes have found themselves in land disputes against the American government over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cordoned off by the Public Land Order of 1960. This Alaskan coastal territory held precious oil and gas reserves for industrialists; pristine wilderness land conservationists lobbied to protect; and “nutritional, cultural, and spiritual sustenance” for the Gwich’in and Iñupiat (2016: 65).

  • Arctic_National_Wildlife_Refuge, Wikimedia Commons
  • Arctic_National_Wildlife_Refuge, Wikimedia Commons

With the indigenous cultural traditions enacted in their own homeland criminalized as everything from poaching, arson, and outright theft by the conservationists, the Alaskan indigenous groups were summarily stripped of their rights to access their own ancestral land, all for the sake of “preserving unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreational values,” of white tourists and conservationists, not the original inhabitants, (2016:67).

Hard-fought coalitions like the 1980 Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act (ANILCA) and the 1988 Gwich’in Steering Committee have worked to bring together tribes and environmentalists to both protect precious wilderness from drilling and deforestation, as well as protect indigenous rights to subsistence hunting–though the former is often prioritized over the latter.

Banerjee’s paper reminded me of other instances where eminent domain was enforced in the name of environmentalism, to the detriment of the original inhabitants. As a resident of New York City, my mind was immediately taken back to the creation of Central Park, the emerald jewel in the heart of Manhattan’s concrete jungle.

Panoramic view of Central Park from Rockefeller Center, 2008. Wikimedia Commons.

Central Park was the magnum opus of New York City’s 19th century Environmental Movement, which was a direct response to the the destruction of the natural landscape and shrinking of the “green” environment of the city, as the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population boom of the mid-1800’s took over what was once lush wilderness. Municipal sanitation was still in its infancy, and in no position to tackle the overwhelming pollution littering the streets.

The city is dirtier and noisier, and more uncomfortable, and drearier to live in than it ever was before. I have bad my fill of town life, and begin to wish to pass a little time in the county.

William Cullen Bryant, romantic poet (Letters, September 1836: 87).

Inspired by the writings of naturalists and reformers including Henry Thoreau, Ralph Emerson, and Horace Greely, landscape architects Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were hired by NYC in 1858 to beautify the city, and create a public park in the spirit of environmental preservation. Thus, Central Park was born, the most visited urban park in the USA, and most filmed location in the world.

However, what is not so famously known is that in order to create Central Park, an entire community of over 1600 free African-Americans who lived on that land from 1825 – 1857 were forced off of their property through eminent domain; their communities scattered throughout parts of NYC and New Jersey; their homes leveled so that Central Park could be built.

A temporary outdoor exhibit, called Discover Seneca Village.

Remnants of Seneca Village were uncovered in a 2011 excavation by archaeologists from Columbia University and CUNY schools. Amidst the foundations of Seneca Village’s buildings were several thousand 19th-century artifacts, including household items and other abandoned or discarded personal effects.

With Seneca Village and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in mind, one really must consider both the benefits and pitfalls of unchecked industrialization and development, as well as overzealous and inconsiderate environmentalist movements. There have been amazing strides taken to preserve natural landscapes and endangered biospheres. But there have also been heinous crimes committed against the rights and lives of human beings, who are disenfranchized by biocentric conservationists who care more about land than the people who live in it.

Violence

“Climate Change is Violence,” and Disaster Capitalism

A close reading / rhetorical analysis, by Lala St. Fleur

In the title of one particular 2014 article published in the Guardian, columnist Rebecca Solnit urges readers, audiences, and participants in the ongoing discussion about the anthropocene’s environmental crisis to “Call climate change what it is: violence.”

According to Solnit’s article, “extreme, horrific, longterm, widespread” violence “against places and species as well as against human beings” has been perpetrated against Planet Earth and its denizens by the anthropogenic institutions of modern societies, as governments and companies alike “profit off the rapid, violent and intentional destruction of the Earth.” Today’s climate change is the result and fault of mining, fracking, deforestation, urbanization, and the other related problems of modernity. From fossil fuels to world hunger, the land and its people both suffer at the hands of capitalist industrialism. We are violently killing the planet, but Solnit’s article also underlines the fact that in so doing, we are also killing each other.

Solnit points to the 2007-2010 Arab spring bread riot revolts in Africa and the Middle East as a warning of the consequences of climate change, where prolonged droughts caused crop famines that led to the cost of wheat rising, and the people to violently protest in reaction. She draws on parallels to the French Revolution, the bloodiest revolt in European history, which was similarly provoked by the wheat crop failure in 1788. However, while Solnit does acknowledge that the unequal “distribution system is itself a kind of violence,” her article tends to focus a bit too heavily on the social upheaval and “turbulent reactions” that resource scarcity would incite amongst the disenfranchised starving and homeless victims of rising food prices and sea levels, in the event of unchecked global warming and climate change.

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy…. In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful.

Solnit, 2014.

In her article, Solnit states, “I suspect people will be revolting in the coming future against what they revolted against in the past: the injustices of the system. They should revolt, and we should be glad they do, if not so glad that they need to.” In reading Solnit’s article, I found myself wishing that she would further tackle the need to people to redirect their aggravation and violence at the institutions truly at fault for systemic inequality. But for all that Solnit made a point of overemphasizing that “climate change is violence,” she focused that violence on the bottom-up responses to food and land shortages, rather than the top-down causes behind and process by which that violence was committed in the first place.

Climate change is global-scale violence…. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Solnit, 2014.

Solnit says that we must revolt against the language that hides the brutality of climate change violence–but that is the brutality of hunger, poverty, disenfranchisement, and exploitation. Climate change is violence, sure. But I think Solnit should have just come right out and said plainly that Capitalism is Violence. Capitalism is the vehicle by which industrialization and economic inequality continue to propel themselves across the world, effectively hiding its heinous crimes against humanity behind the language of economics, profit, and neoliberal free market regulation that all allow fossil fuel companies to pump the planet full of toxic emissions with near impunity in the first place.

Over the course of this Summer 2020 semester, I have become increasingly reminded of a class on disaster capitalism I took in my Spring 2020 archaeology course. We read and responded to several pieces by Naomi Klein, David Harvey, and more, on the topic of the unequal effects of climate change and natural disasters on different socioeconomic and racial groups. I made a PowerPoint for my class presentation, which I have uploaded below in an truncated form more pertinent to this semester’s course, in regards to what climate change violence looks like:

David Harvey’s 2017 article “There’s Nothing ‘Natural’ about a Natural Disaster,” and Neil Smith’s 2006 article “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster” both underline the ways that systemic inequality and capitalism are the real acts of violence against humanity and the earth. Mother Nature has her cycles, and she’s going to do what she always does–there have been recurring greenhouse effects and ice ages since the continents formed billions of years ago. But it’s the ways people react to those changes (climate change, Katrina, Sandy, Tohoku, volcanoes, droughts, and other disasters) that reveal the real acts of violence perpetrated by and against people and the planet itself, as well as highlighting precisely who the most numerous victims of “climate change violence” truly are.

Naomi Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything Capitalism vs. the Climate, highlights the need “to address the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time,” (Klein, 2014: 372). Multiple crises are at work, by which climate change is only one aspect of an even larger problem based on unchecked over development and capitalist exploitation of everything the earth produces, from resources to geological disasters themselves. And so, a revolt against climate change, though indeed intrinsically linked to socioeconomic inequality, cannot by itself knock the capitalist system on its ear, particularly since several aspects tied to climate change can be tackled separately and with greater efficiency as general environmental concerns or cases of socio-economic/racial inequality (the pipelines as an issue of Native American land rights; Flint, Michigan’s water crisis as an example of gross governmental negligence). As such, I am unconvinced that Solnit’s “climate change is violence” is the right declarative statement that will rally the masses.

However, I do agree that the consequences unchecked climate change will exacerbate (namely: resource shortages) will more than likely be the lynch-pin that inevitably triggers both violent and non-violent revolts against exploitative capitalist, industrialist, and imperialist systems. But the masses will need to take aim at the right target first, otherwise these circular arguments will just keep spinning, as finite Global Green New Deals only scratch the surface of the true violence against society.

Natural Disasters

The Past, Present, and Future of Climate Change: Archaeological Perspectives

A personal narrative, by Lala St. Fleur.

I used to live in Upstate New York, in a house with the Susquehanna River right in my backyard. In 2011, Tropical Storm Lee struck the east coast, the hurricane bringing heavy rains that flooded the Susquehanna, and all surrounding areas in New York and Pennsylvania alike. A state of emergency was enacted for my county and all others impacted by the Susquehanna, as our homes were all flooded in several feet of water. My family had to drive several counties over to find a cheap hotel that still had rooms, where we stayed for over a week to wait for the storms to pass and the waters to recede.

FEMA was called in, and inspected our house, but the relief money they gave us didn’t come close to covering the total damages and expenses. And no amount of money in the world would replace the priceless things lost; I used to be a hobbyist who drew and sketched, and all of the work I had done over the years was ruined. My family and I left Upstate NY in 2012, saying good riddance to that water-logged house and that river that had taken so much from us. We moved to NYC…only to be greeted by Hurricane Sandy that same year.

I am well aware of the very real dangers and consequences of climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels. I’ve waded up to my waist in river muck in my basement, struggling to wrap the fuse box and water heater in plastic and blankets as the water rose, only to toss everything down, grab whatever essentials we could pack into our car, and book it to drier, safer high ground.

I decided to enroll in college in 2014. At CUNY’s Brooklyn College, I chose an archaeological anthropology major with a double minor in history and classics. I worked on several projects examining the ways that the ever-changing natural environment shapes prehistoric, historic, and contemporary societies, with a focus on the cultural impact of ancient religious traditions. This included my creation of an ArcGIS Story Map that digitized major Natural Disasters of Ancient Japan (specifically: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis), from the Kofun Period to the Tokugawa Shogunate, which I made during junior year. I was increasingly fascinated about how everything from Japanese religious practices and mythological deities, to architecture, city planning, and government policy were influenced if not directly derived from their understanding of natural cycles and forces. And so, for my undergraduate senior thesis paper, I expounded upon that topic by writing about Japan’s cultural, economic, and political responses to geological events and disasters, from the prehistoric Jōmon and Yayoi periods up to the modern Tōhoku Disaster of 2011.

By looking at the ways that the Japanese peoples have reacted to geological changes for well over 10,000 years, it helped put things into perspective for me about the endless challenges societies face in response to geological events. But there are also equally endless possible solutions that await discovery as those events continue to be researched, so that potential crises are mitigated.

Now pursuing my master’s degree at the CUNY Graduate Center, in the MALS program’s archaeology track, my research has become further grounded in religious and environmental studies. I primarily use geomyths (mythology pertaining to geological phenomena) as my main source of inspiration for academic analysis and inquiry about the relationships between people and the (super)natural world around us.

I am currently working on my master’s thesis, which examines various topographical features and archaeological sites throughout Greece that have long been believed to be the entrances to the underworld, Hades.

I enrolled in the MALS 78500 course on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change in order to further my education about climate change, its history, and its future. For my final project, I hope to incorporate paleoclimatology into discussions about how humans have reacted to geological events, and how the planet has reacted in kind to human intervention.