Human and Nonhuman in Hawaii:Agency, Elegy, Ecology: Response Cornelia Pearsall (bio) For all of its bright cleanliness and flowing breezes, the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu, site of the Victorians and the World conference, put me in mind of Christina Rossetti’s sonnet “Cobwebs” (1855). The poem begins, “It is a land with neither night nor day” (line 1), and describes an unidentified place of insistent negation, with “No bud-time no leaf-falling there for aye, / No ripple on the sea, no shifting sand” (8–9). Certainly, the waves of the Pacific beat ceaselessly along this shore, overlooked as far as one could see by bustling hotel bars much like ours, yet even these ripples seemed regulated, reassuringly family friendly. Although sunset summoned energetic poolside luau performances (viewable for an extra fee), it didn’t augur darkness across the twenty-two always lighted acres, and although no doubt the occasional bloom or leaf fell from the fifty varieties of flora decorating the hotel grounds, not a one dropped without being swept away almost before it touched the landscaped path, along with any grains of wayward sand. Of course, part of the break offered by a resort is that it provides a vacation from mortality; upon check-in, one enters a region seemingly without detritus or decay. In a sense, this space—entirely and minutely managed by humans—is a space that denies the human, the mortal, the changing, the imperfect. Perhaps it was these reflections on human-made ecosystems’ denial of the human that led me to conference papers that reflected on the precariousness of the nonhuman as well, even as moving daily through this manicured and manipulated landscape led to considerations of [End Page 234] ecology more generally. An untitled 1885 poem by Rossetti declares in its first line “Everything that is born must die,” but she posits that a kind of “equal balance” (line 3) rights “Everything” (the word is a refrain): “Honeycomb is weighed against a sting” (5). The poet could not have anticipated the sixth extinction, in which “Everything,” or at least a tremendous array of species, may indeed die. But according to theorists of the Anthropocene, this mass-extinguishing imbalance was already underway in her lifetime, with what Timothy Morton declares “the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale” (7). Those who argue, controversially, that a shift in geological time (a scale itself created in the nineteenth century) from the Holocene to the Anthropocene has occurred point to the alterations in atmospheric carbon content dating from the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent rise in global temperatures, ocean acidification, and megafauna extinctions. The Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who with Eugene F. Stoermer proposed the contested term Anthropocene, dates the era’s origin to April 1784, when James Watt patented the coal-fired, carbon-emitting steam engine.1 Many attribute the damage that followed not only to the engine’s carbon emissions but also, more broadly, to the capitalist expansion and consumerism it fueled; as McKenzie Wark puts it, “The Anthropocene runs on carbon” (xv). With this chronology in mind, Jesse Oak Taylor remarks in his essay in this cluster, the Victorians were “the Anthropocene’s first inhabitants” (225). As it happens, a particularly significant milestone in the measurement of the greenhouse gases produced by carbon-based fuels occurred on the island of Hawai’i, at the Mauna Loa volcano. At the beginning of his essay “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Bruno Latour reports on a news item he has just read in Le Monde. “‘At Mauna Loa, on Friday May 3, the concentration of CO2’” in the air reached “‘the highest [level] it has been for more than 2.5 million years.’” “How are we supposed to react when faced with a piece of news like this one …?”, he asks, before suggesting that we may be unable to react: “people are not equipped with the mental and emotional repertoire to deal with such a vast scale of events” (1). The demands of scale are at once vast and all too human, given that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “Humans, collectively, now have an agency...
Read full abstract
Sep 1, 2016
David Haslam 
Open Access
