I've been thinking about posting something here for the last few weeks, but, until now, I haven't quite known the right tone to take in this blog.
What I've decided, for better or worse, is to make this space an honest reflection of my thoughts regarding the current situation, and to reflect on some of the emotions many graduate students and perhaps younger researchers may experience in the wake of dissertational research, or book writing, or daily (coronavirus-affected) life.
This is a troubling time. The feeling many of us are feeling right now may be hard to replicate or explain in the future, but let me take a moment to try: In January and February, I was on campus most days, photographing, skimming, and flagging several decades of Harpers New Monthly for discussions about science, Nature, environmental thinking, and, most importantly, birds. This work was time consuming but quite fun when it came down to it; I'm quite certain many of the editions I was viewing hadn't been cracked open in years, and I felt-- for maybe the first time-- that I was something of a specialist in the history of environmental thinking. I was simultaneously reading Andrea Wulf's "The Invention of Nature," a fascinating study of the nearly forgotten biologist, public figure, and exploration expert Alexander Von Humboldt, who died in the mid 19th century; and Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature," which is a (dated, but helpful) book from 1989 intended to tell the public about the realities of climate change and the possible trajectories we might be facing in the 21st century. Hint: it wasn't just endless, unsustainable economic growth.
In mid-Februrary I attended a conference in Louisville to discuss my work in the Lili Elbe Digital Archive. I met some fantastic graduate students who were also engaged with Modernist Feminist DH projects, and got to spend time with my dissertation director and fellow digital editors.
In the course of a few weeks, I'd packed up my apartment with the necessities (mostly books, recently purchased groceries, and my two cats) and traveled to Peoria, IL, where my partner is in medical school. The thought of being alone (in what at first was the most hard-hit neighborhood in Illinois) for the next foreseeable months was impossible. It took several weeks for this new social distancing reality to set in-- no gratuitous runs to the store, no meeting with friends, no writing at the library, no books other than the ones you can afford to purchase online or thought to check out before the pandemic, no dissertation writing groups or conferences. I'm sure to some, this doesn't sound that bad-- I was still employed through my Research Assistantship (which thanks to HathiTrust I could continue online) and I had basically unlimited time to work on my fledgling dissertation.
And the isolation certainly isn't all bad, for those reasons. I've been able to focus on my dissertation, and I'm getting sucked into the ideas more and more these days. In some ways it feels like my research and education are culminating in this project, and I feel proud and excited for where it's taking me.
However, that's not really what I want to talk about in this post. What I want to talk about most is the climate as its been affected by the coronavirus-- both the environmental and political climates, that is. My dissertation director has been kind enough to send some hopeful environmental news my way-- I recently received an article about several London streets going car-free in the next few weeks, and another about environmental goals for post-Covid19 reopening, summarized by Sadiq Khan: “We need to come out of this embracing a new normal and with a renewed drive to address the climate emergency.”
I am hopeful that certain cities will implement new rules and regulations, and if just a handful of cities do this, we might even see the effects globally. I'm also hopeful that this momentary pause in emissions could show some skeptics that the way we live absolutely affects the way our world looks, smells, and behaves. Reduced smog, greater animal presence in once-abandoned areas: these are real, visible effects that happened so quickly after the pandemic required a lockdown.
Two texts spring to mind: I am thinking about a chapter ("Climate Change, Slippery on the Skin") I just read in Kath Weston's Animate Planet on the ways some Americans reject climate change because they can't feel or see it with their bodies. Weston claims that that's not necessarily an anti-science perspective, and it's not even necessarily political. Secondly, mentioned earlier, Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, and its thoughts about human perceptions of "nature." One of these perceptions is timelessness- or the ideas that nature has an endless amount of renewal and endurance.
Rather than explain so directly how these texts are helping me process this moment, I just want to express how difficult it feels-- emotionally-- to live in a political/environmental climate that exuberantly rejects evidenced research in favor of conspiracy. This is particularly difficult to deal with when your daily work requires you to get back on the horse and face those realities.
The pendulum swings quickly and powerfully between hope (lull in emissions, exciting research, time to focus, possibility of systematic changes) and despair (widespread rejection of medical experts and epidemiologists, religious fervor for the American economy, death in mass numbers, cynical thoughts about the likelihood of systematic change given the current administration).
I'm not sure, before I began the Ph.D. or even just the dissertation, that I knew how deeply academic work can affect the color of our daily lives. It's keeping me occupied during the distancing; and its giving my work some unexpected urgency.
More on a later day...
