Posts filed under ‘Articles’
Ouroboros Architecture
“Ouroboros Architecture,” in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Charissa N. Terranova and Meredith Tromble (eds.), (New York: Routledge, 2016), 112-135.
This article explores how and why imagined and real environments in space came to serve as models for ecological design of earthly landscapes and buildings in the 1970s. It claims that life in space came to represent the peaceful, rational, and environmentally friendly alternative to the destructive, irrational, ecological crisis down on Earth. Spaceship management aimed narrowly at the biological survival of astronauts, an ethic which also came to dominate ecological design proposals on board Spaceship Earth. The result was a design programme which was at the expense of a wider aesthetic and social understanding of the human condition. The article reviews the work of leading ecological designers of the period, such as Ian L. McHarg, John Todd and the New Alchemists, Alexander Pike and John Frazer, Brenda and Robert Vale, Ken Yeang, Phil Hawes, and others. It situates their projects in the perspective of ecological research methods of the period and puts forward an understanding of their thinking in the context of space exploration. Today’s challenge is to escape the intellectual space capsule that ecologists have created for environmentally concerned architects.
Art in the Anthropocene
“Art in the Anthropocene,” in Jan Freuchen: Columna Translantica, (Oslo: Press, 2015), 112-121.
Global warming is now at the forefront of public debate, along with a host of related environmental concerns. Indeed, humans are changing the face of the earth so dramatically that geologists use the word “anthropocene” to describe a new planetary epoch formed by human impact. Artists have increasingly begun reflecting on how to engage in the climate debates about the degradation of our shared environment. Jan Freuchen’s Columna Transatlantica may belong within this new school of environmental art.
Download article in English here or Norwegian here.
A pioneer country? A history of Norwegian climate politics
“A pioneer country? A history of Norwegian climate politics” Climatic Change, (Online March 2016), 1-13. Journal edition 151:1 (2018), 29-41.
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The shift away from ecology towards climatology in Norwegian environmental policy in the late 1980s and 1990s was not accidental. A main mover was the Labor Party politician Gro Harlem Brundtland who did not want to deal with unruly and highly vocal Deep Ecologists. Better then to start afresh with a different set of environmental scholars appealing to the technocratic tradition within the Labor Party. Instead of changing the ethical and social ways of dealing with environmental problems as the Deep Ecologists were advocating, she was looking for technological and economic solutions. And she mobilized an international regime of carbon capture storage (CCS), tradable carbon emissions quota (TEQs), and clean development mechanisms (CDMs), all of which eventually were approved in Kyoto in 1997. This move towards technocracy and cost-benefit economics reflects a post-Cold War turn towards utilitarian capitalism, but also a longing to showcase Norway as an environmental pioneer country to the world. The underlying question was how to reconcile the nation’s booming petroleum industry with reduction in climate gas emissions. Should the oil and gas stay underground and the country strive towards the ecologically informed zerogrowth society the Deep Ecologists were envisioning? Or could growth in the petroleum industry take place without harming the environment as the Labor Party environmentalists argued?
From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A Short History of Ecological Design
“From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A Short History of E
cological Design,” in Behind the Green Door: Architecture and the Desire for Sustainability, Helle Benedicte Berg (ed.), (Oslo: Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2013), 129-139.
Order the catalogue here.
The Call for a New Ecotheology in Norway
“The Call for a New Ecotheology in Norway,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 7:2 (2013), 187-207.
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The call for a new ecotheology in Norway began in the early 1970s with environmentally concerned deep ecologists and continued within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway and the university system. Church officials and intellectuals saw ecotheology as an effective way of engaging the young in caring for the Creation. Alongside the eco-philosophical projects of redefining the natural, the deep ecologists also sought to renew religious faith. Norwegian theologians found their questioning of economic growth, technocracy, and industrialism appealing, and they sympathized with their call to save wilderness and their endorsement of outdoor life, rural communities, and modest lifestyles. Deep ecology represented for theologians an opportunity to revive the Church, mobilize a new and younger audience, and address the question of how to behave towards God’s Creation.
Wissenschaft als Urlaub: Eine Geschichte der Ökologie in Norwegen
“Wissenschaft als Urlaub: Eine Geschichte der Ökologie in Norwegen” in Tue Greenfort: Eine Berggeschichte, (Dornbirn: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2012), 26-57.
Translation of Peder Anker, “Science as a Vacation: A History of Ecology in Norway,” History of Science, 45:4 (2007), 455-479.
Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute
“Ecological Communication at the Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute,” in Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies, Christina Folke Ax (et.a.) (ed.) Ohio University Press, 2011.
The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature reveals the nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exotic nature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire. The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the consequences of colonialism on nature, including its impact on animals, fisheries, farmlands, medical practices, and even the diets of indigenous people. Cultivating the Colonies establishes beyond all possible doubt the importance of the environment as a locus for studying the power of the colonial state.
Reviews:
Camilo Quintero, “Cultivating the Colonies,” Isis, 104:1 (2013) , 150-151.
Madhumita Saha, “Cultivating the Colonies,” Technology and Culture, 54 (2013), 184-185.
Allison Hahn, “Cultivating the Colonies,” The Middle Ground Journal, 6 (2013).
A.T. Grove, “Cultivating the Colonies,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14:2 (2013).
Graeme Wynn, “Cultivating the Colonies,” Environmental History, 20:1 (2015), 158-161.
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Viewing the Earth from Without or from Within
“Viewing the Earth from Without or from Within” with Nina Edwards Anker, New Geographies 4 (2011), 89-94.
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The first Apollo images of the Earth have produced a perspective enabling humanity to act on Earth and its nature as if it controlled it from “outside.” The recent developments of satellite technologies have had a significant impact on the modes of representations as well as the conceptions of geography and space. Today, the visualization modes of geospatial information, which offer layering, zooming and panning navigation tools that capture world landscapes through vertical perspectives, reinforce the concept of the Earth as an “object.” Furthermore, the integration and superimposition of geographical information strengthen the Universalist ideal of knowledge while reducing it to a scientific and abstract visual database. This new “geography from above” -the home, the city, entire territories, the Earth itself, the Monn, Mars and beyond- redefine our environment, subjectivities and practises. With such tools at hand, architects conceive of the geographic as a possible scale, site of intervention and design approach.
The scale of vision, viewpoint and qualification of space made possible by satellite imagery reframe contemporary debates on design, agency and territory. In volume 4 of New Geographies, we invite sumissions of articles and projects that critically address the relationship of space with such modes of representation. What are the characteristics of such an integrated elevated vision and what geographical knowledge does it bring forth? In this data-space, which information is to be retained as relevant? How is such an analytical space to be subsequently interpreted and experienced? What are the cultural, political and environmental repercussions of a vision celebrated as objective and Universalist? what new global issues and debates do such scales of vision raise and how do such visualizations of the Earth-as-home intesect with concerns of ecology and calls for global awarness?
Plant Community
“Plant Community,” in Schwarz, A.E. & K. Jax (Eds.), Ecology Revisited, (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 325-331.
The Danish botanist Warming coined the plant community concept in his book “Plantesamfund” in 1895. It has a neo-Lamarckian, morphological, and religiously informed understanding of plant geography. The community concept also drew its inspiration from the Danish political and social environment. Warming was a patriotic defender of the King’s council’s ambition to expand the Danish Empire and the exploitation of natural resources. The plant community concept provided a tool for management of nature that was inspired by the King’s steering of human communities. Warming’s morphologically informed research in Brazil and his geographical explorations of Greenland were also of key importance in the development of his plant community concept.
Seeing Pink: The Eco-Art of Simon Starling
“Seeing Pink: The Eco-Art of Simon Starling,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 7 (2008), 3-9.
The artist Simon Starling offers a critique of different aspects of the history of ecology. Ecology represents a fragmented discipline, which signifies different things depending on the situation and on who’s talking. In his work, Starling expresses this multi-faced discipline as a series of different mediations between nature and culture.
Peder Anker 