Anthropogenic climate ecologies and dissipative water cycling


When taught in elementary school, our planetary water cycle is often depicted in a neat geophysical circulatory way.

With the support of tidy graphics, it usually figures serrated mountain elevations, luxurious valleys, large sweating oceans and small blue underground pools. Plump arrows induce a feeling of movement, from cartoonish clouds to gently sloped grounds through icy crusts and expansive oceans. When updated for the 21st century, these heuristic graphics might even include a tiny urban setting, nestled on a coastal area or in a valley, where water actually meets human activities, often swathed in concrete.

As a present and future technofossil, concrete ushers in—perhaps like no other anthropogenic signature—contemporary ideas of urban progress and civilisational feat. It provides solid grounds (and floors) for the performance of social life and the containment of elemental ones (think canals, dams and other aqueducts for water). At the same time, concrete networks level and suffocate the rhythmic growth of organic life below. They prevent the percolation of life-sustaining rain into the absorptive soil over larger and larger parts of the Earth’s surface. As such, concrete is regarded by many as a contender for the golden spike, a definitive stratigraphic marker for our now infamous Anthropocene.

Concrete is rigid and immobile. Water is supple and moving. Their enmeshment shapes agriculture, industries, economies and politics. It also reshuffles ecologies.

With such an enmeshment in mind, between a state of knowledge accumulated over centuries (our hydraulic cycle) and the unpredictability of both our atmospheric and political climates, my research project aims to better grasp how human forces affect and effect planetary water revolutions.

Because of its spongiform chemical qualities, water carries - along its multiple circulations in both time and space - everything left behind by several industrial revolutions and other anthropic activities. While isotopes reveal change in locales, water now carries plastic and pollutants of various sorts. Because the most persistent work of erosion and sediment displacement can be regarded as the oldest form of globalisation, water is a unique medium for grasping both the state and the movement of life on earth, especially human ones.

Building on a multisited ethnography, I have been revisiting the main loci of water activity portrayed in our canonical hydraulic cycle by attuning to solid, liquid and gaseous states. I follow ice, rain, and clouds as they meet people, infrastructure, and cosmologies. In Quebec, flash-melting snow in an abandoned iron mine revealed aquifers that bore new traces of life (3). In California, expansive atmospheric rivers and erratic weather patterns clash with urban sprawl, the real estate economy and insurance policies. Here, the proposed fieldwork in Taïwan is geared towards clouds, their tracking and grounding, their seeding and monitoring.

Following the work of climate scientists at Academia Sinica, I am interested in better understanding how climate science (and its creative modelling) is now able to grasp atmospheric change, providing new tools to anticipate typhoons’ uneven behaviours (and the chain reactions of socio-ecological consequences) while offering robust data to help political decision-making processes avert catastrophes such as severe droughts.

Because of its insularity, its unique bio-geo-morphology, its historical and anthropological diversity, Taiwan is a key site where to study our novel anthropogenic climate ecologies and their dissipative water (re)cycling. In that respect, the work of the Anthropogenic Climate Change Center is exemplary. Professor Hsu Huang-Hsiung’s research on typhoons and natural disaster simulation (4), for instance, proves a milestone for our current understanding of the complex anthropic dimensions of climate change. Both because those changes are certainly amplified by humans, but also because humans are the ones actually producing new knowledge on what has been understood for centuries as a mostly cosmological issue.

The main methodological tools I will be using for this research is participant observation and visual anthropology. Starting with short and open ended interviews, I would like to follow scientists both on their office and fieldwork activities. I am particularly interested in sensors and how monitoring is operated from the ground. I would love to travel the island following a river (possibly the Tamsui River, from its source all the way down the delta), looking at how human infrastructure accompany the original vein. With the help of sound and video recording, I hope to convey the dedicated work scientist are doing, as well as their inner motivation and personal relationship to water (the intend outcome of the research is a book chapter and an ethnographic film).

Since anthropology is interested in how human groups organise their place and space on earth (and, sometimes, under the clouds), and by putting the human back into the water cycle, I hope to provide historical and cultural insights to the ancient practice of reading the skies.

Between heaven and earth.





Notes

(1) As M. Edgeworth and C. Simonetti recalls: « A leading geological force, capable of altering Earth history irreversibly, concrete is by far the most abundant anthropic material ever created in Earth history. It extends upward in the form of skyscrapers, downward as the linings of deep shafts and tunnels, and laterally in the shape of roads and other laid horizontal surfaces. Taken globally, concrete infrastructure could be regarded as the largest composite artefact in human history. Humans have poured enough concrete to cover the entire surface of the globe with several millimetres of the material, though its actual distribution is patchy and uneven. » https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/concrete-a-stratigraphic-marker-for-the-anthropocene

(2) The driving human forces forward feeding what can be called « anthropogenic signatures » are produced by three linked force multipliers: accelerated technological development, rapid growth of the human population, and increased consumption of resources (Waters Colin N et al., 2016).
Each of those activities are intrinsically linked to water. Either because the request an enormous amount of it for production and consumption, or because those activities are affecting, directly or indirectly, the routes and reroutes of our planetary water cycles (Cooke Steven J et al., 2020).

(3) Jaclin David and Jules Valeur, 2021. & Lhoste, E et al, 2023.

(4) Arakane, S., Hsu, HH. A tropical cyclone removal technique based on potential vorticity inversion to better quantify tropical cyclone contribution to the background circulation. Clim Dyn 54, 3201–3226 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05165-x


References

Waters Colin N et al. “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science (New York N.y.) 2016 pp. aad2622–aad2622. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad2622

Cooke Steven J et al. “Overcoming the Concrete Conquest of Aquatic Ecosystems.” Biological Conservation 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108589.

Duffy Christopher J. “The Terrestrial Hydrologic Cycle: An Historical Sense of Balance.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 2017 p. n/a. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1216.

Jaclin David and Jules Valeur. “Sous L’Imagination Des Formes L’Imagination Des Substances Enquêtes Holographiques Dans Et Autour De La Mine Forsyth.” Techniques & Culture 2021 pp. 180–180. https://doi.org/10.4000/tc.15679.

Lhoste, E.; Comte, F.; Brown, K.; Delisle, A.; Jaclin, D.; Ponsin, V.; Rosabal, M.; Lazar, C.S. Bacterial, Archaeal, and Eukaryote Diversity in Planktonic and Sessile Communities Inside an Abandoned and Flooded Iron Mine (Quebec, Canada). Appl. Microbiol. 2023, 3, 45-63. https://doi.org/10.3390/applmicrobiol3010004

McLean Stuart. “Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativity Beyond ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture.’” Cultural Anthropology 2009 pp. 213–245. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01130.x.

C. N. Waters and A. Smith, “Anthropogenic Rock Types,” in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate, ed. J. Zalasiewicz et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 46–50