Boundaries, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial

A screen grab from the Guardian on-line (November 28th).  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

Recently, North Korea boasted that it had successfully launched a spy satellite into orbit. The Guardian newspaper on-line (November 28th) reports that it has ‘sent back “detailed” images of the White House, the Pentagon and US nuclear aircraft carriers that have been viewed by the regime leader, Kim Jong-un.’ The Guardian published the photograph at the top of today’s post. Hilarious, isn’t it? The T-shirts sported by the science wonks are priceless. I want one!  I imagine the piece of paper they’re holding shows Scarlett Johansson sunbathing beside her pool in her USD 3.88 million home in Los Feliz, recorded while the satellite was passing over Los Angeles.

It would be comic, except the news has now brought us one step closer to war. Again. Life near the DMZ has just gotten fractionally more insecure. Am I just imagining it, or are there more live fire-drills taking place? More troop movements? It may be a ruse. After all, they have already failed twice. But the suspicion is that Russia has recently provided much needed technological support, and in return, North Korea is providing Russia with thousands of artillery shells. What a diabolical marriage made in Hell!

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I was struck by the chance juxtaposition in the media of this advanced extra-terrestrial surveillance technology with what’s currently going on in Israel/Palestine: the contrast between two relationships to the world - between attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil and having panoptic access to the entire world.

In Israel/Palestine what we see playing out in terrible  detail via the media is a crisis brought on by a fundamental human orientation to land and territory. Strife and war between humans have historically always been about appropriation of land.  A sense of being at home in a particular place is axiomatic. The securing of a particular area of land through migration, colonization, and conquest leads to the setting up of social order and the organization of economic life of society.  Only by dwelling somewhere do we feel truly human. This also meant that because societies are historically grounded in the occupation of a particular area  of land, the construction of boundaries is absolutely necessary.  

So, what is happening in Israel/Palestine is an ancient struggle for the appropriation of land, one that in spite of all the huge changes that have occurred over the past one hundred years remains central to human meaningful existence. Two peoples claim the same land as their own.

And yet, at the same time, thanks to globalization, a thoroughgoing deterritorialization of human existence has occurred. In fact, this process began long before the period usually described as ‘modern’. The uniquely iintimate link between being human and dwelling on the land was destroyed over 500 years ago when the oceans were systematically opened up.  From this point onwards, human society ceased being land-based and lost its status as the connection to specific area of the Earth.  Humans were no longer earth-bound. With the development of maritime technology - improved ship construction,  the  invention of the compass,  the science of mapping -  Europeans spearheaded the subjection of the entire planet to appropriation and control which had begun millennia before. when humans first developed boats that could carry them across the oceans. The general assumption became that by the end of the twentieth century, globalization meant the struggle between humans for the appropriation of land was over.  Humanity had spread all over the entire globe, across land, sea, and space, and there was nowhere else to go.

The North Korean’s launching of a spy satellite is in line with the logic of modernity in this sense. It is part-and-parcel of the process through which humanity has detached itself from its terrestrial bonds and manufactured a god-like view which bestows upon it immense power. It is this technologically-assisted extension of human perception that dominates our experience of the world – at least those of us who live in the developed world, and those who seek to maintain their security in relation to this world – nations like North Korea, for example.  To ensure a secure boundary for appropriated land entails the production of technologies that will deter others from making a grab for it. In this sense, the spy satellite is a contemporary standard form of boundary establishment generated on a global rather than terrestrial scale.

Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine boundaries of a more ancient kind were erected. Israel constructed a fence to pen in the Gaza Palestinians. But this fence proved catastrophically inadequate. This was not because of sophisticated technological subversion, however, but rather because of the violent invasion of land by humans.

In this sense, the conflict in Israel/Palestine brings together the pre-modern and modern, the post-terrestrial and the terrestrial. Israel’s folly has been to attempt to live like a globalized nation in a region that is still trapped in a feud over land, trapped in a way of dwelling on earth - of being human - that is ancient, and has been kept alive through the bungling of modern leaders.

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But however awful the conflict in Israel /Palestine is, in a weird sense it is actually reassuring on a certain level, in the sense that it is enacting a very familiar kind of struggle over the appropriation of land based on historical precedent, religious justification, and political compromises. With climate change, the conflict between the global and the local will become even more tense. It is transforming the land upon which people dwell, forcing many of them to migrate and causing perpetual conflicts over dwelling rights. We will be seeing lots more violent struggles over land use because of the pressures of climate change, but they won’t be rooted in evident history like the one in Israel/Palestine.

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, , in order to effectively confront climate change we need “to be able to succeed in carrying out two complementary movements that the ordeal of modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other. Up to now…. such an operation has been considered impossible: between the two, it is said, one has to choose. It is this apparent contradiction that current history may be bringing to an end.’

NOTES

The Guardian article can be accessed at:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

The Bruno Latour quote is from Down To Earth. Poltics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018), p.12 

The Geese have arrived (earlier)!

I have noted the arrival of the geese in a couple of previous posts (Oct.1 2019 and Oct.7 2020). This year, they arrived about a week earlier than last year – in the last week of September.  Eventually, thousands of  bean geese (Anser fabalis) winter around here, having come from their breeding grounds in Mongolia and thereabouts. Apparently, the FAD (First arrival dates), as it is technically called, has been getting earlier and earlier due to global warming.  The authors of an article in the Journal of Ecology and Environment wrote back in 2018:  ‘Average temperature of September in wintering grounds has increased, and the FADs of the geese have advanced over the 22 years. Even when the influence of autumn temperature was statistically controlled for, the FADs of the geese have significantly advanced. This suggests that warming has hastened the completion of breeding, which speeded up the arrival of the geese at the wintering grounds.’ (1)

I always find it reassuringly ironic that the geese have to fly over North Korea and the DMZ to get to us. In other words, for them, there is no divided Korea. There is no Korea, North or South, just breeding grounds and wintering grounds. Adopting a ‘bird’s eye view’ in this context helps to put human history in tragic and absurd perspective. But it also drives a deep wedge between the natural history that addresses the lives of the geese and the human history about the lives of North and South Koreans.

This year, the geese’s arrival coincided with my reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s excellent The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). His book added an additional significance to the event. The  annual rhythm of bird migration serves to reinforce the assumption that nature as a whole is permanently cyclical.  But now that we’re in the Anthropocene we are becoming aware that while nature has clear repetitive cycles based on the changing seasons, these are far from eternal. They just seem that way because of our very limited sense of historical time. Geological time, which deals in millions of years, reveal that massive changes occur in nature, sometimes absolutely devastating changes.

But humanly-caused global warming is now happening at such an alarming rate that, as the geese’s migratory pattern demonstrate, nature’s rythmns are changing within our timescale, and are easy to recognize. As a result, Chakrabarty writes that it is now essential that we find ways to conjoin the facts of Natural History with those of Human History. Climate scientists are showing that we can no longer treat them as distinct domains: “In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honoured distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force……. A fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis.”

References:

https://jecoenv.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41610-018-0091-2

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is published by Chicago University Press.