immanence

When your life takes you places. Or, on localism and the ambivalence of the green mobile intellectual…

One of the paradoxes of environmental scholarship is that, for obvious reasons, many of us favor localism over globalism, community solutions over international policy crafting (though we obviously recognize the need for the latter), and living-in-place over a life spent on screens and in airports. Yet we work within an intellectual community that is effectively global — scholarly networks are that by their nature — and that beckons us to be that way in our daily lives, and not just in the background of our (never only) 9-to-5 professional interactions.

Living in northern Vermont (in Burlington over the long run, but partially and currently in the northeast Vermont town of Greensboro for personal/family reasons and because our permanent home is rented out), my family and I engage a lot with the lives around us, human and nonhuman. Most environmentalists would say that this is absolutely as it should be.

Some of my daily reading is about things happening nearby as well, with much of it having a political character. Reading this New York Times piece about local politics in a small New Hampshire town (“One Small Step for Democracy in a ‘Live Free or Die’ Town“) — and of the influence of the libertarian Free State movement and how it galvanized out of complacency those who disagreed with its burn-down-the-house approach to public education — reminded me of some of the things I like most about Vermont.

New Hampshire’s western neighbor has its “Don’t tread on me!” libertarians, but they are far outnumbered by people who understand the virtues of maintaining face-to-face, eco-communitarian social contracts. Christopher Ketcham’s 2013 article “U.S. Out of Vermont!” is still probably my favorite read on Vermont’s own secessionist movement, the Second Vermont Republic, which is Vermont’s closest analogue to the libertarian Free Staters, yet which in its eco-decentralist culture and communitarian principles is radically different from them.

All of that aside, my own life takes me places. I may have grown up in Toronto and later (ultimately) resettled a mere 312 miles east (and a little north) in Vermont, but I’ve also lived in Italy, Ukraine, Wisconsin, and for shorter (mostly fieldwork) periods in Arizona, England, and most recently California’s central coast. And I’ve traveled the world attending conferences and visiting places for the sheer hell of it. My own family is spread across North America, Europe, and South Africa and Australia (if I include in-laws). For better or worse, I am global, and travel across borders more fluidly than many.

I recognize as well as anyone that burning carbon to visit those people and places is not a globally sustainable thing. (But I recognize even more that pressuring individuals to stop flying, switch to e-vehicles, and “do the right thing” will not bring us anywhere near to the solutions climate change calls for, and that focusing our efforts there may well be counter-productive. We need collective, deep, policy-based changes.)

All of this is a lead up to saying that while I love Vermont (and love many other places — my love for them has defined a good part of my academic career, as discussed here and reflected here), I am preparing to head to Berlin for the coming year.

I’ve been invited to take up a senior research fellowship with Berlin Free University’s Cinepoetics Centre for Advanced Film Studies, which will allow me to work on my ongoing project on digital ecologies and Anthropocene imaginaries. The Center has previously hosted such cinema studies luminaries as D. N. Rodowick, Richard Dyer, Thomas Elsaesser, Warren Buckland, and Patricia Pisters, and it will be great to join it for the fall and early spring.

I’ve also successfully convinced the Fulbright Germany office to transfer my proposed project for Fulbright Ukraine (on eco-humanities in Ukraine) to Berlin, with the Freie Universität agreeing to host me.

All of that means that I’ll be in Germany from September to next summer, as a Fulbright Scholar and a Cinepoetics Research Fellow. And I’m looking forward to it.

As Leonard Cohen sang, if he were me, to the students and colleagues he left behind in Vermont, “I’d really like to live beside you, baby/ I love your body and your spirit and your clothes/ But you see that line there moving through the station?/ I told you, I told you, told you I was one of those.”

One of the mobile classes. Robert Fripp’s “mobile intelligent units,” as opposed to the dinosaur class of rock stars. (Well, okay, that analogy’s a stretch.)

The nmobility. But not quite one of the Monocle culture, or Monocleture. Spare me that fate. Send me Adbusters instead.