Articles & Essays
We tend to think about climate solutions from the exterior. Mitigating emissions, climate-proofing crops, erecting solar panels and windmills. But what happens when we shift our perspective? What if we think of climate change from inside cells, bodies, buildings, and systems? This issue of Limn takes the interior as a counterintuitive starting point for thinking about planetary change. Our proposition: Thinking from the interior fundamentally shifts how we understand our warming world and, crucially, the stories we tell about it.
Cover image: Marja Pirilä, Speaking House #8, 2006
Biodynamic agriculture is akin to organic farming, but with some twists. It involves complex, multi-step, and seasonally appropriate techniques, which together work to ‘regenerate’ the agrarian environment. While biodynamic agriculture is predominately practiced in the Global North and associated with the teachings of the German Anthroposophical thinker Rudolf Steiner, Demeter (biodynamic) certification came to Indian tea plantations in the 1990s along with other third-party certification programs (e.g. fair trade). Biodynamic narratives of ‘regeneration’ on tea plantations in Darjeeling as I argue in this article, are green washing, at best. Biodynamic production and its attendant performances are a means of regenerating a fundamentally extractive industry for consumers desirous of redemptive stories about the ecologies that bring their comestibles into being. Biodynamic practice and marketing on plantations highlights, in the framing of this special issue, a kind of ‘plant intimacy’. But this ‘plant intimacy’ is a fetishized and romanticized representation of plantation work that occludes history, forms of violence and difference and political economy.
This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plantation is to be at all useful analytically, then enslaved people, indentured laborers, and workers who find themselves otherwise stuck on those land tenure formations called plantations need to come to the analytical forefront. One means of centering labor in these discussions is to attend to acts and processes of social reproduction. Certainly, the plantation is a space of production, but the plantation would not persist as such a space without acts of childrearing, feeding, eating, care, and maintenance. Attention to these acts centers workers’ perceptions of time, space, accumulation, and the plantation itself. Even in the context of monocultural expansion, plantation workers live not just in service to single crops but through diverse forms of provisioning. Social reproduction and nonmarket exchange, then, are not a redemptive outside to plantation production, but integral to it.
Across the globe, as air temperatures steadily climb, so too do ocean temperatures. This rise is particularly acute in New England. Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century. Warming waters have meant that once-plentiful species—lobsters most prominent among them—are moving to colder northern waters. With fewer and fewer lobsters to catch, lobster fishing in southern New England is no longer financially viable. Those still making a living from the ocean must find different species to exploit. As New England fisheries collapse, seaweed appears as a hopeful alternative. This essay asks, What is regenerated in “regenerative ocean farming” projects, in which seaweed is a key figure? A critical reflection on the turn to seaweed in the context of climate crisis and highlights how seaweed’s potentiality—as healthy food, biofuel, binding agent, carbon sink, and a hopeful alternative to depleted ocean industries—rearticulates capitalist logics of productivism, gender inequality, and settler colonial property relations. Solar-based and “green” economies still operate on economic grammars rooted in the forms of extraction to which they serve as a foil and a regenerative alternative.
While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this article traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights agricultural extension’s racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term project that merged material (i.e., food) provision with social reproduction (i.e., childrearing, kin-making). Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt”: a socio-ecological outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. British governors attempted to use non-plantation space for multiple ends. In this sense, their work might be termed “biopolitical,” in that it was geared toward supporting and amplifying the life chances of certain human bodies and certain botanical species. Through a series of experiments, colonial agents made calculated choices about which of these forms of life should be made to flourish, and which might be allowed to perish. Importantly, settlement, as a set of intertwined projects, did not unfold in a coherent or deliberately sequential manner. Settlement was, and continues to be, a sedimentary process.
The identification of distinguishing characteristics of commodities—a process known as “qualification”—frequently involves the use of specialized lexicons. Before Indian teas are auctioned, brokers evaluate them using a glossary of some one hundred and fifty English words. This glossary was devised at the end of the British colonial period by industrial chemists who aimed to subject the aesthetic judgments of brokers to experimental scrutiny. “Teawords” formed part of a late colonial effort to ensure the circulation of “quality” tea from plantation to market. After India’s independence, Indian brokers and plantation managers continued this effort. Like other vocabularies for describing comestible commodities, teawords performatively reproduce gendered and classed distinctions, but they do much more. When they circulate among brokers and managers, teawords subject plantation conditions to experimental adjustment. As a form of linguistic and material experimentation, qualification extends colonial norms of valuation—and the institution of the plantation itself—into contemporary capitalist circuits.
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