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Abstract
This dissertation traces how and why technoscientific actors orient to planetary crisis as a field of practical, epistemic, and psychopolitical tension to develop and popularize a controversial array of technical interventions into human/ocean relationality. It asks: What is “climate action” when it takes the form of a competition to open reef-building corals to permanent technoscientific settlement? So-called “life support systems for coral reefs” aim at permanently altering marine life and its dynamic milieu the better to accompany reef-building corals—and, by extension, planetary nature—beyond a predicted horizon of mass extinction. By promising to make an engineering virtue of a geohistorical necessity, globalized coral science has become a major force in the push to turn planetary finitude into the foundations for a new kind of know-how I call technoplanetary salvage. In such light, what the social sciences once diagnosed as technoscience’s misrecognized grammar of knowing as mastering nature appears, now, to become its avowed calling. And yet, while technoplanetary salvage remains forward-looking, its vision of “life support” does not point towards managed enclosure or endless bounty but mutual exposure and perpetual maintenance.
In what follows, I argue that a narrowly rational understanding of the problem typically referred to as “climate change” encourages a technofuturist competition over forms of knowledge/power worthy of the description of “climate action.” Rather than a break from or reckoning with the historical drivers of our diminished present, this competition fashions “climate change” as a practical and psychopolitical tool with which to redesign and reorient human/ocean relationality—however temporarily or tenuously. “Buying time” for planetary nature in this way suggests that a shift in the terms of human/more-than-human relationality might delay a coming catastrophe. However, because this shift imposes a grammar of simultaneous historical necessity and radical novelty, its price is a growing confusion over the limits, legitimating authority, and ultimate end of human intervention into planetary nature.
Twenty months fieldwork among coral biologists, reef ecologists, government officials, marine park rangers, coral husbandry technicians, lab interns, environmental activists, and media representatives astride the Great Barrier Reef along Australia’s northeast coast ground the present inquiry. It proceeds in two parts: first, I contextualize the privileged position of corals within the North Atlantic tradition of natural history and modernist technoscience; second, I ethnographically redescribe technoplanetary experiments that scale from the lab to the oceans, coral biology to robotic surveillance, cyclonic activity to political apathy. By combining critical natural history with critical multispecies ethnography, this dissertation situates corals and the Great Barrier Reef as bound up with—and not mere victims of—the large-scale forces bearing down upon human and more-than-human natures today. I posit “earth distress” as an alternative analytic to “climate change” and draw out a series of nonrational aspects of technoscientific knowing: relating, absorbing, synthesizing, luring, and bewildering. In so doing, I offer some ways in which anthropological inquiry might catch and interrupt various expressions of technoplanetary reasoning that seek to use present day crises and the so-called “geological agency of humankind” as justifications for new experiments in capitalist accumulation and liberal governmentality, which undermine broader horizons of justice and radical empathy in the historical present.