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Emerson Hall, Room 105

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The Environment Forum with Emanuele Coccia | Metropolitan Nature: How Different Species Build Cities

Emerson Hall, Room 105

Human beings were able to develop a stable relationship with the land and abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle only when some communities decided to faithfully and stably tie their existence to a relatively small number of trees and shrubs that could provide them with food and shelter. This is how the first city was born: it was this strange act of spatial fidelity to plant life that gave rise to the urban environment. That means that the relationship between different species is not tangentially urban. It is the original urban fact. If this is true, then what we call the countryside is a form of urbanism in which, in addition to the number of people and stones, we also have to conceive how many plants should exist, which ones, how fast they should grow, and so on. Consequently, any form of opposition between city and countryside (or the wilderness") is illusory. The solution to climate change lies not in replacing cities with the countryside or “wilderness,” but in designing cities more radically: extending the culture of urban congestion to a culture of species congestion and biodiversity density. How can we rethink the technological urban model to build planetary interspecies density?

This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

The Environment Forum with Hiʻilei Hobart | What Returns, What Remains: A Story about Hawaiian Landscape and Dis/Possession

Emerson Hall, Room 105

In February 2020, a group of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawaiʻi in the late nineteenth century. This article explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically 14 iwi poʻo (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Koʻolau mountain range of Oʻahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Drawing upon the Native Hawaiian concept of hoʻopahulu, which encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from over-farming in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language), this article highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geogrpahies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.

This event is co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability

For full details, visit: https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/environment-forum-hi%E2%80%99ilei-hobart-what-returns-what-remains-story-about-hawaiian