A Bog Approach: An Ethnography, Or, An Anthropology Of Climate Emergency

This dissertation investigates contemporary human, social, and cultural responses to climate emergency. My ethnographic field research localizes vanguardist “solutionist” discourses where marginalized environments and aspirational state actors intersect on “The Flow Country” blanket bogs in the far north of Scotland. The Flow Country is the premier site of the UK’s large scale “forest-to-bog” peatland restoration project, one of the few “natural climate solutions” enacted and institutionalized. My fieldwork (2017-2018) approached a boggy, yet “neutral,” “Net Zero” discourse that might confound traditional environmentalist positions. My findings characterize a local Net Zero cultural form with 1) a latent construction of future uncertainty that manages to reproduce the “estate” of land ownership regimes; 2) a rhetorical imaginary of “plausibility” dominated by positive scenario construction over religious or scientific politics; and 3) a lyrical model of ethnography that enjoins a more open strategy of accountability and interlocution. I describe my findings in four chapters approaching: 1) the marginal imaginaries of bogs; 2) the relationship of experts and elites to apocalyptic and climate solution discourses; 3) the “extra-human” sensorial experience and erotic politics of environmental monitoring; and, 4) the parallelism of expositive and narrative strategies in corporate, public, and individual climate accounting.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Social Sciences

Grantor

Rice University

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Storer, Eliot

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Faubion, James
• Boyer, Dominic
• Howe, Cymene

• anthropology
• ethnography
• climate change

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/111745

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/111745