På bara några årtionden har bilden av havet förändrats. För inte så länge sedan betraktades världshaven som en främmande värld. Nu vet vi att människor interagerar med havet på många olika sätt. Människans påverkan på havet i form av föroreningar, försurning, utfiskning, övergödning samt stigande temperaturer och havsnivåer påverkar i sin tur människors hälsa, säkerhet och tillgång på mat. Men hur hänger våra idéer och föreställningar - våra berättelser - om havet ihop med kunskapsutvecklingen?

In the past few years, a rush of literary non-fiction books have appeared that aim to explain the threat of rising seas to the public. In this talk Susanna Lindstrom critiques how sea-level rise is framed in many of those books, on two accounts. First, anthropogenic sea-level change is frequently framed by accounts of natural variations of sea level in earth history, focusing on geological rather than societal processes. Second, single and sudden floods are often used to exemplify sea-level rise in ways that draw attention away from incremental environmental change in favor of fast-paced but de-contextualized events. Lindstrom’s presentation argues that both these frames de-politicize sea-level rise and may steer public understanding and discussion away from relevant social, cultural and ethical considerations. As examples of climate reductionism, these depictions may obstruct rather than facilitate appropriate negotiations in response to predicted sea-level rise.

Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Department of Literature.

Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict ‘slow violence’ on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of “arresting stories, images and symbols” reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change and chemical pollution in cultural imaginations and on political agendas. We agree with Nixon that addressing this representational imbalance is an important mission for the environmental humanities. However, we argue that another aspect of the same imbalance, or representational bias, suggests the inverse of this is also needed—to unpack the ways that complicated and multifaceted environmental phenomena can be reduced to fast, simple, evocative, invasive narratives that percolate through science, legislation, policy and civic action, and to examine how these narratives can drown out rather than open up possibilities for novel social-ecological engagements. In this article we demonstrate the idea of invasive narratives through a case study of the ‘invasive alien species’ (IAS) narrative in South Africa. We suggest that IAS reduces complex webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ battle between easily discernible ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ identities. We argue that this narrative obstructs the options available to citizens, land managers and policy-makers and prevents a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics and implications of biodiversity change, in South Africa and beyond.