Charlotte Wrigley: Respecting permafrost and moving beyond their stories of apocalypse (ep409)
“I wanted to approach permafrost to resist this idea of it as an apocalypse or as a scientific object that is able to be fully understood.”
In this episode we welcome our guest Charlotte Wrigley, who invites us to contemplate the upheaval of extinction as a discontinuous process—a becoming, rather than an end. Charlotte’s inquiry into this matter straddles the edges of human relations, geography, climate science, and ethics against the backdrop of permafrost and its changing form.
Unveiling the intra-connected worlds of thawing permafrost and de-extinction efforts, Charlotte waltzes with sticky tensions of a rapidly heating planet and the need to “cool down” expeditious techno-races. How might we learn from permafrost itself, as well as Arctic communities / biomes, and stay with the trouble of the unfixed and unpredictable?
About our guest:
Charlotte Wrigley is a postdoctoral fellow at the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Center at the University of Stavanger. Her research sits at the intersection between human geography, environmental humanities and Arctic studies, and is concerned with thinking through the relations between humans, animals and the material landscape in the Anthropocene. She is the author of the book Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Concept of Love by Cheery via Spirit House Records
Episode-inspired artwork by Fernanda Peralta.
Dive deeper:
Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic, a book by Charlotte Wrigley
The Life of Permafrost, a book by Pey-Yi CHU
Once Upon the Permafrost, a book by Susan Crate
Pleistocene Park, an initiative to restore high productive grazing ecosystems in the Arctic
Do Glaciers Listen?, a book by Julie Cruikshank
The Problem with Work, a book by Kathi Weeks
Expand your lenses:
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Charlotte Wrigley: My mom would always take me on nature walks, we would go birding together. And we didn't live in, you know, a beautiful area or anything like that, but we kind of found beauty in the smaller things, you know, like ducks on the canal, that sort of thing. And I think that really helped me reject the idea that wilderness is the only true form of nature because it kind of suggests that humans or even a human-built infrastructure can't coexist with nature, but actually you can be inspired by whatever your surroundings are. And I guess I kind of carried this idea through to my scholarship, this idea that humans are not separate to nature—we are entangled with our environments.
In the permafrosting, I really loved geography at school, physical geography in particular. We studied volcanoes, glacial landscapes, and I loved all that stuff. But it wasn't really until later I became interested in the human dimension and how humans have shaped and have been shaped by their environments. And also the ecological processes that produce the planet. I got kind of interested in Russia from there, just this huge vast landmass that encompasses so many different types of landscapes and habitats and of course has so much of the Arctic within it.
And then, I guess after my undergraduate degree in history I was just kind of you know drifting about, I was jobless, I didn't really know what direction to go in so I ended up doing some voluntary work in Siberia actually I just kind of I didn't really plan it or anything you know that way you do when you're 21 and have no fear? I just got on a train and crossed like most of Russia to this place on Lake____. and it just just instilled a fascination with the country that's kind of lasted my whole life as complicated as those feelings are now. But…
I still kind of maintain that it's incredibly important to study a place that's not only important politically, as Russia is hugely important now, but also environmentally. And this is particularly true of the Arctic heating at three times the rate of the rest of the planet due to the climate crisis and because Russia has so much Arctic land it's just incredibly important to think about what is going on there….
and I guess that's what brought me to permafrost many years later.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing this glimpse into how you came to be interested in a lot of these subjects that you've been exploring now. To start with a more foundational question, I wonder if you can highlight how permafrost is mostly defined, why you've questioned that formal meaning, and how permafrost as well as the Arctic more broadly have been presented narratively in ways that are often shallow or barely scratching the surface, as you say.
Charlotte Wrigley: Well, I wanted to talk about permafrost in this way because firstly, I kind of identified almost a complete lack of engagement with it, with the social sciences and humanities. And I wanted to kind of question why that was because the Arctic is such an important topic to too many humanities scholars and beyond, of course, but permafrost is kind of essentially being a blind spot, save for, I really want to mention Pey-Yi CHU's book “Life of Permafrost” and Susan Crates “We All Live on Permafrost” (I think I'm getting that book title right I'm so sorry if I got it wrong) but these are two kind of two scholars that I really look up to and have been kind of pioneers in permafrost social science and humanities. But I think, and in the media reporting as well, I just kind of think that it is something that has been missed, or when it does get reported on, it tends to follow this kind of apocalyptic, doom-mongering narrative of it's a ticking time bomb, it's running out of control, the thawing is out of control. And I just kind of find that quite a difficult narrative, or an unhelpful narrative, I guess is a better word. So I kind of wanted to challenge these quite spectacular narratives of the permafrost.
I wanted to approach it from a kind of geographic perspective to kind of examine what permafrost is as a substance. And this is not just materially, but also spatially, socially, politically, as a dynamic container of things that is in relation to the various actors in it and on it. And I also became fascinated by this idea of de-extinction. This is another thing that brought me to this topic. Learning about what de-extinction is and my mind was blown and I was also quite horrified by it. And of course, one of the main candidates for de-extinction is the wooly mammoth. And that had come to people's attention because the permafrost was thawing and so many mammoth bodies were being discovered there.
I found a compelling relation between, I guess the heating and the thawing of the permafrost world and this need to kind of cool things down, both through, I guess, the refreezing of the permafrost and also more kind of anthropogenic technologies of freezing, which is where man-earth-day extinction comes in.
And so I kind of followed this tension through some case studies, the main one being Pleistocene Park, which is a rewilding experiment in the Russian Arctic and the Sahara Republic, which aims to restore the mammoth steppe ecosystem and bring in a bunch of large herbivores to cold adapt and trample the permafrost to keep it frozen. And this is kind of touted as a fix to permafrost thaw and this is kind of the similar a similar situation with mammoth day extinction to address extinction issues, the sixth grade extinction.
So I guess in a roundabout way to answer your question, I wanted to come at the permafrost and challenge this narrative that it is a kind of apocalyptic object, for want of a better word, or substance, but also to challenge the idea of permafrost as just a kind of scientific thing—that science a strategy for understanding permafrost and it is kind of the only thing that is worth knowing about. Permafrost is permanently frozen ground for two or more years at a temperature of zero degrees or below. That is the official scientific definition, but I kind of found that to be lacking. So yeah I just I just wanted to approach permafrost to resist this idea of it as an apocalypse or as a scientific object that is able to be fully understood.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, there's a lot of threads that you brought into this response and I'm looking forward to exploring a lot of these further throughout this conversation. And yeah, we'll definitely be talking more about these de-extinction endeavors and the Pleistocene Park. But as a backdrop for our listeners who aren't familiar, the Pleistocene Park is a reserve in northeastern Siberia where they're attempting to re-create the northern subarctic steppe grassland ecosystem that flourished in the era during the last glacial period. And Charlotte, you were the first scholar from the social sciences and humanities that ever visited the Northeast Science Station and the Pleistocene Park in Cherskey. So in regards to this, what do you think is important to share in terms of the inequities in research funding reflected in the trajectory of permafrost science? And therefore the dominant narratives around permafrost. And why does this call for kind of like an interrogation of how science produces truths and norms in particular ways that might not be as objective as people might think it is?
Charlotte Wrigley: Yeah, that's a great question. And firstly…I mean, it was almost prohibitively expensive to get there. And I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to find the funding as a PhD student. Most scholars would not get this opportunity to go. And that is the reason why I was the first one, because usually you need big scientific grants, natural science grants, essentially, because the sort these sorts of grants are rarely available in the humanities. And so, it was also interesting to see when I got there, pretty much all of the scientists were American. There were a couple of Russians there, but it also kind of displayed the discrepancy in funding available across nations. It's not just for the sciences. It is very much dependent on basically you being a Western scientist.
But it's also kind of important to highlight how the science of permafrost, which began in the Soviet Union essentially, well it began before that but it didn't really have a name, but essentially it was a tool of colonialism.
And this was kind of occurring as Russians and the Russian Empire were moving eastwards into Siberia and encountering permafrost for the first time. And it became essentially a way to cement their presence on the land and to take the land from the indigenous people who are already living there. There are many indigenous groups living in Siberia, many still there, but of course they have been subject to colonialism. But it essentially kind of boiled down to who could understand, who could understand permafrost, who could control permafrost in order to cement, as I said, their presence on the landscape. And this was how the kind of discipline of permafrost science emerged and only became more relevant in the Soviet Union when there was so much money available for science. It's certainly not like that now in Russia.
But in the Soviet Union, funding was essentially limitless, especially if it was science that you could use to further the ideals of the Soviet Union and permafrost was something that essentially Soviet scientists wanted to I've forgotten the quote, but I read it quite recently something that they wanted to subjugate something that they wanted to completely, you know, get within their power which are kind of Reflects the sort the sort of thinking that was going on there. There was there was there wasn't really any ideas about living with permafrost, it was how can we mold permafrost to do the things that we wanted to do. Which I find fascinating and of course especially now isn't working at all and there was a sense in which you could maybe have controlled permafrost when it was doing what it should. I'm doing inverted commas there which you can't see of course but permafrost certainly doesn't do what it should ever. But certainly now you're seeing so many examples of infrastructure that was built in the Soviet Union, or even more recently, collapsing, buckling. It's basically becoming much harder to, as I said, subjugate permafrost in this very colonial way.
So yeah, these are the ideas that I think it's really important to firstly show that they are not necessarily correct, certainly not correct in the sense that you can control permafrost in this way, but also to resist this, not just colonial narrative towards the indigenous peoples who are living in the Sahara Republic and beyond, but also it's a colonial narrative to think you can subjugate and control the land. So that's where I was coming from with that.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you. And that's really important for us to keep in mind just not taking research findings as they are, but being curious and critical to look behind the curtains, not to entirely undermine these findings, but to at least situate it within a deeper understanding of what lenses, what incentives, the politics behind them and what inequities in funding produce these specific forms and direction of knowledges to help people to see that there are more narratives beyond these specific things and whatever these research findings are, that might not properly illustrate the full picture and is definitely worthy of critique as any other form of knowledge would be as well. And discontinuity is an underlying thread of your work both in terms of how you've thought about permafrost, as well as how you've approached the research and storytelling aspects. So I would love it if you can share more about how this has influenced your “how” as you situate yourself in the Arctic humanities and what it means that thinking discontinuously about matter pushes back on attempts to control or categorize permafrost.
Charlotte Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, I did want to call the book Discontinuous Earth, but the publisher didn't like that title, so it ended up as just kind of a thread running through the book. But I think if people were to read the book, that's really what I want them to take from it, this idea of discontinuity. And it kind of comes from the permafrost itself, because….
…permafrost is scientifically categorized continuous or sporadic and the continuous permafrost is the thickest oldest coldest permafrost found in the most northerly latitudes of the world and discontinuous is patchier is more dynamic is more unpredictable but it is not fixed in place.
And scientific research has discovered that continuous permafrost is becoming discontinuous permafrost due to the climate crisis. So I wanted to kind of run with this idea to think about, yeah, as you say, permafrost materiality, but how we can also use this idea that
…permafrost is not a fixed thing, it's not something that is possible to hold in place, it's not something that is possible to predict.
I also wanted to apply it to the idea of extinction and a way that we can potentially reconceptualize what we mean by as of course to the death of a species or we might talk about the sixth great extinction event which many scientists believe we're in or we might even talk about the extinction of the human race, the end of the human race which as I mentioned before is a narrative that has emerged kind of in tandem with this kind of apocalyptic doom-mongering in response to the climate crisis.
But I wanted to think with discontinuity as a way to think, to rethink, extinction as a kind of messier, more generative occurrence that doesn't necessarily have a beginning or an end, which is the way we sort of think about extinction as an end of things, but is instead more to do with the process of unmaking and remaking.
Kamea Chayne: Just to clarify this, I guess dominant narratives around extinction, as you should kind of follow this linear path of life, death, extinction into nothingness. So when we think through this lens of discontinuity, it really questions this very linear pathway to showcase the constant transformations and kind of intra-actions and intra-connectedness of the world? Is that what you're sort of addressing?
Charlotte Wrigley: I use different ways of different modes of permafrost I guess to illustrate these ideas. I talk about the extinction of permafrost in one of the chapters.
Can we think about an extinction in the context of something that is considered to be nonliving?
But I draw on indigenous ideas from the Sahara Republic, which is where I based my research and thinking about how they might consider the permafrost to be not necessarily alive per se, but needing to show respect to the permafrost or the tundra. There is a book that I draw on called The Breath of Permafrost, which kind of illustrates the need for showing permafrost respect in order to keep the sort of balance with the land, which I think is really fruitful for thinking about extinctions of things that do not necessarily have life in the normative sense of the word.
I also think about the kind of relation between the living animals at the Pleistocene Park, which have been brought from all over the world and kind of placed in this little area of northern Siberia, probably very confused, but also they are kind of trampling on the bones of thousands and thousands of other creatures. And it's these bones which have brought the Pleistocene Park into being essentially. It is the finding of this dead ecosystem essentially that inspired the men behind the park to recreate this ecosystem. Creatures are still inflecting the land, they are forming relations with the permafrost and the animals that are kind of inhabiting that land now and how extinction is much more of a fuzzier process than we might think. And then I finally think about extinction through of course the lens of speculative new techno science which aims to resurrect extinct creatures. And of course you're getting into: if extinction becomes something that we can control what does that what does that say about the sorts of power relations that humans have with other species with the planet as a whole? And so I use these examples to demonstrate that extinction is not a linear occurrence. Once a creature is dead, there is even a potential to resurrect it as much as I have huge problems with that concept and that it certainly wouldn't be the species as people knew it, but it's just kind of demonstrating how the picture is never as obvious or clear as it can often be made out to be.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I really appreciate these nuances that you're raising here. And I resonate with everything that you've shared. I'm personally really drawn to all of the above ways of thinking that hold possibly seemingly conflicting truths together. And I think what comes to my mind right now is I can see how people might interpret this idea of seeing extinction as more as transformations rather than something with a beginning and an end. That this might sort of neutralize the impact and judgment of what is happening. So for example, what if people are like, oh, if we just understand all of these things as constant transformations rather than, for example, a species that is coming to an end in their current form, what if that makes people care less about the quote unquote “endangerment” of the current plight that a lot of species or their communities or their larger webs of life, like whatever people wanna use in terms of measuring the wellness of a being. So what if it leads to that sort of interpretation? Does that make sense what I'm trying to say?
Charlotte Wrigley: I think you're saying that there's a fear that talking about extinction in terms of not so much an ending but as a transformation might make people care less... yeah, I mean that's a really great question.
The thing that I would say to that is, I think grief can often be paralyzing. And I think a lot of people are faced with a situation that is so big that it's kind of beyond them. And I'm talking about the sixth great extinction, but of course, the climate crisis as well. There's a sort of paralysis that a lot of people feel. There is so much kind of going wrong that they don't really know how to respond. There was a... I can't remember the name of the book again, I apologize, but an anthropologist did an ethnography of a Norwegian town which had basically...its ski season had failed for two years in a row and you know these educated people and they know it's the climate crisis that is causing this but they were just kind of... they didn't want to talk about it, they didn’t react politically, they were just sort of like rabbits caught in the headlights.
And so what I would say in regards to finding transformation and extinction is what I hope it could do and discontinuity could do is break free of this kind of normative ontology, essentially this normative way of doing things, which has clearly not been working for a very long time. And instead to kind of embody the, to embody discontinuous ways of being in the world and that involves finding ways of making connections that don't correspond to I'd say the kind of techno-capitalistic fetishism that we kind of find ourselves in.
And this is what I worry about with de-Extinction in that it's seen as a kind of easy techno-fix to the end that extinction brings. Whereas, you know, I feel like that's just kind of perpetuating the violences that have got us into this situation in the first place.
So whilst we of course should I don't think we should let it paralyze us in the sense that it stops us from making other relations with other creatures and the natural world, but instead it kind of opens us up to more, if that makes sense?
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, totally. And also as a parallel, I'm thinking about how at the more micro level, there is the death of an individual and certain cultures might view death as the very end and how that worldview and perspective might influence particular actions or politics of organizing life. And then other cultures who might see death as part of a larger picture of decomposition enabling new life or transformation into new life. And just recognizing that perspective shift doesn't necessarily lead people to then devalue life altogether and see life as not important because it's just constantly transforming, but it might offer alternative ways of viewing and relating to this end. And yeah, possibly reorienting how people approach and live their lives as well. And yeah, a lot of these are kind of philosophical, but I do think these are important considerations to hold during these troubled times. And you kind of touched on this, but something that I felt called to sit with and think through is the idea of species categorization. So various past conversations we've had on the podcast before have pushed back against rigid categorizations and the limitations and worldviews that they impose.
And I remember our past interview with Dany Celemajer on multi-species justice, where we also raised the question of how a species is defined to be able to garner care and secure resources and formal protection when they are deemed endangered on that sort of more linear measurement. And then how about the beings who don't fit neatly into these categories, like maybe lichen or the fungal world or the wellbeing of larger super organisms that understand the health of that overall community as more than the sum of their parts. So as we open up the ways we think about extinction more, I'm curious to hear your views on the limitations of mainstream environmentalism's categorization of species, endangered species, and extinct species, as well as what might get left out of this picture.
Charlotte Wrigley: Yeah, that's a great question and it's something that I am hoping to explore in potentially a new project on permafrost and biodiversity because, and you touched on it, thinking about other forms of life that are not necessarily…how would I put this?…. They're a little bit more fuzzy at a pin down and I think this is absolutely true of Permafrost as well and it's kind of illustrative of what I've been saying about transformations and discontinuity because as Permafrost thaws there are things within it that have been frozen and potentially (going to use a normative word here) but “wake up”—it's not necessarily waking up in the way that we would understand it— but these are things like giant viruses, bacteria, carbon of course, greenhouse gases, but I talk about an incident that happened in Arctic Russia about five years ago now in which Anthrax was there. There were reindeer that had died in the 1930s I think from Anthrax and the people there, there were the Nenets people from the Yamal Peninsula. They buried the reindeer but they couldn't bury the reindeer very far down because of plumber frost and then a very hot summer, part of the climate crisis of course, meant that these reindeer thawed and the anthrax that had killed them had laid dormant and were able to reinfect the current reindeer herd and the village itself.
So this was obviously something that was quite shocking. Most of the viruses and bacteria that you would find in permafrost would not be harmful for humans certainly, but it really does raise a really interesting point about how we value life and biodiversity because we can talk about, and this is what the Pleistocene Park talks about is the complete is lack of biodiversity on the tundra, but what happens if you increase biodiversity from permafrost thought but it's the sort of wrong biodiversity, it's the wrong sort of life, you don't want these things potentially infecting your reindeer.
But of course this is an ethical conundrum because who are we to dictate which forms of life are valuable and which are not? And I the idea of a species categorization really falls down because certain species are obviously afforded much more funding, much more interest, much more care than others….
and this is I think why you're seeing such a big drive to de-extinct the mammoth because it is so charismatic. It's something that everybody knows what a mammoth is. So if you were to bring it back, so-called, you would have something incredibly compelling to a lot of people I mean, nobody is suggesting that we should de-extinct an ancient virus. But these are very important ethical questions that I think certainly really emerges with the permafrost as well.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and to bring back what you shared towards the beginning about the inequities of permafrost research, you talk about the need to decolonize how certain knowledges are privileged over others, and the importance of recognizing that knowing tundra is an embodied practice. To these points, I wonder if you can give us some examples of the indigenous communities on the Russian tundras and arctic whose knowledges have emerged from being intimate with permafrost spaces. And then how their lives and foodways with permafrost have been transformed or limited by broader policies imposed on them, or that might have forcibly included them in national politics and those particular ways of relating to the land. How does this also invite us to honor the breadth of the permafrost and the centuries of knowledge and tradition of the people in these communities?
Charlotte Wrigley: Yeah, well...A lot of what I read in the Breath of Permafrost was actually the author—he is a Sakhan scholar—e was almost chiding his fellow Sakhans for, I think he put it, turning their back on their traditional ways of life. But of course, during the Soviet Union, there was a massive push to collectivisation, which was essentially done to assimilate all indigenous people into the ways of the Soviet Union essentially (wasn't necessarily a Russian thing) but it was an ideology that didn't allow for any sort of difference. So this was incredibly damaging to a lot of the indigenous groups' ways of life, in particular the ones that made their homes on the tundra, and these were often nomadic. They were nomadic reindeer herders. One of the main reasons why they were nomadic, as well as needing to move because of the reindeer heads of course, was because you stay in one place on the tundra, and this is what one second scholar told me, you stay in one place on the tundra, you are warm, your body is warm, your camp is warm, and so you are essentially not respecting the breath of the permafrost in that sense, you are potentially thawing it, so in that sense that you have to move on. But there are other cosmological understandings that are still around but are not, I would say, practiced to the level that they would have been without the Soviet Collectivisation.
There are a lot of myths around the mammoth for example because of course mammoth bodies are found with quite a regularity on the tundra much more regularly now with it thawing but it still wasn't a uncommon occurrence to find a mammoth body. And so some of the indigenous groups have ideas around the mammoth that don't recognize it as being extinct instead the mammoth is a god that the permafrost with its tusks and to find a mammoth, a dead mammoth at the surface it's very bad luck to touch it, to do anything with it and so you must consecrate the gravesite with an offering and this still happens. It's kind of debatable how much the kind of belief still endures because of this collectivization. But I met a woman who, whose husband had gone hunting for mammoths, actually, for mammoth bodies to take the tusks to sell to China, because this can be quite a lucrative practice. She was very worried for him because he had not taken any grave offerings. So she was concerned that if he found a mammoth body and didn't consecrate the grave then terrible luck would befall him. So these ideas endure but they don't really ever overcome this dominant scientific narrative that assumes the Pemmerfost is kind of lifeless. Although when I was doing my fieldwork there, the government of Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, which has a Sakhan majority government, they introduced a permafrost law, which was interesting in that it didn't go so far as to grant subjecthood to the permafrost, but it talked about the rights of the Sakhans to live on robust permafrost. And of course this law was kind of in name only, they know they can't really do anything to actually make the permafrost more robust. But it kind of demonstrates how important permafrost and tundra is to many people still who live there.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and I want to go deeper into de-extinction as well. So in my past conversation with Thom Van Dooren, we started to question projects attempting to bring back lost species in terms of what their true underlying intentions might be, whether they're more so driven by intellectual or human exceptionalism and novelty or really a desire to heal relationships in our landscapes and communities, given that many of the changes that led to the extinction of those species are very much still present, and many more transformations have already taken place. You've also questioned, “if extinction is a slow unraveling, then does a rewilded animal begin to knit the frayed edges back together, or has the absence in between produced something else entirely?”
I'd be curious to have you just explore more and share more about the resurrected attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth in these terrains and what the reserve's intentions have been with such endeavors to quote rewild the landscape. And also crucially I can't help but think about how such reserves want to study the role of these animals and these places and kind of replicate what the landscape was like in the last glacial period. Yet these communities are much more complex than what we can see as in the microbial communities of these places have drastically changed. The climactic patterns have changed. The sociocultural dynamics have changed. So it feels like a very out of context approach to study this landscape in a way that denies the relational aspects of these communities that are, I think, also integral to what makes them what they are, but which also have been completely remade. And maybe this is just a very critical perspective, but I'd be curious to hear what more you have to say about it.
Charlotte Wrigley: Yeah, no you're totally right, I agree. And interestingly, one of the permafrost scientists that I spoke to, asking his opinion on Pleistocene Park, he just kind of rubbished it and said, well they don't have the right sort of dust. So for him, it was about the dust, and I hadn't really thought of it in such kind of small terms. But of course, as you say, the microbial communities, socio-cultural contexts, and I actually, I taught a course on Pleistocene Park, and most of my students were asking questions like, yeah, but what about the people who live there? They're not gonna want a mammoth running into their back garden and trampling everything. It's just it wouldn't work for that very obvious reason. And, you know, of course that's very true. I mean, firstly, I want to make it clear that there's a separation between Pleistocene Park and mammoth de-extinction. The park is not involved directly in any mammoth de-extinction. In fact, when I, you know, I was asking the director of the park, Nikita Zimov, you know, what he thinks about mammoth de-extinction and he just said, I want to stay out of it because there are too many people who don't like it for religious reasons. They see it as playing God. But if, you know, if a mammoth comes along one day, I will give it a home. So this is kind of a very hands-off approach to the extinction, which is of course very controversial. But essentially what they're doing at the Pleistocene Park is, it has nothing to do with ecosystem relations or processes or balancing the ecosystem. It's essentially about the function of what the animals can do to it. So before they got many large herbivores, I think they have bison now and quite a few cows, muskoxen, so some really heavy beasts and that's what they want to stimulate this grassland and trample down the permafrost. Nikita and his father, Sergei, they were just driving a tank over the tundra and trampling and squashing down the ground that way. You know, this is certainly not a ecological, you know, cuddly environmentalist project. They are trying to mitigate permafrost though almost forcefully. So, and of course you know, kind of masculinist, dominant, scientific ideas emerging from that. But they've always been very clear about their intentions, which is they don't care about the animals, they don't care about the land itself, they care about addressing the climate crisis, they care about saving human lives. Which, you know, I was very impressed by their project and their kind of single-mindedness. It's completely not my politics or the way I want to think about the world. But in a sense, you know, they are identifying a problem and they are addressing the problem in a way that they know how.
With de-extinction though, I'm just completely critical of it because it just seems to me it is a vanity project in a lot of senses.
I just kind of look at the people who are involved in it. People like Hwang Woo-Suk, who's been disgraced by his Korean government for falsifying evidence of another other scientific work that he's done. George Church at Harvard, you know, he's taking money from Silicon Valley, um, you know, his kind of funders, if you look into who they are, have some murky backgrounds in themselves, it just kind of seems that this is a practice, which is done, um firstly for scientific glory I think, to be the first person to de-extinct a mammoth you would be famous for life. But also, you know, they are you can't even say that they're identifying an ecological problem like the Zimov's are and correcting it because to me the whole idea of using mammoths as a way to address the climate crisis, you just need so many mammoths, there are so many hurdles that you would need to overcome to even, you know, have a real global impact. So I just can't see any other reason other than for kind of scientific notoriety. And then you're not, you know, you're getting into the dubious ethics of the thing. To produce a mammoth you would likely need to use Indian elephants to gestate the babies. Indian elephants gestate their young for two years, so you are essentially denying an elephant the chance to be a mother of its own young. Not to mention the fact that most of the babies that would be born in this incredibly experimental stage of de-extinction would likely not survive. So it's incredibly unethical from that standpoint and I just can't see any good in it whatsoever.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and I know it's not always easy to end up with questions that have no simple answers or the inability to see a very clear and straightforward path toward healing a lot of these things. But also, I know we've done a lot of exploration and critiquing of dominant narratives and approaches and relations with permafrost in this conversation. And as we close off our main discussion, I would just love to leave the space open for you to share about where your inspirations might lie in regard to permafrost and any other deeper questions or calls to action that you might have for our listeners.
Charlotte Wrigley:
Well, I guess my inspiration from permafrost is its discontinuity and as much as I weave quite a depressing tale in my book, I like to think that I find hope as well.
You know, I think that permafrost can offer inspiration to perhaps relating to the world in a more in a smaller and fuzzier way, I guess.
Kamea Chayne: Or possibly anyone who's like working in the in the space of permafrost who are taking a more alternative approach to things that recognizes the complexities and like everything that we discussed today that kind of push back against mainstream narratives and ways of seeing permafrost.
Charlotte Wrigley: Not so much permafrost but I guess I'm inspired by the work of Julie Cruikshank who wrote an amazing book called Do Glaciers Listen and she was really grappling with how to reconcile scientific knowledge with knowledges that seem to completely I guess disregard an objective truth, if you want to call it that, I don't, but she did an ethnography of glacial scientists and the indigenous groups who were kind of living on and with the glacier and how you know these kind of breakdowns and communication would occur with the scientists who would disregard some of the warnings that were that were offered to them by the indigenous people such as “don't cook bacon on the glacier because the glacier won't like it” and I just found that incredibly not just.
And I think you need to have a little bit of levity because I read this great article, again, I can't remember the name, but I will pass it along to you, about there's a tendency for a lot of white Western scholars to talk about taking indigenous knowledge seriously, or indigenous cosmology seriously, and this anthropologist went to do an ethnography of, I think, Evenki, people on the Siberian tundra and you know he ran this kind of idea past his interlocutors and just kind of laughed at him saying why should they take us so seriously we don't take ourselves seriously which I just thought was um it was lovely just to kind of like bring some sort of humor in the face of things that could actually get quite dark.
But yeah, I guess my kind of overall message is, I think we can get bogged down in the idea of preservation and saving the planet, when actually I think we should just be kind of imagining these new ways of relating to both each other and the environment.
Because I guess talking about saving the planet is such a colonial idea, this idea of white supremacy, of stewardship, that unfettered capitalism will, you know, bring about these techno fixes.
And for me, this isn't a world that I want to save. So I take inspiration from the permafrost as kind of degrading these ways of life and allowing for us to imagine futures that are not based on environmental destruction.
// Musical interlude //
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Charlotte Wrigley: Yeah, so the answer I have for this is, it's not even an environmental text, but it's called The Problem with Work by Kathi Weeks. And I was really influenced by this, this idea that there is no moral imperative to work. She philosophically takes all of the kind of doctrines that have dealt with the practice of work and kind of dismantles them one by one and kind of comes up with just the very idea of labor good is fundamentally flawed. Because we kind of, it's just kind of ingrained in us that this attributes of being hard working is seen as overwhelmingly positive, but we are kind of reaching the point where so many of the jobs that exist are essentially unnecessary or could be done by robots or AI. This concept of a society where people don't have to work is as yet unthinkable but she kind of demonstrates that it doesn't have to be. And people freed from wage labour could be more creative, they could build community bonds, they could practice art and music and essentially contribute better to a society that isn't necessarily defined by money. So that was really revelatory to my thinking.
Kamea Chayne: I'm very excited to check this book out. So thank you for that resource. What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Charlotte Wrigley: So I don't really have any mantras, but something that I've loved doing and have loved doing for a couple of years now is picking mushrooms. Of course it's the season right now. There are so many mushrooms here in Norway this year, but I just find it incredibly meditative because I'm a very fast walker. I love hiking and I'm usually, you know, dashing through the mountains, but with mushroom picking, you really have to be slow. You have to stop and notice the world around you, you have to look very deeply into the soil. I find myself checking weather forecasts, trying to predict when the mushrooms are gonna come up, but you can't of course because they're unpredictable. You have to understand habitats, you have to be able to recognize different types of trees, and it's also an incredibly tactile practice, not just because you're touching the mushrooms as you're picking them, but also because you're eating them and there is also a sense of even if you're good at identifying mushrooms there's also a sort of frisson of fear when you when you're eating them you know just in case and I don't know I kind of find that an incredibly exciting practice I guess.
Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Charlotte Wrigley: Oh! It's hard to find inspiration sometimes, but I guess just kind of relating it to the first question that you asked me, there's been a lot of people who are refusing to do what the late David Grave I would call bullshit jobs. I was in a small town in Utah recently and I was overhearing a guy at the bar who owned the bar. He was angrily talking about how everyone since the pandemic had quit, he had no workers, nobody wants to work in this country anymore and I just found it very funny but I think what the pandemic has done has really caused a lot of people to re-evaluate their priorities. They now value family relationships, leisure time, etc. overworking this kind of minimum wage job with a boss that hates you essentially so I'm really inspired by the people who are pushing back, so many of them who are working these very low paid jobs. So it's really brave of them to be resisting this kind of way that's just been the norm for so long but yeah that's very inspiring to me.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more links to Charlotte's work and references from this conversation linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Charlotte, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This has been super thought provoking and we're so grateful for you being here with us today. For now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Charlotte Wrigley: I guess the message that I've been banging on about all podcast: practice discontinuity if it's not too self-indulgent, leave yourself open to new experiences, relations, stories and futures. There is never a single truth or way of doing something. And we just need to find these alternative ways of living. So thank you so much.
