On not getting bogged down: creating depth through mires in the Anthropocene

Keywords: Depth, storying, listening, Anthropocene, peatlands
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 33

Abstract

Ecologically, mires, or bogs, are waterlogged peatlands, habitats formed over millennia by the slow accumulation of incompletely decomposed plant matter in anoxic waters. Colloquially, mire and bog are verbs for being stuck – mired in a problem, bogged down by an issue – reflecting the inhospitable, liminal materialities and imaginaries of these places. In this paper we think with mires not through stuckness, however, but its opposite, considering how thinking with mires can unstick conventional ways of knowing and relating to entangled ecologies in the Anthropocene. Learning from the the Mi’kmaqqi teaching that meanings and insights are deepened through the relational, circular process of (re)telling of and (re)listening to stories (M’s-it No’kmaq et al. 2021), we engage in active listening and telling of both folktales and contemporary scientific narratives about mires in order to expand ways of knowing and relating within the complex socio-ecologies of the Anthropocene. While mire folktales from diverse places around the word share themes of unknowability, misrecognition and in-betweeness, as well as allegories for the limits of human mastery over more-than-human nature, modern scientific narratives figure mires as valued spaces of carbon sequestration as well as places of intense risk, where increasing wildfires on human-drained peatlands can enact ‘extreme emissions events’. In both genres, mires are re/figured as places in which the encounter of human life-times with the deep time of peat (cf Woolley 2018) unsticks modern conceptions of linear time and human mastery, opening up contemplation of existence within complex socio-ecologies, creating depth