Short on time this week? Make sure not to skip the videos closer to the end.
It was gorgeous here in the middle of this week; clear skies, temperatures in the low to mid-70s. Around noon one day I went out for a sandwich and coffee and took them to the nearby park. I started out on one bench in the sun. Too hot; I moved to a location in the shade. The park was quiet and I stayed a couple hours. After just a little while, the breeze picking up, the shade became too cool, meaning every 15 minutes or so I’d slide over a bit, or over to the next bench nearby, attempting to keep my bare legs in the warm sun. I was like a little mini sun dial, slowly moving around all the picnic tables in the park pavilion.
So often, we lose sight of the knowledge that we’re on a spinning planet moving through the solar system, and that these motions matter, and have tremendous effect on every part of our lives. It’s both fantastic and mundane: the planet spins just a little more, and I scoot over on the bench.
The desert, in my experience, with its daily extremes in temperature, helps one keep that in mind a little bit more. If I’m walking about without a jacket here, and I see the sun begin to slip behind the line of mountains, I turn around and head for home. Who I am for the day, what I’m up to, gets put together by so many other moving beings, both earthly and celestial.
It’s this interdependent movement that ‘mobilities’ scholar Mimi Sheller wants us to attend to more carefully.
To Sheller, we’re all too sedentary. By this, she doesn’t mean that we’re failing in some personal exercise regime or daily step count, but something much more radical: that the entire way we likely perceive the world, and the places and things that make up the world, is too flat, and too still, and this causes problems for truly understanding a world made up of beings perpetually in motion.
This is a little blunt and reductive, but it’s also probably the easiest way to summarize some of the driving impulses in the fairly new academic field of ‘mobility studies,’ which Sheller has, in part, helped create.
Her book, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, serves as something of a reference guide to the existing mobility studies literature thus far. In it, one of Sheller’s main points is that much of our political thought and practice is based on an unexamined “sedentary ontology.” That is, we presume that things are static or immobile in their basic mode of being, rather than in motion. It’s not just that; most theories of justice, Sheller says, are “non-spatial” or “a-spatial”—they take space for granted, treat it as a kind of background for social processes playing out in the world; even social theorists that have tried to account for space have nonetheless failed to go beyond a “still” or “immobile” understanding of the world.
Asks Sheller, “What if we understood locations or places of dwelling such as cities not simply as ‘spatial’ but also as mobile?” This suggestion makes sense once one really begins to think about the history of colonization: isn’t “America” both a mobile concept and place that moves across an entire continent, altering everywhere as it does?
“Mobility produces space,” Sheller also says, and we can see the truth of that play out not only in examples of migration and colonization, but also in the way chosen forms of mobility create space and cut off other ways of moving (automobiles, as always, are the prime example here). And this isn’t just some one-way street of mobile human agents changing their contexts. Rather, “mobile subjects are relationally produced through their entanglements with each other and with spatial forms.”
Who we are isn’t some predetermined and static thing. It gets made, and it gets made by the many ways we are connected to and interdependent with one another and everything around us. And all of that, just like ourselves, isn’t predetermined or static, but also in motion, including those things we tend to see as still and unchanging. How the world moves both moves and makes us.
This all brings up really thorny questions of justice, as both restricting movement or forcing movement can literally determine who we are and how we relate to the rest of the world. This is what border walls and passports do. This is what evictions and prisons do. It’s what technologies that allow for easy movement of some goods and things and slower movement of others—be it dollars or data, workers or widgets—also do.
Sheller thinks that the ‘mobilities’ framing helps connect processes that happen at really different scales, and might help us discover better ways of thinking about justice that can work at both micro levels (unequal distribution of safe walking paths in a neighborhood, for instance) and macro levels (the movement of greenhouse gases and financial capital; the mass movement of people).
I find this all intriguing, though I’m still sorting out its application. I thought it might be best to start out a little more concrete, by learning about the processes of motion active around me right where I am—both those I might be able to see easily and those I might not.
Where can we see movement in a space presumed to be sedentary?
What notions of movement are challenged by just attuning to the world around us a little differently?
The landscape where I currently find myself—the Chihuahuan desert, with its “sky island” mountain ranges—is a perfect location in which to ask such questions. Consider your own assumptions about the desert. Do they involve fixity? Stillness or emptiness? How about mountains—unchanging? That which shall not be moved? Where do those assumptions come from, and are they quite accurate?
To get us going, I’m going to drop right here a giant quote from the section on ‘weathering’ in the Wikipedia article on deserts, which I expect will put a few cracks in these commonplace understandings. Yes, it’s a little long, but really, props to this particular Wikipedia contributor for some vivid descriptions. I’ve also done some highlighting to help.
Oh, and let me recommend some theme music for this, too.
Deserts usually have a large diurnal and seasonal temperature range, with high daytime temperatures falling sharply at night … During the day the sky is usually clear and most of the sun's radiation reaches the ground, but as soon as the sun sets, the desert cools quickly by radiating heat into space. In hot deserts, the temperature during daytime can exceed 45 °C (113 °F) in summer and plunge below freezing point at night during winter.
Such large temperature variations have a destructive effect on the exposed rocky surfaces. The repeated fluctuations put a strain on exposed rock and the flanks of mountains crack and shatter. Fragmented strata slide down into the valleys where they continue to break into pieces due to the relentless sun by day and chill by night. Successive strata are exposed to further weathering. The relief of the internal pressure that has built up in rocks that have been underground for aeons can cause them to shatter. Exfoliation also occurs when the outer surfaces of rocks split off in flat flakes. This is believed to be caused by the stresses put on the rock by repeated thermal expansions and contractions which induces fracturing parallel to the original surface. [….] Ground water may be drawn to the surface by evaporation and the formation of salt crystals may dislodge rock particles as sand or disintegrate rocks by exfoliation. Shallow caves are sometimes formed at the base of cliffs by this means.
As the desert mountains decay, large areas of shattered rock and rubble occur. The process continues and the end products are either dust or sand. […]
As the mountains are eroded, more and more sand is created. At high wind speeds, sand grains are picked up off the surface and blown along, a process known as saltation. The whirling airborne grains act as a sand blasting mechanism which grinds away solid objects in its path as the kinetic energy of the wind is transferred to the ground. The sand eventually ends up deposited in level areas known as sand-fields or sand-seas, or piled up in dunes.1
Did you catch that? “The whirling airborne grains act as a sand blasting mechanism which grinds away solid objects in its path.”
What action, and across what distances! From the movement of water under the earth to whirling blasts of sand across great valleys to the movement of heat into outer space.
The desert is a dust storm ricocheting heat into the universe, and the mountains come tumbling down.
This may all still sound a little grandiose (whirling dust storms!) or a little abstract (mountain erosion). It doesn’t have to be. Take the latter.
Heading up the hill from my shared flat here in the town of Bisbee, which is built into a canyon formed by the Mule Mountains, one climbs stairs that run by converted old miners’ shacks. The stairs become less frequent until they become just a path, which grows steeper and narrower as you head for the ridge above. I tried to do a trail run on this route my first week here, and quickly dropped the ‘run’—the scree on the trail was simply too loose and unstable. After a few steps where I slipped and watched a spray of small orange rock roll away beneath me, I consented to walk.
Others, though, used to run up the steepest face of this hill. Or at least that’s what I overheard one of the town librarians telling a couple tourists who were inquiring about hiking routes. Supposedly there was a yearly event where runners would race up to the Bisbee “B”, then turn around and run back down. One year, apparently, the reigning champion made it up and turned around, then promptly went flying head over heels, again and again down the mountainside. After that, the race was no more.
“As the desert mountains decay, large areas of shattered rock and rubble occur.” Particles vibrate and move, rock splits, and our routes and capacities are influenced or limited. Some days, the land helps our own bones mirror the shattered stones.
Was that us moving, or the earth?
We can keep peeling away our layers of unexamined belief about who or what moves, and how or why. There’s another theorist I find useful on this, William Connolly, who wonders what might have resulted had many of our modern thinkers not attached themselves to notions of what he calls “planetary gradualism,” to ideas “that treat the earth as a set of glacial regularities that change very slowly.” What if, instead, they had gravitated more towards the likes of Sophocles, who “appreciated how periodic eruptions of plagues, earthquakes, volcanoes, and raging seas bounce into the fabric of social life”?2
Connolly’s analysis mirrors Sheller’s: those in the social sciences and humanities have too often focused on social processes as the main form of action, and treated the spatial terrain as merely background. Connolly goes on to introduce a temporal element to this reduction of the spatial. Whole intellectual traditions, he suggests, downplay “historic periods of volatility in partially self-organizing planetary processes such as climate, polar glacier flows, volcanoes, drought systems, monsoons, mountain glacier transitions, El Niños, and the ocean conveyor system.” These traditions “too often assume planetary gradualism, a gradualism in which even the sudden eruption of a massive volcano or a major asteroid hit is said to be followed by the slow return to a planet of long, slow cycles.”
Connolly thinks that this mistaken planetary gradualism may have hindered us from facing the reality of climate disruption, what he refers to as “galloping planetary climate change.”
The novelty of the speed of transformation produced by fossil fuel-induced climate change is a mainstay of climate movement rhetoric. I’m interested in thinking more, down the line, about what might shift in the ways we relate and respond to this current period of climate transitions should we follow Connolly’s lead, and take for given the planet as a swift and bold actor, rather than seeing such action as an aberration.
(The earth as swift and severe: a dust storm not far from Yuma, AZ. Arizona often sees dust storms during its monsoon season, but the summer of 2018 brought an especially intense event. More info about the above video here.)
Presumptions of gradualism and stillness may also come into play not only in how we think of the elemental earth, but in much of the life it supports. Take plants, for example, metaphorical ideals of rootedness and reliable seasonal growth.
Yes, some of us are familiar with the magical and speedy growth of a plant watered one evening and sprouting the next morning. Yet I find that even many experienced gardeners have trouble really seeing the movement of desert plants, as the patterns of growth differ from those in other climates. The Ocotillo, for instance, which looks still and unchanging for months at a time, will go through sudden and rapid periods of change. The plant enters dormancy during dry stretches, and may appear almost dead. Yet after a good rain it will sprout new leaves, and within a few weeks bloom and then fruit, only to re-enter dormancy not long after. This can happen multiple times in a given year.
The rain here, of course, doesn’t come when those from overall wetter climes might expect it. We’re back in Connolly’s frame of volatility as a normal: water comes in a monsoon, in a summer of flash floods, not in a long spring of gentle showers. The Ocotillo knows this, knows to expect the unexpected, and sleeps while awaiting a storm.
Those of us who are temperate forest dwellers may still have trouble not describing desert flora as immobile or stationary. Fair enough; the paddles of a prickly pear don’t exactly flutter in the wind. But, more than many others, desert plants are equipped for mobility. Which is to say, they are equipped to move with you, as my socks more than aptly demonstrated after a recent hike. Burrs, stickers, thorns; half the plant community from the north end of town made it back home with me. Just like with humans, not everyone drives their own car; some of us are hitchhikers. Practitioners of “subversive mobilities,” to use another phrase of Sheller’s.
One last example to close out, of unexpected movement in the desert, both human and other.
My first week here, I made friends with the table of folks next to me while out on the patio of the local brewery, and accepted an invitation to go with them early the next morning to the marsh at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area, a short drive from Bisbee.
We arrived before 6am, and listened to a murmur of cooing that grew in strengthening waves as the light crept in. We could not see the source of the sound, only surmise its presence. Then, about ten minutes before official sunrise, it began: first one line, then another, then another, as hundreds then thousands of sandhill cranes rose together from the marsh, crying their communal call, and flew away:
They estimate there are some 30,000 cranes this year at Whitewater Draw. As I stood in the chill morning air, trying to keep my hands warm, I had no means for determining the accuracy of such a number. I simply felt full and flooded, surrounded by the calling cranes.
It made me consider one of our other common presumptions about movement on the earth: that mass migration is an anomaly, something to be feared and worried over. Watching the birds, I wondered: what if mass movement is just another everyday activity? What if it can also be beautiful?
It’s not as though there aren’t things to be worked out—the cranes come south for the winter to feed on agricultural fields, and in some locations they are meeting increasing numbers of snow geese on the same farms, limiting the food available for the sandhills. Still, the crane populations have continued to grow. And by the thousands, they learn how to take flight and move together.
There we were below them, our little cluster of humans, necks bent back, frozen in awe. Somehow, just like the birds, we knew when it was time to leave, and stepped away from the water and back onto the trail in unplanned unison. One could hear all the engines in the unpaved lot revving back to life at the same time, as the little line of birdwatchers mirrored the birds and made their way out from the marsh in search of breakfast. The sun followed us, chasing the shadows away from the desert floor.
The planet spins, the sun reaches down, and by wheel or by wing, we all move along.
Numbered citations removed to make this a little easier to read; they can be found in the original article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert.
William Connolly, Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth.