Terraforming Terra
Call for Papers: Green Transitions Workshop at the Greenhouse, University of Stavanger, Norway, 11-12 November 2022
Terraforming has traditionally been understood to refer to planets beyond Earth, and the processes necessary to make them habitable for human life. But as the climate crisis renders life on Earth increasingly precarious - desertifying agricultural lands, drying up water supplies and destroying ecosystems - what we understand to be a ‘habitable’ planet needs rethinking. Some of the proposed solutions to the crisis can be defined as geoengineering: the practice of altering Earth processes to create a greener, more comfortable, and survivable planet for humanity; in other words, terraforming. Examples of terraforming might range from planetary wide - and irreversible - schemes such as solar radiation management, to smaller, gentler actions such as gardening.
Debate in the Environmental Humanities has largely - and correctly - pointed towards the ethical and political issues with geoengineering, and the hubris that so often accompanies the Anthropocene’s designation of humans as top geologic agents (Buck, 2019; Hamilton, 2013). Who gets to decide which geoengineering technologies are implemented, and whose perspectives are incorporated (or not) into world building projects and technofix solutionism are of key concern, particularly to Indigenous Peoples whose terraformable lands have been colonised (Powys Whyte, 2018). Nevertheless, it is necessary to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that soon it will be too late to maintain a stable climate. Our future survival will likely (and, indeed, already does) depend on terraforming in some capacity; through this workshop, we wish to interrogate the potential tensions - or ways forward - of this future. What technologies could be sanctioned for Earthly terraforming, and how can we ensure they are implemented fairly and safely? How do we resist these technologies merely maintaining the status quo of unfettered capitalism, colonialism, and fossil fuel reliance?
We invite participants with a range of perspectives addressing the changing and contested nature of terraforming. By bringing together scientists and practitioners involved in its implementation, designers and artists speculating on future worlds, and humanities scholars revealing planetary heterogeneity, this workshop will facilitate critical and creative discussions on terraforming technologies. What can we learn from each other? What does it mean to make a planet habitable – to terraform it? By holding these conversations through the workshop, we will foster connections and collaborations across disciplines, and find common ground for our common world.
We welcome papers that engage with the following non-exhaustive themes:
The ethics and politics of terraforming
Indigenous knowledges and perspectives on terraforming
Other-than-humans as terraformers
Terraforming of under and outer worlds
Geoengineering and technological “fixes”
Agriculture and food systems, including water, irrigation, and gardening
Rewilding and conservation
Terraforming experiments (biospheres, terrariums etc)
Blue terraforming and oceanic perspectives
Architecture and design - imagining the terraforming of the future
Creative approaches to terraforming - sci fi, speculative futures, art
