Building Precarity with Hope Practices: Climate Change, Fake Chimneys, and Chaetura pelagica

• In Event: A Good Life, In Theory: Thinking and Living with Climate Change - III

Abstract

As an aerial insectivore, the chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica) population has declined over 90% in the last forty years, primarily due to decline in insect biomass, human disturbance, habitat loss, and climate change (COSEWIC 2018). As a result of contemporary forestry practices decimating original habitat of old-growth hollow trees, the chimney swift now shares common habitat with humans in the form of chimneys, tobacco sheds, and wells. Action plans legislated by the Species at Risk Act in Canada guide the building of particular infrastructures when critical habitat of threatened species is damaged. For chimney swifts, this means building artificial chimneys for the birds each time critical habitat, in the form of historic masonry chimneys, is destroyed.
Yet the swifts do not tend to inhabit human-built fake chimneys; they are generally a failed experiment in Canada (Finity and Nocera, 2012). These mitigations, refused by the swifts, serve as monuments to both the absence and presence of species extinction and to the difficulty of approaching alterity affectively—getting close enough, for example, to mark either loss of species or desire for future reconciliation. The structures, as complex architectural superpositions of the zoe and bios (Braidotti 2006), provide sites for reflection about climate change and the “good life.” In this talk, I examine three field sites of failed mitigations, suggesting that we might hold them close as creative conceptualizations of relations with the absent nonhuman other as they enact human hubris, embody hope-practices (Head, 2016), and story the Anthropocene through nonhuman bodies.

Author

• Jennifer Clary-Lemon, University of Waterloo