We live in an epoch shaped by environmental
risks and consequences at a planetary scale. On
graph after graph, metric after metric –
population growth, species extinction,
particulate matter in the air – the world has
become defined by destructive acceleration.
Paradoxically, while the threats are serious, we
remain little mobilised – in part maybe because
of the poverty of the environmental imagination.
The environmental crisis can be seen not only
as a crisis of the physical and technological
environments; it is also a crisis of the cultural
environment – of the modes of representation
through which society relates to the complexity
of Earth systems in their vast scales of time
and space.
So how do we think and talk about
something as intangible and invisible as
climate change? And how can experimental
design methods connect political ecology with
aesthetic experience to place the story of climate
change, a story that is difficult both to tell and
to hear, at the centre of public and disciplinary
concerns? If environmental issues are
incomprehensible in their scale, ubiquity and
duration, then perhaps stories can make them
sensible, or legible to the senses. This is partly
because stories give meaning to what
otherwise would be an illustration of the
utterly unbearable scale of events and rapid influx
of information occurring around the globe and
across time. The reason this is needed so urgently,
as Bruno Latour repeatedly states, is that
“the Earth has become once again... an agent
of... our common geostory”. He continues:
“The problem becomes for all of us in philosophy,
science or literature, how do we tell such a story.”
Geostories: Another Architecture for
the Environment is a manifesto for an
environmental imagination that renders sensible
the issues of climate change, and through
geographic fiction invites readers to relate to
the complexity of Earth systems. The prefix “Geo”
engages the Earth as a grand question of
design: a site, scale and aesthetic condition. As
a suffix, “–stories” addresses matters of the
Earth in speculative scenarios that infiltrate
earth, sea and air strata, encouraging us
to extend our awareness of human settlement
of the planet out to the cosmos and down to
the Earth’s core. Organised into three sections
- terrarium, aquarium, planetarium – the
series of 14 projects synthesise knowledge on
technological externalities, such as oil extraction,
deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, water
shortage, air pollution, trash, space debris
and a host of other socio-ecological issues.
In response to the slow violence of the
environmental crisis and the great acceleration
of global media cycle, Geostories advances the
“slow media” of geographic fiction – geostories- to render sensible the issues of climate change.
Stories and ideas matter for the Earth. The
conditions and cultural origins of the
current environmental crisis have relied on
narratives of industrial modernity – about the
Earth as a resource that some humans can exploit
however they like while the economic and
territorial costs of such transformations, such
as pollution, public health and the degradation
of shared commons – what are often called
“externalities” – are abstracted in economic
calculation and remain out of sight from urban
centres. If the present predicament of
climate change springs from such an economic
mythology, then those who live through it will
need to learn to tell other stories. The
urgency of climate change requires another
planetary imagination, which ruptures
with externalisation and transforms the
To tackle the current
crisis of climate change,
we must learn to tell
different stories
Previous spread, left: the
project Pacific Aquarium
(2016) consolidates the
nine proposed Areas of
Particular Environmental
Interest (APEI) into one
contiguous zone.
Parliament of Refugees is
an assembly of
Anthropocene objects.Geostories
Another Architecture
for the EnvironmentAuthors: Design Earth – Rania Ghosn,
El Hadi Jazairy
Funded by: Graham Foundation
and MIT Architecture
Publisher: Actar Publishers, Barcelona,
New York 2018
Pages: 242
Format: 17 x 24 cm
http://www.design-earth.org
http://www.actar.com(^1) Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into
Modes of Existence: An Anthropology
of the Moderns (Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA 2013), p 13.
(^2) Bruno Latour, “Agency at the
time of the Anthropocene”, in
New Literary History, 2014,
no. 45, pp. 1–18.
(^3) This includes illustrations in the
biological sciences and geological
sciences, such as the frontispiece
from Charles Lyell’s Principles
of Geology, which depicts the
rock cycle, Charles Darwin’s
illustration of coral reef formation,
or Duria Antiquior, a pictorial
representation of a scene of
prehistoric life based on evidence
from fossil reconstructions.
Previous spread, right:
Cyborg Fish Colony is a
school of worker fish that
faces the challenge of
governing the oceans.
Team: Rania Ghosn,
El HadiJazairy, Namjoo
Kim, Hsin-Han Lee, Rawan
Al-Saffar, Kartiki Sharma,
Jia Weng, Sihao Xiong