Terraforming
Seeing through new lenses
As part of our collaboration, Vera and I have been exposing ourselves to new ideas by reading articles and books as well as listening to podcasts. New ideas can change our frame of reference, and encourage us to consider the places around us differently. Here is one that has changed mine from Amitav Ghosh’s book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis* published in 2021. For those of you not from the prairies, I have tried to explain prairie terms in the captions on the images.
What has especially stuck with me months after reading The Nutmeg’s Curse is Ghosh’s definition of the verb terraform. A new word to me! Ghosh explains that this verb was used initially in science fiction to mean molding the land of other planets to look like Planet Earth. Think of colonizing Mars. For the purposes of The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh has interpreted the word terraform to mean “ecological interventions…that turned territories perceived as wastelands into terrain that fit a European conception of productive land.” Ghosh continues, “the right to terraform was thus an essential part of settler identity; their claim of ownership founded on the notion that they were “improving” the land by making it productive in ways recognized by Europeans.” While people have been shaping the earth for the past 12,000 years, the relatively recent view of the natural world as inert and without agency has allowed us to exploit the earth in unprecedented ways.
The verb terraforming had me looking anew at the shape and contours of the land around my home.
Here’s something that seems very obvious to me now, but which I had never considered before looking around with my new terraforming lenses. When a grid road runs between two sloughs, it was at one time one big slough, with the road built up to go through it. Honestly, I used to think there were two sloughs and the road just happened to run in between them! (See terraforming glasses above.)
In a wet spring, you notice where the pools and channels of water lie. I love the expression that “water has memory.” Some of this low lying water is seasonal, existing only in spring. Other small bodies of water lie where an aspen bluff was bulldozed or a wetland was removed. I began to notice how low lying areas connected to each other, and how these waterways have changed as potholes and wetlands have been drained. When my husband Shane and I began to talk more about the increasing destruction of wetlands in our area, he pointed out that farmers had been draining wetlands for a long time, but that in his father and grandfather’s time the machinery to do so was smaller and slower.
I began to see that places that I thought of as natural such as road allowances, old farm sites and overgrown ditches had at one time been terraformed as well but had become naturalized over time. These places not only become home to the more than human world, they are also beautiful oases.
Although I was aware of some of this before, the verb “terraforming” has allowed me to see the many ways we have altered the natural world in sharp relief.
This word also has me looking in new ways at the place I call home. Our house was built from fieldstone 126 years ago. Last winter, I learned some basics from a stone mason as I applied “mud” (a lime mixture) to the stone walls in our basement. This gave me lots of time to think of how the prairie might have looked at one time, with stones everywhere. As the stones were being removed from the land, the native prairie was also being ploughed and destroyed, making way for the cropped land that has sustained my husband’s family for 5 generations. In this same basement where I am helping repair stone walls, there is a cistern, and although we do collect rainwater, our main source of water is from a series of dugouts created over the years from a wetland area. The grid road that connects our farm to the outside world was built from clay and gravel removed from the hills by Pheasant Creek , a place I often think of as undisturbed.
This shows me not only how entangled I am, but also how much I benefit on a daily basis from the terraforming of what some call the ongoing settler colonial project.
As Vera and I focus on the present day destruction of wetlands, aspen bluffs and other small patches of unused land, we realize that this is nothing new – it has been going on since colonization began, since buffalo were extirpated and Indigenous people removed to reserves of land. Indigenous people also shaped the land but with an entirely different view of the natural world (certainly not as a wasteland!) and their place in it. (Buffalo and other animals played a part in altering the natural world, too.) Today, the destruction of land not used by agriculture has accelerated, in part because today’s machinery can destroy a wetland more efficiently than it could yesterday.
Canadian writer J.B. MacKinnon writes that if the natural world becomes “a landscape of straightened rivers, cleared forests and drained wetlands, beneath skies emptied of birds, it is only more of the same, it’s meanings already decided by other people in other times.” This paints a bleak picture. He goes on to say that, like many of us, he is “drawn to nature as a counterpoint to the world of regulations and traditions, grids and networks that we live in day to day.”+
I feel the same.
Had you heard the word “terraforming” before? Or considered the man made alterations to your immediate environment, whether it be urban, rural, or somewhere in between? What particular places are counterpoints for you to a world of regulations, grids and networks? We would love to hear if this post has sparked anything in you and invite you to share your comments in the space below, by pushing the comment button.
*Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer and global thinker. While he uses nutmeg from the Banda Islands as his starting place in The Nutmeg’s Curse, he goes on to show how colonization by Europeans all over the globe requires seeing “all parts of the world (as) inanimate, mechanical, soulless, and therefore open to economic use and ultimately destruction.” Prior to colonization, Ghosh believes that the natural world was seen as a force of its own, full of agency and meaning, brought alive by stories and ceremonies.
+J.B. MacKinnon, The Once and Future World: Nature as It Could Be, 2013, p. 102
One final tidbit: For those of you in the gaming world, the popular series Animal Crossing has a 17 minute guide called “Terraforming 101”.
“Where will the frogs sing?” is the collaboration of two rural settler artists responding to the beauty and destruction of SE Saskatchewan’s remnants of land to encourage reflection on the land’s intrinsic value.
Love those terraform glasses. I need a pair! This is something I think about quite a bit, though the term itself is new. That said, we are so accustomed to the terraformed landscape around us that we don't easily recognize it. And often, even when we do recognize the change, it is actually subsequent change--as land is sometimes transformed over and over again. (From a prairie to farmland to a subdivision or shopping mall...and that's just in recent history.) Or maybe we look at a forest thinking it is natural when, in fact, it was once a very different forest that was ravaged by timber companies, then lost all of its topsoil to erosion before growing back with other trees and plants, many of which are non-native and may even be invasive. Hope you will share other good resources on this subject as you come across them.
I hadn't heard the word "terraform", but I sure am familiar with the concept. I often try to imagine the land as it was before the Europeans got here. Sadly, most of our ancestors saw it only as a vehicle for their survival and profit. My favorite example of this is the Army Corps of Engineers (US). Many of their projects so disrupt the natural geography that disaster results. Draining of the Everglades so sugar cane can be grown and the creation of dikes and levees in New Orleans that gave way during Katrina are 2 examples. We might do better to let the topography lead us to sustainable use.