Ashby Kinch:
This is the second of two episodes on “How Climate Changes Me”, a collection of professional and personal insights from graduate students researching the impact of climate change on human culture. Climate change is a topic that science, alone, cannot fully address. But the humanities have a long history of looking at hard problems from multiple perspectives, so are well-suited to explore the human dimensions of the problem.  

In this two-part series, we’ll hear graduate student voices from Masters programs in Literature and the Environment and Environmental Journalism, exploring hard questions of mental health, climate grief and the drive to find joy and creativity in the face of these trying times. These ideas were partly inspired by a conference at UM called Eco-Melancholia, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled “Re-Imagining Death: Community Conversations on Death, Dying, and Grief.” We thank the NEH for their support. 

We’ll hear graduate student voices from programs in Environmental Journalism and Literature and the Environment probing questions of mental health, climate grief, and the drive to find joy and creativity in the face of these trying times. These ideas were partly inspired by a conference at UM called Eco-Melancholia, funded by a grant from National Endowment for the Humanities called “Re-Imagining Death: Community Conversations on Death, Dying, and Grief.” We thank the NEH for their support.  

This episode features Madalynn Madigar, a 2023 graduate student of the master’s program in Eco-criticism, a concentration in the master’s of Literature program in English. Madalynn headed this fall to the University of Oregon, where she has full funding to complete a PhD in English. She’s on the podcast today to talk about petroleum, its hold on our society, and how literature can help us make sense of the slow apocalypse of petromodernity, a world dominated by petroleum. Throughout the episode, you’ll hear snippets of her conversation with Amelia Liberatore, who produced this series. You’ll also hear snippets of her talk at the Eco-melancholia conference, where she explored these themes in depth. Listeners can find more content from this conference at the website for UM’s Humanities Institute, with a link in the show notes.  

Welcome to Confluence, where the river of conversation still flows clear. 

Amelia Liberatore:
Hello, my name is Amelia Liberatore and it’s my pleasure to share my conversation with Madalynn Madigar. Madalynn’s interests span many areas of literature and society and I really enjoyed hearing how she draws connections across these themes of petroleum and apocalypse. Madalynn, thanks for being with us today. Can you please introduce yourself?

Madalynn Madigar:
Hi, my name is Madalynn Madigar, she/her pronouns. I'm a graduating student in the literature department in Ecocriticism and with a certificate in environmental ethics.

Amelia Liberatore:
Ok, ecocriticism – that’s a new one for me. Can you say more about that?

Madalynn Madigar:
So the field kind of started out in the ‘90s. And it's really, I think, still really in its infancy in a lot of ways, but it's basically how is literature as that cultural expression really shaped by environmental studies, and then the environment as a whole? It's also a lot more, I think, kind of groundbreaking theory work that's coming out on: how are we living in this time, and this age, that's called the Anthropocene a lot? But should we even call that the Anthropocene?

Amelia Liberatore:
Gotcha, so this is a specific field within literature and cultural studies. How did you land in this field?

Madalynn Madigar:
I started work in a psychology lab, actually, that was identity and psychology. And one of the really great workers there, his name's Daniel Rosenfeld, and he's doing just really cool work on vegetarian studies, actually. And I said: “Wow, you know, I'm not a vegetarian.” But I started looking into kind of the ethics and then environmental impacts of agriculture and meat. And then I started working with him, and it just kind of clicked into place for me. Because we can look at it and we can be like, “Yeah, I'm an environmentalist. Maybe just bare bones, industrial agriculture is really bad. But then why aren’t we all giving up meat when we look at those facts?” So I think that really started the ethical trajectory towards me with vegetarianism and veganism. And yeah, and then that's been a really heavy focus that I've liked to try to stay involved with. I've shifted a little bit away in my current studies, and in my thesis project, but animal studies is really still a great part of my interest.

Amelia Liberatore:
Tell me a little bit about your thesis work and what your focus is now.

Madalynn Madigar:
Sure, yeah, I’d love to do that. So I'm working in the energy humanities, specifically in petroleum culture, so it's abbreviated to petro-cultures. So that's, then instead of our relationship with animals and the environment as a whole, specifically our relationship with petroleum.

And then specifically, in literature and pop culture, I'm looking at the ties that that have been between oil and monstrosity. So how has that appeared with so many different pieces of cultural expression? How has that appeared in news? How has that appeared in literature? You know, it's talked about a lot kind of, you know, they'll say, like: “Oh, this monstrous oil spill this—" everything is so coated in those words, and that rhetoric of monstrosity.

So I first started considering all this in a class with a professor here, Katie Kane. She has a great course that's “Petro-modernity and Culture”. And just really, I remember sitting in that class being like, “Wow, this really is a whole--” – kind of the moment I had with, with vegetarianism and veganism – and I thought about that with petroleum and how much that's just as pervasive to the current society as our other interactions with the environment, really. So it's just really incredible and horrifying in a lot of ways…

We think of it not just as, as the gasoline and, and that transportation and that fuel in the energy sector, but it's also so much of, of how we have plastics and polyesters and all these byproducts. And, wow, all these things are actually like petroleum byproducts. And I had no idea of fertilizers and nail polish and glitter and it's just, wow, the pervasiveness of this is really astounding.

We're choosing to put in ‘petromodernity’ as this label for this moment we're living in and it's just that so much of the modern world is based on petroleum and fossil fuels. So that's my current work.

Amelia Liberatore:
Great, thanks so much for summarizing those concepts. You presented at a conference titled Eco-Melancholia at UM in May 2023. In your presentation you started to peel back some layers on how our dependency on petroleum plays a key role in ideas about the apocalypse. Let’s listen to some of your presentation now.

Madalynn Madigar [in presentation]:
While apocalyptic narratives, including environmental apocalypses, are often represented as one all-encompassing event, these representations ignore the endings of the world that have already taken place for countless people historically and in the present moment. The action of numerous apocalypses, many intertwined with the complex effects of colonialism, is more consistent with what Rob Nixon terms slow violence or, quote, “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, nutritional violence that's typically not viewed as violence at all.”

I want to direct our focus to one specific cause of globalized slow violence that is petro-capitalism. Gabriela Valdivia defines petro-capitalism as quote, “a capitalism that hinges on the production, exchange, and consumption of petroleum. Petro-capitalism is central to the development of today's society.”

As a core commodity for contemporary society, petroleum defines not only global markets, but also many aspects of our culture and socio-political landscape. Mucked up in petro-capitalism, the planet faces the nearing turning point in our relations with fossil fuels and oil is the cause for much anxiety. As most of us know, petroleum is a non-renewable resource, which means of course, that it has finite reserves available. While estimates fluctuate and are very difficult to calculate, several accounts estimate that there remains about 50 years of oil left to be extracted based on proven reserves. These numbers may stretch further in reality and technological and industrial advancements may increase the oil available to be extracted. However, it’s becoming harder to deny that the age of easily accessible oil reserves has ended and we're in a time of what Michael Klare calls “tough oil.” As we collectively stand, we are in no way prepared to rapidly shift away from the [totality?] of petro-capitalism without consequence.

Amelia Liberatore:
This is something that really stood out to me during your presentation, this concept of measuring how long oil reserves might last. And as you say, we seem pretty unprepared for a future without oil, without gasoline, without so many of these petroleum products. Can you speak to that? How do we get there?

Madalynn Madigar:
I wish I knew the answer on how we're gonna get there. I think that that's really kind of the energy humanities petro-culture field right now is to say where we are. And then, you know, I agree, that's where we want to be: We want to stop having our cars with fossil fuels and petroleum, we want to stop having petroleum powering our homes, and we want to stop the plastic and the waste. But then, now that we're in this situation, how do we get there? I think we need to focus on people who are being directly harmed by these industries first, and then support them and, and raise up marginalized voices as well. I want to look towards Native communities especially as the source of that activism. There was a great, great swell during the No DAPL, with the pipeline.

Amelia Liberatore:
Oh right, I also found that hugely inspiring. I’ll just give a brief recap of that action here: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline between 2015 and 2017. That movement is often referred to as No DAPL and it was a historic instance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people coming together to protect sacred land and water. Thousands of people, including members of hundreds of Native American tribes, gathered for months to protest the construction of this pipeline. The protests were eventually cleared by force in late 2016 and early 2017. Today, the Dakota Access Pipeline runs from North Dakota to Illinois and transports three quarters of a million barrels of oil every day.  

Now, I’d like to turn toward the mental health aspects of the work that you’re doing. Because a lot of what you’re saying about petrocapitalism – our obvious and not-so-obvious dependency on oil – it’s really troubling. Here at UM we hear terms like eco-grief, eco-emotions, eco-melancholia… So let’s listen to another portion of your presentation when you talk about eco-melancholia specifically.  

Madalynn Madigar:  [in presentation]:
Engaging with the eco-melancholia we might feel about the damaging effects and pervasiveness of petrocapitalism is difficult but necessary if we are to work within and against these feelings that we will doubtlessly encounter in environmental advocacy and scholarship as we attempt to halt planetary destruction. Our eco-melancholia surrounding petroleum may involve the apocalyptic, but shifting how we discuss and depict the atrocities of petrocapitalism to better reflect the true slow violence of industrial oil destruction and climate change may support a more accurate understanding of the effects and feelings of current petro-cultures. Instead of thinking of the apocalypse as a singular catastrophic collapse of the physical planet, how might we reconceptualize slow apocalypse, those that communities have and continue to experience in the form of slow violence, especially those at the cost of petro-capital? How can we grasp the feelings and experiences of living with ongoing perils that are unequally causing harm around the globe and threatening to exacerbate already precarious livelihoods?

Amelia Liberatore:
Later in your presentation you suggested that this concept of “haunting” may be useful for us to put petroleum and capitalism in perspective, especially here in the relatively wealthy global North. Let’s keep listening to your explanation of that.

Madalynn Madigar [in presentation]:
Things that haunt us stick with us and make it difficult to forget or move past into a future no longer influenced by those ghosts. This makes haunting applicable for both melancholy and petroleum. Specters of oil loom over the shape and trajectory of modernity, as it remains fueled by, and in service to, the continued reliance on petroleum.

The editors of a recent volume, Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene argue that the slow changes to the planet and the Anthropocene are most acutely beginning to be felt as a haunting in our privileged Global North. Quote, “It can be argued that affluent communities, most located in the Global North, encountered the Anthropocene not as physical violence but as a haunting, uncanny presence, the ghost that rises out of the global landscape. The Anthropocene haunts everyday objects and practices: cars, air-conditioned houses, gardens, airplanes, dinners, trips to the beach.”

It serves to point out that fossil fuels are a central, if not the foremost act, and these examples of the Anthropocene haunting, that we're just listed through the monster’s progeny of gasoline, refrigerants, fertilizers, jet fuel and single-use plastics.”

In her work on eco-melancholia, Catriona Sandilands captures the importance of haunted melancholy. Quote, “In a context in which there are no adequate cultural relations to acknowledge death, melancholia is a form of preservation of life, a life that is already gone, but whose ghost propels a changed understanding of the present.” Our increasing knowledge of the unsettlingly vast impacts of the anthropogenic emissions, pollution, and waste, among other indications of planetary transformation, continue to haunt and disturb us. Our concerns of these changes manifest in the apocalyptic and as depictions of the environmental apocalypse proliferate in literature, film, and popular media, analyzing the feelings surrounding these events becomes ever more crucial. However, it matters how we depict environmental apocalypse narratives in order to effectively address the real-world distractions taking place. Seeing global warming and other injustices of petrocapitalism as not just singular apocalyptic events refigured instead of slow effects that are already taking form and impacting communities and places, leaves lingering questions. What are we to do in order to live in and address the multiplicity of climate change, petro-capital, and slow apocalypses? What resistance do we undertake against a petro-capital system to cease this violence? Investigating these questions through haunting and other creative means, is therefore essential to creating a dialogue around how we can and should continue to exist among the rumblings of the apocalypse. Thank you. [applause]

Amelia Liberatore:
So Madalynn, you are one of two grad students at UM in the ecocriticism field. How on earth do you manage to think about and write about these topics so intensely? Can you share a little about your self-care practices, or some things that have been helpful for you during your time here?

Madalynn Madigar:
It's been helpful talking with other people studying this in my department and the philosophy department, we were just having this conversation the other day of: wow, I mean, we just engage with that so much. How do we continue to stick with that heaviness? You know, and, and I think it is almost, almost at the verge of an overwhelming feeling. But then you, you have to, I think, continue to reengage in it. Maybe it, maybe it's a poor way to do it, maybe it's a poor way to then have the academic involvement to push you back in, but in a way it is, like, I'll read some new book or a theory that's out there and people that are still in this, who are a lot smarter than me right now. And I'm like, okay, you know, we're still trying to give it this push and give it this go in this realm, you know? Maybe, maybe we're just gonna keep trying.

One thing I've been doing recently, it's kind of silly. I've been watching a lot of original series Pokémon anime, which is really funny. But there's a lot in there, that's really hopeful in the connections between humans and then nonhumans, you know, they're represented as Pokémon. But then it's also the overall environment. There's a lot of that kind of Japanese environmental philosophy that keeps recurring. That’s been really interesting now returning to that, of course, as a lot older than when I watched it when I was, like, five. But it's been really uplifting to see that. And it's not a utopia there. But so much of it is kind of a more utopian situation than what we have. Cities are depicted in the show as flourishing, and having all these different, you know, animal Pokémon species there, along with humans who are respecting that. And there's just that constant dialogue of how we're supposed to be living with the nonhuman others and how we're supposed to be respecting the environment around it.

Amelia Liberatore:
You know, I didn’t grow up watching Pokémon, but I totally get what you’re saying about animated shows and that near-utopian view of society. It seems like a really important antidote to visions of the apocalypse, or as you say, many slow apocalypses. Does it make you wonder if we even need to keep referencing these apocalyptic narratives?

Madalynn Madigar:
I think there's a place for that apocalyptic and that dystopian – but even, you know, a comment got made on a panel I was on: someone was trying to have a whole class where he was including only like utopian films. And he says, “But I couldn't do it. I couldn't complete this list, because we don't have so many of these utopian things to look for.” And I think that that's a really essential thing that's had this long tradition that's kind of been buried of this utopianism. But what do we want to strive for? And especially in my work, like, well, how do we want our post-oil future to be? What steps do we want to do to make it that way?

We have responsibility for helping to see what type of life that's going to be. So are we going to have, which no, hey, I love rats and cockroaches, I'm weird, I like all things. But is it gonna be a world that's only rats and cockroaches? Or are we going to have still some of the remaining biodiversity that will make it a flourishing biosphere?

Amelia Liberatore:
Well, I certainly hope there is more than rats and cockroaches in the future as well! Madalynn, thank you so much for sharing your work with us on Confluence. I hear you’re pursuing a doctorate at the University of Oregon this fall, so congratulations and good luck on the next part of your journey!