Interscalar Vehicle

Planetary recognition compels a re-evaluation of long standing disciplinary conventions and methodologies of thought that cannot be captured by ‘transdisciplinarity’ alone. How does Planetary intelligibility manifest in procedures of investigation, and how to avoid ‘seeing’ the Planetary only in a generalizing, distant fashion, without depoliticizing its causes?

In seeking to localise and engage geopolitical dimensions of the Anthropocene, anthropologist Gabrielle Hecht has developed an Interscalar approach in order “spark new narratives [...] and forms of knowledge” commensurate with Planetary thought. Three guiding considerations underwrite her method: First, is to treat the concept of scale as an analytic and political claim; second is to enter the Anthropocene by way of waste, since it is how we know the impact of human activity (in plutonium deposits, CO₂ concentrations, etc.); and third “putting the Anthropocene in place”, that is specific sites (with their particular histories) as points of departure for thinking the Anthropocene. Importantly, Hecht’s method offers other representational techniques and logics for narrating the Anthropocene beyond graphs, charts and statistical visualisation.

In order to enact such a mode of analysis, an “interscalar vehicle” is introduced. These are objects that enable movement through “deep time and human time, through geological space and political space”. A uranium-bearing rock serves as Hecht’s exemplary object, enabling her to travel from Gabon’s uranium mines, to France (where Gabonese uranium fed the national nuclear program), to Japan (mingling emotional experience and scientific analysis of the nuclear bomb), all the while tracing capital valuation/devaluation, the long history of waste, colonial labour conditions, not to mention the present economic and medical realities following the “slow violence” of toxicities inherent to “materials of modernity” and the now radioactive homes inhabited by former miners. In other words, a highly local, tangible entity, contains the Planetary within it, in economic, social, material, technological, ecological, metabolic and geopolitical terms. An interscalar vehicle enables a thinking with the Anthropocene that “expands our vision of time and space,” however without flattening the Planetary into a placeless, uniform condition of experience, both of the past and possible futures.