Please join us as we welcome Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities Michelle Bastian for a guest lecture. The event is open to all with no registration needed.

Drawing on work in phenology, the scientific study of seasonal timing in ecosystems, which she has recently undertaken as a form of field philosophy, the lecture will show and discuss how longstanding human perceptions and understandings of ecological seasonality are not only changing under the pressures of climate change, but given form by attentiveness to place (see full abstact below).

Michelle Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and an Associate Professor II at the University of Oslo in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities.

The event is free to attend and open to all – faculty, students, and interested members of the public alike.

Abstract

While local weather can always be unpredictable, the seasons, by contrast, can seem a bit dull. As archaeologist Michael Given has argued, they can appear in culture and literature as "the tired formula of a repeating seasonal cycle, a there-and-back walk up and down the hill". But as literary scholar Sarah Dimick has suggested, this once reliable seasonal 'form' is becoming disordered as climate breakdown challenges the taken-for-granted round, changing not just weather patterns, but the seasonal indicators that we glean from the behaviour of the plants and animals around us. Working out whether a behaviour is untimely, or within the expected seasonal range, is part of the job of phenologists, those people who study yearly lifecycle timing within ecosystems. Since the late 1990s phenology has demonstrated ways that climate change is shifting ecosystem timings with the UK Spring Index showing an advance of 8 days since the early 1900s. The underlying data is provided by long-term citizen scientists for the Woodland Trust’s Nature’s Calendar, who have kept track of their local environment across multiple decades. I discuss findings from interviews with these recorders and particularly how their sense of seasonality is given form by their close attention to place.

Organizer

The research programme for Environmental Media & Aesthetics and Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH)