Political Geology
Adam Bobbette · Amy Donovan Editors
Political Geology Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life
Editors Adam Bobbette Department of Geography
University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK
Amy Donovan Department of Geography University of
Cambridge
Cambridge,
UK
ISBN 978-3-319-98188-8
ISBN 978-3-319-98189-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950737
© Te Editor(s) (if applicable) and Te Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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Cover design: Tom Hardy
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List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Plate 1.1 from Suess’ Te Face of the Earth
Fig. 1.2 Plate XXV from William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, showing Hamilton himself at the crater Forum Vulcani, examining the hydrothermal activity
Fig. 1.3 Plate XLI from Campi Phlegraei, showing the Excavations of Pompeii (the Temple of Isis)
Fig. 1.4 Alexander von Humboldt’s cross section of Chimborazo in the Andes
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Fig. 2.1 Small blocks are used for experimental investigation of rock weathering in a heritage conservation project (a and c). Te data loggers are connected to a laptop (b). Once the data is downloaded, the samples are weighed (d) 39
Fig. 2.2 A breakdown of a Latourian “transformation” (Latour 1999: 71): moving from a sample to a peer-reviewed text, via a spreadsheet and statistical analysis. According to Latour, each shift from the material towards the discursive is marked by an increase in “compatibility”, “standardisation”, “text”, “calculation”, “circulation”, and a decrease in “locality”, “particularity”, “materiality”, “multiplicity”, and “continuity” (1999: 71) 41
Fig. 3.1 Teresa Arenas and her dog Baldomero in Unidad Habitaciónal Tepozanes, October 13, 2017 (Photo by Seth Denizen) 71
Fig. 3.2 Mexico City, 2018 74
Fig. 3.3 Pantítlan (Adapted from: Sahagún 1577)
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Fig. 3.4 Virgen de Guadalupe, Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe 89
Fig. 5.1 Four screen grabs from Te Battleship Island (2017)
Fig. 6.1 Sukidi’s oferings on a Sabo dam. In the background are illegal mining activities. Te ofering includes a rice volcano with a fried egg on top and a cosmic axis incense stick. Behind it is a sweet potato and tobacco, to the right are cups of sweet, rice jellies for spirits. It is also a model of the cosmos and an intervention into the causal relations between the mining, riverbank, and volcano. Adam Bobbette
Fig. 6.2 Ofering on a footpath at the edge of forest and paddy felds, Keningar. It consists of lunch, a banana, fried noodles and shrimp crackers, sweets, and rice wrapped in banana leaf. Spirits fnd delicious what humans fnd delicious because pleasures are shared across body forms. Adam Bobbette
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Fig. 6.3 Sukidi’s workshop table, Adam Bobbette 189
Fig. 11.1 Paektusan (Image from Landsat 8; USGS 2018). International frontier shown in green. Also shown are signifcant hills (Sono, Sobaek), the neighbouring volcano (Namphothae) and towns mentioned in the text (Samjiyon, Pochon). Lake Samjiyon, a site of signifcance because of its statues—notably that of Kim Il Sung—is also shown
Fig. 11.2 Lake Chon from the Korean side, August 2015
Fig. 11.3 Te Korean tiger
Fig. 11.4 Te distribution of groups within the ARF, as documented in a DPRK newsletter (DPRK 716). Note that the groups permeate throughout the old Gogoryeo kingdom—far north of Paektu (which is depicted with a star)
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Fig. 11.5 Paektusan on the triumphal arch in Pyongyang. Amy Donovan
Fig. 11.6 Statues in Samjiyon (top) and Pyongyang (bottom) that depict revolutionaries holding books—representing scientifc work. Amy Donovan
Fig. 11.7 Buildings containing fats built for scientists in Pyongyang—note the atomic symbols in the upper storeys. Amy Donovan
Fig. 11.8 Boards from the Natural History Museum in Pyongyang, depicting the two fowers, Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia, and the archaeological achievements of DPRK in tracking down ancestors of Koreans in deep time
Fig. 11.9 Figure 1 from Geology of Korea, showing Paektudaegan—Great Paektu—in bold, and other mountain ranges in normal lines
Fig. 11.10 Comparison of stratigraphies for Paektu region (Sources Liu 1999; Liu et al. 1998; Paek 1996; Sakhno and Utkin 2009; Wei et al. 2013; Wei et al. 2007)
Fig. 11.11 Entrance to the volcano observatory on the shore of Lake Chon. Amy Donovan
Fig. 12.1 Measuring sulphur dioxide at Holuhraun, Iceland, September 2014. Amy Donovan
Fig. 12.2 Ortelius’ map of Iceland
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List of Tables
Table 2.1 Lineages: research centres and individual scholars
Table 4.1 Estimates of (risked) technically recoverable resources (TRR) of shale gas in Poland
Table 4.2 Estimates of shale gas potential in the UK (note diferent categories)
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Table 11.1 Simplifed history of Korea 297
Political Geology: An Introduction
Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan
What Is Political Geology?
Tis volume delves into the politics of the earth. It aims to shed light on the mysterious forces within the wider discourse of geopolitics, thinking through the geological aspects of “vertical territory” (Braun 2000). It will expose the political to geologists with their rock hammers, seismometers, compasses, and maps, their multiple ways of making sense of the density and movements of what is below us and often too old and slow-moving for us to grasp, and that may be more readily explored in art and literature (Grosz 2008). It will also open geopolitics to the sensory capacities of geophones and tilt meters, plumb lines and rain
Author order is alphabetical—both authors contributed equally.
A. Bobbette (*) · A. Donovan
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: awb49@cam.ac.uk
A. Donovan
e-mail: ard31@cam.ac.uk
© Te Author(s) 2019
A. Bobbette and A. Donovan (eds.), Political Geology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_1
A. Bobbette and A. Donovan
gauges and consider how geologists, with their tools, expedition equipment and teams, are themselves politicians operating in spaces, on behalf of others, and seeking authority (Coen 2013; Donovan and Oppenheimer 2015a; Hopwood et al. 2010; Rudwick 1985; Schafer 2003; Shapin and Schafer 1989). It follows these geologists as they enter into the depths of the geos of politics, its strata, veins, and structural tectonics, and exposes how politics moves—its frictions and alliances; and how its structures form and endure. Te premise of this is to create a productive, generative symmetry between geology and politics that can be understood both as the politics of geology and the geology of politics.
Te classical, and now often criticized, conception of the basis of geopolitics, drawing on the modern legacy of geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel, claimed that “the basic concept is that the state is a particular spatial grouping on the earth’s surface” (Dickinson 1969: 69). In this framework, the earth is a surface upon and across which unfolds the dramas of sovereign territories and their politics. Critical geopolitics (Dalby 1991; Tuathail and Agnew 1992) challenged this framework, demonstrating the hidden assumptions and biases of fat representations of the world—and feminist geopolitics has interrogated the everyday implications of geopolitical machinations (Hyndman 2001). More recently, political geographers such as Bruce Braun (2000), Stuart Elden (2013), and Gavin Bridge (2014) have added thickness to this horizontal scope by demonstrating how state space is constituted vertically and the depth of political processes extend into and through the geos, while feminist geopolitics has also embraced the material world (Dixon 2016).1 Social and political space, in these renderings, is fundamentally geological. Tis means, more familiarly, that the basis of politics is in geological resources such as fossil fuels, minerals, and sand and is ordered by their appropriation,
1Tere is also much work showing the deep connections between nineteenth century geographical thinkers and the infuence of mining engineering and techniques of conceptualising resources. Tis is to say that the epistemology of the geos as a superfcial entity was often in a complex dialogue with other ways of framing it. Consider for example the infuence of Humbolt’s mining work on his own vertical conception of territory and habitat (Anthony 2018). See also Guntau (1996) “Te Natural History of the Earth”.
processing and distribution; but less familiar is the suggestion that geology too emerges in and through political processes, as it is demarcated, framed, and becomes an object of knowledge. Tis volume engages both of these processes as they reach the subsurface and the substance of geology: the earth’s organization into strata, and the depth of geological time and transformation—territory in four dimensions (Bridge 2014). Te essays here engage the contact zones between politics and the gradual but incessant transformation, production and destruction of the earth’s surface. We intend this volume to contribute to how we understand the relationship between politics and geology by pressing on the nature of their relationship: to ask what its substance is and how it has defned and continues to defne our world and what is possible in it.
It is only recently that political geology has emerged as a framework concept. In 2012, a symposium was organized under the title, “Political Geology: Stratigraphies of Power” at Lancaster University in the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change that brought together (mostly) geographers. Tis was followed by two workshops with the title given to this volume, “Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life,” in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge in March and November 2017 that brought together the historians of science, theologians, anthropologists, political ecologists, and human geographers whose papers form the basis of this book. Tere has also been a slow emergence of the term in published papers as its analytical work begins to circulate and gain purchase (Swanson 2016; Barry 2017). For the most part, the term has been taken up by anthropologists and geographers, and as keywords can do when they begin to work, they do not invent whole cloth but channel existing energies and intuitions around them to make something newly sensible; in other words, to focus discourse and cross disciplinary registers: “they clear a way through the complex and opaque” (Amin 2016).
One of the infuences on political geology, as Nigel Clark, Bronislaw Szersynski and Simone Kotva demonstrate in their chapters here, has been the fruitful debates around the Anthropocene: a proposed geological epoch that explicitly acknowledges human impact on the stratigraphic record (Crutzen 2006 ). Tis has had profound implications for the ways that social scientists, humanists,
and scientists conceive of humanity’s relationship with the planet, the history of politics in relation to geology, and how we inherit the legacies of Enlightenment humanism as it puts humanity on a par with the geological (Castree 2014 ; Dalby 2007a ; Johnson et al. 2014 ). It also raises difcult questions about scientifc and technological development and the human conquest of the earth—and of other humans. Te term was frst proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000 in the halls of geological societies and the International Commission on Stratigraphy, but it quickly opened the science of stratigraphy to social and political questions (Castree et al. 2014 ; Palsson et al. 2013 ; Szerszynski 2012 , 2017a , b ). By 2014, the Anthropocene was a keyword in the social sciences and humanities, speaking to pressing political, social, environmental, and geohistorical issues (Clark 2014 ; Clark and Yusof 2017 ; Dalby 2007b ; Johnson et al. 2014 ; Lorimer 2012 ; Lövbrand et al. 2009 ). It resolved controversies within the social sciences and humanities raised by postmodernism and post-structuralism because the Anthropocene was a scientifc framework developed by geologists and other solid-earth scientists that was redefning the human and presenting, as Jamie Lorimer ( 2012 ) has put it, “a more-than-human politics”. It seemed like the twilight of the modernist ontological distinction between humans and nature—and was sanctioned by scientists themselves: those whom social scientists, including Bruno Latour ( 2017 ), had argued were central in developing that distinction in the frst place. Voices from establishment science were proposing the notion that the human was a geological force that would leave a trace in the stratigraphic record: the human would become one more layer of material among materials. As of the publication date of this collection in 2018, disciplinary formalities and debates are still to be resolved before the Anthropocene is ofcially adopted into the nomenclature of the geological sciences; and in the meantime, much of the fevered pitch of its original moment has settled as the term has saturated the academic industry and spilled into mass media flms and newspapers. Political geology has been galvanized by this fourishing of geological discourse brought on by the Anthropocene because it has surfaced new vocabularies. It has turned a new generation of social
scientists and humanists onto scholarship in the history of the geological sciences as they have sought to understand how it came to be that the West understood what geology was, how the stratigraphic record became a narrative of the earth, and the role of geologists in shaping the imaginaries of what the earth is and how it works.2 In this volume, this recent legacy is clear to see as scholars are taking stock of the impact of the Anthropocene as a redefnition of what it means to be human and therefore of what constitutes politics. In this respect, it has a clear home in the recent theoretical moves towards materialism and Deleuzian philosophy, under a critical realist ontology (DeLanda 2006; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Grosz 2008).
Another reason for the emergence of political geology lays in the recent troubling of the distinction between the geological and biological (Whatmore 2006). Te conventions of the modern Western sciences did not come to be organized according to this distinction until the nineteenth century, with the biological sciences concerned with “life”, its genesis, transformations, and structures, while the geological sciences have generally been concerned with “non-living”, inorganic things, and “once-living” things as they reconstruct the past environments of life.3 Discourses around the Anthropocene, because of their insistence on the interweaving of the human with the geological, the living with dead matter, have emboldened rethinking this division and making clear that it is both an ideological and political one as much as a historical one (Whatmore 2006, 2013). Scholars have asked, why and how did this distinction come about? What are its stakes and who benefts from where the line is drawn? How does governance operate through the diference, and how is the realm of politics itself constituted by this distinction? How does it make possible the fundamental distinction between what constitutes the human and non-human, nature,
2For example, Martin Rudwick (1985), James Secord (1990), and Stephen Jay Gould (1990) are among many other scholars working in the history of geology and earth sciences that have been read lately by social scientists and humanists.
3Natural scientists of the eighteenth century did not recognize this distinction though they worked with today’s geological material. See: Martin Rudwick, ‘Minerals, strata and fossils’ (Rudwick 1996: 266).
and culture? Te chapters in this volume for the most part take a critical stance to this distinction by historicizing it or showing the porosity between the geos and bios—as Deborah Dixon does as she describes Hashima as an imperial accretion involving geological violence to human bodies; and as Adam Bobbette argues in his chapter, suggesting that the distinction of geos and bios is culturally and geographically determined. Te distinction between the geos and bios is, as the chapters ahead attest, an epistemological, political and material matter of concern at the centre of political geology.
Te rest of this introduction expands on these core premises by outlining the three main themes of the volume: epistemology, modernity, and the future. Tese also defne the structure of the book. In doing so, we set out to characterise political geology as defned by neighbouring and overlapping sets of problems. Political geology does not have a single method or discipline; it rather has common concerns and traditions that energize it.
Political Geology of Knowledge
Te frst axis that characterizes the essays in this volume is an engagement with the history of the Western geological sciences as a complex architecture of epistemological practices. Tis means understanding these sciences as ways of knowing and speaking for the earth— as Rachael Tily does in her article here on geomorphological practices at Oxford. Her political geological enquiry stresses both the mechanisms and embodied practices that bring about particular ways of knowing the earth, and the social relations that constrain and make them possible, open or foreclose them.
Before the emergence of the modern split between bios and geos, natural historians were concerned with how rocks, mountains, landscapes and fossils have told the story of Earth, its changes, and structure (Rudwick 1996, 2005). Te emergence of modern geology introduced new narratives of the age of the earth and ideas of species extinction, and later laid the groundwork for Victorian theories of
biological species modifcation and descent through time.4 Geologists sought to put what often appeared obstinately static—rocks—into motion and because of this, the earth sciences have been sciences of learning how to see and sense (Rudwick 1976; Hopwood et al. 2010). To understand the signifcance of this to the sciences, consider as an example the Prussian geologist Eduard Suess’ Te Face of the Earth, published in English in (1904) in four volumes, as a “comprehensive work… devoted not to the formulation of laws, but to the comparison of observations scattered over the whole earth…” (iii). In the frontispiece to volume one, the reader holds a massif of the central Indian Himalayas in their hands with each of its peaks notated: “S = Silurian, C = Carboniferous, P = Permian, T = Triassic (ii)” naming their epochal origin and representing them through unique detailing of their textures and forms (Fig. 1.1). Te linear order of their placement gives the appearance that they are stacked in a row like books on a shelf. Tis simple, clear and precise arrangement was crucial to the efect of the drawing: the compression of space, time and material. As Bruno Latour (2013) has argued, these aesthetic tools are mechanisms for seeing and acting with places at a distance; of displacing places for us and transporting us to other places. Tey make the earth sensible as a story of material transformations that can be registered by the human body, while opening the body outwards to the expanses of geological time.
Te diferences in the liveliness of the earth between places were also the subject of considerable investigation as the extent of geological time became clear. Take for example the debates over the origins of basalt—a dark-coloured volcanic rock, found all over the world. In the mid-eighteenth century, the dominant view of the earth’s interior was that it was flled with water (Young 2003) and that lava was
4As Martin Rudwick has shown, this transition did not take place in a simple way that replaced one story with the next; Western geological narratives were made by scientists, priests and learned men of the clergy in ways that did not contradict religious doctrine; see Rudwick (2005, 2009) for a full account of “the diferentiation of properly distinct spheres of enduring meaning, both scientifc and religious”. See also Gould (1987) on the relationship between science and religion in geology.
formed from heating of coal seams. As the century progressed, links were made between the basalts of Giant’s Causeway and the Massif Centrale in France, suggesting that basalt may be of volcanic origin. James Hutton, however, came to the conclusion that basalt was a plutonic rock—formed from the cooling of melt deep in the earth. Tese three schools of thought—neptunist, vulcanist and plutonist— were played out and contested alongside the sensible eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna in the late eighteenth century, and the geographical investigations of geologists such as George Greenough (Rudwick 1962), George Poulett Scrope and Leopold von Buch (Young 2003). Tese scientists, like many others, toured Europe and witnessed eruptions of living mountains—feeling the heat and describing the moving productivity of the earth. Tey learned geology through their senses, by making comparisons across space of the shapes, chemistries, and appearance of diferent rock formations. Indeed, the
Fig. 1.1 Plate 1.1 from Suess’ The Face of the Earth
neptunists were ridiculed in part because they had “never visited volcanic countries”: they therefore lacked the experiential knowledge required to interpret the earth (Pinkerton 1811, in Young 2003: 51). William Hamilton (1730–1800), often cited as the “frst volcanologist”, undertook extensive study of the Neapolitan volcanoes (Fig. 1.2). He also visited the newly discovered towns of Pompeii and Ercolano (Fig. 1.3), in which the remains of past, fourishing societies were entombed in rock and now formed part of the stratigraphy. Ascents of Vesuvius became regular activities for Hamilton and his friends, and for many other visitors to Naples who wished to see and sense the volcanic activity themselves (Vesuvius erupted regularly between 1631 and 1944).
As sense-making techniques, the geological sciences are inseparable from forms of media and representation which have co-evolved with other forms of media and representation (Parrika 2015). Tis means more than that the science of geology relies on representation to do its work; it also means that the earth itself is a form of media. Many early naturalists and geologists, including Hamilton (Sepkoski 2017) understood the earth to be an inscription surface, like a vinyl record
Fig. 1.2 Plate XXV from William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, showing Hamilton himself at the crater Forum Vulcani, examining the hydrothermal activity
or wax cylinder; or as a kind of giant colonial bureaucratic fling cabinet that echoed the cabinets that gentlemen natural historians kept their geological samples in. Notions of the cabinet, box, crate, and other systems of ordering, archiving and transporting geological samples mirrored the very understanding of the earth as itself a fling system. Te transformation of concepts of aesthetic serialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the scientifc and engineering disciplines informed the idea that the subsurface of the earth is also a serialized object, stacked in stratifed layers (though often a turbulent one [Young 2003]). Geological modes of representation included the burgeoning media of photography and cinema, in which the serialization of discreet units created representations of movement and transformation in time. In the early twentieth century, many geologists relied on multiple visual and rhetorical strategies to bring alive the movements of the earth. One example is that of the great DutchIndonesian geologist Reinout Van Bemmelen (1949), who, in his two volume Te Geology of Indonesia, employed, like others at the time, a combination of photography, cross section, axonometric, plans,
Fig. 1.3 Plate XLI from Campi Phlegraei, showing the Excavations of Pompeii (the Temple of Isis)
maps, and diagrams, to create a kind of animated portrait in book form of the deep historical evolution and change in the Indonesian archipelago. Historians of geology have shown how these techniques of representing the interior of the earth came to be considered self-evident representations of what happens underground, instead of an active engagement with wider technological practices and ideas about the capacities and limitations of representation (Daston 2007, 2017; Secord 2018).
Te geological sciences have long been productively contaminated by these adjacent aesthetic practices even if those sciences project an image of purity (Oreskes 1999). Tis is one of the ways that geology is political: through what it makes sensible and what it excludes; how it allows the geos to become an object of understanding; and how the tools through which it achieves that shape and bring into being what can be understood. Interpreting the geological sciences through its representational practices then also means understanding how those practices circulate among other knowledge practices and reproduce them. Tis is important because there has long been a struggle to represent the geos. One example is the turn in Western geophysics towards laboratory-based work alongside technical feldwork, rather than observation alone, in the second half of the twentieth century. Te French volcanologist Haroun Tazief was one of protagonists of this debate. He had signifcant popular appeal throughout the 1950s until the 1980s as a prolifc producer of volcano flms and often included himself as the presenter and heroic scientist fgure circulating, probing, sampling, and pontifcating on ridges and outcrops of the world’s most famous volcanoes. Even Jean-Luc Goddard celebrated Tazief’s flms in the Cahier du Cinema in 1985 when he positioned his scientifc work within a trajectory that led from Renaissance painting to avant-garde cinema:
…showing the underwater eruption of the volcano in the Azores, graces with such a terrifying richness of forms that only Tintoretto would have dared to paint it, and by showing us a river of lava twisting
A. Bobbette and A. Donovan
through a cauldron of purple and gold, [Tazief deployed] colors that Eisenstein alone dared to use in the banquet of Ivan the Terrible… 5 (Conley 2014)
It is in these shifts between the borders of art and science that we can see the controversies of contemporary earth sciences waged. It was Tazief’s rival Claude Allègre who championed the drive for precision and exactitude that feld instrumentation and laboratory work promised when he eventually expelled Tazief from teaching at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris where Allègre was the head. In a debate that circulated through newspapers, the pages of Nature, and on French television, Tazief was accused of irresponsibly misleading the public about a potential eruption of Soufrière volcano in 1976, when he argued, based on his frst-hand experience travelling up and down the volcano, that it would not dangerously erupt. Allègre instead pointed to information from an inexperienced colleague that volcanic rock had reached the surface and recommended an evacuation of the population on the slopes—an evacuation that turned out to be costly and unnecessary, but that was arguably justifed in an uncertain context (Hincks et al. 2014). Allegre and his supporters framed Tazief as “overwhelmed by modern science”—meaning pushed out.6 Such debates were driven in part by a crisis of legitimacy in the earth sciences as they competed with the dominance of physics and mathematics (Oreskes 1999). In order to appear to be an “exact science” with the authority to manage populations, the earth sciences would have to produce the authority of exactitude. Tis transformation afected the representations of the geos as it became a numerical model inside computers—and a laboratory of its own right in the feld—and a whole new generation of geologist technologists swept through the felds of the earth sciences.
5For the original see Godard, Jean-Luc (1959: 53–55) “Le conquérant solitaire”. Cahiers du cinéma, March.
6M. Mattauer, in a circular sent to representatives of the Institut. He was subsequently sued by Tazief for defamation—for details, see the timeline http://www.ipgp.fr/~beaudu/soufriere/ forum76.html (in French).
Te plural knowledges that make up the modern Earth Sciences thus emerged in an active and lively geos that was itself in conversation with the sciences. Earth science courses today emphasize feld work even as they also embrace numerical models, experimental petrology and high-precision measurement. Seismometers, tilt meters, and spectrometers sit on the sides of volcanoes all over the world, constantly recording their heartbeat and listening for periods of heightened activity. Field experiences are part of the activity of geologists—and, for many, a reason for remaining in the discipline—but they are accompanied by long periods of laboratory work or computer modelling that seek to measure and detail the intricacies of rocks, fault lines and continents. Such models and measurements lead to the products of geological science, in the form of maps and charts—many of them three dimensional and colourful in their depiction of the past, present, and future of the geos for human consumption and reworking. An important example of this is resource geology: the identifcation and representation of potentially lucrative mineral deposits or energy sources, as charted by Kärg Kama and Magdalena Kuchler in their paper. Te history of exploitation of earthly resources is particularly politically rich, evidencing the geopolitics, imperialism, and brutality of past and present cultures. An example of this in a post-colonial context is given by Deborah Dixon, as she argues for a feminist political geology in her chapter.
Te political geology of knowledge traces how the geological sciences have made the geos knowable and sensible as a political dimension of the science of geology. It shows that representing and acting at a distance have been a part of demarcating the diferences between society, culture, nature; and that representing the geos is a process of articulating the relationship between nature and culture, and of constituting and managing their diferences. As we have long known, representations are never neutral, and they are shaped by the technological histories, the tools available and the ecology of representations at a particular cultural moment. Political geology takes the representational techniques of geologists seriously as a window onto the politics of how and what we know of the geos.
Amodern Political Geology
Tis story of modern geology and its representations, as is often the case, has been told as if it were a Western one. And like many of the other modern Western sciences, it has been told as though it was difused through a West-to-the-Rest movement, from the centres of imperial knowledge outwards. Charles Darwin’s accounts of how Charles Lyell helped him to see the deep history of the landscape while he was on the Beagle stand out as just such a case in which the geological sciences formed the framework that Europeans applied to distant places (West 1938). On his travels, Darwin collected rock samples from the Pacifc islands and South America, which he brought back for inspection; and the establishment of natural history collections and prototypes for public museums contained samples from around the world in a way that told the story of the earth’s evolution in Western geological terms. Infuential geologists of the time were in similar contact with travellers in the networks of empire that extended beyond Europe. Suess’ frontispiece was a lithograph based on a photograph sent to him in Vienna by Carl Ludolf Griesbach, working for the British colonial Geological Survey of India in the late 1870s. Lyell himself travelled extensively in the USA and Canada in the 1840s and 1850s, collecting samples while on lecture tours (Dott 1998). Alfred Russel Wallace, during his trips through the Malay archipelago, sent letters containing his geological observations back to Darwin. Te emergence of the modern story of the earth was, in these terms, a project developed by Western men (and a few women) circulating through the long-range colonial networks, trade routes and way-stations and, as was often the case, were themselves functionaries of those empires as administrators, ofcers or the wealthy donors that made colonial expeditions possible (Scott 2008).
In their travels, these scientists gave their names and provincially oriented stamps to their stories of the earth. Te British founders of modern geological sciences such as Adam Sedgwick, Roderick Murchison and Charles Lapworth named geological epochs based on local places and peoples in England such as the Devonian (from Devon), Cambrian
(the ancient people of Cumbria), Silurian (the ancient Silures of Wales) and Ordovician (after a Celtic tribe), which they then projected outward and applied, naming the earth in their own image. Suess named the biosphere and lithosphere based on Greek nomenclature and embedded within it the ontological distinction between the organic and inorganic, bios and lithos. Griesbach’s name, in honour of his work, was given to a minor stage in the formation of the Triassic.
Tese two movements—of men and of nomenclature—have characterized the narrative of modern geological sciences as a West-to-the-Rest movement in which geological knowledge is distributed outwards and the story of the earth indexes imperial modes of expansion and exploitation. In this process, the adoption of modern geological sciences into various state and national cultures, and often the displacement of indigenous knowledges, became a sign of modernization (Bobbette 2018)—as noted widely in the literature about science and colonialism (Bonneuil 2000; Seth 2009). Tis has continued in twentieth century postcolonial contexts in which the bureaucratic and scientifc institutions of the geological surveys that played such crucial roles in the exploitation of the colonies were often left intact and their ofcials replaced with locals. Sukarno and Suharto era Indonesia stands out as one example because the republican state maintained its Netherlands East Indies colonial geological institutions and relationships with European geologists throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and these geologists would regularly return with the most up to date expertise and equipment. During this time, many of Indonesia’s leading earth scientists were trained in Europe (sometimes by Allègre himself) before returning to occupy top positions in the civil service. Enacting the most contemporary practices in the feld and laboratory lent credibility to states wanting to demonstrate techno-scientifc modernity—and similar dynamics are evident in Latin America and the Indian Subcontinent, for example (Chambers and Gillespie 2000; Rodriguez 2006). Tis circulation of geological knowledge has to be understood as the political lining in ideas of development and progress; and the dams, bridges, roadways, mines, and techniques of geological risk reduction (such as earthquake seismology and volcano science) articulate this state power in material form (Braun 2000; Bridge 2014; Donovan 2016; Lövbrand et al. 2009; Bobbette 2018).
What facilitates this politics is a principle that lies buried deep in the epistemology of geological science and practice: the “view from nowhere”. Modern geology has long sought the disembodied, non-cultural, objective projection of the geos. Mapping and measuring stands as one example. Alexander von Humboldt’s magnifcent cross section of Chimborazo in the Andes is seen as if the mountain is sliced in two, and like Suess’ portion of the Himalaya’s, we can take it all in at once (Fig. 1.4). Its fora are named, while the hours of walking, painstaking and careful hauling of instruments, cold, altitude sickness and the fatigue of Humboldt, Aimé Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar are erased. It was crucial to the modern scientists that their bodies, fragility, placedness, errors and wounds be erased so that the production of empirical knowledge could gain authority (Shapin and Schafer 1989; Shapin 2010). Tis radical transformation of a gruelling expedition to a view from nowhere was at the same time the production of the view from anywhere. Tis turn of events is important because it seemed to mean that anyone, anywhere could take up the project of modernist geological sciences as long as they were taught the appropriate methods, techniques and way of erasing themselves while universalizing. Tis was geology as a political
Fig. 1.4 Alexander von Humboldt’s cross section of Chimborazo in the Andes
project of efacing the scourge of subjectivity, the internal and the point of view: the human body in general (Oreskes 1999; Daston 2007; Coen 2013). As Rachael Tily’s chapter on the development of geomorphology at Oxford so admirably demonstrates, the view from nowhere is a somewhere, and scientists themselves understand their own histories in far more complex and specifc embodied narratives than is often conveyed in papers.
Te pervasiveness of the view from nowhere, even if it did not capture how geological knowledge was made, co-constituted that other highly modern notion, objectivity (Porter 1996). It is the dream of natural entities which lie outside of disagreement and dissensus, the realm of facts, of those kinds of things upon which, with the right and correct use of reason and technology, we can all agree (Fleck 1979 [German original, 1935]) (Latour 1999). In this story, to produce a fact is to produce an entity which is objective, beyond the situatedness and relativity of a point of view and the body. To be modern is to insist upon the purifcation of facts and views from nowhere (Latour 2013). Tis insistence is bound up with the idea that the task of modern geology is to penetrate into the murky world of the ground and synthesize the complexities of topography in order to return with an objective picture that we can all agree upon about the world beneath our feet. Tis purifcation of nature, the erasure of the body, the discovery of the universal in the production of facts is the conceptual architecture of modernist geology.
What then is amodern about political geology? It is the tactical intervention in this architecture of modern geological thought. It is neither pre- nor postmodern, but sits uncomfortably in relation to the modern because it both is and is not modern. It abandons the idea that there is a non-modern, primitive, or savage state that preceded the modern, or that the achievement of scientifc objectivity was the result of a longfought Enlightenment that lifted (select parts of) humanity out of the darkness and that because of this, time is characterized by a progressive betterment and upward lift of knowledge. As an axis which reorients our understanding of geological practices then, the amodern shifts the kinds of stories that can be told about geology and its knowledge. In place of these conventional modernist frameworks, the amodern pluralizes the world of geological practices and traditions. Instead of a difusionist
Bobbette and A. Donovan
West-to-the-Rest model of geological knowledge, political geology tells stories of the multiple traditions of geological thinking and of encounters between traditions of geological thought, because it is not only in the Western tradition that geological thought has been used to tell origin stories of the universe, the place of humans on earth, or what is beneath our feet. Tis is in all thought and is created as diferent geological worlds have been projected and other origin stories, conceptions of matter, time and bodies enacted (Ramaswamy 2017). Tis means pluralizing geological thought as a political project of resisting, transforming or escaping the Western tradition from within it—as is described by Angela Last in her paper. Political geology seeks to do this by beginning with an understanding that the formation of geological knowledge can be a cosmological project in a world of multiple cosmos-in-formation; it stresses the encounters and relationships between these diferent geological traditions, as Adam Bobbette, Angela Last and Amy Donovan do in their chapters. If the story is not such a simple one that geological knowledge travelled from the hills and clifs of Devon outwards to ensnare the rest of the globe, other stories need to be told that stress the encounters between these traditions, their fghts and trials, how they have hybridized, transformed each other or violently appropriated and suppressed one another. Amodernity supposes that geological knowledge is born, tested and practiced in a community of plural actors, views and traditions.
Te importance of hybridity to geological knowledge means explaining and understanding how, in circulating around the globe, geological knowledges encountered and suppressed other forms of geological knowledge. When Cook and his crew installed cosmological instruments to chart the transit of Venus in the Pacifc Islands, they instructed local Pacifc Islanders to treat the instruments as property. Tis meant instructing—and likely unleashing—as Simon Schafer has argued (2012), a new relationship to objects. In a similar vein, struggles continue to be waged in many indigenous communities over the use of geological knowledge (including its laboratories and instruments) to serve the goals of the extractive industries, viciously transforming geology into resources for human exploitation (Yang 2012). As Bobbette’s chapter demonstrates, on Mount Merapi in Java, shamans continue to practice animist metaphysics as a way to resist
the incursions of mining companies, predatory capitalists and modernist state scientifc experts. By insisting that landscapes and geology are living entities, they push back against the idea that nature is a dead resource to be churned up, processed and transformed into a commodity. Political geology zeros in on these encounters as the sites where violence and oppression operate under the guise of an ecumenical scientifc objectivity. It is important to stress too that these encounters are rarely unidirectional and that domination in the history of geological knowledge does not operate through a strict imposition of ideas and practices onto other people but instead, as Anna Tsing (2005) has shown of globalizing knowledge, emerges through the “frictions” of encounters between local and global, old and new, the powerful and subaltern. Mediation operates between cultures and in itself needs to be explained, as Schafer (2009) has ofered, by go-betweens: the people who do the translating, carrying and moving between friction-full encounters. Tis means including the people that Cook taught to use instruments, and giving full attention to those who take up, transform and creatively undermine the dissemination of knowledge.
In addition to considering the frictions within the movement of geological knowledge, political geology “takes seriously” non-Western traditions of geological thought and experience. Recent work in philosophical anthropology has oriented itself to indigenous thought not as a pre-modern refection of human thought, nor as a “world view” diferent from northern and/or western thought, but as a thought to be engaged with because its architecture can undo the presuppositions of Western geological thought. Te method of “controlled equivocation” developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2015) and Martin Holbraad (2012) is a strategic encounter with the thought of others in such a way that their epistemological axes are engaged to critique northern Western metaphysics. In other words, the categories and terms that structure other people’s thought have the capacity to dislodge “our” own categories and terms— such as animist traditions which do not recognize the distinction between geos and bios. Or, in the case of shamans on Mount Merapi, it is possible to “give” to a volcano and therefore also possible for a volcano to “receive” and “ingest” the objects given (Bobbette 2018; Schlehe 1996). One approach to this idea is to say that it is one shamanic “world view”
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this out of the same kind of skeleton as the lizard, with the one difference that he has no breastbone. Let us see how it has been brought about. The bones of his neck are jointed and free enough as you can see (Fig. 21), and so are the joints of his tail, beginning from behind his hip bones (h). But with his back it is different. The backbone can be clearly seen inside the empty shell, running from head to tail so as to cover the nerve-telegraph, but the joints (j) have all grown together, and on the top they have become flattened into hard plates,74 while the ribs (r) which are joined to them have also been flattened out and have grown firmly together so as to make an arched cover or carapace. If now you look at the back of the young tortoise (Fig. 22), which has been taken out of the egg before it was full-grown, you will see these plates (p) on the side where the tortoise-shell (ts) has been peeled off. They have not yet widened out enough to be joined together, and the ribs (r) are as yet only united by strong gristle. But what is that row of oblong plates (mp) round the edge? Those are the marginal plates, and they are mere skin bones, like the bony plates of the crocodile, but they are all firmly fixed together so as to bind the edges of the ribs, while plates of the same kind form the shell under the body, and the whole is covered by the horny skin.
Back of a Young Tortoise.—(From Rathke.)
ts, Tortoise-shell covering the whole carapace; this has been removed on the right side; mp, marginal plates binding the edges of the ribs; np, neck-plate; p, plates formed of the top of the backbone joints which have grown together; r, ribs which have not yet spread out so as to form a continuous shell; lm, lm′, front and hind leg muscles not yet covered by the carapace
But there still remains another great puzzle. How come the shoulder bones and hip bones of the tortoise to be inside his ribs instead of being outside them, as in other animals? But look again at our baby tortoise, and you will see that the muscles of his front legs (lm, Fig. 22) are not covered by ribs, neither are those of his hind legs (lm′). They stand just like those of other animals, in front between the ribs and the neck, and behind between the ribs and the tail. But as the tortoise grows up, the bony plates press forwards and backwards, and cover up the shoulders and hips, protecting the soft legs and neck, and
giving him the curious appearance of living inside his own backbone and ribs.
In this way, then, the tortoises have managed to hold their own in the world. Living slowly, so that they sometimes go on growing up to eighty years old, wanting but little food, and escaping the cold by sleeping the winter months away in some sheltered nook, they ask but little from Life, while they escape the dangers of sluggishness by growing their skeletons so as to form a citadel which even birds and beasts of prey can rarely break through. They are, it is true, often eaten when young, and the jaguar of Brazil knows how to dig the poor American tortoise out of his shell and eat him; while large birds are formidable enemies to our Greek tortoise, and are said to drop it down on the rocks, and break it to pieces. But, on the whole, they escape most of these dangers, and wander in the woods and dry sandy places of sunny Greece and Palestine, laying their bullet-shaped eggs in warm spots to hatch, seldom wandering far from home, and lying down for their winter’s sleep under heaps of drifted leaves or in holes of the ground.
These are true Land-tortoises,75 and so are the gigantic tortoises which used to live in the island of Aldabra, and others still surviving in the Galapagos and other islands near Madagascar, which weigh at least 200 pounds, and on whose backs Mr. Darwin rode when he found them travelling up the island to get water to drink, feeding on the juicy cactus as they went. Some carapaces in our museums belonging to these tortoises measure four feet long and three broad; yet they were timid fellows when alive, drawing back completely within their shells when danger was near. We even find some smaller landtortoises76 in America, called the Box-tortoises, which have soft joints in their under shell, so that they can draw it up both in front and behind, shutting themselves completely in.
Not so the River-tortoises,77 which are greedy animal-feeders, and as they live in the water do not need the same protection. Their box is much flatter and more open at the ends, so as to allow them to swim freely with their webbed feet; and they are fierce and bold, the Snapping Turtle78 of the lakes and rivers of America being a terrible
fellow, tearing the frogs and fishes in the water with his sharp claws, and even snapping strong sticks in half with his powerful beak. The Mud-tortoises, too, which swim swiftly with their strong legs and long neck outstretched, do not need a hard shell, and they have scarcely any plate below, and only a gristly leathery covering above, which looks very like the mud in which they hide.
Lastly the Sea-tortoises or Turtles, which swim in the warm parts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, have only an open flat shell under which they cannot draw their head and feet, for they strike out boldly into the open ocean, feeding on seaweed, jelly-fish, and cuttle-fish, rowing grandly along with their broad paddles which they feather like oars as they go. They have only one time of weakness—when they come on islands, such as Ascension and the Bahama Islands, which they choose probably because they find fewer large animals there. There the mother turtle arrives at night, looking fearfully around, and if all is still comes flapping in over the sand, and, clearing a hole with her flippers, lays about 200 soft round eggs and covers them up and leaves them. Then in about a month the young turtles come out and make at once for sea, though many of them fall victims to large birds of prey on their way. Woe, too, to the mother when she is laying her eggs, if these large birds are near, for she cannot defend her soft body; or, worse still, if the natives are on the look-out; for then the Green Turtle,79 coming ashore from the Atlantic, is tilted over on her back and killed for food; and the Hawk’s-bill Turtle80 from the Indian or Pacific Oceans is cruelly stripped of its shell for ornaments. Yet they must run these risks, for their eggs would not hatch without the warm sun, and we see how great is the gap between the last water-breathers and the first air-breathers, when we remember that the frogs go back to lay their eggs in the water, while the tortoises, even when they live far out at sea, are forced to come in to shore, in spite of great dangers, to lay their eggs that their little ones may begin life upon land.
Fig. 23.
Skeleton of a Lizard.
sp, Spinous processes, which in the tortoise are flattened into plates; r, ribs; s, shoulder bone; a, upper arm; e, elbow; fa, forearm; h, hip bone; th, thigh bone; k, knee; l, bones of the leg; q, quadrate bone between upper and lower jaw
And now, if we leave the tortoises and turn to the Lizards, we find them meeting life’s difficulties in quite a different way. Here are no sluggish movements, horny beaks, and strong boxes; but bright-eyed creatures covered with shining scales, their mouths filled with sharp teeth, with which even the small lizards can bite fiercely, and having nimble lissome bodies, which wriggle through the grass or up the trees in the twinkling of an eye. Yet the lizards, as we have seen, are formed on the same plan as the tortoise, and their scales are thickenings in their outer skin, just as his tortoise-shell is, and not true scales like those of fish. They have learned to hold their own by sharpness and quickness, and are probably the most intelligent of all the cold-blooded animals, though even they are only lively in a jerky way under the influence of warmth. They can breathe more easily than the tortoise, for their ribs rise and fall, drawing in and driving out the air they need; but they are still cold-blooded, for their heart has only three chambers. It is when the bright sun is shining that they love to dart about, chasing the insects upon which they feed; and the joints of their backbone move so easily upon each other that they can twist and turn in all imaginable ways, keeping their heads twisted in a most comical manner when on the watch for flies. Nay, the very vertebræ
themselves are so loosely made that they can split in half, and if you seize a lizard by the tail he will most likely leave it in your hand and grow another.
They can live both in dry sandy places, where larger animals cannot find food and water, and in thick underwood, and marshy unhealthy places, where more quickly-breathing animals would be poisoned by the fetid air; and we find them swarming in hot countries in spite of enemies, their scales protecting them from the rough surface of the rocks and trees on which they glide, their feeble legs scarcely ever lifting their body from the object on which they glide rather than walk.
Fig. 24.
Gecko and Chamæleon.
The true land-creepers, like our little Scaly Lizard,81 lurk in dry woody places, and on heaths and banks, darting out on the unwary insects. Many of them lay their eggs in the warm sand or earth, but the Scaly lizard carries them till they are ready to break, so that the young ones come out lively and active as the eggs are laid. Others have taken to the water, and among these are the Monitors of Africa and Australia, which feed on frogs and fish and crocodiles’ eggs, and are
so strong and fierce that they often drag larger animals under the water. Some are tree and wall climbers, such as the “Geckos,” with thick tongues and dull mottled skins, and they have sharp claws and suckers under their toes, so that they can hang or walk upside down, on ceilings or overhanging rocks, or on the smooth trunks of trees; and they love to chase the insects in the hot sultry nights, tracking them to their secret haunts. They are far more active than the large gentle Iguanas or Tree-Lizards of South America, from a few inches to five feet long, which may be seen among the branches of the trees of Mexico, their beautiful scales glistening in the sun as they feed on the flowers and fruit. They swarm on all sides in those rich forest regions, scampering over the ground, and then clinging with their claws to the tree-bark as they gradually mount up into the dense foliage; and they have many advantages, for not only can they climb to great heights out of the reach of beasts of prey, but they can also swim well, having been known to fling themselves from the overhanging branches into the water below when danger was near. They do not, moreover, descend as gracefully as the “Flying Lizards” of the East Indies, which have a fold of skin stretched from the lengthened ends of their hinder ribs, so that they sail from branch to branch as they chase the butterflies and other insects.
But the most curious of all tree-lizards is the Chamæleon, with his soft warty skin, his round skin-encircled eyes, his bird-like feet, and his clinging tail. He never hurries himself, but putting forward a leg, at the end of which is a foot whose claws are divided into two bundles, he very deliberately grasps the branch, as a parrot does, loosens his tail, draws himself forward, and then fastens on again with tail and claws; while his eyes, each peering out of a thick covering skin, roll round quite independently of each other, one looking steadily to the right, while the other may be making a journey to the left. What is he looking for? Just ahead of him on a twig sits a fly, but he cannot reach him yet. So once more a leg comes out, and his body is drawn gradually forwards. Snap! In a moment his mouth has opened, his tube-like tongue, with clubbed and sticky tip, has darted out and struck the fly, and carried it down his throat, while the chamæleon looks as if he had never moved. It is not difficult to imagine that such a slow-moving animal, whose natural colour is a brownish green like the leaves among which he moves, would often escape unseen from his enemies.
And when light falls upon him, his tint changes by the movement of the colour-cells in his skin, which seem to vary according to the colour of the objects around, whenever he is awake and can see them.
So by the waterside, on the land, and among the trees, the lizard tribe still flourish in spite of higher animals; and just as we found some legless kinds among the amphibia burrowing in the ground, so here, too, we find legless lizards, some with small scaly spikes in the place of hind legs, others, like the glass-snake of America82 and our English slowworm83 (or blindworm), which have no trace of feet outside the skin, but glide along under grass and leaves, eating slugs and other small creatures, though they are true lizards with shoulder bones and breastbones under the skin.
Here, then, we seem to be drifting along the road to snake-life, but we must halt and travel first in another direction, upwards to a higher group of animals, which may almost be called gigantic flesh-eating lizards, though they are far more formidable and highly-organised creatures. These are the Crocodiles, and no one looking at them can doubt for a moment that they at least are well armed, so as to have an easy time of it without much exertion. Huge creatures, often more than twenty feet long, with enormous heads and wide-opening mouths, holding more than thirty teeth in each jaw, they look formidable indeed as they drag their heavy bodies along the muddy banks of the Nile, their legs not being strong enough to lift them from the ground. Their whole body is covered with strong horny shields, and under these shields, on the back, are thick bony plates, which will turn even a bullet aside, and quite protect the crocodile from the fangs of wild beasts. Their eyelids are thick and strong, and they have a third skin which they can draw over the eye sideways like birds; their ears, too, have flaps to cover them, and their teeth are stronger and more perfect than any we have yet seen, for they are set in sockets, and new ones grow up inside the lower part of the old ones as they are broken or worn away
Fig. 25.
The Nile Crocodile.—(Tristram.)
But it is in the water that we see them in their full strength; there they swim with their webbed feet and strokes of their powerful tail, and feed upon the fishes and water animals—monarchs of all they survey. Nor is the crocodile content with mere fish-diet. Often he will lie with his nostrils just above the water and wait till some animal—it may be a goat, or a hog, or even a good-sized calf—comes to drink, then he will come up slowly towards it, seize it in his formidable jaws, or sometimes strike it with his powerful tail, and drag it under water to drown. For he himself can shut down his eyelids and the flaps over his ears, and he has a valve in the back of his throat which he can close, and prevent the water rushing down his open mouth; and after a while he rises slowly till his nostrils are just above the water, and he can breathe freely while his victim is drowning, because his nose-holes are very far back behind the valve. Then when it is dead he brings it to shore to tear it to pieces and eat it.
Thus the crocodiles of the Nile and the Ganges, the Gavials with their long narrow snouts, and the Alligators of America, with their shorter and broader heads, feed on fish and beasts, and all dead and putrid matter, acting as scavengers of the rivers; while they themselves are almost free from attack, except when tigers fall upon them on land. But it is the young crocodiles which run the most risks when they come out of the small chalky eggs which have been hatched in the warm sand of the shore. True, their mother often watches over them at this time, and even feeds them from her own mouth; but in spite of her care many of them are eaten in their youth by the tortoises and fishes which they would themselves have devoured by-and-by, if they had lived to grow up; while the monitors, ichneumons, waterfowl, and even monkeys, devour large numbers of crocodiles’ eggs.
And now, if we were to turn our backs upon the great rivers in which these animals dwell, and wander into the Indian jungle or the South American forest, we might meet with enemies far more dangerous and deadly, although they stand much lower in the reptile world. Who would think that the huge boa of South America, and the python and poisonous cobra of India, or even our own little viper, whose bite is often death to its victim, are creatures of lower structure than the harmless little lizard or the stupid alligator? Yet so it is. For Snakes have no breastbone and have lost all vestiges of front legs and shoulder bones, nor have they any hips or hind legs except among the boas and rock-snakes; and even these have only small traces of hips, which carry some crooked bones, ending in horny or fleshy claws, in the place where hind legs ought to be. They have no eyelids (and by this we may know them from the legless lizards), but their skin grows right over the eyes, so that when a snake casts its skin there are no holes where the eyes have been, but only clear round spaces like watch-glasses, in the scaly skin. Their ears have no drum, and are quite hidden under the scales with which their body is so thickly covered that they must feel very little as they glide along. These scales, like those of the lizard, are thickened parts of the outer skin, and if you stretch a piece of snake-skin you can see them lying embedded in it, the clear skin itself showing between.
Fig. 26.
Skeleton of a Snake.
sp, Spinous processes of the joints; r, ribs; q, quadrate bones, joining upper and lower jaws; e, front of the lower jaw, where there is an elastic band in the place of bone; b, ball end of joint, facing the tail; c, cup end of joint, facing the head
We must not, however, imagine that the snake is at a disadvantage because he has lost so many parts which other reptiles possess. On the contrary, he has most probably lost them because he can do better without them. The transparent tough skin over his eye is a far better protection in narrow rugged places, and among brakes and brambles, than a soft movable eyelid; and if he does not see as well as the crocodile, he has a most delicate organ of touch in his long, narrow, forked tongue, with which he is constantly feeling as he goes, touching now on one side, now on the other, each object he comes near, and drawing the tongue in at every moment to moisten it in a sheath at the back of his throat. A breast bone, moreover, would have been a decided hindrance to him, for he wants the free use of all his ribs; and as to the loss of his legs—in the place of four he has often more than two hundred. For all along his backbone, except just at the head and tail, a pair of ribs grow from each vertebra, being joined to it by a cup-
and-ball joint (c and b, Fig. 26), and the muscles between them are so elastic that the ribs can be drawn out so that the body seems to swell, and then drawn back towards the tail. In doing this they strike the ground and the snake moves forwards, just as a centipede does on its hundred legs.
It is worth while to take our harmless Ringed Snake in your hand to feel this curious movement to and fro of the ribs, and to notice how the creature forces itself through your grasp. Moreover, you will learn at the same time one use of the broad single plates under the snake’s body (see Fig. 27), for they, like all the scales, are loose from the skin on the side towards the tail; and as they are fastened by muscles to the ends of the ribs, you will find that at each movement they stand up a little like tiles on a roof, and their edges coming against your hand help to drive the snake forward.
Another thing you will learn if the snake does not know you, and that is how strangely they hiss, often with their mouth closed, while their whole body seems to quiver. This is very puzzling at first, till you learn that one of their lungs has shrunk up, and the other is a very long and narrow bag stretching nearly the whole length of the snake’s stomach, and the hissing sound is made by drawing in and forcing out the air from this long bag.
Common Ringed Snake.84
Where the body is coiled the single under plates are seen.
Meanwhile, another way in which the snake will escape from your hold unless you grasp it tightly, is by wriggling in all directions, so that you do not know where to expect it next; for the whole of the joints of its backbone are joined by a succession of cups-and-balls, the ball of one joint fitting into the cup in the one behind it. It is easy to see how such joints can move almost every way, since the ball can twist freely in the cup wherever the muscles pull it (except where checked by the spines on the top of the backbone), and can even turn so much to one side that the snake can coil itself round or tie itself into a knot.
A creature that can glide along so smoothly, twist about so freely round trees, through narrow openings and tangled brushwood, and even swim in the water, has no small advantage in life; and the snake can also coil itself up under a heap of dead leaves or in a hollow trunk of a tree for safety, or to watch for its prey when no animal would
suspect it was near. But even the harmless snakes have something besides this, namely, the power of swallowing animals much broader and thicker than themselves. You will see on looking at the lizard’s skull (p. 103) that its bottom jaw is not joined at once to the top one, but there is a bone (q) between, which enables it to open its mouth wider than if the two jaws touched each other. Now this bone (q) in the snake’s jaw is so loosely hung that it moves very easily, and the lower jaw also stretches back far behind the upper one, so that when the snake brings the jaw forward it can open its mouth enormously wide. Nor is this all; it can actually stretch the bones of its jaws apart, for they have not their pieces all firmly fixed together. In the front of the mouth each jaw has elastic gristle in the place of bone, and the two halves of the jaw can thus be forced apart from each other, making room for a very large mouthful indeed.
Fig. 28.
The Boa Constrictor in the Forests of South America.
Now the snake’s teeth are all curved towards the back of his mouth, and they are never used for chewing or tearing, but only for holding and packing down its food. So when he seizes a creature too large to be easily swallowed, he fastens his front teeth into it and then brings forward one side of his jaws. He then fixes the teeth of this side
into the animal, and holds it fast while he brings forward the jaws on the other side, fixes these teeth, then loosens and brings forward the others, and so on. In this way he keeps his mouth stretched over the prey and gradually forces it down his elastic throat, moistening it well all the time with slime from two glands, one on each side of his mouth, and when it is swallowed he lies down and rests while the stomach digests its heavy load.
We see, then, that even harmless snakes have many advantages. Thus our ringed snake, feeding on mice and lizards, frogs and fish, wanders through the grass and bushes of warm sunny banks, feeling this side and that with his delicate forked tongue, and gliding so fast that the lizards and mice try in vain to escape; while in the water he seizes the frogs by their hind legs and jerks them into his mouth. He does not even always stop to kill his food, for a live frog has been known to jump out of a snake’s mouth as it yawned after its meal. So he lives through the summer, changing his skin several times by loosening it first at the lips, so that two flaps lie back over the head and neck, and then rubbing himself through moss, bush, or bramble, so that the skin is drawn off inside out like a glove, and the new skin appears underneath, fresh, hard, and bright, ready for use Then in the warm season the mother lays her ten or twenty soft eggs in a mass of slime, and leaves them in some sunny spot, or under a heap of warm manure to hatch, and she herself wanders away, and when winter comes coils herself up in the trunk of some hollow tree, or under the hedge, to sleep till spring comes round again. Life does not always, however, flow so smoothly as this, for the snakes have their enemies; the fox and the hedgehog love to feed upon them, the buzzard and other birds of prey swoop down upon them from above, and the weasels attack them below; and this, perhaps, is partly the reason why the ringed snake generally keeps near the water, into which it can glide when danger threatens.
All snakes are not, however, so harmless as our little ringed snake. The Pythons of India and the Boas of America, though they have no poison in their teeth, can work terrible mischief with their powerful joints as they coil round even good-sized animals, such as an antelope or a wild boar, and crush them in their folds. Then it may be seen what a terrible weapon this flexible backbone is, as the muscles draw it
tighter and tighter round the unfortunate animal, breaking its bones in pieces, till, when it is soft enough to be swallowed, the snake gradually forces it down its capacious mouth, moistening it with saliva as it goes. These large boas and pythons would, in fact, probably devastate whole countries if it were not that when they are young they are devoured by other animals, so that very few live to grow into dangerous marauders.
Other snakes have taken a still more terrible way of killing their prey. There may be some chance of escape from a coiling snake, unless he already holds you with his teeth, but the poisonous Cobra85 may strike before you know that you have startled him, and though the Rattlesnake86 makes a sharp noise as he shakes the loose horny plates to call his mate or to alarm an enemy, yet when he means to strike his prey it is too late when the sound is heard to get out of reach of his fatal fangs. From the snake’s point of view, however, it is clearly an advantage to be able with one single stroke to paralyse its prey, so that it has only to wait for the poison to do its work, and then its meal is ready. Even our little viper (see p. 121), needs only to strike a mouse once, and then draws back as the poor victim springs up and falls and dies, soon to be packed down its destroyer’s throat.
Fig. 29.
The Cobra di Capello.87—(From Gosse.)
The mouth being closed, the poison fangs cannot be seen. The tongue is perfectly harmless.
Yet this terrible poison, which acts so speedily, is no special gift to the snake. It has only lately been discovered by M. Gautier that we, and probably all animals, have in our saliva some of the very poison with which the cobra kills its prey, only with us it is extremely diluted, and is useful in digesting our food. The cobra, however, has the poison, which no doubt exists in the slimy saliva of all snakes, specially concentrated and collected in two glands, one on each side of its jaw. From each of these glands (g) a small canal passes under the eye to the edge of the jaw (c), and opens immediately above a large curved fang (f). This fang is fastened to a bone in the cheek which moves easily, so that the poison teeth can be shut back and lie close against the gum when they are not wanted, and when they are wanted can be brought quickly down again. Though the fang looks round like ordinary teeth, it is really flattened out like a knife-blade, and then the edges are curved forwards so as to form a groove or, in some snakes, a closed tube, down which the poison can run to the point.
of a Rattlesnake.
ff Poison fangs; g, gland secreting poison; c, canal leading from gland to base of fang; t, harmless tongue; s, saliva glands.
Now when the snake wishes to strike its prey it raises its head, brings down the fangs and drives them into the creature’s flesh, and at the same time certain muscles press upon the poison gland, so that the liquid poison is forced into the wounds. If, however, the fang was fixed to the canal, the snake’s weapon would be gone if the point were broken, so we find that the canal-opening lies just above the tube of the tooth, and behind are six small reserve teeth, covered by a tender sheath skin, ready to grow up and take its place when wanted.
Should we not think that with such weapons as these the poisonous snakes would conquer every enemy? Yet they, too, only have their fair chance of life, for besides the destruction of their eggs other dangers await them. The rapacious birds, with their feathery covering, their horny and scale-covered legs and feet, and their hard beaks, will offer battle even to a poisonous snake. The buzzard makes short work of our common viper or adder, whose fangs, though fatal to small animals, are not nearly so powerful as those of snakes of hot countries. Seizing the viper with his claws in the middle of its body, the buzzard takes no notice of its frantic struggles as, winding itself about
Jaw
