Intensification
October 2025
Notes
1
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. Also see my elaboration of abjection in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 71.
2
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 26.
3
Rosalind Fredericks and Sarita West, dir., The Waste Commons (Alchemy Films, 2025).
4
Fredericks and West, The Waste Commons.
5
Fredericks and West, The Waste Commons.
6
Fredericks and West, The Waste Commons.
7
I am indebted to Tamsin Mather, Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves (Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2024).
9
Richard Panek, “ART; ‘The Scream,’ East of Krakatoa,” The New York Times, February 8, 2004, ➝.
10
Panek, “ART; ‘The Scream’.”
11
Kevin Hamilton, “How a Volcano and Flaming Red Sunsets Led an Amateur Scientist in Hawaii to Discover Jet Streams,” The Conversation (blog), August 16, 2021, ➝.
12
Stewart Brand, “Introduction,” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3.
13
Davide Castelvecchi, “Rampant Groundwater Pumping Has Changed the Tilt of Earth’s Axis,” Nature Magazine (blog), June 19, 2023, ➝.
14
See Jeremy Rifkin, Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe (Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2024); Peter Gleick, The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future (New York: Public Affairs, 2023); Tim Lenton, Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
15
Fagradalsfjall’s eruption in 2021 was the volcano’s first since it entered a period of dormancy roughly 6,000 years ago; the event also was the first eruptive event on the Reykjanes Peninsula in about 800 years. John P. Rafferty, “Fagradalsfjall Volcano,” Encyclopedia Britannica, April 11, 2025, ➝.
16
See Adriana Petryna, Horizon Work at the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 79.
17
For a more expansive discussion of fetishism, see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 181–203.
18
T. J. Jovanelly, “A Geologist’s Guide to Exploring and Understanding Iceland,” EOS (blog), November 5, 2020, ➝.
19
“Volcanoes in Iceland: Names, Facts, and Features,” Iceland.org (blog), accessed June 19, 2025, ➝.
20
Hannah Osborne, “‘Time’s Finally up’: Impending Iceland Eruption Is Part of Centuries-Long Volcanic Pulse,” Live Science (blog), November 14, 2023, ➝.
21
Akshat Rathi, “Indonesia’s Samalas Volcano May Have Kickstarted the Little Ice Age,” The Conversation (blog), September 30, 2013, ➝.
22
Brian Fagen, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 123–27. Also Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000, trans. Barbara Bray (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 173.
23
Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 10–11, 32–33, 220–23. In the 19th century in Iceland, the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur, where I was staying, was confronted with a glacier threatening to swallow the town. The pastor gave an impassioned sermon to the glacier, his eloquence famously stopping the glacier at the edge of the village.
24
See Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Planting Sweetgrass,” in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 13–66.
25
Tim Ingold, “Epilogue: Towards a Politics of Dwelling,” Conservation & Society 3, no. 2 (December 2005): 501–8.
26
Kerri Ni Dochartaigh, Thin Places (London: Canongate, 2021), 52–54. Also, Laura Béres, “A Thin Place: Narratives of Space and Place, Celtic Spirituality and Meaning,” Journal of Religion & Spirituality In Social Work: Social Thought 31, no. 4 (2012): 394–413.
27
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), 389–400.
28
Daniel Grossman, “Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong,” Nautilus (blog), February 9, 2016, ➝.
29
Carol Rasmussen, “GRACE-FO: Cracking a Cold Case,” NASA: Jet Propulsion Laboratory: California Institute of Technology (blog), May 2, 2018, ➝.
30
The loss of southern Louisiana poses a lethal threat that will send shock waves through the US, and much of the world besides. As Tor Törnqvist, a scientist at Louisiana State University warns “the tipping point has already happened… There is basically no real way back anymore.” Törnqvist quoted in Mark Schleifstein, “We’re Screwed’: The Only Question Is How Quickly Louisiana Wetlands Will Vanish, Study Says,” NOLA.com (blog), May 22, 2020, ➝.
31
Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 47.
32
John White, Professor at LSU says of Louisiana: “We are ahead in time if you want to think of it that way. What happens here is going to happen everywhere else unless we do something.” White quoted in Josh Archote, “Sinking Louisiana: Is It Too Late to Save Louisiana’s Coast? LSU Professors, Researchers Weigh In,” Reveille (blog), November 18, 2020, ➝.
33
Luigi Jorio, “Why Iceland Is Becoming a Glacier Graveyard,” Swissinfo (blog), May 25, 2025, ➝; “Vatnajökull ice cap,” Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður, n.d., ➝.
34
Mike McRae, “For The First Time Ever, Scientists Discover Fractal Patterns in a Quantum Material,” Science Alert (blog), October 18, 2019, ➝.
35
For an expanded discussion of the importance of melting ice, see McClintock, “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice,” e-flux Architecture, June 2020, ➝.
36
Jon Gertner, The Ice at the End of the World (New York: Random House, 2019), xiv.
37
Mariana Gosnell, Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (New York: Knopf, 2006), 473.
38
Andri Snær Magnason, On Time and Water, trans. Lytton Smith (Rochester NY: Open Letter, 2019), 7.
39
Douglas Keay, “Aids, Education, and the Year 2000: Margaret Thatcher Speaks Out,” Woman’s Own, October 31, 1987, 8–10.
40
Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” The New York Times, June 24, 1988, sec. A.
41
Marianne Nicolson, “Biography,” Marianne Nicolson (blog), n.d., ➝.
42
Personal conversation after Nicholson’s talk at Princeton University on October 7, 2022. Marianne Nicolson, “Artist Conversation: Marianne Nicolson” (Princeton University, October 7, 2022), ➝.
43
Seamus Heaney, “Postscript,” in The Spirit Level (New York: Faber and Faber, 1996), 70.
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