Criminal Anthroposcenes: Media and Crime in the Vanishing Arctic [1st ed.] 9783030460037, 9783030460044

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 1-22
Criminal Anthroposcenes: Why Scenes Matter and the Matter of Scenes (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 23-49
Establishing Shots: Detecting Anthropogenic Fog in Modern Crime Scene Photography (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 51-105
#Sickbear: Photographing Polar Bears as Ideal Nonhuman Victims (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 107-143
Dark Tourism in Iceberg Alley: The Hidden Ecological Costs of Consuming Iceberg Deaths (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 145-187
Passenger Security and Spacetime: Touring the Northwest Passage in the Wake of Colonialism and Climate Change (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 189-241
Conclusion (Anita Lam, Matthew Tegelberg)....Pages 243-252
Back Matter ....Pages 253-260

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Criminal Anthroposcenes Media and Crime in the Vanishing Arctic Anita Lam with Matthew Tegelberg

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors Michelle Brown Department of Sociology University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN, USA Eamonn Carrabine Department of Sociology University of Essex Colchester, UK

This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of global media networks is now unparalleled. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and criminology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture nexus. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15057

Anita Lam • Matthew Tegelberg

Criminal Anthroposcenes Media and Crime in the Vanishing Arctic

Anita Lam Department of Social Science York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Matthew Tegelberg Department of Social Science York University Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-46003-7    ISBN 978-3-030-46004-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Credit: DeShaun Craddock/Anita Lam This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated in memory of Anita’s father, Raymond Kwan Yam Lam.

Acknowledgements

In addition to colleagues, both past and present, who have mentored us, we would like to thank MEVA Analytics and Nick Buchny for their assistance in building our AI detective. We were also encouraged to pursue this project because of the enthusiasm of our students, including Carly Downs (our wonderful research assistant) and students who participated in the fourth-year criminology seminar (Crime Scenes in the Age of the Anthropocene) at York University. We are grateful to Michelle Brown, Eamonn Carrabine, Josie Taylor, Liam Inscoe-Jones and the production team at Palgrave for their thoughtful support. Anita is especially thankful for her mother whose patience and unwavering belief grounded her during the writing of this book. (Credit for the book cover: Created by Anita Lam, with permission from DeShaun Craddock to remix his beautiful photograph, ‘Leave the Light On.’)

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Criminal Anthroposcenes: Why Scenes Matter and the Matter of Scenes 23 3 Establishing Shots: Detecting Anthropogenic Fog in Modern Crime Scene Photography 51 4 #Sickbear: Photographing Polar Bears as Ideal Nonhuman Victims107 5 Dark Tourism in Iceberg Alley: The Hidden Ecological Costs of Consuming Iceberg Deaths145 6 Passenger Security and Spacetime: Touring the Northwest Passage in the Wake of Colonialism and Climate Change189 7 Conclusion243 Index253 ix

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1

Bounding boxes, object masks and probabilities are automatically generated on top of Weegee’s photograph, entitled ‘Murder on the roof.’ (For Weegee’s original photograph, entitled ‘Murder on the Roof ’ (13 August 1941), see https://www.icp.org/ browse/archive/objects/murder-on-the-roof (accessed 7 January 2020).) 64 Mean brightness versus standard deviation for the entire sample of crime scene photographs 81 Change in mean brightness over time, with crime scene photographs from New York City highlighted in red 82 Comparison of three composite histograms 84 Mean brightness versus standard deviation for the entire sample of Instagram images on International Polar Bear Day 123 Dominant colours and colour palettes for the three visual narratives that dominated Instagram images posted on International Polar Bear Day 126 Iceberg sighting at Grates Cove on June 7, 2019, as indicated by Iceberg Finder 158

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Breakdown of crime scene photographs in the sample by place and time period 70 Table 4.1 Total number of manually scraped Instagram images by date, hashtag and volume (2013–2019) 116 Table 4.2 Image rankings by Instagram feed and for the whole sample 127 Table 5.1 Estimated carbon footprint for air travel to and from St. John’s, Newfoundland 162

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1 Introduction Anita Lam and Matthew Tegelberg

Behind thick steel bars, Inmate #20201 slowly paces the 20-foot by 16-foot cell. With his surprisingly lean, white body, the older inmate occupies one of the 28 cells in a jail2 located on the western banks of the Hudson Bay in northern Canada. Imprisoned for the past 30 days, he has only been fed water, so that his gnawing pangs of hunger will serve as a powerful deterrent to any poor behavioural choices in the future. His release date has yet to be determined because his pattern of recidivism has marked him as higher risk than the other inmates in this small jail. To prepare for his release, state agents will forcibly relocate him to a remote area of the Arctic. Upon release, he will be constantly monitored. As a material reminder of his imprisonment, his ear will be tagged with a radio and his inner lip tattooed, both of which will aid in identifying, tracking and surveilling him in the future. As he awaits his release from what some have called the first, largest and most innovative jail of its kind in the world, let us consider Inmate #2020’s crime. With his dark eyes, strong jaw and deadpan expression, Inmate #2020 has been described by both bystanders and officials as an unassumingly quiet, but cunning predator; indeed, the upper half of his face is as calm as the lower half is violent.3 Prowling the small town of Churchill, Manitoba, he has been repeatedly apprehended for trespassing and dumpster diving. Scrounging amidst the scraps of waste left in garbage heaps, Inmate #2020 searches for food in order to survive. Caught at gunpoint after patrol officers were alerted to his presence by a hospital worker’s blood-curdling scream, #2020 was thrown in © The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_1

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jail on Halloween night for aggressively breaking into the local hospital out of hunger. His presence, and the presence of others like him, have been a constant source of fear for the town’s residents, many of whom will not go out at night, or will refuse to go out alone in the dark. Operating seven days a week and 365 days a year, a 24-hour telephone hotline4 has been set up for residents to proactively report their sightings of these dangerous trespassers. Since the beginning of the year, the hotline has received reports of 226 sightings, including 28 during the week of Halloween. As a result of these reports, Inmate #2020 became one of five new inmates in the jail that week.

Laden with familiar tropes from both factual and fictional crime writing, the story of Inmate #2020 directs our attention to two interrelated scenes: the crime scene and the scene of punishment, where the latter orients us to investigate the former.5 Yet our close attention to this specific crime scene, or others like it, can blind us—no matter how carefully we comb the area for visible clues—to one of the most important root causes for #2020’s repeat offending. In this case, it is not enough to arm ourselves with a range of criminological theories to explain why #2020 commits crime, precisely because these theories—whether they include examinations of his psychology, socioeconomic class, age and sex, or discuss the city and culture in which his crimes took place—have been developed to account for crimes with human perpetrators. First and foremost, Inmate #2020 is not human. He is a polar bear who is doing time in the polar bear jail situated in Churchill, a town that has proclaimed itself to be ‘the polar bear capital’ of the world. In Churchill, the human inhabitants have (re)structured their interactions with polar bears along the lines of a rudimentary criminal justice system, one built on the principle of deterrence and the spirit of conservation. Indeed, the process of imprisoning ‘bad’ polar bears has been framed as a conservation effort that represents a marked improvement over meting out death sentences to recidivistic bears. However, the criminal justice analogy at the heart of this initiative assumes that there is a time-bound, body-bound criminal event—that is, a harmful incident that not only occurs at a specific time and place, but is also committed by a perpetrator who takes on a single bodily form. When we focus on the visible spectacles of a polar bear’s hungry violence in terms of a ‘criminal’ event, we consider human encounters with

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a polar bear as blood-pounding, adrenaline-pumping incidents, so viscerally formed that these scenes are permeated with immediacy, urgency and human fear. We attend to the steady ringing of the 24-hour BEAR hotline in Churchill and become concerned about overcrowding at the polar bear jail (Pereira 2016). In these sensational, emotionally saturated representations of human encounters with nonhumans, however, we fail to notice what Rob Nixon has called ‘slow violence.’ According to Nixon (2011: 2), slow violence is a relatively invisible ‘violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ To see slow violence, in this case, requires a recognition that Inmate #2020 is reacting to the delayed and nonlinear effects of anthropogenic climate change in the Arctic. Relatedly, it requires an acknowledgement that #2020 is, in fact, a victim of humaninduced environmental degradation as much as he is a nonhuman perpetrator of various kinds of petty and violent ‘crimes’ against human victims. In instances, such as this, victims can transform into perpetrators out of necessity, and perpetrators can themselves be victims in the staggered thawing of Arctic sea ice that has long been in the making. If we are going to investigate why polar bear alert systems are increasingly activated in northern towns and villages, where there have been unprecedented losses in Arctic sea-ice (ADS 2019; Labe 2019; Richter-Menge et al. 2016), then we should consider how these calls double as warning signs of slow violence’s effects. Losses in sea-ice have restricted the polar bears’ capacity to hunt seals, their primary food source, and compelled them to travel on land during hunting season in search of non-traditional sources of food, such as human garbage. Increases in the number of human-polar bear encounters (see Dickie 2018) have been cause for declaring a state of emergency—as in the Russian town Belushya Guba in February 20196—leading a terrorized public to call for help. But what might those calls mean? Provocatively expressed by Frances Ferguson (2013: 33), the phone is ringing off the hook and panic is sinking in because ‘the sudden, sharp consciousness of [climate] change [has come] upon us like the ominous tones of an intruder bent on murder when the babysitter picks up the telephone receiver in a horror film: “I’m in the house.”’ Rather than look

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outside for strangers in bear form, danger is already in the house. Our house is now on the verge of collapse, having slowly deteriorated over time without much notice. In this metaphor, the house, our shared residence, is Earth, and it has been fraying at the edges with devastating implications. Drawing on climate forecasts made as early as 1988, James Lovelock (2007) describes how the ‘unfreezing’ of Greenland and the Arctic basin alone would produce a range of cascading effects that could dramatically transform ecosystems and human civilizations around the globe. Such unfreezing has been a consequence of global warming. Because the record-breaking heat over the past decade has not been uniformly distributed, man-made global warming has been particularly pronounced and intense in the Arctic (Mooney 2016; NASA n.d.). As the northern polar region is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the Earth (Borenstein 2017), its ice has been rapidly melting in unprecedented ways. In summer 2018, ‘the last ice area’ off the north coast of Greenland— assumed to be the final northern holdout against global warming because it is the Arctic’s oldest, strongest and thickest sea ice—has thawed enough to break up and open waters that are normally frozen (Watts 2018). Across the Arctic, a warmer climate has brought about the shrinking of major glaciers (e.g., CCCR 2019), the melting of permafrost, and the thinning of sea ice. These dramatic changes, in turn, have a series of projected knock-on effects that will irrevocably alter the rest of the planet, such as the global rise in sea levels, significant release of greenhouse gases, increased ocean acidification, and significant habitat and species loss (Carbon Brief 2011). In the twenty-first century, then, the Arctic increasingly matters (e.g., Hansson and Ryall 2017), becoming a lens through which to view the world (Emerson 2010: xvi). The Arctic landscape, as humans have come to know it over the course of millennia, is vanishing due to anthropogenic climate change, bringing to the foreground climate scenes that feature nonhuman victims, such as polar bears, calving glaciers and melting icebergs, as well as an increasing number of human tourists seeking to see these nonhumans before they vanish. This book investigates the ways in which these climate scenes intersect with our imagination of crime scenes, especially as overlapping forms of slow and spectacular violence play out in images, environments and mediascapes in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Defining the Anthropocene Combining anthropos, the Greek word for human, with -cene, a suffix from the Greek kainos for new, the term ‘Anthropocene’ was first coined by Eugene Stoermer in the 1970s and later popularized by Paul Crutzen in a short article for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). For these authors, the Anthropocene refers to a new epoch in the Earth’s long geological history, in which humans have become a major geological and environmental force. They identify anthropogenic climate change as critical evidence of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen et al. 2007), and only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it comes to profound and ongoing human-driven geophysical alterations to the natural world (Steffen et al. 2011: 842). Highlighting the massive scale of human alteration, climate change ‘has brought into sharp focus the capability of contemporary human civilization to influence the environment at the scale of the Earth as a single, evolving planetary system’ (Steffen et al. 2011: 842). Because Earth scientists remain divided on whether or not the Anthropocene is indeed a new geological epoch—particularly one that follows the more stable planetary conditions of the Holocene—the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 to produce the necessary scientific evidence to support a formal recognition of the Anthropocene within the geological time scale (Zalasiewicz 2009). While members of the AWG acknowledge the difficulty in delineating an official start date for the Anthropocene, many identify the latter half of the nineteenth century as the first stage of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen et al. 2007, 2011; Zalasiewicz et al. 2019). It was during the Industrial Revolution that the human footprint first became traceable on the geological record, as ‘growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane’ became trapped in glacial ice core samples (Crutzen 2002: 23). Through the concept of the Anthropocene, Earth scientists and interdisciplinary scholars have started wider conversations—or what Lorimer (2017) calls Anthropo-scenes—about the relations between humans and the natural world, raising new questions in public and political discourses,

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philosophical discussions of ontology and epistemology, and in popular imaginaries (Meyer 2018; see also Hamilton et al. 2015). Situated at the intersection of academic, public and political discourses, criminology has begun to engage with the Anthropocene (e.g., Holley and Shearing 2017; Shearing 2015; 2017 Special Issue of Crime, Law and Social Change; White 2018). Calling for a reconfiguration of criminology for the twenty-first century, these engagements seek to cultivate new criminological imaginations that take into consideration things that have often been left out of frame. For example, Holley and Shearing (2017) argue that the Anthropocene presents an opportunity for criminologists to consider broader landscapes of harm across Earth systems. In paying greater attention to global environmental harms and crimes, criminology’s study of the Anthropocene can take cues from the research trajectories of green criminology. As a perspective (South 1998), green criminology unifies the study of environmentally related harms and crimes within the field of criminology (e.g., Bisschop 2015; Brisman 2014; Lynch and Stretsky 2014; Spapens et al. 2016). Premised on a desire to defend the environment, green criminologists seek to uphold the rights, safety and security of both humans and nonhuman species and, in doing so, expand the ‘criminological imagination’ by reconciling the natural and social worlds (Natali 2013: 78). By expanding victimhood to nonhumans (e.g., Ruggiero and South 2013; White 2018), they argue for a more ‘connected criminology’ that examines causation and moral responsibility as complex interconnections between humans, nonhumans and environments (e.g., Marks et al. 2017). How to think about the interconnectedness of humans and nonhumans–or what Holley and Shearing (2017) call human-to-thing and thing-to-human relationships—becomes one avenue for doing criminology in the Anthropocene. Yet in this era of global interconnectedness, visual representations of environmental crimes and harms play a role in (re)framing the criminological imagination, so that doing criminology in the Anthropocene requires an attentiveness to the ways of seeing and unseeing that have enabled environmental degradation to occur as business as usual. This book, then, offers another avenue for engaging with the Anthropocene via green-cultural and visual criminologies. While green-cultural criminology endeavours to examine media depictions of ‘nature’ as well as

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images of environmental harms, threats and crimes (Brisman and South 2013, 2014), visual criminology ‘seeks a more theoretically and methodologically informed understanding of images,’ particularly in relation to regimes of control and power (Brown and Carrabine 2017: 1; see also, e.g., Carrabine 2012; Ferrell et  al. 2008; Hayward and Presdee 2010; Rafter 2014; Rafter and Brown 2011; Young 2005). Both approaches assume that mediated images of violence are caught up in the messy web of emotions, meanings, ethics, spectacles and consumption patterns. Both proceed with an understanding that representations constitute, as much as reflect, realities and practices. The dominant practices of seeing the world are inscribed in the construction and reproduction of particular representations of environmental harm, so that seeing depends upon the work of unseeing or anaestheticization. To see is also to not see; to make visible depends upon a singular focus that simultaneously disappears certain humans, nonhumans and harms from view. Built on the insights of green-cultural and visual criminologies, this book introduces the concept of criminal anthroposcene to examine the entangled ways in which humans, nonhumans, environments and media representations come together in the age of the Anthropocene.

Criminal Anthroposcenes To study the complex interconnections formed in the Anthropocene, we introduce the concept of criminal anthroposcene. In developing this concept, we aim to bridge the Anthropo-scenes of interdisciplinary knowledge production (Lorimer 2017), by bringing criminology into conversation with climate change research, and work done in the environmental humanities. For us, the concept is anchored by a recognition that there is a reciprocal or entangled relationship between crime scenes— the traditional province of criminology and criminalistics—and climate scenes in the age of the Anthropocene. By crime scenes we refer to those imaged by police departments and photojournalists, as well as imagined by the general public since the late nineteenth century in the West. By climate scenes, we refer to scenes of human-induced climate change in which traces of human crime are not immediately visible in the

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foreground, but nonetheless may loom as a suspicious spectre in the background. While the crime scene has served as an engaging, visceral hook in media representations of spectacular violence, it is drawn on top of other invisible forms of slow violence that characterize the harmful happenings of the Anthropocene, which, in turn, can gradually morph into the suspicion of criminal activities or wrongdoings. To highlight the relationship between spectacular and slow violence, we deploy criminal anthroposcenes in this book to explore the interplay between traditional crime scenes and climate scenes in the following two interrelated ways.

 eeing the Anthropocene in the Crime Scene, Seeing S Crime Scenes as Climate Scenes To visualize the Anthropocene that has been part and parcel of the crime scene since the use of forensic photography in the Industrial Age, we recover images of human-induced climate phenomena within mediated representations of crime. In taking this backward-looking approach, we mimic the temporal stance of a blindfolded Justice, in which we judge past visual records by the patterns set by precedents in the history of crime scene photography and Hollywood filmmaking. In so doing, we reconsider what crime scenes have always included, salvaging the climatic nonhumans that have always been in frame but ignored as visual fog. To bring anthropogenic slow violence to the foreground, we move away from considering a scene in the sense of the classical Latin meaning of scēna—that is, as simply natural scenery in the background of human action. Natural scenes, then, are not just ornamental or decorative stages upon which humans trod. While Erving Goffman (1959) echoed Shakespeare by inviting us to see how ‘all the world’s a stage,’ his analysis and those done in its wake emphasize the ways in which humans present themselves to other humans on different parts of the social stage. While human performance7 depends upon props and an audience, agency in this theoretical framework lies solely with the human actors who take centre stage. Yet, when what was once mere décor for human history has ‘gotten up on stage to share the drama with the [human] actors’ (Latour 2017: 3), becoming itself a principal actor in the age of the Anthropocene,

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we must revise our understandings of the theatrical stage and its relationship to performers. Here, we take cues from contemporary theatre practices, which have moved away from stage design, and its construction as painted décor, towards scenography. Scenography acknowledges that the three-­ dimensional environment of the stage is sensorially sculpted by light, space and atmosphere (Aronson 2017). To craft a scene in relation to scenography, thus, entails an atmospheric transformation that makes visible how encounters of the world are rendered attentive (Hann 2018). By emphasizing the materiality of the stage, and the attachments and rhythms it fosters, we come closer to examining how the material informs the ways we image and imagine the world, including crime scenes. Arguably, some of the environmental damage associated with the formation of the Anthropocene arises from the danger of aestheticizing scenes, criminal or not, while being anaestheticized to the material implications of their construction. Such aestheticization turns the Earth’s lands into landscapes (e.g., Carrabine 2018) and Earth’s living inhabitants into distanced spectators. Treating crime scenes as criminal anthroposcenes, then, enables us to counter such anaestheticizations. It allows us to reveal the elements of climate change that have been ‘hidden’ in those scenes, re-centring attention on our own habits and actions that have increasingly become cause for concern, given the acceleration of climate change.

 eeing the ‘Criminal’ in the Anthropocene, Seeing S Climate Scenes as Crime Scenes Not only do we aim to revisit crime scenes in order to see them as climate scenes, we also aim to see contemporary climate scenes as crime scenes. In contrast to the backward-looking method of seeing the Anthropocene in historical crime scenes, this approach considers what crime scenes might come to include in this new geological era. In the mutating relations between humans and nature that mark the age of the Anthropocene, crime scenes have expanded to include climate scenes marked by environmental harm. Where it once stood victorious over humans as a threatening force, or as a passive backdrop for human-on-human

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violence, ‘the Earth is now a victim’ (Serres 1995: 11). Staged as ‘Anthroposcenes’ (Chaudhuri 2016), climate scenes have been tackled as dramatic and theatrical representations. As a representational tool, (research) theatre has been called upon to make sense of the scale and complexity of climate change, in order to reveal the habits of ordinary people’s minds (Chaudhuri 2016; Chaudhuri and Enelow 2014). For example, Théâtre des Négociations was an experimental theatre project that addressed what Latour has called a crisis of representation in climate conferences hosted by the United Nations, a crisis that raises the question of ‘[w]ho represents the oceans and forests, the polar regions, climate refugees and extinct animals in a conference of nations?’ (Foerster-Baldenius 2015). While we are similarly interested in addressing the challenge of representing climate change, we take a different approach, by visualizing climate scenes as though they are analogous to crime scenes. We recognize that this approach is premised upon an analogy that presumes equivalence between crime and climate change. Sometimes that equivalence might be factual, whereby there is at least one crime at the heart of the climate scene. This crime might be the ‘invisible crime’ of climate change (Brisman 2018), or corporate crime that has facilitated and resulted in large-scale environmental harms (e.g., Ruggiero and South 2013; South 2007; Smandych and Kueneman 2010; Shuqin 2010). At other times, the analogy is grounded less by an explicit reference to a specific crime and more by the identification of environmental harms that shock or fail to prick our conscience.8 Here, we consider aesthetic or cultural synergies that enable us to see climate scenes as crime scenes. Specifically, we consider how the visualization of darkness mediates the point at which representations of climate change intersect and align with the imagination of crime. By seeing climate scenes as crime scenes, this visualization approach is offered as a means for enlivening climate change communication. For all the problematic aspects that have been raised in relation to media representations of crime—they are too sensationalistic (e.g., Dowler et  al. 2006), they become part of a person’s lived identity (e.g., Cohen 1972), they intervene in evidence-based policymaking (e.g., Chan 2017)—these may very well be the qualities that need to be interjected into climate change communication. In general, climate change communication has been challenged by the geographical and temporal scales of climate

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change itself (e.g., Hulme 2010; Jasanoff 2009), where the phenomenon has been ineffectively represented because it is too abstract and too distant from ordinary people’s lived experiences (Climate Outreach n.d.). Visual representations of climate scenes have not been perceived as immediately comprehensible or compelling evidence of climate change (Doyle 2011; Manzo 2010; Schneider and Nocke 2014), failing to provoke strong emotional reactions in audiences. By contrast, a violent crime scene, whether in fiction or real life, can lay bare the very things a community might be trying to conceal, including racism, sexism or class inequalities, while rousing an immediate passionate response to the incident. Unlike climate change communication, representations of crime scenes have been affective, visual entry points into ordinary people’s understanding and imagination of crime. By making concrete the abstraction of crime, the visceral impact of mediated crime scenes has compelled politicians and citizens to transform local incidents into pressing catalysts for criminal justice policymaking (e.g., Garland and Sparks 2000; Garland 2001; Simon 2000). Given its enduring popularity, the visual vocabulary for representing crime can be fruitfully borrowed by climate change communicators, especially in light of their crisis in representation. Thus, by reading climate scenes as though they were violent crime scenes, we bring the criminological imagination to bear on an area of media communication that has been less effective at depicting the environmental harms that potentially threaten us all.

Book Overview Using the term criminal anthroposcene, we explore the morphing of crime scenes into climate scenes and vice versa. By considering the production and consumption of specific criminal anthroposcenes, we highlight the ways in which these scenes are materially and affectively drawn together as mediated images that circulate in our popular imagination; as spectacles for tourist consumption at particular sites; and as spatiotemporalities that stage new and old insecurities in the age of the Anthropocene. In each chapter, we shift our attention from crime/climate scenes to criminal anthroposcenes and, in doing so, provide examples and descriptions of

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what we mean by the term criminal anthroposcene. Instead of offering a static definition of the term, each chapter discusses a criminal anthroposcene as it is situated in a particular cultural context. We offer these examples rather than definitions because we hope that this concept will enable (green-cultural and visual) criminologists to sharpen their intellectual tools when it comes to analysing representations of environmental harms. By adding to criminology’s methodological and theoretical toolbox, we offer an elastic and dynamic concept that can encompass different understandings of ‘criminal’ and ‘Anthropocene,’ so that its status as an idea shifts in meaning and effectivity with each chapter. In the following chapters, we also reframe enduringly popular Arctic scenes, such as iceberg hunting, Arctic cruising and polar bear watching, as specific criminal anthroposcenes. In so doing, we introduce new sites for criminological analysis, moving away from the streetscapes of major cities that have been central to the formation of the Global North. We extend instead our analytic gaze to the Far North’s changing landscapes of entanglements, examining the Arctic as an overlaid arrangement of human and nonhuman living spaces (Gan et al. 2017). We do so in deliberate contrast to criminology’s predominantly urban-centric focus (for a critique of this focus, see, e.g., Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2013). By turning our attention to the Arctic, we investigate a landscape and ecology so heavily populated by ‘natural’ things, or nonhuman actors that we must account for their performances, trajectories and interactions in our analyses. While we acknowledge and do not want to diminish research agendas that highlight how human suffering in the age of the Anthropocene continues to disproportionately affect particular communities, amplifying existing social, political and economic inequalities, we aim to highlight how the situatedness of the Anthropocene implies that human action is also amplifying suffering across diverse communities of nonhumans. For us, the Arctic is an early staging ground for the emerging challenges that criminologists will need to consider in light of anthropogenic climate change’s slow violence. In Chap. 2, we propose scene thinking as a theoretical and methodological way for advancing green-cultural criminology. Although scenes have always been in the background of cultural criminology, they have not been explicitly deployed as ‘matters we use to think other matters with’ (Haraway 2016: 12). We argue that scene thinking demands that

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criminologists think through scenes in their multiplicity, by attending to the roles played by a diverse range of actors (both human and nonhuman), all of whom are conceived as vibrant matter. As a result, scenes matter as much as the matter of scenes. In Chaps. 3 and 4, we examine the photographic matter of already-imaged scenes of slow violence. Both chapters contribute to visual criminology’s methodological toolbox, by providing a new mode of mass image analysis that can enable us to rethink or re-see the image (Brown and Carrabine 2017). Built on the principles of computer vision and machine learning, an artificially intelligent (AI) bot is tasked with examining photographs that visualize, whether explicitly or not, the effects of anthropogenic climate change. In Chap. 3, the AI detective is used as part of an experiment to see the anthropogenic fog of darkness in over 500 crime scene photographs produced by police and news photographers from 1880 to 1945. Through data visualizations, we use the AI to make visible what might otherwise have remained anaestheticized or invisible to our human eyes. In showing us the Anthropocene in historical crime scene photography, we see how a noir aesthetic has structured our imagination of crime scenes from the very beginning. This noir aesthetic also appears in Chap. 4 as an emerging way to represent climate change’s effects on polar bears in the Arctic. Here, the AI demonstrates a shift in the way polar bears are represented as ideal, nonhuman victims of climate change in nearly 4000 Instagram images, highlighting how aesthetic darkness makes a quintessential Arctic scene appear ‘criminal’ or ‘suspicious.’ Darkness also informs Chap. 5 as a mark of suspicion that can be ascribed to particular consumption practices. In this chapter, we discuss how a criminal anthroposcene emerges in Iceberg Alley as a form of dark tourism in the Anthropocene. As a death row for icebergs, Iceberg Alley presents melting icebergs as nonhuman death spectacles to sightseeing tourists and as pure iceberg water to sophisticated consumers. As a scene made by anthropogenic climate change, iceberg consumption is couched in a narrative of purity and sold in ways that conceal the dark, ecological costs associated with commodifying iceberg deaths. Like Chap. 5, which takes seriously the matter of ice, Chap. 6 examines Arctic cruising in the Northwest Passage as a scene of last chance tourism, one made possible by human-induced climate change. Because the Anthropocene may

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require a fundamental rethinking of safety and security (Holley and Shearing 2017; Marks et al. 2017; O’Malley 2017), we examine how an Arctic cruise operator constructs passenger security as travellers navigate Arctic waters. Here, the Arctic is constructed as a site of overlapping chronotopes of (in)security, where its past, present and future are moulded by the forces of colonialism and climate change. By critically engaging with tourism studies, Chaps. 5 and 6 pay attention to the intersecting mobilities of ice-forms and human travellers, in order to highlight the commodification of ecocide—that is, the extensive destruction, damage or loss done to ecosystems or natural environments as a result of anthropogenic climate change (Higgins 2010, 2012; White 2018). In short, this book brings together insights from criminology, climate change communication and tourism studies in order to study the production and consumption of mediated criminal anthroposcenes. In so doing, it allows us to reconsider what crime scenes have always included and might come to include in the age of the Anthropocene.

Notes 1. Please note that this is a fictionalized account of similar real-life incidents that have occurred in Churchill, Canada, as reported in Beaumont (2017), Leonard (2013), Mulvaney (2019) and Yong and Meyer (2013). The description of the inmate’s behaviour has been supplemented with reference to Parks Canada (n.d.). Statistics about inmate turnover refer to numbers provided by Manitoba Sustainable Development (2018). 2. In Canada, inmates serve time in a jail when their sentence of imprisonment amounts to two years less a day; by contrast, inmates serve time in a prison when their sentence exceeds two years in length. Rather than officially use the term ‘jail,’ the Town of Churchill prefers the term ‘holding facility,’ although the differences between a holding facility, detention centre and jail might only amount to semantics. Experientially, these sites exist on a carceral continuum, especially since confinement has been configured and re-configured as part of the dark side of global mobility (Loyd et al. 2012). 3. This description is paraphrased from Cesare Lombroso’s (2006: 312) praise of the painter Ruben’s depiction of criminal physiognomy in Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1616).

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4. The BEAR hotline forms part of the Polar Bear Alert Program in the Churchill area. Once sighted, Polar Bear Alert staff will attempt to chase a bear out of the town by making loud noises, or by shooting the bear with rubber bullets or paintballs. Polar bears that continue to prowl the town, or refuse to stay away, are then captured and placed in the polar bear jail. 5. According to Emile Durkheim (1933/1984: 31), the term ‘crime’ is used to designate ‘any act which, regardless of degree, provokes against the perpetrator the characteristic reaction known as punishment.’ Thus, crime is the cause of punishment. In the Durkheimian framework, crime scenes logically precede and trigger punishment. 6. Polar bears have been spotted in such large numbers in Belushya Guba, a town on the Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, that a state of emergency was declared on February 9, 2019. In December 2018, a ‘mass invasion’ of at least 52 polar bears terrorized residents in this remote region located in the Arctic Ocean (Steer 2019; TASS 2019). 7. The performative approach in criminology has encompassed multiple trajectories, given the different ways performance has been theorized in the social sciences. For instance, in studies of language and governmentality (e.g., Edwards and Hughes 2008), performativity refers to the ways in which human speech acts bring into being the very objects that they signify (Austin 1962). The performance metaphor has also been applied to social interactions in everyday life by Goffman (1959). According to Goffman, ordinary people present themselves as selves (i.e., personas) to each other, acting as though they were on a stage in a theatrical performance. Goffman’s work has been taken up by criminologists interested in the study of stigma and its effects on social interactions. More recently, the concept of performativity has been applied to the doing of specific identities, such as gender (Butler 1990). While the word ‘performance’ has a rich academic history, the performer of note in scholarly analyses has primarily been human. Notable exceptions to this anthropocentric emphasis have been connected to work done by Science and Technology scholars, such as Callon (1998) who studied the performance of markets. 8. Green criminologists have varied in their approach to defining environmental harms as crimes (Gibbs et  al. 2009; Ruggiero and South 2010; White and Heckenberg 2014). While some have taken a strictly legalistic perspective that narrowly takes into consideration only those environmental harms that have been defined as violations of specific criminal

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laws, others have taken a broader approach. This alternative, harm-centric approach examines environmental harms, irrespective of whether or not they have been officially designated as crimes. As such, it also considers normative and legal behaviours that are harmful to the environment.

References ADS (Arctic Data Archive System). (2019) ‘Arctic Sea Ice Extent’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/#/extent/&time=2019-04-09%20 00:00:00 Aronson, A. (ed.) (2017) The Routledge Companion to Scenography, London: Routledge. Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Beaumont, H. (2017) ‘Polar Bear Prison’, Vice News URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvz9gm/ this-northern-town-runs-a-prison-for-rogue-polar-bears Bisschop, L. (2015) Governance of Illegal Trade in E-Waste and Tropical Timber, London: Routledge. Borenstein, S. (2017) ‘Science Says: Fast Melting Arctic Sign of Bad Global Warming’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.apnews.com/91faf 9c826d24a45a41e06ba3ab3c336 Brisman, A. (2014) ‘On Theory and Meaning in Green Criminology’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 3(2): 21–34. Brisman, A. (2018) ‘Representing the “Invisible Crime” of Climate Change in an Age of Post-Truth’, Theoretical Criminology 22(3): 469–491. Brisman, A. and South, N. (2013) ‘A Green-Cultural Criminology: An Exploratory Outline’, Crime, Media, Culture 9(2): 115–135. Brisman, A. and South, N. (2014) Green Cultural Criminology: Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide, New  York: Routledge. Brown, M. and Carrabine, E. (2017) ‘Introducing Visual Criminology.’ In M. Brown and E. Carrabine (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, London: Routledge: 1–9. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Callon, M. (ed.) (1998) The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell.

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Carbon Brief. (2011) ‘Impacts of a Melting Cryosphere Loss Around the World’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.carbonbrief.org/ impacts-of-a-melting-cryosphere-ice-loss-around-the-world Carrabine, E. (2012) ‘Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology 52(3): 463–489. Carrabine, E. (2018) ‘Geographies of Landscape: Representation, Power and Meaning’, Theoretical Criminology 22(3): 445–467. CCCR. (2019) ‘Canada’s Changing Climate Report’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://changingclimate.ca/CCCR2019/ Chan, J. (2017) ‘Politics of the Anthropocene: Lessons for Criminology.’ In C. Holley and C. Shearing (eds.) Criminology and the Anthropocene, New York: Routledge: 181–200. Chaudhuri, U. (2016) ‘Anthropo-Scenes: Staging Climate Chaos in the Drama of Bad Ideas.’ In S.  Adisehiah and L.  LePage (eds.) Twenty-first Century Drama, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 303–321. Chaudhuri, U. and Enelow, S. (2014) Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Climate Outreach (n.d.) ‘The 7 Climate Visuals Principles’ URL (accessed 11 January 2020): https://climatevisuals.org/7-climate-visuals-principles Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: MacGibbon and Kee. Crutzen, P. (2002). ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415: 23. Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. (2000) ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18 Donnermeyer, J.F. and DeKeseredy, W. (2013) Rural Criminology, London: Routledge. Dickie, G. (2018) ‘As Polar Bear Attacks Increase in Warming Arctic, A Search for Solutions’, Yale Environment 360 URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-polar-bear-attacks-increase-in-warmingarctic-a-search-for-solutions Dowler, K., Fleming, T. and Muzzatti, S. (2006) ‘Constructing Crime: Media, Crime, and Popular Culture’, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 48(6): 837–850. Doyle, J. (2011) Mediating Climate Change, Surrey, England: Ashgate. Durkheim, E. (1984) The Division of Labor in Society, New York: The Free Press. Edwards, A. and Hughes, G. (2008) ‘Inventing Community Safety.’ In P. Carlen (ed.) Imaginary Penalities, Cullompton: Willan: 64–83. Emerson, C. (2010) The Future History of the Arctic, New York: Public Affairs. Ferguson, F. (2013) ‘Climate Change and Us’, Diacritics 41(3): 32–38.

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Ferrell, J., Hayward, K. and Young, J. (2008) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, London: Sage. Foerster-Baldenius, B. (2015) ‘Le Theatre des Negociations’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): http://raumlabor.net/le-theatre-des-negociations/ Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, H. and Bubandt, N. (2017) ‘Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.’ In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N.  Bubandt (eds.) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: G1–14. Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garland, D. and Sparks, R. (2000) ‘Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of Our Times’, British Journal of Criminology 40(2): 189–204. Gibbs, C., Gore, M. L., McGarrell, E. F. and Rivers III, L. (2009) ‘Introducing Conservation Criminology: Towards Interdisciplinary Scholarship on Environmental Crimes and Risks’, The British Journal of Criminology 50(1): 124–144. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New  York: Doubleday. Hamilton, C., Gemenne, F. and Bonneuil, C. (2015) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, New York: Routledge. Hann, R. (2018) Beyond Scenography, London: Routledge. Hansson, H., and Ryall, A. (eds.) (2017) Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press. Hayward, K.J. and Presdee, M. (2010) Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image, New York: Routledge. Higgins, P. (2010) Eradicating Ecocide: Law and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet, London: Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers. Higgins, P. (2012) Earth is our Business: Changing the Rules of the Game, London: Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers. Holley, C. and Shearing, C. (2017) ‘Thriving on a Pale Blue Dot: Criminology and the Anthropocene.’ In C. Holley and C. Shearing (eds.) Criminology and the Anthropocene, New York: Routledge: 1–24. Hulme, M. (2010) ‘Problems with Making and Governing Global Kinds of Knowledge’, Global Environmental Change 20(4): 558–564.

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Jasanoff, S. (2009) ‘A New Climate for Society’, Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 233–253. Labe, Z. (2019) ‘Arctic Sea Ice Figures’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https:// sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-sea-ice-figures/ Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity. Leonard, T. (2013) ‘Inside the Polar Bear Prison’, Daily Mail URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2488048/Insidepolar-bear-prison-northern-Canada-town-Churchill.html Lombroso, C. (2006) Criminal Man, translated and with a new introduction by M. Gibson and N.H. Rafter, Durham: Duke University Press. Lorimer, J. (2017) ‘The Anthropo-scene: A Guide For the Perplexed’, Social Studies of Science 47(1): 117–142. Lovelock, J. (2007) The Revenge of Gaia, New York: Basic Books. Loyd, J., Mitchelson, M. and Burridge, A. (eds.) (2012) Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lynch, M. and Stretsky, P. (2014) Exploring Green Criminology: Toward a Green Criminological Revolution, Surrey: Ashgate. Manitoba Sustainable Development. (2018) Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program Weekly Activity Report for the Week of October 29 to November 4, 2018, Manitoba: Author. Manzo, K. (2010) ‘Beyond Polar Bears? Re-Envisioning Climate Change’, Meteorological Applications 17(2): 196–208. Marks, M., Matsha, R.M. and Caruso, A. (2017) ‘Cities, Walls and the Anthropocene: When Consciousness and Purpose Fail to Collide.’ In C. Holley and C. Shearing (eds.) Criminology and the Anthropocene, New York: Routledge: 133–152. Meyer, R. (2018) ‘Geology’s Timekeepers are Feuding’, The Atlantic URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/ archive/2018/07/anthropocene-holocene-geology-drama/565628/ Mooney, C. (2016) ‘Scientists Are Floored By What’s Happening in the Arctic Right Now’, Washington Post URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/02/18/scientistsare-floored-by-whats-happening-in-the-arctic-right-now/?noredirect= on&utm_term=.b01169fb0577 Mulvaney, K. (2019) ‘“If It Gets Me, It Gets Me”: The Town Where Residents Live Alongside Polar Bears’, The Guardian URL (accessed 13 January 2020):

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/13/churchill-canadapolar-bear-capital NASA. (n.d.) ‘GISS Surface Temperature Analysis’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ Natali, L. (2013) ‘The Contemporary Horizon of Green Criminology.’ In N. South and A. Brisman (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, London: Routledge: 73–84. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. O’Malley, P. (2017) ‘Bentham in the Anthropocene: Imagining a Sustainable Criminal Justice.’ In C. Holley and C. Shearing (eds.) Criminology and the Anthropocene, New York: Routledge: 109–132. Parks Canada. (n.d.) ‘Polar Bear Behaviour’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/mb/prince/securite-safety/ours-bear/ ours-bear5 Pereira, A. (2016) ‘Churchill’s “Polar Bear Jail” Getting Crowded with Inmates’, Canadian Geographic URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/churchills-polar-bear-jail-getting-crowded-inmates Rafter, N. (2014). ‘Introduction to Special Issue on Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology 18(2): 127–133. Rafter, N. and Brown, M. (2011) Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture, New York: New York University. Richter-Menge, J., Overland, J.E. and Mathis, J. (2016) ‘Arctic Report Card: Update for 2016’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.arctic.noaa. gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2016/ArtMID/5022/ArticleID/270/ Executive-Summary Ruggiero, V. and South, N. (2010) ‘Critical Criminology and Crimes Against the Environment’, Critical Criminology 18(4): 245–250. Ruggiero, V. and South, N. (2013) ‘Green Criminology and the Crimes of the Economy: Theory, Research, Praxis’, Critical Criminology 21(3): 359–373. Schneider, B. and Nocke, T. (eds.) (2014) Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Serres, M. (1995) The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shearing, C. (2015) ‘Criminology and the Anthropocene’, Criminology & Criminal Justice 15(3): 255–269.

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Shuqin, Y. (2010). ‘The Polluting Behaviour of the Multinational Corporations in China.’ In R.  White (ed.) Global Environmental Harm: Criminological Perspectives, Devon: Willan Publishing: 150–160. Simon, J. (2000) ‘Megan’s Law: Crime and Democracy in Late Modern America’, Law & Social Inquiry 25(4): 1111–1150. Smandych, R. and Kueneman, R. (2010) ‘The Canadian-Alberta Tar Sands: A Case Study of State-Corporate Environmental Crime.’ In R.  White (ed.) Global Environmental Harm: Criminological Perspectives, Devon: Willan Publishing: 87–109. South, N. (1998) ‘A Green Field for Criminology? A Proposal for a Perspective’, Theoretical Criminology 2(2): 211–213. South, N. (2007) ‘The “Corporate Colonization of Nature”: Bio-Prospecting, Bio-Piracy and the Development of Green Criminology.’ In P.  Beirne and N.  South (eds.) Issues in Green Criminology, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing: 230–247. Spapens, T., White, R. and Huisman, W. (2016) Environmental Crime in Transnational Context: Global Issues in Green Enforcement and Criminology, London: Routledge. Steer, G. (2019) ‘State of Emergency Declared as Dozens of Polar Bears Invade Russian Town’, Time URL (accessed 13 January 2020): http://time. com/5526741/polar-bears-russia/ Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, J. (2007) ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ Ambio 36(8): 614–621. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, J. (2011) ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369: 842–867. TASS. (2019) ‘Emergency Declared in Novaya Zemlya Archipelago Over Polar Bear “Invasion”’ URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://tass.com/ emergencies/1043985 Watts, J. (2018) ‘Arctic’s Strongest Sea Ice Breaks Up for First Time on Record’, The Guardian URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.theguardian. com/world/2018/aug/21/arctics-strongest-sea-ice-breaks-up-for-firsttime-on-record White, R. (2018) Climate Change Criminology, Bristol: Bristol University Press. White, R. and Heckenberg, D. (2014) Green Criminology: An Introduction to the Study of Environmental Harm, London: Routledge.

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Yong, E. and Meyer, R. (2013) ‘Busy Times at the World’s Largest Polar Bear Prison’, The Atlantic URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/trouble-in-polar-bear-capital/510839/ Young, A. (2005) Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law, London: Routledge. Zalasiewicz, J. (2009) ‘Newsletter 1’, Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (International Commission on Stratigraphy) URL (accessed 13 January 2020): http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Anthropocene-Working-GroupNewsletter-No1-2009.pdf Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C., Williams, M. and Summerhayes, C. (eds.) (2019) The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2 Criminal Anthroposcenes: Why Scenes Matter and the Matter of Scenes Anita Lam and Matthew Tegelberg

TOP OF HORTONSPHERE – NIGHT: As Cody [Jarrett, gangster] reaches [the top of the Hortonsphere] he realizes, dimly at first, that he reached a dead end. There is no way down but the ladder he climbed. Voices off-screen [of the two FBI agents in pursuit], drawing closer. Weaving slightly, aware now he has chosen his own death-trap, he stands astride top of a Hortonsphere, which is like the globe itself. He stands there alone, naked and unprotected, challenging the world in his madness. [From the ground, staring up at the Hortonsphere] it is even more like a globe – the earth itself – with a lone, tragic figure standing atop it, claiming it, refusing to admit defeat. [As bullets fly and Cody is shot, he declares:] ‘Anyway, Ma, I made it…Top of the world!’ He is now out of his mind. He staggers against the rail, trying to shoot back at what hit him. Instead his bullets hit the pipe valve which holds the gas in the tank under pressure. He is pumping slugs into pipes. We hear the sound of escaping gas. Suddenly the gas is ignited from the blast of Cody’s gun and Cody is completely enveloped in flame. […] Off-screen sound of terrific explosion. (Goff et al. 2003: 142–3) [At the top of the world, once covered by frozen ice sheets, the Arctic is thawing, awakening things long dead and buried in the rich, marshy dirt – known as permafrost due to the cold that had frozen it solid for over 35,000 years.] The newly active permafrost is packed with old stuff: dead plants, dead animals, mosses buried and reburied by dust and snow. This matter, long protected from decomposition by the cold, is finally rotting, and releasing gases into the atmosphere

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_2

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that could quicken the rate of global warming. This matter is also full of pathogens: bacteria and viruses long immobilized by the frost. Many of these pathogens may be able to survive a gentle thaw – and if they do, researchers warn, they could reinfect humanity. Climate change, in other words, could awaken Earth’s forgotten pathogens. (Meyer 2017)

We open this chapter with the explosive ending of the classic gangster film White Heat (1949), and the stunning implications of the first piece of science writing in The Atlantic’s ‘Life Up Close’ series. The first represents the climactic ending of what has been considered by cultural criminologists (e.g., Rafter 2000: 55) and film critics (e.g., Mason 2002; Shadoian 2003) alike as one of the best crime films of all time. The second heralds a climatic ending to the world that we know. Both take place at the top of the world—one metaphorically presented atop a Horton sphere, a globelike pressure vessel for storing compressed gases in chemical plants and oil refineries, and the other geographically located at the top of the Earth at the edges of the Arctic Ocean. Less than a century separates these texts, one given life in the aftermath of the heavy destruction brought about by the atomic bomb, and the other in recognition of the wide-ranging, slowly destructive consequences of human-induced climate change. Both deal with the effects of heat: while gangsters routinely ‘pack heat’ in Hollywood gangster films, the titular ‘white heat’ references more than just gunfire; it encapsulates the effects of industrial technologies, ranging from the scalding and disfiguring heat of steam blasted by a train’s steam engine in the film’s opening scene, to the industrial inferno set off by Cody Jarett in the final scene. As a crime film for the atomic age, the ending, with its mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke and destructive fiery explosion, visually links heat to the imagination of a nuclear holocaust. As a film that upset critics upon its release with its depictions of pain, death and destruction (Shadoian 2003), White Heat traffics in images liberally dosed with spectacular violence set to a nerve-­jangling assault on the ears.1 Compared to the shaking frame of White Heat’s final scene, in which the exploding gas tanks cause the camera and the resulting image to quiver as though in the wake of an apocalypse, the melting ice sheets in the Arctic Circle disappear quietly as a consequence of slow violence, brought about by the rising temperatures associated with global warming

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(Johannessen et al. 2004; Kattsov et al. 2010; Maxwell 1992; Osterkamp and Romanovsky 1999). While the notion of warming seems rather benign when juxtaposed against the idea of white heat, its gradual heating effects are insidious and as surprising as any fiery explosion. ‘Even in the quietest places, the world will become newly hostile’ (Meyer 2017) because of this warming. Indeed, a succession of unusually hot summers has accelerated the thawing of Arctic permafrost to the point that its current destabilization appears 70 years earlier than expected (Reuters 2019). Mounting temperatures have the potential to release not only greenhouse gases and infectious pathogens, but also biological, chemical, physical and radiological wastes abandoned at former Cold War sites associated with nuclear material (Colgan et al. 2016), such as at Novaya Zemlya, the site of the largest atomic test ever performed, and Camp Century, the highly publicized nuclear missile base under the Greenland ice sheet that formed part of the US’ Project Iceworm (Owen 2016; Petersen 2008). Because White Heat has been read first and foremost within the genre of Cold War crime fiction for its psychological explanation of aberrant, criminal behaviour (e.g., Shore 2018; Spina 2018), it seems to be disconnected, at least on the surface, from a story about active permafrost and disappearing ice. Yet its last scene has made such a lasting impression precisely because it dramatizes what it means to live in the Anthropocene, an era in which humans are re-envisioned as a geophysical force whose collective actions can determine the very climate of the planet as a whole (Chakrabarty 2012). Ultimately, Cody Jarrett ‘ain’t human,’ at least according to his wife. His madness is a reaction to what humans have done to nature. As a ‘walking A-bomb,’ Cody is the ‘human embodiment of man’s destructive alteration of nature’ (Shadoian 2003: 149). His viciousness is ‘analogized as a dangerous force of nature’ (Nochimson 2007: 121). When Cody destroys the Horton sphere, a visual metaphor for the planet, his act of destruction is irrevocably tied to his self-­destruction. Here, human action irreversibly affects the planet to the point that the traditional distinction between natural history and cultural history dissolves (Chakrabarty 2009). Foreshadowing the kinds of criminal anthroposcenes that characterize our relationship to the Earth today, White Heat suggests that we have become Cody Jarrett writ large. Entangling crime with anthropogenic climate change, these criminal anthroposcenes can be examined through scene thinking.

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This chapter introduces scene thinking as a fruitful approach for those interested in studying media representations of environmental harm. Because green-cultural criminologists have defined such study as their raison d’être, we focus on the ways in which scene thinking can transform their analyses of environmental degradation. Because scenes are conceptual tools that green-cultural criminologists have inherited from cultural criminology, we first review cultural criminology’s typical approach to thinking about scenes. We, then, explain how we can think through scenes and their multiplicities. While scenes have always been part of the background of cultural criminology, they can be meaningfully foregrounded as a unit of analysis. For us, the scene represents a fluid and dynamic unit of analysis that can enable researchers to oscillate between multiple geographic and temporal scales. In our approach, scenes allow us to move from mediated constructions, whether in the form of crime-images or the lifestyle choices of subcultural communities, to an examination of vibrant cultural-material matter. Thus, scenes matter, and they themselves are composed of matter. And as Donna Haraway (2016: 12) reminds us, ‘[i]t matters what matters we use to think other matters with.’ To show why scenes and scene thinking matter as methods for studying exceedingly complex forms of global environmental harm, such as climate change, we end this chapter with an analysis of melting permafrost as a scene of slow violence. In doing so, we turn away from the spectacular, explosive violence portrayed by crime films, such as White Heat. We attend instead to a qualitatively different scene, one that grounds and entangles us in the dirt of vibrant matter. By digging in the dirt of permafrost, we depart from the conventional confines of cultural criminology’s anthropocentric focus and binary logic of representation. Ultimately, scene thinking attunes us to the diverse roles played by a range of human and nonhuman actors in both mediated and material contexts.

Scenes and Scene Thinking As an emerging branch in the field of criminology, green criminology is most likely to concern itself with studying the ‘invisible crime’ of anthropogenic climate change among other environmental harms (Brisman

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2018; Farrall et al. 2012; McClanahan and Brisman 2015; White 2012). Since the 1990s, when the term ‘green criminology’ itself was coined (Lynch 1990), green criminologists have examined the criminological dimensions of a wide range of complex, global environmental harms (e.g., White 2010, 2012, 2013; White and Heckenberg 2014). They have investigated the causes and consequences of environmental crimes as well as non-statutorily proscribed environmental harms. However, they have rarely paid sustained attention to the role media play in representing environmental crimes, harms and disasters to wider audiences (Brisman and South 2014). In response, green-cultural criminology developed as an effort to engage with mediated constructions of environmental harm in news media, cinema, visual arts and popular culture (e.g., Brisman and South 2013, 2014, 2017; Carrabine 2018; Ferrell 2013; Kohm and Greenhill 2013; McClanahan et al. 2018; Natali 2016). To study such media representations, green-cultural criminology constructed itself on the back of cultural criminology’s research agenda (e.g., Brisman and South 2014). While cultural criminology examines media images and narratives of crime and criminality, green-cultural criminology centres its analytic focus on environmental crimes and harms. Described as a ‘perspective within a perspective’ (Brisman 2018), green-cultural criminology amounts to either a culturally oriented niche in green criminology or a green niche within cultural criminology. Although cultural criminology offers a conceptual toolbox from which green-cultural criminology can productively borrow, it is a theoretical and methodological heritage that requires more careful and critical consideration. To ‘think from’ a heritage, as Donna Haraway (2016: 131) cautions, is to inherit a stance from which we speak, think or act, which in turn demands not only commitment, but also ‘a call for our transformation by the very deed of inheriting.’ Here is our call for transformation: if green-cultural criminology is truly an exercise in ‘cross-fertilization’ between green criminology and cultural criminology (Brisman and South 2014: 7; our emphasis added), then its growth depends upon its ability to think about and dig into dirt as a fertilizing matter. More than a metaphor for figuratively representing disorder or impurity (Douglas 1966), dirt is itself matter. To dig in this dirt requires not only inheriting conceptual tools from cultural criminology, but also transforming those tools to

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both see and analyze cultural-material things. One of the major conceptual tools offered by cultural criminology is to see the world as scenes. Thus, to think about scenes in cultural criminology is not new. Whether it has taken the form of criminological aesthetics, or what might be more precisely called subcultural criminology (Young 2008), cultural criminology has been haunted by scenes. What ensues is a scenic detour through cultural criminology’s approach to scenes. This section highlights the ways in which scenes have been, up to this point, interpreted in rigid ways that have not only privileged human action at the expense of nonhuman competencies, but also stripped scenes of their elastic and scalar power. We note the limitations of cultural criminology’s typical use of scenes, in order to explain how scene thinking can be used to transform the ways that green-cultural criminologists interpret and handle the physical, material and cultural things at the heart of criminal anthroposcenes.

Criminological Aesthetics at the Scene of the Crime When cultural criminology takes the form of criminological aesthetics, it approaches crime films ‘scenographically’ in order to address spectators’ engagement with the crime-image. Cinematic scenes of violent crime, for instance, have been deftly examined by Alison Young (2010). For Young, the scene is methodologically and theoretically equivalent to the cinematic crime-image. Presuming the interchangeability of scene and image, she ‘engag[es] with the texture of each image or scene’ (Young 2010: 8; our emphasis added). This scenographic approach is used to examine how cinematic techniques of inscription are deployed in key film scenes to invite a spectator’s affective investment. To think about the crime-­image is to ask ‘how does the image work?’ and ‘how do we watch?’ rather than ‘what does it mean?’ (Young 2008). Through form and narrative, crime films address spectators with their ‘linguistic turns and tricks, […] framing and editing devices in and through which crime becomes a topic, obtains and retains a place in the discourse’ (Young 1996: 16). Under this approach, scenes are derived from filmic texts as relatively bounded units of analysis. They are presented to spectators and scholarly analysts as carefully constructed containers that hold within them a set of

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spectacular social relations, possible audience identifications, multiple meanings and affective energies. Like a crime scene that has been secured and delimited by police tape, the scene in criminological aesthetics is rendered as a bordered space of vision when it is reduced to a crimeimage by an investigator. Conceptualized as a visual point for ethical reflection (Carrabine 2011, 2012), the crime-image is also importantly an ‘encountered sign’ (Young 2014: 170) enmeshed in an active process of interpretation. Interpretation, however, proceeds along a binary logic of representation, in which ‘[o]ppositional terms (man/woman, white/ black, rational/irrational, mind/body and so on) are constructed in a system of value which makes one visible and the other invisible’ (Young 1996: 1). In this list of oppositional terms, the binary pairing of human and nonhuman is relegated to what amounts to an ellipsis (‘and so on’). Consequently, the human–nonhuman pairing has been of little interest in criminological aesthetics, which has been primarily anthropocentric in its focus. Humans populate the scene as perpetrators, law enforcers, victims and spectators (e.g., Young 2005, 2016). Despite a recognition that ‘crime connects bodies known and unknown through the proliferation of images’ (Young 2008: 24), nonhuman bodies have remained invisible in analyses of crime-images, and are only deemed important when they are framed as evidence, or as crime-solving tools. Yet these invisible nonhuman bodies—especially those bodies that can be identified with the Earth itself—are integral to and have always been present in the formation and reception of criminal anthroposcenes. To study criminal anthroposcenes, then, requires an acknowledgement that scenes are more than just an image. They hold not only ethical, cultural and affective weight, but also material implications. The materiality of cultural things informs our social world, as much as their representation. When we turn to the task of considering human–nonhuman relations in the age of the Anthropocene, we require a material semiotics that is situated in actual encounters, where beings, both human and nonhuman, matter. To the extent that ‘[i]nteresting research is research conducted under conditions that make beings interesting’ (Vinciane Despret, quoted in Haraway 2016: 126), we need to first show some interest in beings other than ourselves. In so doing, we might return to the interesting bodily conditions that underlay the

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original etymological meaning of the word ‘aesthetics.’ ‘[B]orn as a discourse of the body’ (Eagleton 1990: 13), aesthetics emerged from Ancient Greek words, aisthitikos and aisthisis, that speak to the sensory experience of perception, so that the original field of aesthetics was not art, but rather the corporeal, material nature of reality (Buck-­Morss 1992). To revive interest in the empirical experiences registered by the whole corporeal sensorium is to muddy our cultural forms of imagination, by considering how we might ultimately dissolve the binary distinction between Nature and Culture. Doing criminological aesthetics in the age of the Anthropocene shifts us away from a binary logic of representation, so that we might perceive the Earth with a new sensitivity. In Latour’s (2017: 145) words, this perception, or aesthetics is tied to ‘a capacity to make oneself sensitive that precedes all distinctions among the instruments of science, politics, art and religion.’ Because we can no longer, if we ever could (Latour 1993), imagine a social world without nonhumans, or a natural world without humans or human alteration, it is time to dissolve the traditional binary distinctions that were once used to make sense of our world.

On the Street with Subcultural Criminology While criminological aesthetics asks how we live through our images of crime, presuming that we belong to a larger community with a shared reservoir of crime-images (e.g., Rafter 2007; Rafter and Brown 2011), subcultural criminology asks how subcultural members cobble together a collective style in their generation and consumption of mediated crime representations (Ferrell and Sanders 1995). Like criminological aesthetics, subcultural criminology’s focus highlights human agency while depriving nonhumans of a capacity for action. This is most clearly seen in subcultural criminology’s defining feature—specifically, its interest in the human construction of meaning. Crime and its control are human constructs that can be read by other humans in terms of the meanings they carry (Hayward and Young 2004). In this approach, nonhumans are inert objects in the background of the ‘gritty particulars of street-level human interaction’ (Hayward and Young 2004: 270; our emphasis added), even

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though they form the scenes in which subcultural members engage. Given subcultural criminology’s ‘attempts to make sense of a world in which the street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street’ (Hayward and Young 2004: 259), it is curious how much scenes—primarily urban, street scenes—permeate the approach without being explicitly named and identified as a unit of analysis. In subcultural criminology, scenes implicitly appear in the approach’s interrelated focus on the transgressive subject’s expressive lifestyle, and the urban environment (e.g., Presdee 2000)—what Hayward and Young (2004: 265) have called the ‘underlife’ of the city. For instance, subcultural criminologists examine how lifestyle is generated among subcultural members, particularly in light of the creativity and style made possible in late modernity (Hayward and Young 2012). Such an avenue of inquiry has been traced back to not only the Chicago School of Sociology (Hayward 2012), with its emphasis on the ‘motives, drives, rationalisations and attitudes’ of a criminal subculture (Sutherland and Cressey 1978: 80), but also to symbolic interactionist theory (Becker 1963; Blumer 1971) and work done by members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, such as Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige and Paul Willis (Ferrell and Sanders 1995; Ferrell and Hayward 2016; see also Bevier 2015). Notably, these theoretical antecedents of contemporary subcultural criminology were predominantly anchored to an examination of youth subcultures, explaining them as reactions to structural contradictions in society (e.g., Hall and Jefferson 1976). While subcultural criminology self-consciously grounds itself in a theoretical lineage of critical and radical criminologies that stood against orthodoxy in the 1960s (e.g., Cohen 1955), its examination of deviant subcultures has remained remarkably firm in its seeming disregard of new developments in the study of subcultures outside of criminology. In other disciplines, such as cultural studies, the study of youth cultures has included other theoretical conceptualizations of social formation beyond subculture, including the notions of neo-tribe and more importantly for us, scene (Blum 2001; Hesmondhalgh 2005; Hodkinson and Deicke 2007). Scene research in the social sciences has progressed as lifestyle research, in which scenes are lifestyle communities that appear as symbolically, aesthetically and thematically located ‘territories’ in social space (Miles 2000; Pfadenhauer 2005) and urban

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culture (Irwin 1977; Silver et  al. 2010; Silver and Clark 2015; Straw 2001). These scenes are tied to practices of consumption and media communication, many of which translate social intimacy into public spectacle (Blum 2001). As heavily interlinked, evolving engagements and networked involvements, scenes bring people, spaces and resources together in ‘trans-local’ and global assemblages across the world, moving beyond subcultural formations that play out only in certain urban neighbourhoods (e.g., Bennett and Peterson 2004; Harris 2000; Hodkinson 2002). When used as a substitute for subculture, scenes can loosen our thinking about the ways in which social worlds are ordered, by envisioning less rigid boundaries and essentializing versions of group identity (Casemajor and Straw 2017). The latter is especially noteworthy given criticisms that subcultural criminology has had the effect of labelling certain subcultures as deviant and criminal when their activities are neither criminal nor particularly deviant (Young 2008). For a critical criminology that serves as a ‘trashy counterpoint’ to the ‘clean results’ and ‘neat execution’ of mainstream criminology (Ferrell et al. 2008: 159), subcultural criminology’s insistence upon such a bounded concept of subculture is at odds with the theoretical and methodological messiness that it proposes to capture.

Scene Thinking In contrast to the bounded scenes that have been highlighted by cultural criminology, the concept of scene has meandered throughout urban studies and cultural studies to make sense of cultural unities with elastic or invisible boundaries. Thus, ‘scene’ has been a flexible albeit slippery term, called upon to perform multiple tasks: scenes can simultaneously characterize collectivities, spaces of assembly, workspaces of transformation, spaces of travel and circulation, and ethical and mediated worlds (Straw 2015). Taking cues from the hybrid assemblages of humans and nonhumans documented by Bruno Latour (2005; see also Latour and Woolgar 1986), scenes have described the coming together of peoples, texts, spaces, practices, affinities and tastes into loose heterogeneous groupings. As such, thinking with and through scenes offers criminology a more holistic approach to studying its

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usual ‘acts, persons or institutions’ classifications, particularly since these classifications have often been studied as separate research questions (Valverde 2017). Formed and connected by a ‘hazy coherence’ (Straw 2001), scenes group together acts, persons, practices, texts and institutions, among other natural-cultural things, even though they may be of highly variable composition, scale and scope. As a theoretical and methodological stance in cultural studies, moreover, the scene might not simply identify a discrete thing or a phenomenon at all. Rather, Woo, Rennie and Poyntz (2018) argue that scene thinking is a perspective; it is ‘literally a point of view, a way of seeing the world’ (Woo et al. 2015: 292). As a sensitizing perspective to see anew, ‘scene thinking’ roughly coincides in its development with the movement of visuality towards the centre of cultural analysis (Casemajor and Straw 2017). Scene thinking, then, is activated by the idea that scenes themselves become visible, legible or intelligible through their ordering by an ‘optical machine’ and their circulation in the realm of the visual. As machines through which we look at the world, optical technologies, such as the camera and the microscope, have framed the ways in which we see or fail to see. Through their technological mediation, they have shaped the contours of our imagination (i.e., the process by which we make images) and also made possible the optical trick of zooming in and out of scenes. Here, the zoom offers a way of handling the multiple, abstract scales of the Anthropocene that have so challenged climate change communicators (e.g., Hulme 2010; Jasanoff 2009). Rather than consider a scene as fixed in scale, scenes can exist at multiple scalar logics, which in, turn, are made evident by a zooming effect. The zoom itself is a scaling activity; it is itself an achievement of particular actors within a scene (Callon and Latour 1981; Latour 2005: 185). After all, it is, as Latour (2005: 187; our emphasis added) writes, ‘through the staging of the zoom effect that the social of social theorists enters the scene.’ And in entering the scene, the zoom effect brings into the foreground the powerful, social processes of framing and staging. As a way of bringing into frame the unseen or overlooked in our everyday lives, scene thinking is not just about putting invisible things into a visible frame. It is about examining the framing, or contextualizing activity of actors that make up a scene: what do they show to an audience and

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on what stage? To that end, the zoom effect enables us to travel from one framed scene to the next without settling in advance an absolute frame of reference (Latour 2005). Scenes do not necessarily remain on a single stage at a single site, but rather travel and circulate across multiple sites and scales at once, moving across the micro, meso and macro, as well as between the local and global. Thus, scene thinking frees researchers from making decisions that would otherwise fix the scale and scope of particular actors prior to engaging in their research. Consequently, the zoom effect reminds us of the situated staging of a scene. After all, there must be a stage, located in space at a particular place and time, on which actors perform.2 The notion of situated staging grounds us in more concrete, accessible ways of thinking about the Anthropocene. When the Anthropocene is read as a totalizing, abstract concept, it gives name to the ‘whole picture’ of how our Earth systems have been altered by human activities across millennia, spanning across stages—here, understood as either glacial or interglacial periods (Oxford English Dictionary), or phases that track the trajectory of human enterprise through carbon emissions (e.g., Steffen et al. 2007)—that themselves extend across centuries and regions. When we start seeing how the anthroposcene plays out on specific stages as settings for action, we move away from a concept produced from the lofty heights of a (hard) science devoted to offering panoramic views of the world. As Latour (2005) reminds us, panoramas are powerful contraptions because they stage totality by already ordering the scale at which we see; however, they are ultimately staged in blind rooms where nothing enters or leaves the room’s walls other than baffled or interested spectators. In contrast, scene thinking takes into account the porous boundaries of ‘rooms’ (i.e., local sites, contexts, places and settings), and how they allow for the contingent coalescences of actors, stages and spectators. It examines how the connections between humans and nonhumans are mediated, often through an optical machine that is situated somewhere in the world at a particular height and with a distinctive field of view. Thus, scene thinking entails doing a ‘kind of material semiotics [that] is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly’ (Haraway 2016: 4).

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 cene Thinking at the ‘End of the World’: S On the Matter of Scenes To illustrate scene thinking—particularly its value for bringing to the foreground the vibrant, nonhuman matter of scenes—we return now to the thawing permafrost in one of this chapter’s opening scenes. We revisit it as an example of how scene thinking allows us to see, think and write the world in ways that depart from the conventional confines of cultural criminology, shifting us farther away from a binary logic of representation and an anthropocentric focus. As both a matter of scientific fact and a matter of global concern, melting permafrost is both an example of the cultural-material matter of a criminal anthroposcene as well as the starting point for examining why and how scenes matter for green-cultural criminology. Because ‘[i]t matters what matters we use to think other matters with’ (Haraway 2016: 12), the scene of thawing permafrost pushes us beyond the binary modes of thought that have informed green criminology’s conceptions of harm (Halsey 2004). It asks that we consider nonhuman actors and their animations, as well as a complex trajectory of effects. But first, we need to travel beyond the cities of the global North— settings for most of cultural criminology’s research—and engage with the northern edge of the world. In far northern Siberia, there is an extensive stretch of permafrost that extends north of the Arctic Circle in a region called the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. Named partially for the Nenets—the nomadic guardians of a style of reindeer herding that is the last of its kind (BBC n.d.)—and Yamal, which roughly translates to the ‘end of the world’ (Kontra 2017), the area’s name transports us from a geographic end to a temporal end, merging together space and time in a place forged by winter temperatures that regularly plummet to -50 degrees Celsius. As a spatiotemporal end, the Yamal Peninsula might also be the site of a dead-­end—much like the Horton sphere for Cody Jarrett in White Heat. Because of global warming, temperatures in the region have soared to unprecedented highs. In July 2016, the area experienced an extraordinary heatwave during which temperatures peaked at 35 degrees Celsius, and remained above 27 degrees Celsius for weeks. Typically, historical

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summertime temperatures only briefly reach 15 degrees Celsius in the southern regions of the district. Due to the sustained heat in 2016, frozen tundra rapidly melted across thousands of miles, and consequently defrosted dead things that were long buried in the permafrost. In particular, decades-old reindeer carcasses thawed, releasing microbes that had been previously immobilized by the frost. Described as ‘zombie diseases of climate change’ by The Atlantic (Meyer 2017), some of these microbes were associated with the spore form of Anthrax. As a result, a disease that had not been seen since 1941 in the region returned with a vengeance, leading to a massive outbreak of reindeer Anthrax. In a few weeks, 2300 reindeer died within two to three days of being infected; 90 deer herders sickened, more than 20 Nenets were hospitalized, and one 12-year-old Nenet boy died. Because the lives of the Nenet people are inseparably intertwined with the reindeer population—to the point that ‘no-one knows for certain whether it is the reindeer that lead the people or vice versa’ (BBC n.d.)—reindeer Anthrax is especially harmful to the region, holding within it the possibility of turning the Yamal Peninsula into les champs maudits (‘the cursed fields’).3 When we consider the return of Anthrax to the Siberian region as a scene of environmental harm and of anthropogenic climate change—a criminal anthroposcene in our terms—it seems to escape both the notice of cultural criminologists with their primarily urban, anthropocentric focus, as well as that of green criminologists with their focus on human4 perpetrators of environmental harm (e.g., Beirne and South 2013; White and Heckenberg 2014). While humans feature as victims in the immediate scene (e.g., the sickened and dead Nenets), and in the distant background as invisible perpetrators of climate change, the protagonists at the heart of this drama are nonhuman, ‘dead’ matter, including warm air particles, previously dormant microscopic pathogens, reindeer corpses, and permafrost. To appreciate the ways in which their actions shape and contribute to an Anthrax outbreak, we need to reconsider some of the assumptions that have fed and sustained a binary logic of representation in both green and cultural criminologies. In particular, we need to query the maintenance of a strict distinction between humans and nonhumans in the age of the Anthropocene. While the distinction emerged in the Holocene—the 11,000 years of relative stability between two glaciations,

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during which human beings were able to develop civilizations—the Anthropocene represents a new geological epoch in which the Earth will no longer remain ‘stable and in the background, indifferent to our [human] histories’; rather, global ‘warming is such that the old distance between background and foreground has faded away’ in light of the frenzied vitality of natural history (Latour 2017: 112, 74). When we can no longer reduce the world to a background landscape, we need to cease de-­animating material, nonhuman protagonists, by depriving them of their activity. To do so, we need to stop over-animating humans, by attributing only to them agency and superior capacities for action (Latour 2017). As Jane Bennett (2010) has persuasively argued, this habit of parsing the world into dull, passive and inert matter (e.g., stuff that we call ‘it’ or ‘thing’) and vibrant life (e.g., living human beings or human-like beings, such as mammals that have been granted a higher level of consciousness) amounts to a ‘partition of the sensible’ (Rancière 2001). This, in turn, has the effect of feeding human hubris as well as humans’ Earth-destroying fantasies of consumption and conquest. The image of dead or instrumentalized matter prevents us from detecting and perceiving a fuller range of lively, nonhuman powers that work around and within us. Vegetal, mineral or fleshy materials are not passively awaiting animation by divine or human power (Bennett 2015); they are already themselves vibrant and vital. That is, in Bennett’s (2010: viii) terms, they have the capacity to ‘not only impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.’ Grounded in an ecological sensibility, Bennett’s refusal to separate and quarantine matter from human life is premised on a same-­ stuff claim—specifically, everything in nature is made of the same building blocks, whether we call those common denominators quarks, matter-energy, qi or atoms. Because humans and nonhumans are fundamentally made of the same stuff, the relationship between persons and material things should be read more horizontally rather than through a vertical hierarchy of being. Like Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor–network theory, Bennett’s theorizing entails a methodological flattening of the world, urging us to slowly think and move across chains of relations between actors.5 In any scene, actors are either human or nonhuman

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agents that have the efficacy to perform actions, because they have sufficient coherence to do things, produce effects, alter the course of events, and ultimately make a difference. Following Bennett’s insights, we can conceptualize the disappearing permafrost as an increasingly common scene in the Anthropocene; it is formed by entangled human and nonhuman bodies, and one of its effects includes ‘Anthrax outbreak.’ While we can study this scene at different scales of analysis, by zooming in and out of it, we examine it here at ground level. In this period of ecological mutation between humans and nonhumans, down is the direction to go (Latour 2017: 269). By moving downwards to begin in the soil, we start from a point that gives all actors an equal degree of attention. Indeed, this ground-level focus enables us to attend to the performance of a distinctively Arctic character: the permafrost. Mostly occurring in the Earth’s northeastern hemisphere, from Siberia to the Tibetan Plateau (Zhang et al. 1999), permafrost refers to the frozen soil, sediment and rock that remains at or below 0 degrees Celsius for at least two consecutive years (National Snow and Ice Data Center n.d.). Despite the static permanence implied by its name, permafrost is characterized by its instability: it is typically covered by an active layer that regularly melts. Because of global warming, the active layer in the permafrost—the part in which microbes and other life forms can live—is thawing even more rapidly, warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures (Banks 2018). When we see permafrost as vibrant, active matter rather than as some inert, neglected or uninteresting matter, we move closer to an ecologically informed analysis that recognizes soil as the cultural-material stuff that makes us all. Mythically originating from the mud as sculpted clay figures, humans are Earth matter, arising out of the soil like other life forms, both great and small. Since soil is both the site and agent of Earth’s incessant cycle of life and death, it recycles Earth matter6 in such a way as to dissolve hard distinctions between life and death: within it, ‘[l]ife is death is life is death is…’ (Natasha Myers, quoted in Puig de la Bellacasa 2019: 400). When frozen as permafrost, however, soil becomes ‘a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark’ (evolutionary biologist Jean-Michel Claverie, quoted in Fox-Skelly 2017). As a dark and potentially dangerous underworld, the

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thawing permafrost teems with bacteria and viruses. Some of this ‘undead’ matter is now awakening and becoming mobile, such as the rod-shaped bacterium Bacillus anthracis, otherwise known as Anthrax. Anthrax is notably a human pathogen that can survive both freezing and thawing in the permafrost. The pathogen’s survival, however, depends on its interactions with a host, so that microbe–human–nonhuman assemblages are placed at the heart of the host–pathogen relationship (Casadevall and Pirofski 1999). These assemblages shape whether the pathogen can replicate and persist within or on another species. In actively producing some disturbance in the host, Anthrax is a microscopic parasite that lives by, with, on and in others. It is a nonhuman actor with its own trajectories and propensities, both of which can work against the will of humans and other nonhumans. When humans or animals become Anthrax hosts— for instance, by inhaling its spore form, eating other Anthrax-infected species, or by direct contact with the bacterium through a break in the skin (World Health Organization n.d.)—their disposition is significantly and even fatally altered by the pathogen. Their bodies are weakened and immobilized by fever, chills, aches or fainting. Consequently, the victims are put out of action and their competencies diminished. In this case, the ‘dead’ matter of Anthrax becomes animated while de-animating other living beings. As a result, this parasitic matter has a material agency that can affect, and even fell humans and other nonhumans, despite their much larger size. Yet Anthrax is not the only parasite, or in Michel Serres’ (1982: x) term ‘thermal exciter,’ to be wakened in the melting permafrost. Embedded in the active layer of thawing permafrost are other ‘parasitic’ bacteria, particularly methane-producing ones. When these bacteria consume organic matter, known as yedoma, in the rotting soil, they directly release methane into the Earth’s atmosphere (Bianchi 2015). Today, methane is of profound concern because it is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (Plester 2017). Initially activated by human-induced climate change in the Arctic, permafrost-eating bacteria have the potential to release massive amounts of methane and other greenhouse gases, inducing even more runaway warming and permafrost thawing in the Arctic. From the soil, these bacteria may very well unleash what some

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scientists have called ‘the sleeping giant of the global carbon cycle’ (Ceurstemont 2018)—that is, the release of carbon in the permafrost that has not been accounted for in climate models, such as those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In important ways, the wide-ranging effects of microscopic parasites activate a sudden shift in scale, where we travel from seeing matter up-close at ground-level to its extensive dispersal in and through the air. In moving from the micro to the macro, or the local to the global, we take the shifting of scale as one way in which a scene’s elastic boundaries can enlarge to encompass new actors. Further, we conceive of this scaling as an actor’s—in this case, the microscopic parasite’s—own achievement as opposed to the researcher’s pre-determined focus of analysis. By digging in the actual dirt, rather than the metaphoric dirt that has preoccupied cultural criminology (e.g., Ferrell 2006; Young 2005), we highlight material agency in our scene thinking in order to counter human exceptionalism. In so doing, we also broaden what we see, by attending to the vibrancy of nonhuman matter. The messiness of the dirt spills out as non-linear, emergent trajectories of harm causation. In the melting of permafrost, we find the melting of cause and effect: enmeshed in cyclical processes of life, death and rebirth, the permafrost is entangled in circuits where effects and causes can alternate position as well as rebound on one another across multiple scales. As an assemblage of ice, soil, microbe and organic matter, melting permafrost is simultaneously a victim and witness of anthropogenic climate change, as well as a perpetrator of further global warming.

Conclusion ‘Made it, Ma. Top of the world!’ Cody Jarrett yells to the night sky as he dies in a fiery blaze, silhouetted by a thick cloud of smoke. And so ends the life of a deranged fictional gangster in one last burst of defiance, fully ‘aware now he has chosen his own death-trap’ (Goff et al. 2003: 141). As the image of a human-made deathtrap has shifted since the end of the Second World War, the ‘white heat’ of a post-war nuclear holocaust has been rewritten and reframed within the context of the Anthropocene as a progressively slow yet aggressive heating of the world, particularly in areas

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where white snowscapes and frozen tundra once dominated. Exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change, the melting permafrost, in turn, ‘could potentially open a Pandora’s box of diseases’ (Fox-Skelly 2017), introducing new scenes in which nonhuman and human bodies become entangled at multiple scales. While social scientists have focused their attention on the organization of the criminal underworld (e.g., Lupsha 1981; Paoli 2014; Sanchez-Jankowski 1991; Van Duyne 1995), far less attention has been paid to the actual underworld—that is, the subterranean region positioned below the surface of the Earth itself. There, soil, such as permafrost, is also an underground characterized by darkness and swarming crowds, albeit of microscopic rather than human life forms (Puig de la Bellacasa 2019). As a type of underworld, the permafrost is as important a site as the streets in which gangsters roam. It is a criminal anthroposcene that comes into view once we turn away from an anthropocentric focus and actually move downwards to dig in the dirt. To better conceptualize such messy scenes, this chapter has outlined scene thinking as an approach that could supplement analyses done under the banner of green-cultural criminology. In short, scene thinking represents a researcher’s decision to treat a set of actors, institutions, practices, texts and vibrant matter as though they constitute a scene with elastic boundaries. This is arguably what actors do as they sweep discrete people, places, events and artefacts into something that bears the name of a scene. By foregrounding taken-for-granted conditions of possibility and animation, scene thinking underpins our notion of criminal anthroposcene. For us, the criminal anthroposcene is a contingently produced site of action that brings together the criminal (that which produces harm or insecurity), the criminological (that which impinges on the study of crime and transgression) and the Anthropocene. Scene thinking demands that criminologists think through scenes in their multiplicity, by attending to the roles played by a diverse range of actors (human and nonhuman), matter (dead or alive, but always vibrant) and contexts (mediated, cultural and material). As a result, scenes matter as much as the matter of scenes. After all, matter is powerful, ‘consequential stuff’ because it is the ‘medium, soil…matrix and generatrix’ of all things that are and come to be (Haraway 2016: 130).

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Notes 1. Gangster films, as a genre, have been known to be noisy (Lam 2017), but White Heat amplifies the noise (Shadoian 2003). 2. Theatre critics acknowledge that theatrical scenes, for instance, must be situated. For them, theatre can ‘succeed without lights, props, and even…an actor, but it cannot exist without space: there must be a location, a venue of some sort in which theatre can […] take “place”’ (Tompkins 2003: 537). 3. The French referred to the fields of Anthrax-killed sheep across Europe during the Middle Ages as les champs maudits (Doucleff 2018). 4. Green criminology’s focus on corporate perpetrators of environmental harm can be read as another example of its interest in the criminal propensities of persons. After all, corporations are conceived in law as persons, and arguably in analogous way to human persons. They are granted the agency to act in accordance with their own interests. 5. In actor–network theory, actors are also called actants to highlight nonhumans in those roles. In this book, we consistently use ‘actors’ rather than ‘actants’ in recognition of the dramaturgical link between scenes, scene thinking, action and performance. 6. For example, Washington is set to become the first US state to legalize the composting of human remains as an alternative to traditional burial and cremation methods. Known as ‘recomposting,’ the practice involves decomposing the human body quickly with microbes and bacteria. The decomposed human body will then be added to soil, serving as mulch for plants, trees and flowers.

References Banks, K. (2018) ‘The Big Thaw’, Canadian Geographic. https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/big-thaw BBC. (n.d.) ‘Nenets’ URL (accessed 10 January 2020): http://www.bbc.co.uk/ tribe/tribes/nenets/index.shtml Becker, H.S. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York: Free Press. Beirne, P. and South, N. (eds.) (2013) Issues in Green Criminology, Oxon: Routledge.

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Bennett, A. and Peterson, R.A. (eds.) (2004) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2015) ‘Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-­ Oriented Philosophy.’ In R. Grusin (ed.) The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: chapter 9. Bevier, L. (2015) ‘The Meaning of Cultural Criminology: A Theoretical and Methodological Lineage’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology 7(2): 34–48. Bianchi, T.S. (2015) ‘Permafrost-Eating Bacteria: A New Twist on Thawing Arctic and Global Warming’, The Conversation URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://theconversation.com/permafrost-eating-bacteria-a-new-twiston-thawing-arctic-and-global-warming-47252 Blum, A. (2001) ‘Scenes’, Public 22/23: 7–35. Blumer, H. (1971) ‘Social Problems as Collective Behavior’, Social Problems 18(3): 298–306. Brisman, A. (2018) ‘Representing the “Invisible Crime” of Climate Change in an Age of Post-Truth’, Theoretical Criminology 22(3): 469–491. Brisman, A. and South, N. (2013) ‘A Green-Cultural Criminology: An Exploratory Outline’, Crime, Media, Culture 9(2): 115–135. Brisman, A. and South, N. (2014) Green Cultural Criminology: Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism and Resistance to Ecocide, London: Routledge. Brisman, A. and South, N. (2017) ‘Green Cultural Criminology, Intergenerational (In)equity and “Life Stage Dissolution.”’ In T. Wyatt, N. South, A. Nurse, G.  Potter and M.  Hall (eds.) Greening Criminology in the 21st Century, Farnham: Ashgate: 219–232. Buck-Morss, S. (1992) ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October 62: 3–41. Callon, M. and Latour, B. (1981) ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathans: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So.’ In K.  Knorr-Cetina and A.V.  Cicourel (eds.) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Strategies, Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 277–303. Carrabine, E. (2011) ‘Images of Torture: Culture, Politics and Power’, Crime, Media, Culture 7(1): 5–30.

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Carrabine, E. (2012) ‘Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology 52(3): 463–489. Carrabine, E. (2018) ‘Geographies of Landscape: Representation, Power and Meaning’, Theoretical Criminology 22(3): 445–467. Casadevall, A. and Pirofski, L. (1999) ‘Host-Pathogen Interactions: Redefining the Basic Concepts of Virulence and Pathogenicity’, Infection and Immunity 67(8): 3703–3713. Casemajor, N. and Straw, W. (2017) ‘The Visuality of Scenes: Urban Cultures and Visual Scenescapes’, Imaginations URL (accessed 10 January 2020): http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca/?p=9152 Ceurstemont, S. (2018) ‘Arctic Permafrost Might Contain “Sleeping Giant” of World’s Carbon Emissions’, Phys Org URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://phys.org/news/2018-12-arctic-permafrost-giant-world-carbon.html Chakrabarty, D. (2009) ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–222. Chakrabarty, D. (2012) ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History 43(1): 1–18. Cohen, A. (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, New York: Free Press. Colgan, W., Machguth, H., MacFerrin, M., Colgan, J.D., van As, D., MacGregor, J.A. (2016) ‘The Abandoned Ice Sheet Base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a Warming Climate’, Geophysical Research Letters URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/ 10.1002/2016GL069688 Doucleff, M. (2018) ‘Are there Zombie Viruses in the Thawing Permafrost?’ National Public Radio URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://www.npr. org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/01/24/575974220/are-there-zombieviruses-in-the-thawing-permafrost Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge & K. Paul. Eagleton, T. (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Farrall, S., Ahmed, T., and French, D. (eds.) (2012) Criminological and Legal Consequences of Climate Change, Oxford: Hart. Ferrell, J. (2006) Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging, New  York; New  York University Press. Ferrell, J. (2013) ‘Tangled up in Green: Cultural Criminology and Green Criminology.’ In N.  South and A.  Brisman (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, Abingdon: Routledge: 349–364.

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Observed and Modelled Temperature and Sea-Ice Variability’, Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography 56(4): 328–341. Kattsov, V.M., Ryabinin, V.E., Overland, J.E., Serreze, M.C., Visbeck, M., Walsh, J.E., Meier, W., and Zhang, X. (2010) ‘Arctic Sea-Ice Change: A Grand Challenge of Climate Science’, Journal of Glaciology 56(200): 1115–1121. Kohm, S. and Greenhill, P. (2013) ‘“This Is the North, Where We Do What We Want”: Popular Green Criminology and “Little Red Riding Hood” Films.’ In N. South and A. Brisman (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Green Criminology, Abingdon: Routledge: 365–379. Kontra, J.M. (2017) ‘Zombie Infections and Other Infectious Disease Complications of Global Warming’, The Journal of Lancaster General Hospital 12(1): 12–16. Lam, A. (2017) ‘Law’s Resonance and Undercover Performances in Gangster Films’, No Foundations 14: 87–107. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory, New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lupsha, P.A. (1981) ‘Individual Choice, Material Culture, and Organized Crime’, Criminology 19(1): 3–24. Lynch, M.J. (1990) ‘The Greening of Criminology: A Perspective on the 1990s’, The Critical Criminologist 2: 11–12. Mason, F. (2002) American Gangster Cinema: From ‘Little Caesar’ to ‘Pulp Fiction’, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Maxwell, B. (1992) ‘Arctic Climate: Potential for Change under Global Warming.’ In F.S. Chapin III, R.L. Jefferies, J.F. Reynolds, G.R. Shaver, and J. Svoboda (eds.) Arctic Ecosystems in a Changing Climate: An Ecophysiological Perspective, New York: Academic Press: 11–34. McClanahan, B. and Brisman, A. (2015) ‘Climate Change and Peacemaking Criminology: Ecophilosophy, Peace and Security in the “War on Climate Change”’, Critical Criminology 23: 417–431. McClanahan, B., Brisman, A. and South, N. (2018) ‘Green Criminology, Culture, and Cinema.’ In N.  Rafter and M.  Brown (eds.) The Oxford

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Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.151 Meyer, R. (2017) ‘The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change’, The Atlantic URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/ archive/2017/11/the-zombie-diseases-of-climate-change/544274/ Miles, S. (2000) Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, Buckingham: Open University Press. Natali, L. (2016) A Visual Approach for Green Criminology: Exploring the Social Perception of Environmental Harm, London: Palgrave Macmillan. National Snow and Ice Data Center (n.d.) ‘State of the Cryosphere: Permafrost and frozen ground’ URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/permafrost.html Nochimson, M.P. (2007) Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong, Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Osterkamp, T.E. and Romanovsky, V.E. (1999) ‘Evidence for Warming and Thawing of Discontinuous Permafrost in Alaska’, Permafrost and Periglacial Processes 10(1): 17–37. Owen, T. (2016) ‘Could More Deadly Dangers like ‘Zombie Anthrax’ Lie Beneath the Arctic Circle’s Melting Ice?’ Vice URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43meq9/could-more-deadlydangers-like-zombie-anthrax-lie-beneath-the-arctic-circles-melting-ice Paoli, L. (ed.) (2014) The Oxford Handbook of Organized Crime, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petersen, N. (2008). ‘The Iceman that Never Came: “Project Iceworm”, the Search for a NATO deterrent, and the Kingdom of Denmark, 1960–1962’, Scandinavian Journal of History 33(1): 75–98. Pfadenhauer, M. (2005) ‘Ethnography of Scenes: Towards a Sociological Life-­ World Analysis of (Post-Traditional) Community Building’, Forum: Qualitative social research 6(3). Plester, J. (2017) ‘All Hell Breaks Loose as the Tundra Thaws’, The Guardian URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/20/hell-breaks-loose-tundra-thaws-weatherwatch Presdee, M. (2000) Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime, London: Routledge. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2019) ‘Re-animating Soils: Transforming Human-Soil Affections through Science, Culture and Community’, The Sociology Review Monograph 67(2): 391–407.

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3 Establishing Shots: Detecting Anthropogenic Fog in Modern Crime Scene Photography Anita Lam

‘Look out of this window, Watson,’ Sherlock Holmes directs. ‘See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into this cloudbank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to the victim’ (Conan Doyle 2009a: 913). On such a day, the fog’s looming presence provides a cover under which criminals can hide, escaping observation from even the most eagle-eyed detective. Crimes could take place under the cloak of darkness provided by the dense and sulfurous cloudbank that came to define the London scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Thorsheim 2006). Created by the noxious emissions from factory chimneys and workshops in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the dense fog—alternatively named ‘London ivy’ by Charles Dickens (1853/1974: 179) and ‘pea-soup’ by Herman Melville1— appeared as a challenge to the detective and as an opportunity for the criminal (Corton 2015a). This thick fog has strikingly crept into our imagination of iconic crime scenes. It has wound its way through the spectacular violence associated with murder scenes2 to the point that no representation of Sherlock Holmes or Jack the Ripper3 would be complete without the presence of fog (Corton 2015b; Smith 2016).4 Even in © The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_3

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photographs devoid of humans, images of vacant city streets are read as potential crime scenes once fog enters the picture. Shooting in Paris in 1898 with a large format camera, for example, Eugène Atget produced images of empty street scenes that have been ‘likened to those of a crime scene’ by Walter Benjamin (1999: 527).5 While fog has been central to the way we imagine crime scenes, we have tended to reduce it to a scene-setting device, rather than consider it as a significant clue for making sense of what we call criminal anthroposcenes—that is, scenes in which crime and the Anthropocene intermingle and are inextricably knit together in their formation and representation. As urbanization and industrialization have been crucial contexts for theorizing and understanding modern crimes (e.g., Haggerty 2009), they have also been central processes that have shaped the Anthropocene. Consequently, the signs of the Anthropocene can and do coincide with signs of crime, if only we looked for them. When we look at crime scenes, however, we have attempted to peer through the fog, in order to reveal the criminals who hide in its midst. We assume that the fog can hide clues, obscuring the criminal traces left behind at a scene of human violence. But anthropogenic fog is itself a clue, one that points to the ‘invisible crime’ of climate change (Brisman 2018), if we could only expend some effort to actually look at it rather through it. This chapter is devoted to an experimental attempt to look at the fog, and to bring it into the foreground in crime scene photographs that have established our popular imagination of crime. To do so, we return to the formative years of both the Anthropocene and crime scene photography, examining the fog of darkness in historical crime scene photographs with the aid of an artificially intelligent (AI) detective. As unemotional and mathematically astute as any classical detective, our AI detective is enrolled in our investigation in order to counter the anaesthetics that have characterized the representation of criminal anthroposcenes. This anaesthetics has worked to direct our attention to crime while making it more difficult to perceive representations of the Anthropocene. In what follows, we first theorize the anaesthetics we hope to overcome in our investigation. As a setup for our approach to analyze criminal anthroposcenes, we then discuss detective work as a method for both seeing and making sense of clues at crime scenes. In the intertwined histories of classical detective fiction, photography and criminalistics in the nineteenth century, detective work has been built on a semiotic approach and

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a technologically mediated way of seeing: the police detective’s forensic eye was modelled on the literary detective’s eye, which in turn was shaped by the camera’s eye. To update the technology at the heart of detective work for the twenty-first century, we deploy computer vision. Powered by the computer’s eye, supervised machine learning and a set of algorithmic competencies, our AI detective is programmed to assess the visual dimensions of anthropogenic fog in a sample of over 500 crime scene photographs. These photographs of murder were taken by either police photographers or news journalists during the industrial stage of the Anthropocene (1880–1945) and in three cities—New York City, London and Paris—that have been centrally responsible for anthropogenic climate change. By using cultural analytics to examine this sample of crime scene photographs, we provide an innovative, methodological approach to doing visual criminology (broadly conceived as criminology’s study of images and visual regimes). Because visual criminology has sought to expand its lexicon of conceptual and methodological tools (Brown and Carrabine 2017b; Hayward and Presdee 2010; Rafter 2014), we offer a lengthier description of how our AI detective works. By working with an AI detective, we aim to challenge some of the assumptions associated with visual criminology’s dominant approach to studying images— namely, its semiotic approach—and to put it into conversation with current trends in computer science. In the last section of this chapter, we analyze the visual dimensions of our sample of crime scene photographs. This analysis not only reveals our habitual, anaestheticized way of looking at crime scene photographs, but also provides alternative ways to see these images anew as statistics, image plots and histograms. Through these data visualizations, we document the fog as a visual sign of darkness, ultimately connecting it to an overarching noir aesthetic that continues to inform our imagination of crime.

Anaesthetics and the Criminal Anthroposcene When we look at crime scene photographs, our eyes are trained on the spectacular aftermath of human-on-human violence (e.g., Biber et  al. 2013). We notice human death, but not necessarily the slow environmental violence that surrounds the victim’s body. We attend to criminal

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traces, but fail to see the anthropogenic environmental degradation associated with the Anthropocene. We do not see how signs of the Anthropocene have both pervaded and provided our visualizations of crime with their grime, grit and air of darkness. When we treat crime scene photographs as images that bring together visualizations of crime with those of the Anthropocene—that is, as representations of criminal anthroposcenes—we are anaestheticized in two intersecting ways. First, anaesthetics characterize our engagement with images of the Anthropocene. According to Nicholas Mirzoeff (2014), visualizations of the Anthropocene invoke the aesthetic in terms of bodily perception as well as beauty, particularly when they are tied to a tradition of Western imperial artwork that has long presented the conquest of nature as natural, right and beautiful. More importantly, Mirzoeff argues that these visualizations simultaneously invoke an aesthetic anesthesia, where we have come to perceive anthropogenic environmental destruction as similarly beautiful. Consequently, we come to decode images of fog and smog as representations of humans’ rightful conquest of nature in general and of the air in particular. At the same time that we aestheticize air pollution, we are anaestheticized to the physical and material conditions that have produced it. Secondly, an anaestheticization has arisen from our reading of crime stories that make up the (Western) canon of modern crime fiction. In these stories, visualizations of the Anthropocene have often been reduced to a literary device or metaphor for moral and criminal darkness, aestheticizing our perception of modern industrial pollution. Such an aesthetic anaesthesia arises not only from how fog has been represented in crime fiction, but also from why crime stories have been read in the first place. In Detective Novels on Tour (1930/2016), Walter Benjamin considers how reading detective novels is as integral to modern ‘rail travel as stopping at train stations is.’ For a few hours of travel, train readers are transported into a crime story, feeling ‘the shudders of suspense and the rhythms of the wheels running up [their] spines’ (Benjamin 1930/2016: 112). Navigating the train station, the city dweller anaestheticizes the fear of train travel (Salzani 2007), such as the angst of missing a connection and the loneliness of the compartment,6 with the visceral fears evoked by the fictional murder at the heart of the detective story. Imagining crime,

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then, allows for ‘the numbing of one fear by the other,’ and in doing so, offers ‘protection [from] the boiler god who glows through the night, to the smoke Naiads who romp all over the train’ (Benjamin 1930/2016: 110). While Benjamin praises the anaestheticizing effects of imagining crime, particularly as a means to cope with the anxieties of modern travel, we argue that there is another invisible anaestheticization at work: in playing detective, train readers can also ignore the smoky swells of fossil fuels that have been released by the ‘boiler gods’ powering the train’s steam engine.7 The consumption of crime stories, then, has played a role in anaestheticizing us to the anthropogenic fogs that surround us, redirecting our attention to human victims in the crime scene and reducing signs of the Anthropocene, such as smog, to the ambient atmosphere around human tragedy.

 hotographed Signs and Clue-Based Methods: P Seeing Like a Detective in Fiction, Criminalistics and Visual Criminology To cut through the double anaestheticization that hinders our ability to clearly see criminal anthroposcenes, we turn in this section to a discussion of detective work as a method for perceiving clues, such as anthropogenic fog, that often escape most people’s notice. In considering the intertwined histories of detective fiction and criminalistics, this section addresses the following questions: What does it mean to see clues like a detective? And how has this way of seeing—most influentially embodied by Sherlock Holmes—shaped criminalistics and visual criminology? As we will soon see, visual criminologists and criminalists continue to walk in the methodological footsteps first set down by Holmes when they make sense of the world on the basis of clue-based (or semiotic) ways of knowing. To understand detective work as a methodological approach, we return to the nineteenth century, during which the industrial stage of the Anthropocene unfolded in tandem with the emergence of classical detective fiction (roman policier). Appearing and proliferating alongside the professionalized modes of policing that came into being in the

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nineteenth-­century industrialized city (James 2009; Scaggs 2005), detective fiction served as one catalyst for police modernization. Its modernizing influence extended to advancing techniques in criminal investigation. Indeed, detective fiction was deeply imbricated in the history of criminalistics. Not only were many of its imagined, fictional technologies transformed into real-life tools for criminal investigation (Arntfield 2016), but these crime stories were used to train criminalists to read crime scenes. For example, Dr Edmond Locard—considered the Sherlock Holmes of France (Mazévet 2006) and the father of forensic science—trained his first-year students in the methods and techniques of criminalistics by assigning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet as mandatory reading material. Reprinted as a full book in 1888, during which London experienced the horror and media frenzy associated with the Whitechapel (or Jack the Ripper) murders, A Study in Scarlet introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world as the second highest expert on crime scene science in Europe, after the real-life police detective Alphonse Bertillon (Conan Doyle 2009b: 672). The novel also served as a textbook for studying criminal investigation before such scholarly texts or professional manuals were widely available (Arntfield 2016). In the tale, Holmes scrutinizes the crime scene in ways that would later be formalized in Locard’s exchange principle. The exchange principle assumes that every contact leaves a trace (Horswell and Fowler 2005: 28). According to Locard, physical evidence ‘does not forget,’ and it ‘cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it can diminish its value’ (quoted in Horswell and Fowler 2005: 48–50). In the entangled trajectories of detective fiction and criminalistics, the forensic eye of the criminalist is modelled on the eye of Sherlock Holmes and his particular way of seeing the world. Homing in on physical evidence, the literary detective draws upon an extraordinary ability to see and study traces by personifying the nineteenth-­century observing machine: the camera (Thomas 1999). By making it possible ‘for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being’ (Benjamin 2006: 79), the invention of photography was a pivotal moment for criminology, criminalistics and the emergence of detective fiction, allowing for the eventual intermingling of the literary and the forensic. As Walter Benjamin (2006: 79) has astutely

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noted, ‘[t]he detective story came into being when [the] most decisive of all conquests of a person’s incognito had been accomplished’ through photography, making ‘[t]he invention of photography […] no less significant for criminology than the invention of the printing press for literature’ (for more details on how photography has shaped criminalistics and extended the power of human vision, see Finn 2009; Sekula 1986; Tagg 1980). While printing presses churned out detective stories for the general public, photography was revered for its scientific verisimilitude by the authors who created those stories. Before writing what scholars have considered the primordial detective story (Arntfield 2016), Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger in January 1840, extolling Louis Daguerre’s prototype for the modern photographic portrait as ‘truth itself, in the supremeness of perfection’ (quoted in Trachtenberg 1980: 37). Like Poe, Conan Doyle’s interest in photography preceded his fictional stories of detection. As an amateur photographer, he contributed more than a dozen articles to the British Journal of Photography between 1881 and 1885 before writing A Study in Scarlet in 1886. Thus, Poe and Conan Doyle came to the art and science of detection by way of photography. Modelling the literary detective’s eye on camera-vision (Haworth-Booth 1997), they created a ‘private eye’ capable of capturing and recalling images from contingently produced scenes. As importantly, the forensic gaze of literary (and police8) detectives depended upon an underlying epistemological model based on clues, so that their photographic way of seeing could be transformed into a clue-­ based way of knowing.9 In deciphering the clues associated with criminal identity, semiotics—broadly defined as the study of signs and their meanings—emerged as a method of detection, particularly in the nineteenth century. For Sherlock Holmes (Ginzburg 1980), semiotics becomes an interpretive method for making sense of what appear at first glance to be trivial details, marginal data or debris. Assuming the role of semiotician (Berger 1984; Valverde 2006), the detective links together signs found at the crime scene, in order to trace the effects of crime back to their origin. In so doing, the detective works with a method that has also informed the bulk of visual criminology, particularly when it comes to analyzing already existing images (Carrabine 2017). First developed by Roland Barthes into the study of all kinds of sign systems (1957/1993, 1977), semiotics has

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since been applied, at the nexus of criminology and cultural studies, to decode photographic representations of crime (e.g., Hall 1973; Jones and Wardle 2010; Walklate 2017). While Sherlock Holmes deployed his camera-vision to create mental images of a crime scene, which he could then scrutinize for clues, visual criminologists have used semiotics to examine photographs of crime as clues—clues that tell us something about the multiple meanings of crime and how those meanings intersect with a particular visual culture (e.g., Biber 2007; Carrabine 2012, 2015, 2016; Ferrell 2017; Ferrell and Van de Voorde 2010). Whether explicitly or implicitly, semiotics has had a strong hold on the ways in which visual criminology makes sense of photographic material; so much so that it has become the standard against which newer, more dynamic methodological approaches are introduced. For example, Carney (2010) argues that visual criminology ought to be distanced from a strictly semiotic approach, whereby the photographic image is conceived as a performative, dynamic and material ‘social force’ rather than as a static representation. Similarly, Young (2014) takes issue with treating signs as static objects that await analysis. She seeks instead to study active semiotic events, in which meanings are generated through a spectator’s encounter with signs. Despite adjustments to the semiotic approach, this clue-based way of seeing and knowing continues to inform the analysis of visual representations, so that visual criminologists continue to walk—as have criminalists—in the methodological footsteps first set down by Sherlock Holmes. Given the primacy of the semiotic approach in both detective work and visual criminology, we reconfigure this approach as cultural analytics in the next section, so that we can examine a large sample of crime scene photographs with the aid of an AI detective’s computer vision.

 n Method: The AI Detective, Computer O Vision and Cultural Analytics Since the late nineteenth century, Sherlock Holmes, with his camera eye and photographic memory (Thomas 1999), has been revered as ‘the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the [Western] world has

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seen’ (Conan Doyle 2009c: 161). We update the visual technology at the heart of detection, by working alongside an actual twenty-first-century reasoning and observing machine: an AI bot. By seeing crime scenes through the eyes of our nonhuman analyst, we take the mathematical spirit and abstract reasoning of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, le Chevalier C.  Auguste Dupin, to its logical conclusion. While literary detectives were renowned for their investigation of crime scenes through nineteenth-century camera-vision, we introduce state-of-the-art computer vision to our analysis of crime scene photographs. When we deploy computer vision and supervised machine learning, however, we are not interested in pitting mathematical and computational reasoning against the bodily, material world. Rather, we are hoping that our AI detective might enable us to see anew, by shifting our attention and forensic gaze to the representation of anthropogenic fog in historical crime scene photographs. Here, our experiment in detection is aimed at visually revealing what our human eyes might not be able to see. We use computer vision to counter our anaestheticization, by documenting some of the visual dimensions associated with the Anthropocene since the birth of modern crime scene photography. To engage in a partnership with an AI detective, however, requires a rethinking of visual criminology’s methodological assumptions. In its study of images and the popular imagination (e.g., Rafter 2007), visual criminology makes two methodological assumptions that are challenged by the presence of an AI detective and cultural analytics. This first part of this section discusses each of these methodological assumptions in turn, highlighting what it means to see and detect as a human–nonhuman assemblage of competencies. In so doing, it outlines the ways in which computer vision can diverge from human ways of seeing. In this section, we also trace the ways a nonhuman, algorithmic detective can be trained and made to detect representational patterns, revealing the technical steps for producing a forensic gaze in a twentyfirst-century machine. As a whole, this section brings an updated version of visual criminology’s semiotic approach into conversation with current trends in computer science and computer programming.

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 aking and Training an AI Detective: Computer M Vision, Algorithms and Supervised Machine Learning Visual criminology assumes that the analyst at the heart of the semiotic machine is human, as does classical detective fiction. Yet, despite being a human detective, Sherlock Holmes is compared by his side-kick Watson in The Sign of Four to ‘an automaton – a calculating machine’ that can be ‘positively inhuman […] at times’ (Conan Doyle 2009d: 96). Holmes’ ‘true cold reason’ and capacity for detection are linked to his unemotional manner (Conan Doyle 2009d: 157). As Holmes’ mode of detection is associated with the cold promise of mathematical precision and scientific rationality, its contemporary mode might very well be tied to the current promise of algorithmic objectivity. As Gillepsie (2014: 169) has argued, algorithms are ‘cold mechanisms’ that define a narrow, mechanistic process of calculation behind which lie ‘warm human and institutional choices.’ While Sherlock Holmes has been compared to a machine, our AI detective is an actual machine built on the principles of computer vision. As such, it is a configuration of algorithmic competencies and computational models. When conceived as mathematical constructs that accomplish a given purpose under explicit provisions (Hill 2015), algorithms allow our nonhuman detective to take action and to have effects: ‘Algorithms do things, and their syntax embodies a command structure to enable this to happen’ (Goffey 2008: 17). Algorithms, then, allow the computer—which might itself be considered an algorithm machine (Gillepsie 2014)—to be afforded a level of agency when it comes to the acts of seeing and image processing. Thus, our nonhuman bot is an active participant in the processing, analysis and visualization of our sample of crime scene photographs, rather than merely a tool for our analysis. After all, an algorithmic system is not just a fetishized object made of code and data, but rather an assemblage of human and nonhuman actors who intersect in scenes that are made possible through algorithms and platforms (Ananny and Crawford 2016; Crawford 2016). As a result, representational meanings are not simply a positivist discovery but instead a relational achievement between human and nonhuman agents that are partnered together in an assemblage (Annany 2016); it is only together that they produce knowledge and derive meaning.

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Specifically in this case, human–nonhuman relations are shaped by the interactions embedded in supervised machine learning. Machine learning is ‘any methodology and set of techniques that can employ data to come up with novel patterns and knowledge, and generate models that can be used for effective predictions about data’ (Van Otterlo 2013). Without explicit programming, algorithms ‘learn’ by defining rules for how to classify new data inputs. As the most common form of machine learning, supervised machine learning is an approach for deriving meaning from data, in which the machine learner begins with a pre-conceived model of the world. As such, the human researcher sets the parameters (often in the form of hand-labelled inputs) by which the nonhuman detective engages in its detective work. Consequently, a human supervisor trains the nonhuman before it can find patterns in representation. In this regard, we do not treat our AI detective as a completely independent and autonomous agent, presuming that its automated processes are correct by default. Instead, we assume a sense of distributed responsibility in the ensuing analysis of crime scene photographs, such that responsibility is simultaneously shared across a mixed network of algorithmic and human actors (Mittelstadt et al. 2016; Simon 2015). This distributed responsibility is most acute when it comes to programming what our AI detective can see. Composed of neural networks that are capable of deep learning, our AI detective ‘sees’ representations as multiple processing layers, moving from an array of pixel values to the presence or absence of edges in an image (LeCun et al. 2015). Our AI does not automatically see objects in images. Instead, it proceeds to gradually recognize objects by first detecting and assembling smaller units that make up the image: it first detects edges in particular orientations and arrangements as motifs; these motifs are assembled into forms that correspond to the parts of known objects. Through deep learning, our AI detective is eventually trained to recognize particular objects. Once trained, its algorithms are capable of deriving categories and creating associations by sensing and combining elements of the world that they have been programmed to see (Cheney-Lippold 2011). Because algorithms are meaningless and relatively inert machines until they are paired with a database (Gillepsie 2014), our nonhuman detective needs to be trained with a visual dataset in order to see.

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Training the Nonhuman In order to gain the ability to see and understand scenes, the AI was trained in relation to computer vision’s operationalization of scenes. In computer vision, a scene is defined as a place in which a human can act or navigate (Xiao et al. 2010).10 Because scenes are made up of objects that can be detected, our AI detective was pre-trained on the Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset.11 Designed to push the boundaries of computer vision, the COCO dataset was produced with ‘the goal of advancing state-of-the-art object recognition by placing it in the context of the broader question of scene understanding’ (Lin et al. 2015). It was created by crowdsourcing the tasks of collecting and labelling images of everyday scenes—a task that amounted to over 70,000 hours of human labour. This collective labour produced a visual database of 328,000 colour photographs and 91 different object types, all of which would be easily recognizable to a four-year-old human. The large-scale dataset is comprised of three types of images for each object type. Easily found through Google or Bing image searches, iconic-object images depict a single large object, often in the centre of the image from a canonical perspective12; iconic-scene images are also shot from canonical viewpoints and typically lack people in frame; and lastly, non-iconic images are collected from Flickr and tend to frame their shots in ways that diverge from those depicted in the iconic images. More reflective of the actual composition of everyday scenes, non-iconic images feature objects that are partially occluded from view because they exist amid clutter, or in the background and the margins of the image. Given the emphasis on non-iconic images, COCO was introduced to improve the detection of such views, which has been an area of struggle for current computer recognition systems. Trained on the COCO dataset, our AI detective gains particular capacities when it turns its attention to crime scene photographs. While computer scientists tend to presume that there is a single place or location that defines a scene, crime scenes do not occur only in bedrooms, kitchens or living rooms; they occur on the street, under bridges and in fields or in public places, such as restaurants, lobbies and elevators. There is no single place—with a specific shape, size or collection of embedded

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objects—that defines a crime scene. Instead, the incident of crime comes to repurpose places, drawing new boundaries in both public and private spaces with police tape. Thus, the presence of a dead body—a sign of violent crime—‘redefines the space and reconfigures the status of everything—or everything else—in the room’ (Bond 2009: 4). In keeping with this approach to defining a murder scene, our AI detective is programmed to scrutinize photographs to reveal the presence of a dead person rather than assume that there is a typical scene of murder associated only with certain environments. Because forensic crime scene photography aims to preserve the integrity of a crime scene, victims’ bodies can be partially hidden in the image and, in this way, be visualized through non-­ iconic views. While the COCO dataset equips our AI detective to make sense of these non-iconic views, the dataset itself introduces the following two weaknesses.13 One, COCO’s database of persons primarily includes ‘live’ people who are mostly in an upright bodily position, either standing, walking or sitting.14 Because our AI detective understands persons based on what COCO has already categorized as persons, it is occasionally challenged when persons are represented in other types of bodily positions (e.g., lying down). Two, COCO is comprised of colour images whereas our visual dataset, made up of black-and-white photographs, is in greyscale. This has affected the AI’s ability to detect object edges, and consequently, its contextual reasoning has been hampered by the greyscale format. As a result, our AI detective has encountered some difficulties when it comes to pinpointing the victim in the photograph, which will be discussed in greater detail as part of our findings.

 e AI Detective’s Scene Analysis: Object Detection Th and Semantic Segmentation Once trained, our AI detective is ready to engage in scene analysis. In computer vision, scene analysis depends upon object detection, because all things depicted in an image are considered to be objects. Object detection, in turn, involves two tasks: the classification of individual objects and the localization of each object in a photographed scene (Lin et al.

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2015). To localize individual objects, the computer roughly defines the object’s spatial location in the image with a rectangular bounding box. Empowered by the Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) in conjunction with its pre-training on the COCO dataset,15 our AI detective undertakes object detection by simultaneously generating bounding boxes, as well as object masks within each bounding box through semantic segmentation (see Fig. 3.1 for an example). The goal of

Fig. 3.1  Bounding boxes, object masks and probabilities are automatically generated on top of Weegee’s photograph, entitled ‘Murder on the roof.’ (For Weegee’s original photograph, entitled ‘Murder on the Roof’ (13 August 1941), see https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/murder-on-the-roof (accessed 7 January 2020).)

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semantic segmentation is ‘to classify each pixel [in the image] into a fixed set of categories [such as person] without differentiating object instances [e.g., without differentiating between different persons]’ (He et al. 2008: 1). When tasked with detecting all persons in an image, for instance, a high-quality object mask is superimposed upon each detected person, irrespective of the different sizes or positioning of a person’s body. When detecting persons in a crime scene photograph, however, the AI is unable to distinguish between live persons (such as police detectives or civilian bystanders) and dead ones (such as the victim in a murder scene). Because of these limitations in our AI’s capacity for detection, we distributed the responsibility for scene analysis between ourselves and our nonhuman analyst. In other words, we verified the accuracy of our AI’s independently made object detections. For instance, when the AI is tasked with autonomously detecting the victim in a murder scene, we confirmed that the person identified was both a person (as defined by humans) and the victim in the image.

Cultural Analytics According to Lev Manovich, cultural analytics is ‘the analysis of massive cultural data sets and flows using computational and visualization techniques’ (Software Studies Initiative 2015). As a method for examining large datasets, cultural analytics deviates from the semiotic approach that has oriented visual criminology. In general, semiotics in visual criminology has been deployed to analyze a small sample of images, emphasizing the discovery of minute clues through detailed readings. In this approach, a single exemplary text can serve as the atom of analysis, from which the analyst can extrapolate the workings of an entire genre, period or region of cultural production (e.g., Barthes 1957/1993). By contrast, cultural analytics can identify visual patterns across large samples of data, which, in turn, can more comprehensively cover the contours of an entire genre of representation. In this method, computers can automatically analyze and visualize the aesthetic dimensions of media representations (Manovich 2009, 2017), deploying techniques developed in the fields of AI and

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computer vision, as well as contemporary technologies for storing, organizing and comparing large datasets.16 Originating from the Software Studies Initiative, cultural analytics uses computational methods in a two-step process of digital image analysis and information visualization.

Digital Image Processing and Analysis The first step in cultural analytics is to see the images in a dataset through the computer’s ‘eyes.’ By adopting standard techniques from digital image analysis, our AI detective ‘sees’ the images along a singular visual dimension. In contrast, humans tend to experience all the visual dimensions of an image at once as part of a gestalt experience (Manovich et al. 2011), wherein the whole image is perceived as greater than the sum of its parts. Because of these differences in visual perception, our AI detective enables a sense of defamiliarization, creating the possibility of seeing what we have not previously noticed (Manovich et al. 2011: 38). Such defamiliarization is useful for revealing the anaestheticization to which we have become accustomed. Our AI detective sees what our eyes cannot, especially given the size of our dataset, for the following two reasons. One, we can observe similarities and differences in a single image or even a small set of images, but scaling up the size of the dataset, even to a few hundred images, will overwhelm our visual memory. Two, we have a limited ability to register subtle differences in or between images in terms of visual language. While we can spot differences in content within or between images, slight differences in brightness may escape our notice. Even if we can note visual differences, we are unable to properly describe all the possible variations in grey tones, textures, compositions, lines and shapes in a small sample, much less a larger dataset. Although our visual senses can detect a much larger set of values in greyscale, orientation and size, our language has not been sufficiently fine-tuned to describe the full spectrum of variations that we can encounter. By contrast, our AI detective is able to automatically measure these differences in visual qualities and register them as numerical descriptions. As a result, it can lay bare for us an image’s visual structure, by translating visual qualities into numerical values. Known as visual features, the resulting statistics can then be

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quantitatively analyzed and compared. Here, we are not suggesting that the mathematical insights produced by our AI detective will pave a more truthful path for understanding crime scene photography. Rather, the computational analysis of visual features can potentially yield observations that challenge us to consider new paths or connections to pursue, particularly ones that have yet to occur in visual criminology.

Two-Dimensional Visualizations As the second step in cultural analytics, the visual features are graphed, in order to show the complete image set in a single visualization (Manovich and Douglass 2009). Mapping a visual feature, such as brightness, along X and Y axes allows us to see the overall perceived differences, by describing the visual dataset with an image rather than with our own limited visual vocabulary (Manovich 2013). From these information visualizations, we can detect and see patterns of gradual change or evolution in the visual features of crime scene photographs. The resulting image plots17 superimpose images over data points in a scatter plot or line graph. Consequently, these visualizations enable us to see a single crime scene photograph in relation to precisely delineated representational patterns across time and regions. In the image plots, we can simultaneously see both the single image and a ‘zoomed out’ view of the larger field to which it belongs, making it possible to traverse different scales of visual analysis in one glance (Manovich et al. 2011).

Building a Dataset, Describing the Sample Having described our methodological approach for both seeing and analyzing crime scene photographs, we turn in this section to describing the dataset that will be assessed by our AI detective. Since there is no pre-­ existing archive of crime scene photographs—a criminologically relevant version of the COCO dataset, for instance—we have built our own dataset of crime scene photographs. The overall sample has been put together through the selection and inclusion of photographs that have powerfully

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shaped the contours of our imagination of the crime scene itself. Our current imagination is founded on photographs taken of crime scenes during the modern industrial era. What follows is a discussion of how we have carefully selected a sample of photographs that not only acknowledges the state of the Earth from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century, but also situates three cities—Paris, New  York City and London—as major contributors to innovations in crime scene photography, as well as to anthropogenic environmental destruction during this period. Because there is no concise history of crime scene photography written for and by (visual) criminologists, at least not to our knowledge, we provide a lengthier description of how crime scene photography was enacted by police photographers or photojournalists in each of the three cities across the first stage of the Anthropocene.

Periodizing the Anthropocene According to Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill (2007), the first stage of the Anthropocene can be tracked to the onset of industrialization in 1800, in which industrial societies transformed into high-­ energy societies through their increased use of fossil fuels—first, coal and then oil and gas. By charting the progress of the Anthropocene through the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration across time, the authors act as detectives, scrutinizing the Earth System for a human imprint that can explain how humans have become an immense force that has since overwhelmed nature. Quantifying the accumulated amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of the spread of fossil fuel-based energy systems, they conclude that [a]round 1850, near the beginning of Anthropocene Stage 1, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 285 ppm, within the range of natural variability for interglacial periods during the late Quaternary period. During the course of Stage 1 from 1800/50 to 1945, the CO2 concentration rose by about 25 ppm, enough to surpass the upper limit of natural variation through the Holocene and thus provide the first indisputable evidence that human activities were affecting the environment at the global scale. (Steffen et al. 2007: 616)

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While the first stage of the Anthropocene overlapped with the emergence of professional police forces and detective fiction, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it ended abruptly in 1945. At the end of the Second World War, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a radical upsurge in CO2 emissions marked the start of the Great Acceleration (also known as Stage 2 of the Anthropocene, circa 1945 to 2015) and the most pervasive shift in the relationship between humans and their environment (Steffen et al. 2007: 617). This accelerated, atmospheric human imprint on the global environment, however, can be read as an extension and growth of urbanization, industrialization and population size that were already (over)taxing the Earth during the industrial age.

 ituating the Anthropocene and Locating the Modern S Crime Scene: Paris, New York City and London Processes of urbanization, industrialization and population growth were especially evident in three major cities in the West. Taking cues from Mirzoeff’s (2014) analysis of how paintings of New York City, Paris and London have anaestheticized the Anthropocene, we examine crime scene photographs taken in these three cities in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Not only have these three modern imperial powers been centrally responsible for the change in climate, due to their extremely high levels of carbon emissions (Ritchie and Roser 2017), they have also been centrally featured in crime scene investigations launched by both literary and actual police detectives. Thus, they can be read within the genealogy of the Anthropocene as ‘ground zero for both “the end of nature” heralded by global climate change and the aesthetic encounter with that passing’ (Taylor 2016: 2); they can also be read within the genealogy of detective fiction as crime scenes themselves because, as Benjamin (1999: 527) mused, ‘isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn’t the task of the photographer […] to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?’ In bringing together the crime scene and the Anthropocene, our sample is comprised of a total of 523 crime scene photographs taken in

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Table 3.1  Breakdown of crime scene photographs in the sample by place and time period Time period

Paris

New York

London

Total

1880–1899 1900–1909 1910–1919 1920–1929 1930–1939 1940–1945 Undated Total images

13 82 14 1 3 0 3 116

0 0 297 2 38 20 0 357

3 2 7 8 9 21 0 50

16 84 318 11 50 41 3 523

New York City, London and Paris from 1880 to 194518 (see Table 3.1). Overall, the contents of the resulting dataset have been selected because they have vitally contributed to the visual and imaginative contours of the modern crime scene. While the dataset cannot be described as comprehensive (i.e., it captures all the crime scene photographs taken in the three cities from 1880 to 1945), it is illustrative of the kinds of images that have been made publicly accessible through digitized online collections and print books, often because the photographs represent the crime scene in visceral, evocative ways that we cannot forget. In curating, archiving and making crime scene photographs available for public consumption, these collections point to two competing tensions that inform the way we view these photographs. In general, the goal of crime scene photographs, when taken by police forces, is to preserve the crime scene. These photographs serve as a form of visual notetaking for detectives (Radley 1948), since no human detective has the photographic memory of Sherlock Holmes. To create forensic documents and visual records of evidence, photography was used by police forces in London, Paris and New York City as an institutional tool for objectively capturing the aftermath of a homicide, freezing in time and place a momentary configuration of humans and nonhumans. When crime scene photographs circulate outside of court records in news media and become (re)packaged for public consumption, the images can be subjectively interpreted as an art form with shifting aesthetic and affective resonances. As a result, crime scene photographs can be seen ‘not [only] as a series of documents, but

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[also] as a series of sensory emotional enablers’ (Edwards 2010: 38). We now turn to a more detailed discussion of the significant historical and cultural reference points that have been associated with crime scene photography in Paris, London and New York City.

Paris Crime scene photographs from Paris, primarily taken between 1880 and 1919, mostly originate from Alphonse Bertillon’s work on making the Paris Police Prefecture more scientific (Piazza 2011). Enthusiastically admired by Sherlock Holmes as a ‘French savant’ with a ‘precisely scientific mind’ (Conan Doyle 2009b: 672), Bertillon was the chief of criminal identification for the Paris Police Prefecture, beginning in 1880. As a pioneer of forensic science practices, he played a crucial role in the modernization of criminal identification methods by inventing a system of Bertillonage. In the practice of Bertillonage, the face and profile of known criminals were photographed as visual supplements to precise descriptions of their morphological features and anthropometric measurements. To visualize the criminal, Bertillon rationalized photographic methods, by submitting the shooting of mug shots to strict conditions of image-­ making (e.g., standardized lighting, camera angles and subject pose, among other factors). The resulting ‘spoken’ portrait (portrait parlé) has been central to studies of photography in criminalistics (e.g., Sekula 1986; Tagg 2012). Relatively less well-known, particularly in the English-­ speaking world, are Bertillon’s metric photographs of crime scenes (see Castro 2011a). At the crime scene, metric photographs are taken to illustrate and measure the place of misfortune, allowing for a mathematically exact map of the photographed scene to be drawn. By overlaying gridlines and scales on the image, metric photography fixes with visual accuracy the thousand material details in the crime scene, including the position of the victim’s body, the possible locations of weapons and objects in the scene, and any other clues. In so doing, the photographs ‘preserve an exact, complete and impartial view of the premises, things and beings,’ inviting police detectives to properly look at the scene (Castro 2011b; our translation). Because these images assume that the lens of the

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camera is a metonym for the eye of the observer, the camera’s point of view determines the different planes of the image, with the most objective perspective embodied by the strictly aerial view. In 1907, Bertillon developed the plongeur, a photographic device that rests on a tripod of more than two metres, to take images from directly above the corpse prior to any disturbance of the scene by police investigators. In his aim to record the crime scene’s topography, Bertillon’s metric photographs, particularly his aerial shots, are an important contribution to both the cultural history of crime scene photography and detective policing (Ellenbogen 2012). Bertillon’s work has been featured in recent print books, such as medical examiner Philippe Charlier’s Seine de Crimes (2015), and in an online gallery hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum has digitally archived Bertillon’s Album of Paris Crime Scenes19 (1901–1908), in which [p]hotographs of the pale bodies of murder victims are assembled with views of the rooms where the murders took place, [alongside] close-ups of objects that served as clues […]. Made as part of an archive rather than as art, these postmortem portraits, recorded in the deadpan style of a police report, nonetheless retain an unsettling potency. (The Met Museum n.d.)

Taken as documents of terrible murders that occurred in Paris near the turn of the twentieth century, these images highlight the visuality associated with Bertillon’s innovative police practices, making him one of the early forerunners of visual criminology (Rafter 2014: 130). By visually linking murder to an urban setting, each dead body to a particular room or spot on the street, crime scene photography in Paris vitally contributed to the construction of our crime realities (Cragin 2006; Kalifa 2004).

New York City Crime scene photographs from New York City comprise the bulk of the images in our overall sample. This is a consequence of the large-scale digitization project undertaken by the New York City Department of Records and Information Services. Culled from the city’s municipal archives, a

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collection of 870,000 images were first made available to the public through its online website in April 2012. Among images of boroughs and bridges, the gallery includes ‘images from the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the English-speaking world’ (AP Press 2012). Specifically, the New York Police Department (NYPD) collection includes digital copies of glass-plate photographs of murder scenes, mostly taken by anonymous police photographers between 1915 and 1920. Following Bertillon’s insights, some of these photographers employed a three-legged metal tripod to take overhead, full-body shots of the victim’s body. Some of the images in the New York City archive were previously reprinted in Luc Sante’s (1992) book, Evidence. Since its publication, Evidence has inspired both local and international efforts to excavate archives in search of crime images that could be made publicly accessible in the form of museum exhibits and coffee table books (Bray and Dalton 2009). While Sante’s book was not the first to highlight the aesthetics associated with images of murder (e.g., Black 1991; de Quincey 1925; Rabaté 2007), or to re-present historical crime images as art, it became an ‘influential harbinger of what are now well-established curatorial and publishing genres’ (Biber 2011: 577) at the nexus of crime and art. In addition to police photographs of crime scenes from the municipal archives, our New York City sample includes images from the city’s tabloid newspapers. Tabloid images in our sample include those reprinted in New York Noir (1997), archived online through Getty Images,20 and presented in the online galleries of the International Center of Photography.21 In the US, the modern crime scene was made highly and powerfully visual during the rise of competing tabloids in New York City during the early twentieth century. Dating back to the birth of the New York Daily News (‘New York’s Picture Newspaper’) in 1919, spot news—that is, vivid images made at the scene (Bonanos 2018: 20)—became a new route for the production and circulation of crime images in the US, enabling the mass consumption of crime scene photography. With its increased crime coverage (Hannigan 1997), the Daily News became the nation’s largest-circulating and best-selling newspaper six years after its inception, making it the most widely viewed forum for photography in general and crime photography in particular. Of the freelance photographers who worked for the Daily News, Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig made a

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name for himself in the 1930s and 1940s as a tabloid specialist in night-­ time crime scenes, declaring that ‘murder is [his] business’ (Weegee 2013: 9). Unlike many of the police and tabloid photographers who remain anonymous to this day, Weegee crafted his larger-than-life reputation by arriving at murder scenes before or at the same time as police officers and criminalists (Weegee 1945). Mediating relations between the NYPD and the gangsters who belonged to ‘Murder, Inc.,’ Weegee’s career speaks to the ways in which news photography, police photography and the literary figure of the hardboiled detective intersected in a strategic blurring of fact and fiction (Lam 2019; Pelizzon and West 2004; Wallis 2013). Combining elements from documentary photography, forensic crime scene photography and photojournalism, his flash photography provided a distinct approach for transforming violence into high art (Carrabine 2012, 2014). Made under the harsh light of the flashbulb, his gritty, high-contrast pictures of victims and voyeuristic bystanders came to define how crime was imaged and imagined between the World Wars in the US (Harshorn 2013; Squiers 1997).

London Mostly retrieved from The National Archives’ online collection of open documents,22 the sample of crime scene photographs from London varies from those taken in New York City and Paris. Unlike the other two cities under study, the images from London maintain an archival linking to the Central Criminal Court and assize depositions and police files, retaining some connection to legal practices and their original criminal investigations. While photographs from Paris and New York City regularly feature full-body shots of the victim’s body at the scene of the crime, such shots rarely appear in crime scene photographs from London. Since ‘Bertillon-­ esque conventions’ were not followed until the 1930s (Bell 2015: 31), full-body or close-up shots of the victim appear only in the 1950s, and only as accompanying morgue photographs (Bell 2018). As an exception to this general trend of early crime scene photography in London, our sample includes two police photographs of Mary Kelly’s body,23 lying full length in a bed at the site of her murder by Jack the Ripper in 1888. This

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inclusion acknowledges the ways in which the gas-lit and foggy lens of the Whitechapel murders have darkened the accounts of those who both recorded and vicariously experienced the lives of the criminal classes in Victorian England near the turn of the twentieth century (see Shore 2015). Based on Bell’s (2018) analysis of crime scene photography in England, we highlight two other differences between crime scene photographs in the London Metropolitan Police collection and those taken in Paris and New York City. First, the English police, unlike their American counterparts, attempted to keep detectives and civilian bystanders out of the photographic frame. Secondly, British newspapers, unlike New  York City’s tabloid newspapers, did not publish explicit crime scene photographs, remaining fairly restrained in their representations of crime and violence. Partially owing to the fact that British news photographers were rarely close to the actual crime scene before the 1960s, the daily newspapers accompanied their crime stories with images of house exteriors or the streets in which the crimes took place, often printing portraits of the murder victims in life rather than in death. By keeping violent crime scene photographs out of public circulation, the London sample allows readers to imagine the spectacular violence done to bodies in their own minds, highlighting the connection between image and imagination.

Findings In this section, we detail what we empirically found when we searched for traces of anthropogenic fog in our sample of crime scene photographs. To visually scan existing images for fog, however, requires an acknowledgement that fog is much like smoke (Gaudio 2008; Litwack and Gaudio 2018) or clouds (Damisch 2002) in its formlessness. As substances without fixed forms or bounded bodies, they push the limits of representation and consequently the limits of our capacity to perceive it. While our AI detective can identify human bodies, for instance, with a 96% accuracy across the entire sample, its computer vision needed to be guided, in order to see the representation of fog. Anthropogenic fog is ultimately a body that is all surface, even as it darkens the otherwise invisible medium of air. As a result, our AI detective focused on formal visual features that

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lay on the surface of the image in its analysis. In particular, we programmed our nonhuman bot to calculate two visual features: the size of the human victim’s body and image brightness. The first algorithmic calculation, premised on the size of a bounded body, allows us to gauge how much visual space is taken up by the environment in which the formless fog could be found. The brightness calculation, by contrast, enables us to examine how light sculpts the visual structure of a crime scene image. By considering the changes in photographic technologies and practices, we link our analysis of image brightness to a consideration of how light sculpting practices help produce darkness as an effect. This darkness can be read as a sign of anthropogenic fog; as the camera captures a crime scene, it might additionally capture the blackening of air by pollutants. We ultimately conclude that a noir aesthetic characterizes our sample of crime scene photographs and increasingly so after the 1930s. But first, like the classical detectives before us, we retrace the analytic steps that we have taken to reach our conclusion.

On Measuring Bodies When shooting on location, both police and news photographers tend to focus their lenses on capturing the victim’s body on film, making it one of the most important elements for defining a crime scene. Because the forensic imperative requires a precise documentation of the victim’s body position at the murder scene, the resulting crime scene photographs operate in the same vein as detective work. In both cases, the imaged corpse— once a live human subject—is transformed into an object of investigation that is carefully measured and visually assessed (Bell 1998). In the nineteenth century, Bertillon deployed metric photography to measure the victim’s body and position. In contrast, our AI detective measures the photographed victim’s body by pixels rather than by metric units; it superimposes bounding boxes and object masks onto the crime scene photograph rather than gridlines and scales. As an algorithmic calculative device, the AI can compute how much of an image is (spatially) structured by the presence of a victim’s body. Victims loom large in the imagination and visualization of crime (e.g., Reiner et  al. 2000; Garland 2001),

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but exactly how large? And how much, then, does the surrounding environment figure into the image? We address these questions by measuring the size of the depicted victim’s body (i.e., the number of pixels that make up the body’s object mask24) in relation to the overall size of the image (i.e., the total number of pixels in the image). When averaged across the entire sample of crime scene photographs, the mean size of the victim’s body is 0.09—that is, the body takes up 9% of pixels in the overall image. This average obscures differences across time and place. The victim’s body took up the most visual space in crime scene photographs taken in Paris between 1880 and 1909 (between 12.7 to 21.9% of the total pixels in a photograph). In contrast, it covered roughly 7% of the pixels in crime scene photographs taken by police in New York City in the 1910s, and an average of 9% in images taken by tabloid journalists in the city between 1930 and 1945. Despite these differences in representation, the victim’s body has been consistently photographed in a non-iconic way, at least according to those working in the field of machine learning. According to Berg and Berg (2009), iconic images in machine learning are those that picture a large, central object that takes up at least 25% of the entire image. None of the images in our sample represent the victim as such a large object of the forensic gaze. Instead, victims are represented as relatively small humans against a much larger background,25 raising two important implications: the first emphasizes how these images establish particular spaces as criminally dangerous, and the second highlights how we typically look at images of crime. As the first implication, we can consider how crime scene photographs are establishing shots. In cinema, an establishing shot frames the start of a scene from a distance, showing viewers the spatial relations between human characters, objects and setting (Bordwell and Thompson 2004). Similarly, crime scene photographs establish the relations between the victim’s body and their immediate surroundings. Since the victim’s body, on average, takes up 9% of the crime scene photograph, the remaining 91% of the image is a representation of the surrounding environment. Because all images in our sample are shot on location in metropolises, they come to represent violent crime in the big city, helping to establish an association between the city and fatal danger. Within the city, victim’s

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bodies were more likely to be visualized inside public and private spaces from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. That is, between 80.5% and 88.5% of the crime scene photographs in the sample from 1880 to 1929 were shot indoors by police photographers, many of which resituated the intimate setting of the bedroom26 as a site of murder as well as clue-based detective work.27 When victims are represented in these bedroom scenes as bloodied bodies entangled in bedsheets, the violence is made all the more shocking because it intrudes on a personalized space that ought to be safe. The dangers of the city, then, do not stop at one’s doorstep, or bedroom door; rather, they can leak into interiors as much as they spill outwards onto the streets. In contrast to the early crime scene photographs in the sample, later images increasingly represent outdoor settings. Specifically, 62% of the crime scene photographs from the 1930s, and 80.5% of the images from the 1940s were taken outside. This rise in outdoor photography speaks more to the accessibility of public spaces for news photographers rather than to changes in homicide patterns over time. As the later photographs in our sample are increasingly taken by news photographers rather than by police photographers,28 the city’s streets and sidewalks appear as prominent settings for murder and for gang warfare (as in the case of the gang wars that marked New York City in the 1930s and 1940s). Crime scene photographs from the 1930s onwards, thus, help establish a popular imagination that visually links violent crime to the urban environment, prompting an aesthetic reminder that these images have been and will continue to be tied to the tradition of street photography (Carrabine 2012; Williams 2005). This visual preoccupation with the street, whether in cultural criminology (see Chap. 2) or as an important tradition in the canon of Western art photography, is also highlighted by the imagined ‘mean streets’ that have come to characterize American hardboiled crime fiction (Chandler 1950) and film noir in the 1930s and 1940s. Down these mean streets detectives and photographers go, noting not only the urban sprawl that begets alienation and toughness among inhabitants, but also the suspicion that crime lurks in the dark corners and alleyways of the metropolis. As the second implication, we can consider the ways that we—as human viewers—tend to look at crime scene photographs. Driven by a

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voyeuristic desire to look upon human death and disaster, our eyes tend to focus first and foremost on the victim’s body in the image. In doing so, our visual attention is captured by, on average, only 9% of the crime scene photograph, so that our eyes pass over the remaining 91% without the same level of scrutiny. We treat a large portion of the image, then, as a background that we can mostly gloss over, attuning ourselves to the signs of violent crime rather than to the signs of the Anthropocene. Psychologists would connect this sort of visual inattention to the concept of inattentional blindness (Mack and Rock 1998; Simons and Chabris 1999). As a cognitive form of blindness, inattentional blindness suggests that human viewers perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive their sustained attention. When we are absorbed in the inspection of something, such as the victim’s body, our focused attention on this central point of interest has an important effect: it results in our failure to consciously perceive other visual features in the environment. In short, it enables the double anaestheticization that we theorize as our typical approach to seeing criminal anthroposcenes. When we cease to look through these ‘background’ features and instead endeavour to look at them, with the assistance of our AI detective, we can become newly aware of the darkness that has always characterized crime scene photography. We can see this darkness, not simply as a metaphor for crime, but as an important sign of a criminal anthroposcene.

 n Brightness: Detection and Darkness in the Flash O of Light One of the most important visual dimensions of any image is the interplay between light and darkness. However, our reading of light and darkness often takes place alongside cultural assumptions, which imbue these formal qualities with moral implications. In the West, darkness has long been associated with crime, immorality and vice; and light has constantly appeared as a means for dispersing the fog of darkness. For example, the light of Sherlock Holmes’ reason is what makes him ‘the man who can find his way through the fog’ (Taylor 2016: 161). As a fictional father of criminalistics, Holmes foreshadowed the now well-established association

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between light and the police (Stallybrass and White 1986; Valverde 1991), still evidenced today in efforts to introduce more street lighting in cities to prevent crime through environmental design. Notably, this association between light and police was particularly pronounced when urban streets were first being lit, especially in each of the three cities under study. Introduced as a means to combat the fog, public gaslights flickered into existence in Pall Mall in 1807 (Hunt 1907: 101), making London the first industrially lit metropolis (Schivelbusch 1988). While the public streetlamps provided a tangible index of London’s modernity (Otter 2004), they also served to highlight the ways in which the lamps and the police were interchangeable, given their common origin in the eighteenth-­ century night watch. Over in Paris, the first gas lamps burned in the arcades of the nineteenth century, transforming the experience of open streets at night into a safe interior lit, not by stars, but by the illumination of artificial light (Benjamin 2006). Designed to root out both darkness and crime, nocturnal illumination merged notions of light, detection and surveillance, leading Ralph Waldo Emerson to remark, upon his return from a visit to London, that ‘gaslight is the best nocturnal police’ for ensuring that ‘there is no more night’ (cited in Bouman 1991: 63, 66). Based on Emerson’s analogy, the General Electric Company ran a series of advertisements in the US in 1924, declaring lamps as ‘allies in the alley’ (Bouman 1991: 67). During the first stage of the Anthropocene, then, street lighting came to the fore as a sign of the modern city and as an important stand-in for the police and their capacity for crime detection. Thus, efforts to produce light were read as projects in the name of Progress and Civilization. They presumed that darkness could be controlled and eventually removed from the world. As a result of this history, light and darkness carry with them cultural baggage that can hinder our ability to perceive them outside of the normative values that saturate them. To see and describe light and darkness as formal, visual features of crime scene photography, rather than as metaphors for moral order, we turn to digital image analysis. We program our AI to calculate how these features contribute to an image’s brightness (i.e., the overall lightness or darkness of an image) across our sample. To assess brightness, the AI detective calculates the image’s average greyscale value.29 Because all of the sample’s images are in black-and-white, grey tones are measured on a

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scale from 0 (black) to 255 (white). Grey, for instance, is assigned a value of 127.5 on this scale. Figure 3.2 visualizes how the images are dispersed around the sample’s mean brightness (i.e., the mean greyscale value of 106.3). It visually plots the standard deviation as a measure of variability, with images towards the right of the mean appearing brighter, and those towards the left appearing darker. Although there are brighter images among the sample, the bulk of it appears dark, given the fact that the mean brightness is lower than 127.5 (the value of grey itself ). As such, darkness characterizes the sample from its earliest images at the end of the nineteenth century (110.6) to its later images during the mid-twentieth

Fig. 3.2  Mean brightness versus standard deviation for the entire sample of crime scene photographs

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century (108.6). While Fig. 3.2 offers a static snapshot of the distribution of brightness in the sample, Fig. 3.3 illustrates how the mean brightness of images is distributed in each time period, as well as how it changes from 1880 to 1945. In this image plot, photographs from New York City are highlighted in red to exemplify the gradual decrease in brightness over time (from 104 in the 1910s to 99.8 in the 1940s), and the increased spread of brightness (i.e., the standard deviation in mean brightness increases over time from 17.1 in the 1910s to roughly 34 from 1930 to 1945). In general, there is a decrease in the mean brightness of crime

Fig. 3.3  Change in mean brightness over time, with crime scene photographs from New York City highlighted in red

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scene photographs in each city over the course of the first stage of the Anthropocene, as shadows are increasingly represented with dimmer tones. To see how shadows intensify over time, Fig.  3.4 illustrates the distribution of dark shadows (grey tones from 0 to 85), mid-tones (from 86 to 170) and bright highlights (from 171 to 255) across three composite histograms. Created by layering the individual histograms of specific crime scene photographs on top of each other, these composite30 histograms reveal how the visual structure of an image (i.e., as constituted by pixels) is distributed across light and darkness. By visualizing the tonal range of an image, each histogram serves as evidence of how much lightness and darkness characterize a photograph. Comparing the earliest photographs in our sample to those taken by Weegee in the late 1930s to 1940s, Fig. 3.4 demonstrates a shift in tonal range across time and place, with an increasing skew towards darkness. The composite histogram for the three crime scene photographs of Mary Kelly (1888) is relatively flat, demonstrating low contrast in the image. In comparison, the composite histogram for the 53 images in Bertillon’s Album of Paris (1901–1908) demonstrates a greater intensity in grey tones, albeit concentrated within the mid-tone values. In contrast, the composite histogram for Weegee’s 24 crime scene photographs is skewed towards the dark, denoting areas of pure blackness (i.e., it reaches the grey tone value of 0). With the AI detective’s involvement, we are able to conclude that there is an overall darkening of crime scene photography over time. While the images in our sample have always been more dark than bright, more of them were characterized by darkness over time. Further, the quality of darkness in crime scene photographs transforms over time, intensifying from shades of grey to pitch black. Importantly, these findings empirically support intuitive conclusions that crime scene photographs taken by tabloid photojournalists in big cities across the US, such as Weegee, have contributed to a ‘noir aesthetic,’ one that more fully coalesced into film noir in post-war Hollywood (Hannigan 1997; Silver and Ursini 1995; Tirohl 2012; Williams 2005). This darkening of crime scene photographs, however, needed to be systematically documented through digital image analysis and data visualization, so that we see the darkness as a measurable entity of brightness. In order to peer at the fog of darkness rather than through it, we use the computer’s ‘eye’ to direct our attention

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Fig. 3.4  Comparison of three composite histograms

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to the material production of darkness within photography, pushing us to look at shadows rather than in them. To look at shadows, however, we need to first recognize that darkness is registered as a thing to see rather than as nothing visible, or as an absence of sight (Sorensen 2007). As a thing to see, darkness is itself sculpted by lighting practices. Because shadows in crime scene photography are evocative, highlighting the theatricality of the scene, we can fruitfully trace light sculpting practices to the scenographic ways in which Adolphe Appia revolutionized the twentieth-­century theatre stage. As a stage designer, Appia proposed to position light as a central force of drama and as an elemental scenographic material in the composition of a scene (Palmer 2015). At a time when new sources of brighter stage light, such as limelight, were introduced in theatres, he advocated for ‘active light,’ which would reconceptualize modern theatre space. For the first time in its history, theatre space appears ‘fundamentally [as] a place of darkness that is energised and brought to life by the performance of light’ (Baugh 2013: 122). When we apply Appia’s insights to crime scene photography, we can note that active light informs the visual composition of a crime scene and how we look at it as an image; active light works to inject darkness into the frame. In our sample of crime scene photographs, active light does not appear until the 1930s. In the early crime scene photographs, such as in Bertillon’s Album of Paris Crime Scenes, the diffuse light from shooting during daylight hours produced a soft glow, blurring details in the setting or of the victim’s body into a foggy, hazy grey. However, the light in crime scene photographs taken by twentieth-century tabloid journalists became increasingly sculpted and intensified by new photographic technologies and practices—perhaps none more important than flash technologies. Produced around 1927 by General Electric, the American version of the flashbulb was widely distributed by the 1930s and introduced into practices of news photography along with the Speed Graphic camera. With the portable, handheld Speed Graphic camera—the camera of choice for American press from the 1930s to 1960s (Hannigan 1997)—news photographers were freed from the use of cumbersome photographic equipment, giving them the ability to shoot in outdoor environments in any condition of light. Synchronized with the shutter release of the Speed Graphic camera, the flashgun, according to Weegee’s (1945: 239) own

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‘camera tips,’ was crucial for taking low-light photographs at night as well as during daylight. Like the development of bright stage lights in the theatre, the flashgun produced heavy shadows in the photograph, infusing into the image a sense of visceral drama that ‘instantly connoted sensationalism and immediacy’ (Wallis 2013: 27). Indeed, the flashgun was described by Beaumont Newhall (1964: 157–8) in The History of Photography as ‘for the most part, grotesque because the harsh light flattened faces, cast unpleasant shadows, and fell off so abruptly that backgrounds were unrelieved black.’ Flash, then, is not simply a ‘grotesque’ means for dispelling darkness; it is an important visual technology for giving it tangible and visible form as heavy shadows. These shadows, in turn, are one of the most important ingredients for constituting a noir aesthetic in the US. Made with the intense light of the flash, the darkness of Weegee’s crime scene photographs influenced the noir aesthetic, so that when ‘[p]laced side by side, the images of film noir and of Weegee often speak with one voice’ (Silver and Ursini 1995: 46). With the hard light of the flashbulb, the night-prowling Weegee emphasized shadows in his images, contributing to a unique visual style that would later inform film noir. As evidenced by the composite histogram of Weegee’s crime scene photographs (Fig.  3.4), most of the histogram’s peaks are concentrated in the dark tones, reflecting the presence of low-key lighting. Low-key lighting, in turn, became a technique for distinguishing film noir’s representations of crime from those that came before. ‘In the dark there is mystery,’ wrote American cinematographer John Alton (1949/1995: 44) in Painting with Light. Responsible for the ‘mystery lighting’ that characterized some of the most famous films noir in the late 1930s and 1940s, Alton crafted memorable ‘light-in-darkness’ crime scenes around the well-known street lamp (e.g., Raw Deal 1948), or flashes of guns in absolute darkness (e.g., The Third Man 1949). When Hollywood light-sculpting practices focus on the blinding flash of a shooting gun amid surrounding darkness, they mimic Weegee’s use of the flashgun. Such low-key lighting in film noir, however, represents less a technique to dispel the fog and more a means for highlighting the anthropogenic fogs associated with cigarette smoke, car fumes and steam engines. Hence, the nineteenth-­century fog of darkness came to swirl through mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema as

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a sign of ‘gritty urban realism’ (Dussere 2014: 24; West and Pelizzon 2002: 86). Ultimately, for some film critics, such as Raymond Durgnat (1970/1996), noir itself ‘drifts like a fog across the whole of western culture, threatening to dissolve any trace of identity and difference’ (Naremore 2008: 31), despite being built on a particular aesthetic in crime scene photography and a desire to detect criminal identity.

Conclusion ‘Look at the crime scene photographs,’ we urged our AI detective. ‘See if the anthropogenic fog is more than a metaphor, looming in the background of figures both seen and unseen.’ And our AI detective showed us the ways in which a fog of darkness left its visual mark on the surface of crime scene photographs taken during the first stage of the Anthropocene. Through supervised machine learning and cultural analytics, we empirically documented the formation of a noir aesthetic in crime scene photography, one that painted deadly violence in the city with grey tones and harsh shadows. Here, we worked with an AI detective to illustrate the presence of such an aesthetic, bringing to the fore an old sense of the word ‘aesthetic’ as a capacity to perceive and be concerned (Latour 2017). The AI detective was a necessary investigative partner because we have lost some of our capacity to be concerned about environmental degradation. This lost capacity, in turn, is tied to our habitual practice of unseeing the signs of the Anthropocene. We lack a strongly developed capacity to perceive the anthropogenic fog with our own, very human eyes due to a double anaestheticization: according to Mirzoeff (2014), Western traditions of visualizing the Anthropocene have numbed our capacity to see the material conditions that have produced anthropogenic environmental harm; according to Benjamin (1930/2016), crime stories have served to distract us from modern anxieties that arose during the industrial era. The anaestheticization first described by Benjamin in relation to detective fiction can extend to the contemporary consumption of historical crime scene photographs, where we run ‘the risk of becoming detached spectators, voyeuristic tourists, emotionally anestheticised consumers of the fraught and ugly realities of another era’ (Williams 2005: 17; our

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emphasis added). Yet, it must be noted that the ugly reality upon which we tend to focus is human death (Bray 2017). When we look at crime scene photographs, we attend first and foremost to the human drama and human tragedy captured by the camera. We focus on human death even though this spectacular violence comingles with the slow violence associated with the Anthropocene. Because of this anaestheticization, our capacity to perceive the Anthropocene, particularly in criminology, has been deadened. To see the anthropogenic fog in crime scene photographs, then, is to see such slow violence at work and to become sensitized to yet another (nonhuman) form of deadly matter in the scene. This AI-guided project of seeing what we call the criminal anthroposcene—in this case, of seeing signs of the Anthropocene within the crime scene image—contributed to visual criminology’s methodological toolbox in the following three ways. First, it did not separate media representations of crime from those of the Anthropocene because of their shared historical emergence. Because crime scene photography can be read as a product of the intertwined histories of detective fiction, criminalistics and photography at the end of the nineteenth century, its development coincided with the first stage of the Anthropocene. As such, this chapter used the classical detective story as a guiding force for navigating this interconnected terrain. Stories about Sherlock Holmes not only influenced the methodological trajectory of criminalistics, but also raised uneasy questions about crime scenes and their history. These detective stories explored ‘how a traumatic past imprints itself on the space of the present – and how that past can be reconstructed through an investigation that itself unfolds temporally and in precise locations’ (Goulet 2016: 13). Taking cues from Sherlock Holmes’ clue-based method of investigation, we identified the anthropogenic fog as a visual clue of the industrial past, one that continues to inform our present. We tracked it temporally from 1880 to 1945 in precise locations that substantially contributed to human-induced environmental destruction. By making visible the fog of darkness and the ways it collided with graphic images of criminal violence, we expanded the kinds of interventions that can be made in visual criminology. Secondly, the addition of an AI partner enabled us to make sense of a large visual and cultural dataset, moving beyond the small sample sizes

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used in visual criminology. Cultural analytics allowed us to form conclusions about larger trends, such as an overarching noir aesthetic, that appeared across different regions and time periods. With its precise measurements and delineations, the approach allowed us to empirically demonstrate and visualize cross-temporal or cross-cultural repetitions in representation. By working alongside a nonhuman analyst, we tested the ways in which our AI detective—made capable by computer vision, algorithms and coding—could be granted agency as an active participant in the process of analysis. We engaged in our analysis of crime scene photographs with a nonhuman, in order to highlight the ways in which nonhumans— whether in the form of anthropogenic fog or an algorithmic machine— can shape human perception and action. Thirdly, our aim to see anthropogenic fog drew from the notion of counter-visuality (Mirzoeff 2011). In visual criminology, counter-­ visuality has been a powerful means for ‘making strange what has been naturalized into the landscapes and logics that surround crime and control’ (Brown and Carrabine 2017a: 6). As one of visual criminology’s key contributions to larger discussions about practices of seeing and not-­ seeing, counter-visuality highlights what is made to appear or disappear in the politics of visibility. Counter-visual projects in visual criminology have provided counter-images (Brown 2014), and different ocular vantages from which to see what is not there in official, state, corporate or normalized visualizations of crime and criminal justice (Schept 2014). While the production of counter-visualizations is important for highlighting what else might be placed in the camera frame, it does not reveal how we look at existing visualizations. To show the unseen through other images is one way to unsee, but such a method does not allow us to see the unseen, or to unsee what we typically see in the photographs that have shaped our cultural imagination of the crime scene. Computer vision, then, offers another lens through which to see these historical photographs, detecting things that we—as humans—would not normally see altogether, and encouraging us to see the depicted world in its peculiar terms. Where the computer sees pixel values and edges, we—as humans—see forms and gestalts. Where humans see forms all at once, the computer only sees such forms once they have been assembled pixel-­ by-­pixel from edges. While humans tend to require that each thing have

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its own form, and that things in the universe effortlessly take shape (Bataille 1985: 31), our AI detective did not have these expectations when looking at photographs, focusing instead on the formal visual qualities that lay on the surface of an image. In this way, the AI cannot look beyond the image’s surface to some hidden depth of reality behind it. It cannot follow Susan Sontag’s (1973: 23) directions to ‘think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond [the surface], what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Nor can it scrutinize, like a human spectator, the image by ‘turn[ing] the photograph over, to enter its other side (what is hidden is for us Westerners more “true” than what is visible)’ (Barthes 1981: 100). Thus, the computer’s ‘eye’ can make strange our habitual practices of looking at photographs, facilitating new ways of seeing that do not feed into binaries between surface and depth, inside and outside, or here and beyond. In our visual search for the anthropogenic fog, we juxtaposed multiple eyes and their ways of seeing. We discussed how the nineteenth-century literary detective’s extraordinary sight was premised on the camera’s eye, which was eventually deployed by criminalistics to visually secure and preserve the crime scene. By the mid-twentieth century, news photographers, such as Weegee, built their reputations on weaving together images taken by their camera eye with hardboiled stories of the private eye. From Paris and London to New York City, we travelled across literary texts of crime fiction, forensic photographs and tabloid images to ultimately see the coalescence of a noir aesthetic through the computer’s eye. As a twenty-first century embodiment of the nineteenth-century detective, our AI bot was a calculating, inhuman machine, even though it mimicked human behaviour through machine learning. When our AI detective imitated a human semiotician, it read traces on the surface of the photograph in much the same way that a classical detective would document physical clues left on the surface of objects in a crime scene. In doing so, it calculated the visual dimension of brightness, enabling us to see the noir aesthetic associated with anthropogenic fog. Ultimately, this noir aesthetic of crime scene photography links darkness to both crime and the anthropogenic fog. While the noir aesthetic is often discussed in relation to the emergence of American hardboiled crime fiction and films noir in the 1930s (Osteen 2013), our analysis

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demonstrated that crime scene photographs appeared dark from the very beginning, only darkening further in the 1930s with the introduction of the flashbulb. By considering how the noir aesthetic was materially produced as a consequence of lighting technologies—whether those included industrial efforts to illuminate city streets or advances in camera technologies—we highlighted the material implications of this aesthetic. Materially, the intense light of detection developed hand in hand with the creation of harsher shadows and deepened shades of black. Today, the noir aesthetic that emerged from the Industrial Revolution can be read as a material imprint from a past that continues to haunt us as we live in what Oreskes and Conway (2014) call the Penumbral Period. As ‘a shadow of ignorance and denial [of climate change] had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment’ (Oreskes and Conway 2014: 9), the Penumbral Age is a time of darkness, requiring more than ever that we act as enlightened detectives to perceive and become concerned about the anthropogenic fog.

Notes 1. The first use of ‘pea soup’ to refer to London fog comes from Herman Melville’s Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent (1849), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. 2. Murder scenes have been central to cinematic scenes of violence, which make up our cultural and visual repertoire of crime-images (see Young 2010). 3. Drawing from the most successful account of the Ripper murders before the First World War, Alfred Hitchcock turned Marie Belloc Lowndes’ fictional tale, The Lodger (1911), into a silent film that doubles as ‘a story about the London fog’ (the 1927 film’s subtitle). Deemed by Hitchcock to be his first true film, The Lodger is an expression of modernist cinema’s call upon the audience to acknowledge what is in view within the film frame (Rothman 2012). In this modernist cinema, the fog plays a role in the visual formation of mystery, danger and uncertainty, obscuring the camera’s view and consequently, concealing any conclusive evidence that could prove our worst suspicions.

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4. This desire for a foggy setting persists despite the fact that both the fictional Holmes and the real-life Ripper are likely to have solved or committed crimes under clear skies (Corton 2015b). 5. The likening of Eugène Atget’s photographs to crime scenes is facilitated by Atget’s naming practices. He names his street photographs according to the time and location of image-making, in the much the same way that crime scene photographs are themselves named. As a result, images, such as Rue Pigalle. à 6 h. du matin en avril 1925, can be situated in the same imaginative continuum as the ‘street-name mysteries’ from early feuilletons in Paris, like René de Pont-Jest’s Le Numero 13 de la rue Marlot (1877), and in the generic tradition begun by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Goulet 2016). 6. In addition to loneliness, the nineteenth-century train compartment evoked fear. Schivelbusch (1977/2014: 79) describes the ways in which the train compartment ‘became a crime scene – a crime that could take place unheard and unseen by the travelers in adjoining compartments.’ Due to the isolation imposed upon travellers in compartments, and the fast-moving roar of rapidly revolving wheels, European passengers feared that their journeys could be derailed by murder or violence aboard the train, particularly after the 1860 Poinsot murder in France and the 1864 Briggs murder in England. 7. Notably, it was the invention and refinement of the steam engine that helped propel a turn to fossil fuels (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), setting the stage for the Anthropocene and amplifying humans’ ability to shape the rest of the biosphere. 8. A clue-based epistemology emerged and became successful in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as individuality and identity became central to the police’s work of distinguishing the criminal classes from the respectable ones (Ginzburg 1979). 9. Arguably, ways of knowing have been equated with ways of seeing in Western modernity, as the visual came to dominate language as well as social and cultural practices (Berger 1972; Jay 1993). 10. In computer vision, scenes are associated with specific human functions and behaviours, constituent materials, embedded objects and the shape and size of particular environments. For example, a street scene is associated with walking and, consequently, will be detected when it features a narrow corridor for walking (shape and size of its particular environment); human pedestrians and the things, such as traffic signs and street

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lights, around which they navigate (embedded objects); and constituent materials, such as sky, trees and sidewalks. For an example of how a street scene is composed, according to the SUN database hosted at MIT, please visit: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/SUN/scenes/pages/s/street/ index.html 11. To explore the COCO dataset, please visit http://cocodataset. org/#explore 12. Canonical perspectives are preferred views that are selected as ‘best’ by observers when they are shown multiple views of the same object. Further, they are (re)produced when people are tasked with forming a mental object or with photographing an object. Typically, the canonical view of an object tends to maximize the visible amount of surface area of the object in order to convey the most information about an object’s identity (Verfaillie and Boutsen 1995). 13. Because the object types in the COCO dataset are contemporary ones, including objects such as iPads, flip flops, microwaves and jetpacks, among others, these present-day objects are sometimes (incorrectly) detected in some of the photographs taken between 1880 and 1945, a time period when these objects did not exist. 14. Object detection and image recognition systems have been engineered in relation to seeing people’s faces and detecting live pedestrians. AI detection has been fine-tuned in cases involving face detection, as well as the detection of pedestrians (e.g., Caltech Pedestrian dataset). The former has been incorporated into identification technologies that have proliferated at border crossings and on social media platforms (e.g., Facebook), while the latter has been developed to improve the computer vision deployed by self-driving cars. 15. The Mask R-CNN framework has been tested and modelled on the COCO dataset (see He et al. 2008). 16. See Saleh et  al. (2014), for example, on how computational methods have automated the discovery of artistic influence in fine art. 17. The image plots are produced using ImagePlot, an open source software tool that was produced and released by the Software Studies Initiative. For download, please visit http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot. html#features1 18. Because of the selected time period, all the images in the sample are historical photographs that are older than the number of years (e.g., 30 years) required for sensitive documents to be made available to the public. This allows us to respect the privacy of victims’ families and their descendants.

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19. The Album of Paris Crime Scenes has also been presented alongside fictionalized accounts of those involved in the crime scenes captured by Bertillon, ranging from Bertillon himself to a murderess, in Eugenia Parry’s (2000) Crime Album Stories: Paris, 1886–1902. 20. Getty Images houses the New York Daily News collection, dating back to 1919. 21. The International Center of Photography holds a collection of photographs taken by Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig. 22. The London sample of crime scene photographs was supplemented by photographs from the Getty Images digital archive. 23. Although photographs of Mary Kelly were discovered by Donald Rumbelow and first reprinted in 1960, the original photographer remains anonymous. These images are also different from the mortuary photographs of Jack the Ripper’s other victims, as they are the only set to locate the victim’s body at the crime scene (Anwer 2014). 24. In verifying the accuracy of the AI’s work, we reviewed its ability to generate reliable object masks over the victim’s body (i.e., its ability to produce a mask that precisely covers and tightly fits the contours of the victim’s body). Unreliable masks are those that do not fully cover the victim’s entire body (e.g., it only covers a hand), or covers more than the body (e.g., it includes the surrounding environment beyond the body). In practice, the AI was only able to generate reliable masks for a total of 184 images out of the 385 images in the sample that contained a victim’s body. The resulting analysis of body size was run only on those 184 images. 25. It is possible that this finding is a product of our sample selection. Because our sample relies on publicly accessible images, whether published in newspapers or made digitally available by archives, it is beholden to the ways in which these organizations select images for publication or preservation. Consequently, archives and newspapers seem to have a bias towards selecting crime scene photographs that are only taken at particular ranges from the crime scene, such as 10-feet away from the scene (Bonanos 2018). Rather than choosing close-up images, where the details may become too gory for public viewers, they have tended to preserve or print photographs that capture the entire crime scene, providing viewers with an overall shot that is analogous to the establishing shot in film. In these photographs, bodies have been typically shot at a distance rather than up close, positioned in a particular setting that

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additionally informs the way the scene is read. In these overall shots of the crime scene, a wide-­angle lens is normally used to allow viewers to see a large area of the scene from either a natural perspective—that is, at the photographer’s eye level when she or he is standing at their full height (Dutelle 2012)—or from an aerial perspective, as advocated by Bertillon. 26. As a site for murder, the bedroom was most frequently depicted in crime scene photographs between 1880 and 1919: bedroom scenes made up 68.75% of the images from 1880 to 1899, 32.1% of the images from 1900 to 1909 and 24.8% of the images from 1910 to 1919. Bedroom scenes became increasingly infrequent in our sample after 1920, making up 18% of the images from the 1920s, 2% of the images from the 1930s and 0% of the images from the 1940s. 27. The bourgeois interior, which includes the bedroom, has been linked to the development of the detective novel as a genre. Walter Benjamin (1989: 41–2) explains how the interior is a site for clue-based detective work: ‘[t]he interior is not only the universe of the individual, but also what wraps around him. To live somewhere means to leave traces…Traces of the person who lives there are imprinted on the interior. This is the origin of the detective novel, which pursues such traces. His Philosophy of Furniture, as well as his detective novels, proves that Poe was the first physiognomist of the interior.’ 28. The digitized police collections from the three cities under study, particularly for Paris and New  York City, offer fewer crime scene photographs after the First World War. These images are likely to exist in hard copy at the archives, but have yet to either be digitized and/or presented in their online collections. 29. Since each pixel has its own greyscale value, the greyscale value for each image was measured as an average, whereby the sum of all greyscale values for each pixel in the image was divided by the total number of pixels in the image. 30. The creation of these composite histograms follows the logic that propelled Sir Francis Galton to produce his composite portraits of known criminals in the 1880s. As a method for documenting and visualizing types, the composite image provides a visual generalization or visual aggregate. While Galton produced his composite portraits through a process of timed exposure, wherein each photograph would be exposed for a fraction of the total time until multiple criminal faces would blur into a single face, our composite histograms are produced with

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contemporary photo-editing software, where layers are produced in post-production editing. Nevertheless, the resulting image represents the average, and the blurred edges or lighter areas represent the visual standard deviation from the average. Notably, this drive to produce what Galton termed ‘pictorial statistics’ (Sekula 1986: 47) has been crucial to the development of both criminology and criminalistics. However, the ethical complexities of creating such composite images are mitigated in our example, for we do not infer that humans can be reducible to biological or physiognomic types. Rather, we use our composite histogram to demonstrate representational types, aligning with the project of ordering images and texts into generic types in the (digital) humanities.

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Rafter, N. (2007) ‘Crime, Film and Criminology: Recent Sex-Crime Movies’, Theoretical Criminology 11(3): 403–420. Rafter, N. (2014). ‘Introduction to Special Issue on Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology 18(2): 127–133. Reiner, R., Livingstone, S. and Allen, J. (2000) ‘No More Happy Endings? The Media and Popular Concern about Crime since the Second World War.’ In T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds.) Crime, Risk and Insecurity: Law and Order in Everyday Life and Political Discourse, London: Routledge: 107–126. Ritchie, H. and Roser, M. (2017) ‘CO2 and Other Greenhouse Gas Emissions’ URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://ourworldindata.org/ co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#the-long-run-histor ycumulative-co2 Rothman, W. (2012) Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, 2nd ed, New  York: SUNY Press. Saleh, B, Abe, K., Singh Arora, R. and Elgammad, A. (2014) ‘Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence’, arXiv URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3218.pdf Salzani, C. (2007) ‘The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective’, New German Critique 100: 165–187. Sante, L. (1992) Evidence, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Scaggs, J. (2005) Crime Fiction, London: Routledge. Schept, J. (2014) ‘(Un)seeing Like a Prison: Counter-Visual Ethnography of the Carceral State’, Theoretical Criminology 18(2): 198–223. Schivelbusch, W. (1977/2014) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, California: University of California Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1988) Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, California: University of California Press. Sekula, A. (1986) ‘The Body and the Archive’, October 39: 17–55. Shore, H. (2015) London’s Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 – c. 1930: A Social and Cultural History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Silver, A. and Ursini, J. (1995) The Noir Style, New York: The Overlook Press. Simon, J. (2015) ‘Distributed Epistemic Responsibility in a Hyper-Connected Era.’ In L. Floridi (ed.) The Online Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era, Cham: Springer: 145–159. Simons, D.J. and Chabris, C.F. (1999) ‘Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events’, Perception 28: 1059–1074.

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Smith, C. (2016) Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture: Top Hat, Gladstone Bag and Fog, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Software Studies Initiative. (2015) Cultural Analytics URL (accessed 10 January 2020): http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/overview-slides-and-video-articles-why.html Sontag, S. (1973) On Photography, New York: Picador. Sorensen, R. (2007) Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows, New York: Oxford University Press. Squiers, C. (1997) ‘“And so the Moving Trigger Finger Writes”: Dead Gangsters and New York Tabloids in the 1930s.’ In S.S. Phillips, M. Haworth-Booth, and C. Squiers (eds.) Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 40–49. Stallybrass, P. and White, A. (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen. Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, J. (2007) ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ Ambio 36(8): 614–621. Tagg, J. (1980) ‘Power and Photography: Part 1, A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law’, Screen Education 36: 17–55. Tagg, J. (2012) ‘The Archiving Machine; or, the Camera and the Filing Cabinet’, Grey Room 37: 24–37. Taylor, J.O. (2016) The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog and British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Thomas, R. (1999) Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Met Museum (n.d.) ‘Alphonse Bertillon’s Album of Paris Crime Scenes (19091–1908)’ URL (accessed 10 January 2020): https://www.metmuseum. org/art/collection/search/284718 Thorsheim, P. (2006) Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800, Athens: Ohio University Press. Tirohl, B. (2012) ‘Forensic Photography, Film Noir, and Fellig: Scenes Excavated by the Night Prowler’, Photography & Culture 5(2): 135–148. Trachtenberg, A (ed.) (1980) Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven: Leete’s Island Books. Van Otterlo, M. (2013) ‘A Machine Learning View on Profiling.’ In M. Hildebrandt and K. Vries (eds.) Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn- Philosophers of Law Meet Philosophers of Technology, Abingdon: Routledge: 41–64. Valverde, M. (1991) The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

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4 #Sickbear: Photographing Polar Bears as Ideal Nonhuman Victims Anita Lam and Matthew Tegelberg

‘What a climate it is in those regions!’ Arthur Conan Doyle declared upon returning from a six-month voyage on an Arctic whaling ship in 1880. In contrast to the London fog that permeated the world of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle described the refreshing, ‘sanitary’ properties of the cold Arctic air. Writing with enthusiasm in his diary, he believed that ‘in the years to come, [the Arctic] will be the world’s sanatorium. Here, thousands of miles from the smoke, where the air is the finest in the world, the invalid and the weakly ones will go when all other places have failed to give them the air they want, and revive and live again under the marvelous invigorating properties of the Arctic atmosphere’ (Conan Doyle 2012: 312–13). In the late nineteenth century, the author described the allure of the Arctic as a place of refuge from the poisonous air and unhealthy living conditions that characterized a major urban centre of the modern industrial revolution. What Conan Doyle did not foresee was that, in the years to come, no place, no matter how distant, would escape the rapacious, anthropogenic forces being unleashed by the rapid pace of European industrialization; nor did he anticipate that those industrial emissions would have legacy effects, continuing to linger in the Earth’s atmosphere for many years to come.1 Today, these emissions have © The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_4

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profoundly altered the atmospheric climate, so that the Arctic’s nonhuman inhabitants are increasingly the ones showing symptoms of ‘the invalid and the weakly.’ Human-induced stresses on the Earth system have only accelerated since Conan Doyle’s era. The end of the Second World War ushered in a wide range of carbon-intensive practices, including mass air travel and global urbanization that some geologists, such as Steffen et  al. (2007), mark as evidence of a second stage of the Anthropocene—namely, what they call ‘The Great Acceleration’ (1945–2000). Today, we enter a third stage of the Anthropocene (2015–?), during which humanity must reckon with the unprecedented challenges posed by ‘the recognition that human activities are indeed affecting the structure and function of the Earth system as a whole’ (Steffen et  al. 2007: 681). As one means of accomplishing such a reckoning, images of animal suffering have been produced and circulated to raise awareness of the harmful effects of global warming. In particular, the polar bear has become a powerful symbol of nonhuman suffering since the end of the last two decades of the Great Acceleration. In this chapter, the polar bear comes into analytic focus for two main reasons. One, the polar bear is an iconic metonym of the Arctic itself. Taking its root from the Greek arktos, meaning bear, the term ‘Arctic’ refers to the lands that lie under the constellation of the Great Bear. Two, the polar bear has become an iconic subject of photography in political and scientific projects aimed at visualizing the impact of global warming since the 1980s (Archibald 2015). In what follows, we argue that it is in line with these long-established symbolic and political narratives that polar bears have been cast as ideal nonhuman victims of the ‘invisible crime’ of climate change (Brisman 2018). In the first section, we examine the polar bear’s status as an exemplary victim of climate change (hereafter referred to as climate victim) in climate change communication (Born 2019; Doyle 2007; Manzo 2010; Slocum 2004; Stenport and Vachula 2017; Whitley and Kalof 2014). By merging findings from victimology with efforts in climate change communication, we interrogate why people care about polar bears as climate victims in the first place. We argue that they care because the polar bear has been assigned attributes, over a long history of mediated representation, that align with those of the ideal (human) crime victim. In the

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second part of the chapter, we use computer vision and supervised machine learning to analyze how polar bears have been represented as climate victims in nearly 4000 photographs shared by Instagram users on International Polar Bear Day. With the rise of social media platforms, such as Instagram, social media users produce, share, circulate and consume thousands of images in ways that accelerate what Susan Sontag (2003) once called the hyper-saturation of images of suffering. On Instagram, these images are not consumed in isolation, but rather as a large, intertextual series that may be experienced by users as nearly indefinite. By examining polar bear images through the lens of cultural analytics, we explore how our visual dataset documents an emerging trend in representing polar bears as climate victims—specifically, we trace a potential shift away from depicting healthy bears towards ever more shocking and visceral images of a sick bear. We conclude that the visual representation of a sick polar bear can be read as an early sign of a new noir aesthetic in polar bear photography, one that brings it closer to the aesthetics of modern crime scene photography. In making visible the slow violence of climate change visible, the sick bear photograph orients us to how the Arctic is increasingly represented as a criminal anthroposcene. In this chapter, a criminal anthroposcene is visually formed when the aesthetic vocabulary of crime scene photography, with its underlying operation of the forensic gaze, renders visualizations of climate victims ever close to those of suffering crime victims.

 onstructing an Ideal Nonhuman Victim: Polar C Bears in Popular Wildlife Photography and Climate Change Communication In the vast literature on the production, circulation and consumption of mediated representations of victims and suffering (e.g., Boltanski 1999; Chouliaraki 2006, 2013; Kyriakidou 2015; Sontag 2003; Walklate 2006, 2017), the one in pain, or the one who suffers, has been human. In scholarly analyses, the default victim is presumed to be human (Hall 2013). More precisely, the archetypal image of (Western) society’s ‘ideal’ or ‘legitimate’ victim is embodied by a young, innocent female; she is out doing good

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deeds when she is attacked by an unknown stranger. These representations of ideal victims have effects. Ideal victims are the ones most likely to attract media attention; and they arouse sympathy from the public at large because they are deemed to be blameless (Christie 1986; van Wijk 2013). By contrast, non-ideal victims, predominantly from poor and marginalized social groups, are assigned lesser status in the hierarchy of victimization (Carrabine et al. 2004) and are at least partially blamed for their victimization. Even in international criminal law, ideal victimhood is assigned to those who appear feminine and infantile (Schwöbel-Patel 2018). Through this research, we have come to understand how human victims, of both immediate and ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanski 1999), have been constructed and visualized through media. However, scant attention has been paid to globally mediated representations of nonhuman victimization caused by what Nixon (2011: 3) aptly describes as ‘slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes.’ Thus, in this section, we consider how nonhuman animals—the polar bear in particular—appear as idealized victims in globally circulated images across both old and new media. In so doing, we extend green criminology’s focus on the suffering of nonhuman animals (e.g., Beirne 2009; Natali 2010; Sollund 2008) to consider how some of them have been assigned attributes associated with constructions of ideal (human) crime victims. While green criminologists have expanded the definition of victimhood to encompass nonhuman animals (e.g., Flynn and Hall 2017; White 2013; White and Heckenberg 2014), and investigated how charismatic megafauna (i.e., large mammals facing extinction; see Whitley and Kalof 2014) have been harmed by poaching (e.g., Lemieux and Clarke 2009; Nurse 2015; Wyatt 2012, 2013) and other forms of animal abuse (e.g., Beirne 2009; Beirne and South 2007; Maher et al. 2017; Nurse 2013), they have yet to seriously grapple with how animals are constructed as victims of environmental and ecological harms. Thus, this section contributes to efforts to better understand the media construction of animal victims in green criminology. When it comes to the construction of polar bears as victims of human-­ induced climate change, we need to first consider how the polar bear has been deployed as an image. From 2500-year-old Cape Dorset art to nearly a 100 years of Coca-Cola advertisements, polar bears have been an enduring subject in popular visualizations of the Arctic. They have also

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come to feature prominently in campaigns designed by environmental non-governmental organizations to raise awareness of conservation initiatives (Doyle 2007; Slocum 2004). In these environmental campaigns, polar bears are transformed from a specific species of large megafauna into emblematic ambassadors of the wider suffering and victimization of nonhuman Arctic life. Between the late 1950s and the 1980s, there has been a gradual shift in the representation of polar bears: their portrayal as wild, ferocious and threatening beasts has shifted towards visualizations that increasingly depict them as cute, vulnerable and in need of help (Archibald 2015). Arguably, it was this shift in representation that made it easier for climate change communicators to establish a symbolic connection between polar bears and the effects of climate change. Archibald (2015: 278) concludes that it was ‘the animal’s cute and vulnerable image as of the 1980s [that] positioned North Americans to accept it as a touchstone in the politicized climate change debate of the early twenty-first century.’ Since the establishment of a cute, cuddly polar bear image, the polar bear’s apparent child-like ‘innocence’ has enabled it to attain its status as a global icon in climate change communication over the past three decades. Photojournalists, politicians, environmental activists and social media influencers2 are among the host of contemporary actors that continue to produce and circulate cute polar bear imagery as a means of giving ‘climate change a “face” and embodiment as a stand-in for humanity’ (Born 2019: 649). As the ‘poster child’ of climate change (Owen and Swaisgood 2008: 123), polar bears have been cast as either ‘affected witnesses’ of climate change (Born 2019: 659), or as ‘charismatic victims’ of its effects (Slocum 2004: 428) in news and popular science communication journalism (see also Christensen 2013; DiFrancesco and Young 2010; Stoddart and Smith 2016). In a longitudinal study of National Geographic Magazine, for instance, Born (2019) demonstrates how the magazine’s polar bear photography has aligned with these wider trends in visual climate change communication. What has gone unnoticed in this study is how 65% of National Geographic’s polar bear images between 1992 and 2012 have been credited to two wildlife photographers: Norbert Rosing and Paul Nicklen. While Rosing has primarily engaged audiences through print media (e.g., magazines and catalogues), Nicklen has turned to social

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networking platforms to widely circulate his photography online. With over 5.3 million followers on Instagram alone, Nicklen maintains the status of a social media influencer, which affords him access to an exceptionally large online audience for a wildlife photographer. These two photographers can be understood as authors of two different kinds of visual narratives about polar bears and climate change, both of which are still being reproduced by other photographers today. More importantly, both types of photographers visualize polar bears in ways that align with media constructions of ideal victims, allowing us to fruitfully bring together research from climate change communication with findings from victimology. The first visual narrative, primarily evidenced by Norbert Rosing’s work (2006, 2007), is built on an anthropomorphic, romantic mode of representation, in which polar bears are frequently pictured expressing human emotions, or partaking in activities that resemble human behaviour. In one of Rosing’s popular collections (2006), for example, a series of intimate and playful scenes depict a mother bear raising three small cubs. While these photographs do not make salient the impacts of climate change, Born (2019) suggests that they have emotionally resonated with audiences by enabling them to identify with the polar bear’s human-­ likeness. Such likeness is established through the image’s emphasis on play, motherhood and family life. In contrast, the second visual narrative, reflected in Paul Nicklen’s photography, builds upon a more overt connection to climate change. It situates polar bears within the context of a rapidly changing and increasingly dangerous Arctic habitat. The bodies and behaviours of these ‘great ice bears’ are transformed by the melting of Arctic sea ice. To draw this parallel between the changing bodies of ice and ice bears, Nicklen tends to photograph a hungry mother bear, with one or more cubs, stranded on an iceberg, or wandering along a barren coastal shoreline. The captions accompanying such photographs stress that changing Arctic sea ice conditions are forcing bears to make longer, riskier swims, while others acknowledge the longer periods of time polar bears are spending stranded on land where food supply is scarce. In both Rosing’s and Nicklen’s wildlife photography, the image of a mother bear with cubs resonates with Nils Christie’s (1986: 18) classic figure of the ideal victim. Specifically, the mother bear demonstrates the first three

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attributes assigned to an ideal human victim: she appears as a weak, morally blameless female who has been harmed while carrying out ‘a respectable project’ (Christie 1986: 19). In contrast to the ‘powerful,’ ‘mighty’ and ‘giant’ male polar bears that appear as solitary, ‘masculine [Arctic] royalty’ (Yudina et al. 2018), the ‘affectionate, maternal bear’ is engendered as a potentially vulnerable (white) female, invested in the traditionally feminine task of caring for her young. Because the polar bears are anthropomorphized through wildlife photography, the resulting images not only gender but also racialize the bears. Although it might be odd to consider how the bears themselves have been racialized in these images—they are, after all, not of the human race at all—it is important to note that their apparent whiteness has racial implications, particularly for those who have been trained to visually imagine the world through US and British film iconography. Within this tradition of representation, white is both colourless and multicoloured (i.e., it absorbs all the colours in its brightness); it is simultaneously not a colour as well as all the colours (Dyer 1988). Because photography and cinema are both media of light, as well as technologies that have been developed with white people in mind (Dyer 1997: 84), they have had the effect of ‘not only advantaging white people in representation […] but also of suggesting a special affinity between them and the light.’ When these technologies are applied to capturing polar bears, they similarly form an association between the bears, light and whiteness, where the bear’s white fur is reflected by and reflective of the whiteness of the Arctic snowscape. As a (Western) cultural construction, this northern whiteness, in turn, has long been emblematic of both purity3 and cleanliness (e.g., Razack 2002, 2004)—two notions that have been central to the construction of a victim’s presumed ‘innocence.’ As white bears, then, the polar bears are shrouded in an imagined ‘innocence’ as well as a ‘definitive normalcy that dismisses others’ [coloured] particularity’ (Dyer 1988: 45). Rendered as an unmarked category of normalcy, the polar bear becomes an enduring symbol of the Arctic’s permanence, as well as the desired permanence of respectable projects, such as the stability of a nuclear family. As the anthropomorphized polar bear is represented in ways that bring to mind the ideal crime victim, polar bears have easily and unsurprisingly gained legitimacy as the ‘symbol-species’ of anthropogenic climate change

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(Jenssen et al. 2015). However, the ‘big bad’ offender (Christie 1986: 19)— that is, climate change—is rendered less visibly in popular visual narratives starring maternal polar bears. In the next section, we examine how anthropogenic climate change is made shockingly visible on polar bear bodies, particularly in the Instagram image we call ‘sick bear.’

 tudying Instagram Images on International S Polar Bear Day Social media networking platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, have complicated the ways in which criminologists study public responses to crime (Hayes and Luther 2018). Bringing about a wider sea change in social communication and photographic practices, the rise of user-generated media engagements has also raised methodological questions about how to treat these platforms as sites of analysis for visual criminology (Brown 2017; Carrabine 2012). When conceived as digital democratization, these interactive forms of new media allow for spontaneous, immediate and ephemeral participation by individuals across the planet. These users can generate, share and curate images that both mediate and (re)produce particular visualizations of nonhuman victims. By introducing spatiotemporal dynamics to the processes of picture posting and sharing, social media platforms can enact mediated responses to images of nonhuman suffering—responses that can accumulate into thousands of (re-)posts and images. Although criminologists have skilfully analyzed single images or small samples of visual artefacts, their close semiotic analyses are methodologically unable to account for the hundreds and thousands of images that are produced, circulated, shared and consumed on a day-to-day basis on social media platforms. Thus, in this section, we develop an innovative methodology for collecting and analysing Instagram images. This method depends upon computer vision, supervised machine learning and cultural analytics. These technologies and techniques are used to document trends in representing polar bears as climate victims over multiple International Polar Bear Days.

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International Polar Bear Day is a global event that has taken place annually on February 27 since 2005. Organized by Polar Bears International (PBI), a non-profit polar bear conservation organization, the event raises awareness of the challenges faced by polar bears in a warming Arctic climate and encourages public action to reduce carbon emissions. In 2013, PBI began using social media to spread global awareness of International Polar Bear Day, following its wider mandate to protect polar bears from the threatening effects of anthropogenic climate change. On its website, PBI encourages users to ‘make it social’ by sharing photos on social networking platforms during International Polar Bear Day. Since 2013, over 36,852 images4 have been shared and posted on Instagram on of one of these main hashtag feeds: #internationalpolarbearday, #polarbearday, #polarbearsinternational and #saveourseaice (Polar Bears International 2019). However, two feeds, #internationalpolarbearday and #polarbearday, generated 86% of the overall photo-sharing traffic due to the constant uploading of new posts, particularly in 2019.5 Given the higher frequency of image-posting on these two feeds, we manually scraped all of the polar bear images that were shared on them during seven consecutive International Polar Bear Day events between February 27, 2013, and February 27, 2019. Scraping refers to the process of locating and extracting data from websites and other digital media platforms. This process is often automated with the use of software tools that can be programmed to identify and extract certain types of data from the Internet. Scraping can also be undertaken manually by using a snipping tool to collect and store relevant data for further research. In this case, manual scraping was conducted in order to adhere to a predetermined image selection process that took the following three content considerations into account. One, the image must be a photograph of polar bears in an Arctic environment, such as Churchill, Canada, or Svalbard, Norway. Because only a small proportion of Instagram images featured polar bears in an Arctic environment (25% of the shared images on the #internationalpolarbearday feed, and 16% on the #polarbearday feed), many images were not included in the final sample because they featured polar bears in human-made settings, such as zoos. It was in light of this distribution of settings that manual scraping was undertaken as a less labour-intensive data-gathering methodology. Manual scraping

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involved a deliberate process of selecting and saving only those images that met our criteria; by contrast, automated scraping would have required the manual removal of at least 75% of the shared images from our final sample on the grounds that they did not meet our first criterion. For our second criterion of image selection, we operated under the assumption that no image was considered unique per se. In practice, this involved the inclusion of similar (i.e., nearly duplicate) images, posted by different users, in the sample. These images were not considered identical due to minor differences in detail, such as variations in brightness, cropping and hue, which would be apparent to the computer’s ‘eye’ but not necessarily to our human eyes.6 Finally, in instances where a single Instagram post featured multiple images, any image in the sequence that met our selection criteria was added to the sample. As an overview of the final sample, Table 4.1 breaks down the total number of manually scraped polar bear images according to hashtag feed and year. The final sample consists of 3928 images in total, with the number of shared polar bear images from each feed showing significant growth between 2013 and 2019.7 In general, more than half of the polar bear images have been shared by Instagram users with no institutional or corporate ties. When corporate users participate on International Polar Bear Day, they are likely to be affiliated with tourism operators or photography studios. Table 4.1   Total number of manually scraped Instagram images by date, hashtag and volume (2013–2019) Date

#international polarbearday

#polarbearday

Total

February 27, 2013 February 27, 2014 February 27, 2015 February 27, 2016 February 27, 2017 February 27, 2018 February 27, 2019 Total

4 31 62 128 359 788 721 2093

6 42 127 172 318 473 697 1835

10 73 189 300 677 1261 1418 3928

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 omputer Vision: Training a Nonhuman to See Polar C Bears in Arctic Landscapes To analyze the visual dataset, we again deploy our AI detective (for a full description of the making of this AI detective, see Chap. 3). The AI has learned to see polar bears in Arctic environments by undergoing extensive pre-training on the Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset. Comprised of over 300,000 images, the COCO dataset includes bears as one of the specific object types that can be detected in a scene. After completing its pre-training on COCO, the AI detective uses the Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) algorithm (Lin et al. 2015) to perform a set of mathematical operations on each of the 3928 polar bear images included in our sample. The Mask R-CNN algorithm is used to narrow down the location of our object(s) of analysis—in this case, one or more polar bears—and surround it with a ‘bounding box.’ Within the boundaries of the bounding box, the algorithm automatically creates a pixel ‘mask’ to highlight the contours of the polar bear’s shape. After checking the accuracy of the bounding box placement, we note that the AI detected polar bears in our sample with 93.05% accuracy. However, our review of the AI detective’s work does reveal some noteworthy limitations. First, the AI occasionally confused polar bears with other animal classes within the COCO dataset, labelling the bears as dogs, sheep or teddy bears. We treat these false negatives (i.e., the AI’s failure to identify a polar bear when one is depicted in the image), nonetheless, as positive detections. Having manually scraped the images in our sample, we are certain that all images in the sample include one or more polar bears, irrespective of the AI’s capacity to accurately detect them. Second, the AI’s detection accuracy did not always translate into a precisely generated pixel mask. In other words, an accurate detection did not necessarily result in a pixel mask that would cover the entire surface of the polar bear’s body.

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Calculating an Image’s Visual Features Once the polar bear is detected through computer vision, the AI detective engages in a series of algorithmic calculations in order to analyze the following three visual features for each image in the sample: object size, image brightness and colour.

Object Size To infer distance between the depicted polar bear and the viewer, the AI detective measures the size of the polar bear(s) in the image. These object size calculations are made by counting the number of pixels in each mask before dividing this result by the total number of pixels in the image. When multiple polar bears are detected in an image, the sizes of each individual mask are combined to determine the total area covered by all of the masks. The object size data is then used to rank each image according to the percentage of the visual field occupied by the polar bear mask. Image ranks are assigned from 0 to 2, with 0 indicating that the mask occupied less than 25% of the image. Rank 1 is assigned when the mask occupies between 25% and 75% of the image; and Rank 2 when the mask accounts for more than 75% of the image. Each of these rankings offers a proxy for measuring the distance between the depicted polar bear and the viewer, so that we can extrapolate whether the depicted polar bears are viewed at close range (Rank 2), mid-range (Rank 1) or at a far distance (Rank 0). The visualization of such physical distance can have emotional or moral implications. Because representations of ideal victims tend to evoke the most sympathy from viewers (Carrabine et al. 2004; Christie 1986), sympathy can be conceptualized as an effect of feeling proximity to the victim. Consequently, emotional proximity or distance can be gauged by attending to an image’s composition, by measuring how far the visual object of interest is depicted from the viewer. Such distance can also be used as a proxy for psychological distance—that is, ‘a construct referring to the extent to which an object is removed from the self ’ (McDonald et al. 2015: 110). Psychological distance has been an important factor for explaining why people feel powerless to confront ecological crises, such as climate change. In important ways, psychological distance

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is shaped by a sense of spatial distance. For instance, those who experience spatial distance from a site undergoing profound climate change are less likely to support efforts to mitigate climate change effects in comparison to local inhabitants (Chan 2017; McDonald et al. 2015).

Brightness Given the important roles played by light and darkness in producing a noir aesthetic (see Chap. 3), the AI detective assesses the brightness (i.e., overall lightness or darkness) of each of the images in our sample. After converting each of the colour images into greyscale, the AI calculates the average brightness of each image by measuring grey tones on a scale between 0 (black and 0% brightness) and 255 (white and 100% brightness). In addition to these numerical quantifications of brightness, the visual feature is itself visualized through an image plot. For the entire sample, an image plot is generated to summarize the interaction between the sample’s mean brightness and each image’s standard deviation from this mean. In short, the image plot allows us to see the distribution of light and darkness across the entire sample.

Colour Unlike the black-and-white photographs that were analyzed in Chap. 3, all of the Instagram images are in colour. As a result, colour is another visual feature that can be automatically examined by the AI detective, by extracting from each image a colour palette. The palettes are created using an open source python tool, Color Thief software. The resulting colour palettes represent the six hues that appear with the highest frequency and intensity in a given photograph. The dominant colour is the one that appears with the highest frequency and intensity in the image. Of special importance in the age of the Anthropocene is the cool–warm (blue/green to red/orange) colour spectrum, which functions as a representation of changing air temperature. The cool–warm spectrum has been highlighted in climate change communication through the creation of ‘climate stripes.’ Created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins (n.d.), these stripes visually translate climate change into a sequence of chronologically

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ordered, coloured strips. The sequence represents scientific data on long-­ term average temperature trends. Each coloured stripe depicts the average temperature of a given year, with shades of blue representing cooler years and shades of red representing hotter years. When combined as a sequence that runs from blue to red, these ‘warming stripes’ reveal a striking trend towards hotter average temperatures over time and across most of the globe. Thus, colour alone has been used to visually represent a complex body of scientific research on anthropogenic climate change. When calculating object size, brightness and colour, the AI detective treats the Instagram images as input data rather than as visual narratives. By providing precise measurements of these three visual features, the AI draws our attention to imperceptible differences within and between images that might otherwise remain invisible to the human eye, or registered with less exactitude in the English language. However, it does not ‘see’ polar bears as ‘ideal victims’ or as victims at all. Because our AI is equipped with image processing algorithms, but lacks any linguistic or cultural training, it is not trained to interpret culturally shaped visual narratives. In the next section, we combine our AI’s findings for the entire sample with our own close semiotic reading of exemplary images from the sample. As a result, the ensuing analysis takes seriously the practice of distributed responsibility between humans and algorithmic actors (Mittelstadt et al. 2016; Simon 2015; see Chap. 3). That is, we do not view the AI detective as an independent and autonomous actor that has the capacity to generate findings that are correct by default. While our AI is responsible for seeing the sample through computer vision and for precisely describing an image’s visual features, we take responsibility for interpreting these features in relation to the cultural contexts that inform their production and reception. It is to our joint analysis that we now turn.

F rom Health to Sickness: Representing Polar Bears as Climate Victims Our analysis reveals that three visual narratives dominate our entire sample. Each one can be summed up by an exemplary Instagram image. Formed by its own unique constellation of brightness, object size and

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colour palette, each visual narrative represents a particular mode of photographing polar bears as Arctic climate victims. As we move across our discussion of each of these ideal types of representation, we note a trend towards portraying increasing darkness as well as sickness. To the extent that ‘[i]llness is the night-side of life’ (Sontag 1978: 3), night figures into the Arctic landscape as darkness and shadow. Consequently, we see the emergence of a noir aesthetic in representations of sickened polar bears in ailing Arctic ecosystems. As death looms in these images of climate change, its representation increasingly resembles the aesthetic of modern crime scene photography (as examined in Chap. 3). In this aesthetic convergence of crime and climate change, nonhuman climate victims appear in ways that are increasingly analogous to human crime victims, allowing us to see the Arctic as a criminal anthroposcene. In this case, we see a photographed climate scene as a crime scene, in which slow violence is made visible as violent marks on the polar bear’s body. We now discuss in turn the three dominant visual narratives in our sample, moving from the family portrait to the image of a solitary bear in danger, and lastly, to what we call ‘sick bear.’

Family Portrait of Mother with Cubs In the first visual narrative, a mother bear rests beside two young cubs in a luminous, snow-covered Arctic landscape.8 Framed by nature, with trees to the left and a body of water to the right, the mother calmly gazes upon her playful children in the midst of winter. Credited to photographer Daisy Gilardini, the image is an intimate family portrait of polar bears, much like her other award-winning wildlife photographs, such as ‘Polar bears hugging,’ ‘Hitching a ride’ and ‘Motherhood.’ Shot on location at Wapusk National Park, Canada,9 the portrait focuses on capturing the ‘white bear,’ or ‘Wapusk’ in the language of the Cree indigenous peoples. Near the western shoreline of the Hudson Bay, the park is situated along the polar bears’ migratory path. In the fall, the bears wait on land for the sea ice to freeze again, so that they can move further north to hunt for ringed seals (Laforge et al. 2017; Stirling 2011). Pregnant female bears transform parts of the park into their maternity dens, in which they can

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give birth and from which they can tend to their cubs. It is in this photogenic natural setting that Gilardini, like Norbert Rosing10 before her, anthropomorphizes the bears through her camera, visualizing them as an idealized family unit in the same gendered vein as other popular media representations of polar bears (Born 2019; Yudina et al. 2018), including Coca-Cola’s iconic polar bear family. By offering viewers a family portrait, Gilardini presents the bears through a dominant photographic genre that has, since its inception, been tied to ‘the ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self ’ (Sekula 1986: 7). Placed in opposition to the mug shot (Thomas 1999), the family portrait rose in popularity among the middle classes in the nineteenth century as an affordable form of personal portraiture. Much like traditional representations of the law-­ abiding, middle-class nuclear family, this polar bear family is bathed in light rather than hidden in shadow. As such, it is representative of the brightness that characterizes the bulk of our sample of Instagram polar bear images. This characteristic brightness is captured in Fig. 4.1. As a data visualization for the entire sample, Fig. 4.1 visually plots each image’s mean brightness against its standard deviation. In so doing, the image plot demonstrates a skew in the sample’s brightness, since most of the images are located past the tonal value of grey (127.5). While the sample’s mean brightness value is 163.3, this particular photograph by Gilardini has a mean brightness of 193.4. These brightness findings reveal how light has played a central role in representing polar bears in the Arctic. In this natural environment, ‘thousands of miles from the smoke’ (Conan Doyle 2012: 313), the sun remains visible for 24 hours a day for up to six months of the year. Even during long polar nights, the Arctic landscape continues to be characterized by luminescence caused by the reflection of sunlight off the ice and snow. Hence, the Arctic is not only a place of light irrespective of season, it is also—as pictured in this family portrait and much of the sample—primarily visualized as snow-covered territory. As a result, we can also consider the albedo associated with snow. Albedo refers to the amount of radiation or sunlight that is reflected by a surface. Compared to other material, natural stuff, such as dirt, snow is considered the brightest natural surface on our planet because it has an albedo approaching 0.9 (Dodds 2018). Thus, snow reflects back into the Earth’s atmosphere nearly 90% of the solar energy that makes contact

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Fig. 4.1  Mean brightness versus standard deviation for the entire sample of Instagram images on International Polar Bear Day

with its surface. Represented as gleaming white, snow in this family portrait is visualized in terms of its typical albedo. Consequently, neither the bears nor the snow are pictured as distressed. When snow becomes distressed, it will darken and turn colour, altering its albedo. When snow or ice turns from bright white to grey, black or brown, as it becomes covered in darker materials such as soil, soot and black carbon, the darkening is a

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sign of potential glacial distress (Dodds 2018). With a loss of albedo, more solar heat will be absorbed, which in turn heralds a longer melt season. Scientists refer to the outcome of these feedback loops and cascading effects as ‘Arctic amplification’ (Grotzer and Lincoln 2008; Riihelä et  al. 2013; Screen and Simmonds 2010). Such amplification explains why the average surface air temperatures in the Arctic are warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet (Graversen et al. 2008). Yet neither glacial distress nor visible signs of Arctic amplification enter into the frame of Gilardini’s photograph. Rather, the image represents a peaceful Arctic setting in shades of bright whiteness and light blue. Anchored by a colour palette dominated by a cold, blue hue, the image freezes a snowy scene in time, as though snow itself could never be materially affected over time by carbon emissions and human action. Consequently, the photograph represents the Arctic as a permanently cold place, unaffected by the effects of global warming. Moreover, the brightness of this image diverges from the darkness associated with crime and immorality, severing the possibility that climate change might be rendered visible through the noir aesthetic of crime scene photography (see Chap. 3). Thus, the brightness that characterizes Arctic landscape photography has had the unintended consequence of making the ecological harms caused by anthropogenic climate change more difficult for photographers to represent and for viewers to detect. Consequently, the family portrait of anthropomorphized, fat (i.e., healthy) bears provides little evidence, to both the AI and human eye, that the pictured bears have been victimized by rapid changes to the Arctic habitats in which they live. As a result, Gilardini’s photograph ultimately anaestheticizes viewers to the bears’ suffering, despite being posted and shared on a day for raising awareness of climate change’s effects on polar bears. It shows viewers healthy bears at play in a landscape seemingly unaffected by ecological degradation. Although the mother bear and her cubs might be considered part of a ‘vulnerable’ population of potential victims, by virtue of their gender and age, they appear safe and well, all of them content in their family unity.

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Bear in Danger In contrast to the family portrait, a second visual narrative focuses on a lone polar bear standing amidst thinning or melting sea ice. With soaking wet fur, a polar bear stares off into the distance as large, broken pieces of sea ice float in the background. The image’s focus on a solitary male polar bear as an animal metonym for the Arctic evokes gendered constructions of masculinity that have long been associated with the promotional scripting of the Arctic landscape. In the Arctic, humans are pitted against bear and landscape, both of which appear as ‘hypermasculine’ opponents defined by their untamed wildness and unpredictable ruggedness (Yudina et al. 2018). Represented as a potentially dangerous predator in the wilds of the North, the polar bear takes on all the qualities associated with a ‘big, bad offender,’ and yet it, too, is now endangered by climate change. As an exemplary representative of the ‘bear in danger’ image, we can examine a photograph credited to Anna Yatsenko.11 The photographer posted this image to her Instagram account on International Polar Bear Day 2019 along with a sequence of other photographs that show solitary male polar bears in a vast Arctic landscape. In her caption, Yatsenko (27 February 2019) promotes her book while warning that [d]ue to global warming and melting of pack ice, it may happen that our children may not see representatives of this species, and descendants will read about them only in books or on the Internet. I was lucky – I was able to observe and repeatedly photograph polar bears in their natural habitat.

Thematically, this photograph aligns with the ‘bears in danger’ aesthetic (Born 2019) that aims to establish a closer connection between polar bears and the issue of climate change, by situating these animals within their ruined Arctic habitat. It is ironic, then, that the image’s colour palette consists of calm colours with colder temperatures (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2002), ranging from white to navy blue and dark grey. These dominant colours imply that the coldness of the Arctic is not under threat; while sea ice might be thinning, its melting is not enough

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to significantly change the temperature of the Arctic. Like the family portrait of polar bears, this ‘bear in danger’ photograph also skews towards brightness, with a brightness value (163.5) that nearly replicates the sample’s mean brightness (163.3). As a result, it, too, exemplifies the polar luminescence that has become a definitive visual characteristic of the quintessential Arctic scene. In conjunction with the image’s cold colours, the brightness of Yatsenko’s snapshot works to numb audiences to the slow, incremental violence at work in this scene. That is, viewers are unable to see for themselves the gradual erosion of sea ice cover that polar bears rely upon for survival, only learning about global warming’s effects through the photographer’s written caption. Not only is the static snapshot unable to sensitize viewers to long-term changes in sea ice, the image also numbs them to these warming effects because of its colder colours and predominantly blue hue (see Fig. 4.2). Unlike the warmth associated with the red end of the colour spectrum, the blue end is linked to distance and backgrounding (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2002). Warm-coloured objects tend to stand out in a scene and are foregrounded, while cooler colours tend to be found in the background (Gibson et  al. 2017). Consequently, the coolly coloured sea ice is a background object that is taken for granted; its changes are less likely to be reflected upon by viewers.

Fig. 4.2  Dominant colours and colour palettes for the three visual narratives that dominated Instagram images posted on International Polar Bear Day

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Table 4.2   Image rankings by Instagram feed and for the whole sample Rank

#internationalpolarbearday

#polarbearday

Total

0 1 2 Total

1224 816 53 2093

958 813 64 1835

2182 (56%) 1629 (41%) 117 (3%) 3928

Because of its colour palette and brightness, Yatsenko’s photograph is exemplary of the way in which the entire sample tends to distance viewers from the dangers and risks posed by climate change. It keeps the ‘old distance between background and foreground’ (Latour 2017: 74) as the distance between a stable Earth and human interest. This distancing is additionally an effect of object size—specifically, the size of the depicted bear(s) in the photograph. Statistically, 97% of the images shared on International Polar Bear Day feature polar bears at mid-range (41%) or long-range (56%) distances (see Table 4.2). The mean size of the pictured polar bear(s) for the entire dataset is 0.26. On average, the photographed bear accounts for just over a quarter of the total image, appearing as a relatively small object in a wider landscape. In Yatsenko’s photograph, however, the depicted bear is even smaller in size than the average, taking up only 6% of the pixels in the image. Consequently, the polar bear is visualized at an even greater physical distance from the viewer. While the photograph borrows from the conventions set by National Geographic photographers, in which a polar bear personifies an Arctic ecosystem threatened by climate change (Born 2019), the distance between depicted bear and viewer can have an anaestheticizing effect. It numbs viewers from feeling as endangered by climate change as the polar bear. It is the bear that is in peril as Instagram users look on from the relative safety of their own homes. Rapid changes to Arctic ecosystems are imagined and imaged at a geographical remove from Instagram viewers, many of whom post and share photographs from locations south of the 66th parallel north. In portraying polar bears at a distance, such Instagram images are precisely understood as visualizations of distant nonhuman suffering. Ultimately, they can minimize the shock of seeing nonhuman suffering, the very thing that these pictures sought to reveal.

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Sick Bear and the Emergence of a Noir Aesthetic In stark contrast to the previous two types of representation, an image of a sick polar bear is at the centre of a third visual narrative. The photograph foregrounds a solitary, emaciated bear walking along the grassy shoreline of Somerset Island, Nunavut, surrounded by an assortment of rocks, boulders and other debris in the background.12 The polar bear’s scruffy fur is a yellowish, brown hue that differs from the pristine white fur viewers are accustomed to seeing on a healthy polar bear (Lafontaine 2014). Notably there is no ice or snow pictured in the photograph. Taken by renowned wildlife photographer Cristina Mittermeier and originally posted to her Instagram feed on December 5, 2017,13 the image appeared on the same day that Paul Nicklen, her partner and SeaLegacy14 co-­ founder, posted a short National Geographic video of the same starving polar bear (Stevens 2017). In the video footage, viewers watch as this bear slowly wanders across an iceless Arctic landscape, rummaging through rusty oil drums for food until it settles for a piece of garbage. Provocative captions scroll beneath the video, informing viewers that ‘[t]his is what climate change looks like’ and later suggesting that this bear likely only has ‘a few more hours to live.’ On February 27, 2018, SeaLegacy reposted Mittermeier’s sick bear photograph on its Instagram feed to mark International Polar Bear Day. Remarkably, the photograph of a sick polar bear (hereafter referred to as the sick bear image) is anomalous in our sample. Because it was reproduced 59 times across the entire sample, each with a slightly different crop and level of brightness, it forms its own cluster of images that, as a group, sits much closer to the tonal value of grey (see red circle in Fig. 4.1). With a mean brightness of 129.5, the image of sick bear is darker than the family portraits and the ‘bear in danger’ photographs. Combined with an earthier, warmer colour palette, it represents an Arctic landscape’s loss of albedo. The cool grey, white and blue hues that dominate previous colour palettes are overtaken by shades of brown and ochre in this one (see Fig. 4.2). These warmer, darker hues are explained by the reduction in radiant surfaces, such as snow and ice cover, in the Arctic. As atmospheric and surface heating continue to warm the Arctic, the cool colours

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that the human eye has become accustomed to seeing are supplanted by darker ones. Thus, the unprecedented, physical transformations of the Arctic ecosystem, caused by warmer temperatures and the increased absorption of sunlight, are materially captured by the shift from cool to warmer hues. Consequently, the sick bear image captures in colour photography what the nineteenth-century French Impressionists captured on their canvases as the effects of an emerging Anthropocene (Shields 2019a). Claude Monet, for example, was among the first to portray natural variations in atmospheric conditions through cold-warm colour contrasts (Itten 1970). However, he also contributed to the formation of an aesthetic anesthesia that made the degradation of air seem right and natural (Mirzoeff 2014). This aesthetic anesthesia might be most clearly seen in Monet’s painting Unloading Coal (1875), in which the spirit of industrialization was rendered with an all-encompassing, albeit subdued, yellow hue. The overall warm tone of the painting invites viewers to celebrate the industrial activities undertaken in the name of Progress, anaestheticizing them to the conditions of deteriorating air quality. Most notably, the yellow hue reflects an abundance of coal smoke in the air—a cause for concern rather than whole-hearted celebration. Similarly, the sick bear image is constituted by yellowish, sallow hues, even though it was taken far away from the urban centres of industrialization. As such, its colour palette clearly diverges from the ‘tender/soothing’ pastel blue of the family polar bear portrait, as well as the ‘secure/comfortable’ dark blue of the ‘bear in danger’ photograph (for blue’s positive associations with pleasantness, see Wexner 1954, cited by Valdez and Mehrabian 1994: 396). By moving away from people’s general preference for the colour blue, the sick bear image evokes some of the aversion that most people feel towards yellow (Crozier 1999). This repulsion makes sense in light of Western culture’s association of yellow with disease, as exemplified in the definition of the adjective ‘sallow.’ Etymologically derived from the Icelandic söl-r (yellow), sallow describes a complexion as ‘sickly yellow’ or ‘brownish yellow colour,’ in which these ‘discolourations’ are conceived as ‘dirty’ (e.g., the term also has etymological roots in the Old English salo, which means ‘dirty’). As a depiction of the sallow, Mittermeier’s photograph demonstrates how the physical properties of

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the Arctic air, once praised by Conan Doyle as a source for better health, have now become a root cause for the ecosystem’s gradual sickness. Sickness, in this instance, is not just diagnosed in the land because of its increasing absence of snow and ice cover. It is also diagnosed by reading the polar bear’s body as evidence of climate change’s effects. Here, we return to the idea of visualizing anthropogenic climate change as a ‘big, bad offender,’ and the climate scene in analogous ways to a potential crime scene—that is, as a criminal anthroposcene. Like crime scene photographs that feature an injured victim and an absent criminal, this criminal anthroposcene contains the physical traces of climate change’s offending presence, especially when we read them as visible marks left on the victim’s body. There are two major signs written on the polar bear’s body of its victimization by climate change: the colour of its fur, and the size of its body. First, the sallow colour of the polar bear’s fur can be explained by the dramatic physical alterations to the Arctic ecosystem. Although polar bear fur typically appears to the human eye as white, it is in fact a hollow, transparent surface. The ‘white’ fur is an optical illusion, created by a process known as luminescence, which occurs when light energy from the sun’s rays gets trapped within the hollow surface of the polar bear’s fur. This trapped light energy causes polar bear fur to appear white. As snow and ice cover diminish, less light energy will get trapped and reflected through the translucent fur (Tributsch et al. 1990). Hence, in a warmer Arctic, where polar bears spend more time on land rather than on snow and ice, warmer colour tones will be reflected onto and by their fur. Secondly, the size of a sick bear’s body is a significant evidentiary sign of an Arctic ecosystem made unhealthy by climate change. According to the Polar Bear Fatness Index (Stirling et al. 2008), the skinny appearance of a polar bear, with visible bones and no tangible body fat, is highly indicative of poor overall health. Aesthetically and culturally, this polar bear’s thin frame evokes the skeletal figure of Death, particularly in its form as an emaciated Grim Reaper since the Medieval Ages in Europe (Seaton 1996). It also brings to mind how the slow violence of climate change—unlike the spectacular, quick(er) deaths visualized in crime scene photographs of murder—works on the polar bear’s body as an ongoing wasting away. It takes time for the bear’s fat to gradually

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disappear, and for its starvation to be made clearly visible as protruding bones. In contrast to popular media representations of fat polar bears, the sick bear image reveals the suffering of a nonhuman animal victim through a burgeoning noir aesthetic. The visualization of a sallow, skeletal bear raises the stakes in representing polar bears endangered by climate change. Given these distinctive visual features, perhaps it is not surprising that the image (and video) of sick bear provoked a viral response from social media users within days of the original posting (Stevens 11 December 2017; Rosenberg 9 December 2017). By August 2018, the video alone had been viewed over 2.5 billion times, making it the most widely circulated video in National Geographic history. Taking advantage of millions of social media followers, Paul Nicklen and Christina Mittermeier’s viral image of a suffering polar bear came to function as a synecdoche for a suffering Arctic. While the term ‘polar bear’ emerged as an etymological metonym for the Arctic, polar bears have transformed into important visual metonyms for, as well as bodily evidence of the changing Arctic. Because their luminescent fur and body size can serve as visual barometers of the Arctic’s overall health, sick bears suggest that illness has gravely fallen upon a place once declared to have the potential of being the world’s sanatorium.

Conclusion By extending the scope of green criminology’s engagement with mediated representations of nonhuman animal victims, this chapter deployed an AI detective to investigate how polar bears have been visualized as ideal climate victims in wildlife photography in both old (print) media and new (social) media. In doing so, it brought together and connected what have often been discrete discussions in separate research fields: wildlife photography, climate change communication and victimology. Thus, the chapter first explained why polar bears became a global icon in climate change communication with reference to the ways in which its popular media representations, in wildlife photography and mass advertising, resonated with findings from victimology. Specifically, there had been a

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tendency to visualize polar bears (in the West) as feminized, infantile and pristine white bears. Strikingly, this anthropomorphic characterization aligned with the gendered and racialized attributes assigned to ideal (human) crime victims. When responding to ideal victims, we believe in their innocence and sympathize with their suffering. Because polar bears have been primarily constructed in the same vein as ideal crime victims in media images, their victimization by climate change ought to provoke a moral, emotional reaction from human viewers. Yet despite numerous representations of vulnerable, cute and cuddly polar bears, there is a growing sense that polar bear images have not been the most effective representations of climate change’s devastating effects, despite the polar bear’s status as the ‘symbol-species’ of anthropogenic climate change. For example, The Guardian recently acknowledged its own less-than-effective editorial choices when it came to representing environmental harms through polar bear imagery: Often, when signalling environmental stories to our readers, selecting an image of a polar bear on melting ice has been the obvious – though not necessarily appropriate – choice. These images tell a certain story about the climate crisis but can seem remote and abstract – a problem that is not a human one, nor one that is particularly urgent. (Shields 2019b)

Elsewhere, Climate Visuals, an evidence-based image library, declared familiar images of polar bears on melting ice as less ‘thought-provoking’ visual representations of climate change, prompting ‘cynicism and fatigue’ in viewers (Climate Outreach n.d.). Insofar as familiarity breeds contempt, the established pattern of representing polar bears has recently been reconceived as contributing to what Susan Sontag (2003) has called ‘moral or emotional anesthesia.’ When understood as a dulling of feeling or as a numbed conscience, such anesthesia mutes the viewer’s experience of seeing polar bears suffer. Our analysis reveals how the bulk of polar bear images—as posted and shared by Instagram users on successive International Polar Bear Days—contributes to such anaestheticizing effects. Most of the sample fails to sensitize viewers to the rapid changes that are both physically and visually transforming the Arctic environment. Most of the photographs are bright images dominated by cold

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colours, such as blue and white, in which the polar bear appears as a small object in the distance. When represented through a happy family portrait, the polar bears’ distant suffering is rendered too distant, in the sense that their suffering is not even made overtly visible. When imaged as a solitary bear in danger, the bears’ distant suffering is also visualized as too physically (and emotionally) distant from the Instagram viewer’s own actions. In the entire sample, human actions that contribute to global warming appear out of frame. Consequently, the photographs shared by Instagram users rarely compelled viewers to grapple with their own complicity in the polar bear’s suffering. The absence of any visual traces of human action has made it easier for human viewers to absolve themselves of any possible responsibility for making Arctic habitats less liveable for polar bears. While climate change has been notoriously difficult to represent because its slow violence ‘occurs gradually out of sight… [and] is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011: 2), it may be more effectively captured through the imagination of the Arctic as a criminal anthroposcene rather than as a luminescent polar scene. Thus, with the assistance of our AI detective, we have demonstrated in this chapter not only how wider trends in popular polar bear photography have been reproduced on a social media platform, but also how a darker visualization of polar bear plight, in the form of a sick bear, can potentially mark a new chapter in polar bear photography. The photograph of a sick polar bear embodies what we identify as an emerging noir aesthetic in climate-­related polar bear photography. While the previous chapter examined the noir aesthetic of modern crime scene photography, this chapter has examined how such an aesthetic can colour contemporary climate scenes that have not been typically constructed as criminal, but are increasingly taking on such forms due to the ‘invisible crime’ of anthropogenic climate change. By drawing a connection between the visualization of crime scenes and climate scenes, we are hoping to ‘shock’ the viewer’s conscience by enabling them to see polar bear suffering in analogous ways to a crime victim’s suffering. Although the shocking representation of crime numbed us to seeing the Anthropocene in crime scene photography (see Chap. 3), it might very well add some shock to polar bear photography. Here, we can recall Emile Durkheim’s (1964: 81) definition of an act as criminal because ‘it

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shocks the common conscience’ of a society. By treating the sick bear image as we would a crime scene image, we focused on three visual features: the victim’s body as well as the image’s brightness and colour palette. Here, the slow violence of climate change can be likened to criminal traces that are left on the body of the victim. As such, it can be made visible when we focus on the gradual wasting away of the polar bear’s body, attending to the signs of protruding bones, disappearing fat stores, and increasing sallowness of fur. As importantly, the sick bear image’s colour palette and mean brightness can be read as strong evidence of a material darkening in the Arctic. In the image, the earthy brown hues of a barren, ice-free landscape supplant the bright white and blue hues of a snowcovered Arctic. Embodying a sickened Arctic ecosystem, with its decreasing albedo, the ailing polar bear inhabits a visually darker landscape, one that sits closer to the tonal value of grey. To the extent that visual features have moral implications, this all-­ encompassing greyness transports us from a black-and-white world of absolutes into a world characterized by shades of moral greyness. In so doing, the sick bear image’s noir aesthetic invites a more ethically nuanced and morally complex reaction to seeing photographed scenes of climate change. It does more than simply provoke sympathy. Indeed, sympathy can be construed—as Susan Sontag does—as too simplistic or facile a reaction to seeing photographs of suffering. ‘So far as we feel sympathy,’ she writes, ‘we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering’ (Sontag 2003: 91). As such, sympathy can desensitize us to the ways in which our privileges are drawn on the same map as another’s suffering, so that some of us have the ‘dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain’ (Sontag 2003: 99). By contrast, the moral ambiguity associated with living in a world of shadows and greyness suggests that we are, intentionally or not, accomplices to that which caused the polar bear’s suffering. We can no longer proclaim our innocence. Instead, we are all complicit because we have contributed in some way, some more than others, to the carbon emissions associated with climate change. We have participated in consumption practices (e.g., see Chaps. 5 and 6) that, in turn, have indirectly caused the polar bear’s own ‘consumption’—that is, the wasting of its body by

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illness. Because consumption has also been, by definition, associated with the experience of burning up, it lies in the shadow of the darkening Arctic landscape. It ties the darkening of the Arctic to global warming and the subsequent reduction of snow and ice cover in the region. Further, these multiple, sometimes paradoxical,15 meanings of consumption speak to the experience of living in what Deborah Bird Rose (2013) calls the ‘Anthropocene noir,’ where a blurring of meanings entangles us in ambiguity. Indeed, she argues that we now occupy a similar ethically grey position to that of the classic protagonist in Hollywood film noir. Like the hardboiled protagonist, we can no longer expect happy endings. Instead, moral ambiguity becomes the norm due to a blurring of roles that were once assumed to be mutually exclusive. As a result, we are all ‘part criminal, part detective, part victim; everyone is guilty and shared guilt is a common bond’ (Rose 2013: 6). As detectives, we can search for signs of our criminal traces in particular climate scenes, as we have done in this chapter, or as wildlife photographers, climate change communicators and Instagram users might continue to do in the future. We are also victims of climate change, potentially anaestheticized to others’ suffering as much as our own. At the same time, we are criminals that bear some responsibility for the slow violence unravelling the lives and health of those inhabiting the Arctic and elsewhere. Declaring sympathy no longer absolves us entirely of our guilt, for none of us can ever attain the purity and innocence that have been typically ascribed to the polar bear. Although the image of sick bear appears as an anomaly in our sample, it heralds what a new ‘normal’ might look like in the future Arctic. As icescapes continue to vanish, and more photographers turn away from representing classic Arctic scenes, the photographs they produce may increasingly resemble the noir16 aesthetic that has shaped our fascination with the modern crime scene. Strikingly, this suggests that a noir aesthetic—one historically associated with the urban metropolis—has travelled to the Arctic. There, it can shape the construction of unconventional climate scenes, in order to reveal a sickened Arctic ecosystem. By representing the Arctic as a criminal anthroposcene, illness becomes an evidentiary sign of the otherwise invisible crime of anthropogenic climate change. It is by taking stock of these emerging criminal anthroposcenes that we

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might be shocked out of our own complacency. By shaking the foundations of representing the Arctic, images of criminal anthroposcenes have the potential to unsettle us enough, so that we may come to recognize our own culpability in the victimization of nonhumans thousands of miles away from us.

Notes 1. Of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide can linger in the atmosphere up to centuries and millennia, so that CO2 emissions from the Industrial Revolution can still have a legacy effect, especially because warming oceans and (deforested) land ecosystems may be unable to absorb as much of the atmospheric CO2 as in the past (Carbon Brief and Clark 2012; Earth Observatory n.d.; Hausfather 2010; Pongratz and Caldeira 2012). 2. The term social media influencer refers to an individual user who has established creditability in the online social network surrounding an industry or professional field. This reputation attracts a large audience of followers (i.e., other social media users) that can be persuaded by the communicative practices of a social media influencer. 3. So-called Polar Bear Cams capture live video footage of polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba, and stream this footage online to viewers. According to Lafontaine (2014), the Polar Bear Cams serve as purifying agents that perpetually associate polar bears with whiteness. This whiteness is, in turn, associated with the image of a pristine, northern wilderness, untouched and unaffected by human action. 4. This tally of images is from February 27, 2019, and includes all images posted and shared on the four main feeds, even if posted before or after International Polar Bear Day. 5. The fact that these two feeds yielded higher results can be explained by the close thematic link between these particular hashtags and the International Polar Bear Day event. 6. The images may also differ in terms of the absence or presence of a signature, text and/or watermark. 7. February 27, 2013, was identified as the starting point by scrolling to the bottom of each Instagram feed to determine when polar bear images, featuring one or more of these hashtags, began to appear. 8. For the original image by Gilardini, please visit https://www.instagram. com/p/BfQ_pUQAMuD/ (accessed 13 January 2020).

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9. Wapusk National Park is one of Canada’s national parks located 45 km south of Churchill, Manitoba. Churchill has been dubbed the ‘Polar Bear Capital of the World’ (see Introduction for more details). It functions as a central hub for scientists, photographers and tourists, all seeking to get close to polar bears in conditions that are relatively safe for humans and polar bears alike. 10. To see Norbert Rosing’s family portraits of polar bears in Wapusk National Park, see Rosing (2006: 20–48). 11. For the original photograph by Yatsenko posted on International Polar Bear Day, please see the fourth image in this Instagram slideshow: https:// www.instagram.com/p/BuYoZjunFgS/ (accessed 13 January 2020). 12. For examples of the sick bear image that have been repeatedly posted on International Polar Bear Day, please see the following Instagram links: https://www.instagram.com/p/BgTF2kkl672/ or https://www.instagram.com/p/BfvD1mlBnin/ or https://www.instagram.com/p/BfuNi_ WheJZ/ or https://www.instagram.com/p/BfvTXMWlHOn/ (accessed 13 January 2020). 13. The image can be accessed on Instagram at https://www.instagram. com/p/BcU_8c8FDA8/ 14. SeaLegacy is an environmental organization that is dedicated to ocean conservation. Polar bears and other charismatic megafauna feature prominently in the visual narratives this organization has developed to promote its ocean conservation initiatives. 15. As both the action of destroying or being destroyed, this paradoxical definition of consumption be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. 16. Dodds (2018: 83) also predicts that we are more likely to express darker, aesthetic appreciations of ice as we confront the spectre of a world with less ice. He, however, connects the darkening aesthetic to a revival of Gothic horror, which we discuss as a genre that foreshadows the coming of film noir in Hollywood in the next chapter.

References Archibald, K. (2015) ‘From Fierce to Adorable: Representations of Polar Bears in the Popular Imagination’, American Review of Canadian Studies 45(3): 266–282. Beirne, P. (2009) Confronting Animal Abuse: Law, Criminology, and Human-­ Animal Relationships, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Beirne, P. and South, N. (eds.) (2007) Issues in Green Criminology: Confronting Harms Against Environments, Humanity and Other Animals, Cullompton: Willan. Boltanski, L. (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Born, D. (2019) ‘Bearing Witness? Polar Bears as Icons for Climate Change Communication in National Geographic’, Environmental Communication 13(5): 649–663. Brisman, A. (2018) ‘Representing the “Invisible Crime” of Climate Change in an Age of Post-Truth’, Theoretical Criminology 22(3): 469–491. Brown, M. (2017) ‘The Criminologists as Visual Scholar in a Global Mediascape.’ In M.  Brown and E.  Carrabine (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, London: Routledge: 486–496. Carbon Brief and Clark, D. (2012) ‘How Long Do Greenhouse Gases Stay in the Air?’ URL (accessed 12 January 2020): https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-gases-remain-air Carrabine, E. (2012) ‘Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology 52(3): 463–489. Carrabine, E., Iganski, P., Lee, M., Plummer, K. and South, N. (2004) Criminology: A Sociological Introduction, London: Routledge. Chan, J. (2017) ‘Politics of the Anthropocene: Lessons for Criminology.’ In C. Holley and C. Shearing (eds.) Criminology and the Anthropocene. New York: Routledge: 181–200. Chouliaraki, L. (2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering, London: Sage. Chouliaraki, L. (2013) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of PostHumanitarianism, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Christensen, M. (2013) ‘Arctic Climate Change and the Media: The News Story that Was’, In M. Christensen, A.E. Nilsson and N. Wombs (eds.) Media and the Politics of Arctic Climate Change, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 26–51. Christie, N. (1986) ‘The Ideal Victim’, In E.A. Fattah (ed.) From Crime Policy to Victim Policy, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 17–30. Climate Outreach (n.d.) ‘The 7 Climate Visuals Principles’ URL (accessed 11 January 2020): https://climatevisuals.org/7-climate-visuals-principles Conan Doyle, A. (2012) Dangerous Work: The Diary of an Arctic Adventure, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crozier, W.R. (1999) ‘The Meanings of Colour: Preferences among Hues’, Pigment & Resin Technology 28(1): 6–14. DiFrancesco, D.A. and Young, N. (2010) ‘Seeing Climate Change: The Visual Construction of Global Warming in Canadian National Print Media’, Cultural Geographies 18(4): 517–536.

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Kyriakidou. M. (2015) ‘Media Witnessing: Exploring the Audience of Distant Suffering’, Media, Culture & Society 37(2): 215–231. Lafontaine, C. (2014) ‘Streaming Precarity: The Polar Bear Cam and the Display of Migration’, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 32: 135–158. Laforge, M.P., Clark, D.A., Schmidt, A.L., Lankshear, J.L., Kowalchuk, S. and Brook, R.K. (2017) ‘Temporal Aspects of Polar Bear (Ursus Maritimus) Occurrences at Field Camps in Wapusk National Park, Canada’, Polar Biology 40(8): 1661–1670. Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity. Lemieux, A.M. and Clarke, R.V. (2009) ‘The International Ban on Ivory Sales and Its Effects on Elephant Poaching in Africa’, The British Journal of Criminology 49(4): 451–471. Lin, T-Y, Maine, M., Belongie, S., Bourdev, L., Girshick, R., Hays, J., Perona, P., Ramanan, D., Zitnick, C.L. and Dollár, P. (2015) ‘Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context’, arXiv URL (accessed 13 January 2020): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0312.pdf Maher, J., Pierpoint, H. and Beirne, P. (eds.) (2017) The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Manzo, K. (2010) ‘Beyond Polar Bears? Re-Envisioning Climate Change,’ Meteorological Applications 17(2): 196–208. McDonald, R.I., Chai, H.Y. and Newell, B.R. (2015) ‘Personal Experience and the “Psychological Distance” of Climate Change: An Integrative Review’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 44: 109–118. Mirzoeff, N. (2014) ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture 26(2): 213–232. Mittelstadt, B.D., Allo, P., Taddeo, M., Wachter, S. and Floridi. L. (2016) ‘The Ethics of Algorithms: Mapping the Debate’, Big Data & Society: 1–21. Natali, L. (2010) ‘The Big Grey Elephants in the Backyard of Huelva, Spain.’ In R.  White (ed.) Global Environmental Harm: Criminological Perspectives, Cullompton: Willan: 193–209. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nurse, A. (2013) Animal Harm: Perspectives on Why People Harm and Kill Animals, Farnham: Ashgate. Nurse, A. (2015) Policing Wildlife: Perspective on the Enforcement of Wildlife Legislation, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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5 Dark Tourism in Iceberg Alley: The Hidden Ecological Costs of Consuming Iceberg Deaths Anita Lam and Matthew Tegelberg

In Iceberg Alley, we lay our criminal anthroposcene, a scene of icy tragedy made and remade near the shores of Newfoundland and Labrador since the early twentieth century. Situated from the coast of Greenland to the southeastern coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the North Atlantic corridor— colloquially known as ‘Iceberg Alley’—was the site of a human tragedy that continues to loom large in sssour imagination even after more than a century of its occurrence. On her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, the RMS Titanic hit an ‘iceberg dead, On starboard bow’ on the night of April 14, 1912 (Pratt 1935/1989: 322; our emphasis added). The ‘unsinkable’ ship sank in the early morning of April 15, taking with her at least 1500 human lives (Mersey 1912/1999; Smith 1994). The disaster marked the sinking of human faith in an ‘endless upward spiral’ of technological progress and orderliness, and it has since been treated as a ‘crime scene’ that can be forensically explored by modern technology (director of the Hollywood film Titanic, James Cameron, quoted in Sides 2012). Photographic evidence of the actual iceberg that sank the Titanic has since been scrutinized for the telltale clue—a red streak of ship paint, as though the ship itself could bleed for its lost passengers—that the pictured iceberg did, indeed, collide with the ocean © The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_5

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liner (Wilkins 2012). Imagined by E.J. Pratt (1935/1989: 305), the leading Canadian poet of his time, in the 1930s, the offending iceberg was rendered as a zombie-like creature that could ‘lurch and shamble like a plantigrade.’ Evoking nature as demonic and fearful (Djwa and Moyles 1989: xviii), Pratt’s iceberg—with its palaeolithic face, claws and raw impulse—resembles the Gothic monsters that populate the criminological imaginary (Picart and Greek 2007; Rafter and Ystehede 2010; South 2015), as well as Universal Pictures’ horror films of the 1930s. Notably, Universal’s classic monster movies brought together the image of the animalistic undead with an aesthetic sensibility that foreshadowed the coming of film noir in Hollywood (Silver and Ursini 2004). Like hardboiled crime fiction, film noir ‘took murder…and dropped it into the alley’ (Chandler 1950), merging horror with the urban ‘dreadful enclosure’ of the modern streetscape (Damer 1974). When visualized in Hollywood films noir, such as Nightmare Alley (1947) and Blind Alley (1939), or even in the proto-crime film The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), crime, violence and death are always hiding in the alley (Phillips 2000).1 As a crucial aspect of the ‘mean streets’ down which both the classic noir protagonist (Dimendberg 2004; Osteen 2013) and criminologist walk, the alley has been central to representing the urban environment as full of dumpsters (Ferrell 2006), graffiti (Young 2013), danger (e.g., Wang and Taylor 2006) and fear (e.g., Wolch et al. 2010). Yet the alley is not only a feature of the modern streetscape, anchored on land by the processes of industrialization and urbanization that have pushed the Earth into the age of the Anthropocene. It can also be a place of awesome grandeur and natural danger, one that is comprised of ice and water. Thus, by laying our scene in Iceberg Alley, we pivot away from exploring the spectacle of human-­ on-­human street violence, in order to consider how the human conquest of nature appears as a form of slow violence in the Anthropocene noir. According to Deborah Bird Rose (2013: 214), noir fiction ‘offers us protagonists whose perspectives uniquely articulate our condition in this dark (Anthropocene) era.’ As these stories about self-destruction are applied to living in a time of geophysical uncertainty, the notion of an Anthropocene noir enables us to recognize that our eagerness to remake the world in the name of progress is bringing us ever closer to ruining the Earth and its diverse, nonhuman lifeforms. Strikingly, then, the

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Anthropocene noir emerges from human hubris, and our tragic rush to achieve technological greatness. Together, these impulses underlie the making of disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic. As the Titanic raced full steam ahead towards a new world, only to be mortally wounded by ancient ice—that which is envisioned as ‘dead’ and slow—its aftermath represented a human death spectacle that continues to inform pilgrimage and tourism to Newfoundland and Labrador.2 While the story of the Titanic has been told and memorialized hundreds of times, focusing on human victims and survivors, it is also a story about an iceberg and its less visible nonhuman death. In the Anthropocene noir, some have sought to eulogize this iceberg as a victim of the Titanic. In Wallace Gagne’s (2001) poem Iceberg Victim, he writes: Writers and commentators expended enormous effort presenting the [human] victims’ side of the story, and almost none on yours. About all we heard was how big you were, how cold, how cruelly indifferent. Nobody interviewed you, asked you what it felt like to have an ocean liner smash into your rear end, to have all those people screaming and dying right beside you, to have your good name blackened around the globe. … I wonder what has become of you. Is there any part of you still bobbing on the ocean; are you a fragment floating in a Martini in some expensive Ginza lounge…

Gone is the monstrous, dead iceberg. In its place, we have a new tale that gestures towards the cultural commodification of icebergs, conquered anew by humans as an ice cube in someone’s Martini. In our new geological epoch, icebergs do not appear as demonic giants, but rather as bergy bits3 that float along Iceberg Alley as pieces of a dying glacier. These icebergs are products of calving events that have fundamentally altered the Greenland ice sheet; there, calving breaks a glacier’s body into fragments.4 Some of those fragments float away across the ocean, destined to

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completely melt within five years after the calving event (Bruneau 2004). In their travels, these giant, dismembered bodies of ice have become spectacles, particularly to humans who seek to capture them along the shorelines of Iceberg Alley. Tourists and local residents transform into berg hunters, as they rush to consume icebergs before they are gradually reduced to water. Captured on camera, uniquely shaped icebergs are named and circulate as headlining objects in news media and as viral images across social media platforms. The ‘penis-berg,’ a phallic-shaped iceberg otherwise named #hammerofthegods, was brought to the world’s attention in 2017 (Canadian Press 2017), only to be replaced by the ‘beauty berg’ of 2018 (Rogers 2018). Thus, hundreds of years after the sinking of the Titanic, crowds of spectators from all over the world are physically or virtually assembled around the deaths of icebergs, and by extension the quietly ongoing deaths of glaciers. As ‘essentially death row for icebergs’ (Wallace 2006), Iceberg Alley is a site where melting icebergs are transformed into nonhuman death spectacles for sightseeing tourists, and into pure iceberg water for sophisticated consumers. By examining how icy nonhumans are produced for and consumed by tourists, this chapter investigates iceberg consumption as an emerging criminal anthroposcene. Here, iceberg consumption is conceived as a scene of dark tourism that is made by anthropogenic climate change. Made possible through a state-corporate nexus that allocates resources to tourism development, iceberg consumption ultimately represents a commodification of ecocide—that is, the extensive destruction, damage or loss done to ecosystems or natural environments as a result of human activities (Higgins 2010, 2012; White 2018). Couched in a narrative of purity, it has been sold in ways that conceal the dark, ecological costs associated with commodifying iceberg deaths. To make this argument, we use a particular ethos to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene—what Alexis Shotwell (2016: 3) has described as ‘roughly, the moment that humans worry that we have lost a natural state of purity or decide that purity is something we ought to pursue.’ Because iceberg tourism is heavily informed by this ethos, iceberg consumers believe that they can access, through icebergs, a time or natural state before pollution and industrial impurities. By buying icebergs, either as a tourist spectacle or as a beverage, these consumers seek to recover some state of natural

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purity, even as their consumption leaves ecological traces that hasten the demise of ice-forms. In consumers’ search for purity, then, lies the hidden darkness of such a criminal anthroposcene. To explore this criminal anthroposcene, we first review the literature on dark tourism. We then discuss how a symmetrical analysis of humans and nonhumans can help us dispel the idea that nonhuman material is passive, inert or ‘dead’ stuff. In so doing, we return animacy to the icebergs, not as part of some raw or horrific impulse, but rather as a move towards deliberately labelling iceberg consumption as a form of dark tourism in the Anthropocene noir. To analyze the constructed consumerism of this cultural–natural scene, we examine marketing initiatives, provincial statistics and news coverage on iceberg tourism and iceberg water production in Newfoundland and Labrador. Ultimately, we engage with the notion of constructed consumerism in two ways throughout this chapter: we begin by reconstructing iceberg consumption as a form of dark tourism and later analyze how marketers have constructed icebergs as a ‘bucket list’ sight for sophisticated tourists and as virginal water for the distinguished palate of privileged consumers. Whether consumed visually as spectacular objects or ingested as bottled luxury water, icebergs are hunted and devoured in ways that conceal the environmental costs of their cultural commodification. In gazing upon and consuming icebergs without responsibility or remorse, iceberg tourists fail to reckon with the ways in which their own consumption practices are both sanctioning the deaths of ice-forms and contributing to an escalation of the ecological harms on display.

Conceptualizing the Darkness of Iceberg Consumption In setting an exploratory research agenda for green-cultural criminology, Brisman and South (2013) encourage green criminologists to pay closer attention to the cultural dimensions of environmental harms, risks and crimes. More specifically, they argue for further interrogation of constructed consumerism because patterns of consumption have led to a widespread

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cultural commoditization of nature. By constructed consumerism, they refer to the ways in which consumer ‘goods’ are constructed and sold in ways that hide ‘the bads’ associated with their consumption. In the production and consumption of goods and services, cultural systems are entangled with environmental systems. When nature is transformed into a visible, cultural sign loaded with socioeconomic meaning, harms to the environment—to nature itself—are erased and concealed in ‘popular and shared fantasies about purity and unspoiled environment’ (Brisman and South 2013: 128). When we treat iceberg consumption as a case study of constructed consumerism, the iceberg is considered a cultural object to conquer as much as a substance central to visualizing the current climate crisis (Carey 2007; Leane and Maddison 2018). Situating ice within history and culture (e.g., Cruikshank 2005; Dodds 2018; Sörlin 2015), scholars from the environmental humanities imagine ice as a ‘living’ nonhuman actor in the climate change debate (Bjørst 2010; Glasberg 2011), one that ‘carries, disperses and distributes non/human things in its icy trajectories’ (Duckert 2013: 71). As cold matter, however, ice has an ‘uncomfortable ability to evoke a kind of strange space between life and death’ (Leane and Maddison 2018: 101), offering in its uncanny presence an experience of dark tourism in the age of the Anthropocene. In this section, we first review the literature on dark tourism before applying the concept to iceberg tourism. To set up our symmetrical analysis of iceberg tourism, we then explain how we melt—much like the icebergs in our warming world—the assumption that humans hold a superior position among different forms of vibrant matter on Earth.

Iceberg Tourism as Dark Tourism Dark tourism has been generally defined as acts of travel to sites associated with death, trauma and suffering (Stone and Sharpley 2008; Stone 2013), where death and disaster have been commodified by the tourism industry for popular consumption (Foley and Lennon 1996; Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone et  al. 2018). Even though there is no universally accepted definition of the practice (Miller and Gonzalez 2013; Tunbridge and Ashworth 2016), dark tourism was initially conceived as a broad

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category that did not make any particular distinctions between human-­ made tragedies and natural disasters (Dalton 2015). While scholars seem to consider both Nature and Humans as causes of death and disaster, they tend to focus solely on human victims in scenes of human death and suffering. Attending to scenes that have attained horrific and mythic status, they have examined places of imprisonment (e.g., Carrabine 2017; Pedersen 2017; Strange and Kempa 2003; Walby and Piché 2011; Welch 2015), the crime scenes of serial killers as well as of assassins (e.g., Dalton 2015; Foley and Lennon 1996; Levitt 2010; Powell and Iankova 2016), and sites of genocide (e.g., Miles 2002; Robb 2009; Thurnell-Read 2009), terrorism (e.g., Potts 2012) and disaster (e.g., Stone 2013; Tang 2018), among others. Crime, whether on an individual or mass-level, figures into the popular and cultural imagination of these sites. According to Anthony Seaton (1996), Thomas De Quincey’s essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ anticipates what has now been called ‘dark tourism,’ by considering how violent, secular death, such as murder, could be linked to the realm of individual aesthetics and personal taste. When people travel to witness public enactments of death, violent death and a quest for the Other both ‘became a consumer commodity, [and] a spectator sport’ (Seaton 1996: 237). From the Roman Empire’s gladiatorial combats to public executions across Europe and the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people have journeyed to watch the spectacle of death, presumably fascinated by darkness. Although Lennon and Foley (2000: 11) provide no explanation of what actually makes dark tourism ‘dark,’ darkness connotes in Western cultures a menacing absence of light (Tarlow 2005). In contrast to the light associated with holiday vacations premised on Sun, Surf and Sex, historical ‘dark’ deeds linger and animate the sites of dark tourism, implying that ‘there is something disturbing, troubling, suspicious, weird, morbid, or perverse about them’ (Bowman and Pezzullo 2010: 190). Given the longstanding association between crime and darkness (see Chap. 3), a suspicion of crime or wrongdoing lies in the background of labelling sites as dark tourism. Current scholarship on dark tourism, however, has yet to consider how the concept can be applied to scenes of climate change in what Deborah Bird Rose (2013: 211) has called the ‘Anthropocene noir.’ In the age of

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the Anthropocene, during which anthropogenic climate change is rapidly transforming the Earth’s ecosystems, [o]ur position [as humans] at this time is something akin to the dark tourism that takes people to sites of death, disaster, and suffering. […] The Anthropocene parallel is this: we are spectators in the unmaking of the world we have known; we are spectators in the mass deaths of other creatures and in the misery of numerous and diverse forms of life including humans; we may indeed become spectators of our own demise.

In short, the Anthropocene noir has made dark tourists of us all, as some places in the world are dying more quickly than others. These places become ‘places to die for,’ in the sense that they are places that we ‘must see’ before our own death (see Chap. 6 for how death connects to last chance tourism). They are also places that can themselves die (Urry 2004), in the sense that they can revolve around the death of the physical stuff that makes them unique destinations. With respect to the latter, the unmaking of such physical stuff can be tied to the making of a tourist attraction in the Anthropocene, especially since mass tourism is driving some of the planetary conditions that have ushered in the Anthropocene (Gren and Huijbens 2014, 2016; Steffen et  al. 2007). By taking into account the effects of tourism on a place, such as Iceberg Alley, we examine in the next section how iceberg consumption—an effect of the silent deaths of glaciers—has been central to the marketing of Newfoundland and Labrador as a tourist destination. Driven by the slow violence of anthropogenic climate change, a glacier’s death can be made into a spectacle in line with the thanatoptic tradition of dark tourism. The thanatoptic tradition revolves around the contemplation of death in public places (Seaton 1996). By contemplating death, spectators are invited to recognize their own relative insignificance in the universe. Tied to an appreciation of the fragility of life—primarily, the tourist’s own mortality—the contemporary thanatoptic experience harks back to nineteenth-century Romanticism, during which tourism was seen as ‘turning away from the physical and cultural landscapes of industrialising or industrialised societies’ (Seaton 1996: 238). While iceberg tourism draws from a Romantic thanatoptic

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tradition, it is also an example of dark tourism in the Anthropocene, although tour operators and marketers do not label it as such. Because it matters how sites are named and framed (MacCannell 1989), we are deliberately and provocatively labelling iceberg tourism as a form of dark tourism in order to trouble the consumption of icebergs as something far more suspicious than simply a taste for adventure or luxury. When selling icebergs, tourism promoters have obscured the environmental costs of producing and consuming their deaths.

 f Ice and Death: Conceptualizing the Iceberg O as Vibrant Matter By expanding our analytic gaze to encompass the deaths of icebergs (and glaciers) in the making of iceberg tourism, we are making two interrelated theoretical moves, both of which dispute the notion that humans hold a unique position among different forms of vibrant matter on Earth. The first move places the death of an ice-form on the same analytic footing as the death of a human. By treating the nonhuman in the same conceptual ways that we would treat the human, we are applying what scholars in Science and Technology Studies have called a generalized principle of symmetry (Callon 1984; Latour 1987, 1994). Whether discussing a death spectacle in the natural or social world, the same conceptual repertoire and vocabulary are used. Such a symmetrical analysis offers a means for breaking down and dissolving the great divide between humans and nonhumans (Latour 2005), and between nature and culture (Latour 1993). Rather than presuppose that nature and nonhumans are the unmarked categories in their respective binary pairings, we highlight the ways in which both are as performative and as capable of action as their cultured, human counterparts. Following Bruno Latour (2017: 68), we conceive of the idea of a nature/culture or nonhuman/human distinction as an effect, rather than an ontology, of a simple distribution of action. In this distribution of action and agency, human protagonists have been over-animated and nonhuman ones have been de-animated. In tourism studies, for example, human tourists—their motivations, desires, mobilities and actions—have been privileged under the assumption that the

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physical, ‘natural’ stuff that makes a place is less interesting or less mobile (for an exception, see Sheller and Urry 2004). By considering nonhumans as capable of action and animation, we move closer to our second theoretical position. This second move challenges the idea that nonhumans, such as glaciers and icebergs, cannot die because they are already ‘dead,’ inanimate matter. Countering this image of dead matter, Jane Bennett (2010) has lucidly argued that humans and nonhumans are made of the same vital stuff (see also Chap. 2). As such, humans are not the only ones made of vibrant matter. By beginning with such an ecological sensibility, Bennett proposes—in similar ways to Latour (2005)—that we methodologically flatten the world. In this case, such a flattening enables us to horizontally read human–nonhuman relationships as juxtapositions rather than through vertical hierarchies of being. As a result, nonhumans are not reduced to passive, inert objects awaiting animation by active human subjects. Rather, they are lively forces that can interact with us in complex ways. They are animate things that move in the world: they are moved by us as well as move us; they can also move within us. They have their own trajectories, tendencies and animations (Chan 2012), all of which can produce significant enough effects to alter the course of events. Ice’s vitality and liveliness, for instance, are demonstrated by its movement, often produced without an obvious external cause. Glaciers slowly and steadily move by both sliding and flowing (Demuth 2012), while icebergs roll, turn over, pop, squeal, hiss and growl. When ‘[t]he ice was all around,’ it—in the words of Samuel Coleridge’s (1903) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—‘crashed and growled, and roared and howled. Like noises in a swound.’ In addition to being in constant, noisy motion, ice is also continually transforming, taking on new shapes and surface textures as it reforms, decays or melts into water. As one of the most well-known instances of an iceberg’s life-altering trajectory and its forceful instability, we can consider its collision with the RMS Titanic in 1912.5 Writing the first iceberg biography, marine biologist Richard Brown (1983) traces the ‘Titanic’s Iceberg’ beyond the fatal minute of its crash with the passenger ship, returning to the ice-form its longer natural history. Beginning its life as ‘a rough contemporary of King Tutankhamun’ (Wilkins 2012), the iceberg was only one among the

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1038 icebergs that calved from a Greenlandic glacier in 1912 to float along Iceberg Alley (Bigg and Billings 2014). Foregrounded in Brown’s retelling, the iceberg is as important and as lively as the Titanic and its human passengers. Described in English poet Thomas Hardy’s The Convergence of the Twain (1912), written for the Titanic Disaster Fund, the ice is the ship’s ‘mate’ and ‘align they seem to be,’ for ‘No mortal eye could see/The intimate welding of their later history.’ Together as symmetrical mates, they form an assemblage that has effects that continue to resonate today. In response to the sinking of the Titanic, for example, the International Ice Patrol was established in 1914 to prevent collisions between ships and icebergs across shipping lanes in the North Atlantic Ocean. Although the icebergs of Iceberg Alley have been surveilled by the Ice Patrol and US Coast Guard since the early twentieth century, particularly during the iceberg hazard months of April and May (Bigg and Billings 2014), they are now additionally monitored by tourism promoters for iceberg sightings during these same months as peak viewing season. A combination of visual iceberg sightings on the ground and virtual sightings online has helped to establish Iceberg Alley as a major tourism attraction for Newfoundland and Labrador. The remainder of this chapter traces the animations of the iceberg as it becomes a focal point for the coalescence of a particular scene of dark tourism.

 aking a Criminal Anthroposcene: Iceberg M Alley and the Production of a Tourist Spectacle Along the Canadian shorelines of Iceberg Alley, an emerging criminal anthroposcene comes together through the collision—sometimes literal and sometimes figurative—of a diverse cast of human and nonhuman actors, including texts (government tourism policies and tourism marketing), people (iceberg tourists and iceberg cowboys) and moving nonhumans (icebergs), among others. Our cast of characters converges in time and place along the coastline of Newfoundland and Labrador, a physical location onto which particular tastes and affinities have been grafted. Not only do we have a place of assembly that is tied to tourism as a leisure practice (Straw 2001, 2004), we also have a sweeping together of ‘discrete

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people, places, events and artefacts…into what comes to be called a scene’ (Woo et al. 2015: 292). Thus, we engage in this section with scene thinking by designating iceberg tourism as a cultural–natural scene arising from the commodification of icebergs in the age of the Anthropocene. While Newfoundland and Labrador have deemed icebergs to be a ‘natural resource’ that could be ‘extracted’ in ways that stimulate an otherwise stagnating local, fishing-based economy, icebergs are also ‘unnatural’ resources because they are—in their increasing frequency—tangential products of global warming (Ruiz 2015). Thus, in a province seeking economic diversification, the local iceberg economy takes advantage, at least in the short term, of the intensifying effects of climate change, by turning icebergs into a tourist spectacle that denies its darkness. In recent years, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador has made tourism an important revenue-generating component of its vision, aiming to reach $1.6 billion in tourism spending by the year 2020 (Newfoundland and Labrador 2016a: 12). To that end, the province has invested considerable resources in marketing iceberg viewing as part of its unique brand of tourism, boasting that the hunt for icebergs can be part of a story for every step of the province’s 29,000 km of coastline. By stopping in the small town of Twillingate, billed as the ‘Iceberg Capital of the World,’ tourists can enjoy the magnificent view of Iceberg Alley, where its sculptural ice-forms are ‘pieces [that] just won’t fit inside the Guggenheim’ (Newfoundland and Labrador n.d.). Welcoming tourists to Iceberg Alley, television advertisements for Newfoundland and Labrador feature the region’s original oceanic highway; by gazing upon 10,000-year-­old glacial giants, visitors can feel ‘[a]ll of a sudden…nine again’ (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2012). On Instagram, Twitter and Flickr, Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism pairs iceberg photography with a promise: the ‘majestic, ancient towers of blue ice will inspire your inner child’ (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2012). Despite promising visitors a nostalgic return to experiences of childlike wonder, Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism targets an older audience of sophisticated tourists. Because it takes curiosity, ‘deliberate planning and determined effort’ to visit Newfoundland and Labrador (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019a), only ‘sophisticated travellers looking for a natural and exotic experience “off the beaten path”’ are compelled to tour the region (Newfoundland

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and Labrador Tourism 2019b). ‘Looking for an antidote to the stress and plastic composition of urban life and modern times,’ these visitors form a ‘broad leisure market seeking sightseeing and soft-­adventure experiences’ in an ‘unspoiled natural environment’ (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019b). By portraying the area as pristine wilderness, the provincial tourism board activates cultural notions of nature as purity. Represented as an oasis from modern industrialization, Nature appears in a purity narrative as a spiritual remedy to urban–industrial malaise, especially for older travellers. Demographically, Newfoundland and Labrador’s tourists tend to be older, well-educated and affluent couples in the empty nest stage of the family life cycle (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019b).6 They treat conventional tourist destinations with a ‘been there, done that’ attitude (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019b). Repeatedly emphasizing the tourists’ desires to go beyond the ‘packaged, “plastic” tourism experience of so many other destinations’ (Hospitality Newfoundland and Labrador n.d.), Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism appeals to singles and couples looking to distinguish themselves through their travels. As such, the province’s ‘dramatically rugged landscape’ is positioned as an unusual place ‘where few have gone before’ (Hospitality Newfoundland and Labrador n.d.; Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019a), making it an exclusive destination that can confer upon experienced travellers a mark of sophistication. Since iceberg viewing is now a motivating factor for more tourists to visit Newfoundland and Labrador each year, the province has developed a sophisticated Iceberg Finder website to help users locate and track icebergs during peak viewing season. Launched in May 2006 and updated as a web-based app in 2018, Iceberg Finder (http://icebergfinder.com) has helped boost online traffic to Newfoundland and Labrador tourism websites by 60% (Dunne 2019). In 2019, the award-winning app was used to track more than 500 icebergs for an audience of roughly 500,000 users (Dunne 2019). At the end of the 2019 season, Iceberg Finder reported that over 1500 berg photographs had been uploaded to the website’s interactive map to document the 985 icebergs that had drifted past Newfoundland and Labrador’s shorelines. Made visible through a network of surveillance, the icebergs on Iceberg Finder are sourced in three different ways. Notably, these three sources of tracking, monitoring and

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documenting icebergs are not unlike the kinds of direct, volunteered and automated sources of Big Data (Kitchin 2014; see also Lyon 2014), which have made human surveillance and dataveillance possible on a larger scale. First, icebergs are tracked by tourism operators and staff, dubbed ‘Ambassadors’ by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism. The Ambassadors rely on information from human contacts spread out across the province in order to find and plot the latest icebergs on the Iceberg Finder’s map from the shoreline. Secondly, the app relies on satellite imagery generated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency to identify and provide regular updates on icebergs as they travel across the waters of Iceberg Alley. Finally, Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism encourages visitors and local residents to upload photographs of current iceberg sightings, which are then plotted onto a map in aerial view, where they remain active for one week. The photographs are later added to a digital archive that visually plots each of these past sightings on the Iceberg Finder during the offseason in order to preserve the memory of icebergs that have since disappeared. To see how Iceberg Finder brings together these three sources of data, we can examine Fig.  5.1. Satellite data provide the aerial-view location of the

Fig. 5.1  Iceberg sighting at Grates Cove on June 7, 2019, as indicated by Iceberg Finder. Please note that this is a photo-edited image that, as a single visualization, makes visible all the roll-over, hidden images that were uploaded to the website’s interactive map

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iceberg in the ocean (as an iceberg graphic), while Ambassadors, tour operators and residents provide photographs of an iceberg sighting from the shoreline or from a tour boat. To further help humans visualize an iceberg, an infographic not only names the iceberg (BEO), but also compares the size of the berg to a six-foot-tall human. Here, the iceberg’s towering size comes to matter once it is rendered on a human scale, and in comparison to human size. Of interest to us is how Iceberg Finder, as a surveillance technology, sets the stage for iceberg viewing, by constructing the iceberg as a mediated object of the tourist gaze. It facilitates the transformation of the iceberg into a tourist spectacle in three ways. One, Iceberg Finder’s icebergs can be featured by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism on its social media channels. Through social media platforms, such as Instagram, users and prospective tourists are informed in daily posts about where to see the latest iceberg, as well as how to connect with local tourism operators to get a closer view of spectacular bergs. In reaching out to foreign tourists, tourism professionals construct the iceberg as an object par excellence of the tourist gaze (Urry 1990), translating the ice-form into a virtual collection of signs (e.g., Instagram posts, maps and photographs) that can be endlessly reproduced through social media posts and reposts. The anticipation of seeing an iceberg is also formed and sustained by (social) media, particularly when icebergs are designated as competing contenders in a ‘battle of the bergs.’ For instance, Iceberg BEO becomes repackaged as ‘The Frostinator’ on Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism’s Instagram page, where it is deemed the winner, by user votes, in Round One of the 2019 ‘Battle of the Bergs.’7 The Battle of the Bergs is a means for amplifying user attention to noteworthy bergs and serves to promote iceberg viewing as a desirable tourist activity. However, the battle also pits iceberg against iceberg for human votes, so that the contenders—as in ancient gladiatorial combats—might ‘battle to the death’ for the entertainment of spectators. The ‘thumbs up’ sign on social media (otherwise calculated as ‘likes’) becomes the contemporary analogue to pollice verso (i.e., the thumb signal used by Ancient Roman crowds to pass judgment on gladiators). Implicitly tied to violent (death) spectacles, the notion of battle in this instance places the spotlight on one waged between nonhumans, obscuring from view the ongoing war that humans have waged on nature in the Anthropocene.

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Two, Iceberg Finder transforms icebergs into objects of real-time surveillance. Despite being assembled with the building blocks of post-9/11 surveillance technologies, the app purports to be less interested in placing more and more tourists under the state’s digitally mediated panoptic gaze (Urry and Larsen 2011). Rather, its surveillance of icebergs works to extend the tourist gaze to mobile nonhumans. Defined by John Urry (1990, 1992, 2002), the tourist gaze is situated in relationships that are based on movement—specifically for him, the bodily movement of people to and from destinations. In contrast to the anthropocentric focus of the conventional tourist gaze, Iceberg Finder simultaneously tracks, monitors and documents the movement of icebergs as they slowly pass through Iceberg Alley on their long, and ultimately fatal trip through southern waters. On its map, it reminds users that icebergs come and go, so that the updated map only shows the latest confirmed iceberg locations. Yet by capturing the location of moving icebergs, the site is an important tool for berg-hunting: it synchronizes the movement of people with the movement of icebergs. On the ground, for example, mobile tourists can hunt mobile icebergs during the annual Iceberg Chase Tour, a guided van tour aimed at ‘finding the best possible photography opportunities for iceberg chasers’ (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019c). On the web, representations of icebergs become virtually mobile as they circulate across networks of online communication. The digital images of icebergs become subjected to the gaze of virtual tourists who are themselves situated at a physical distance from the bergs. As a result, the virtual and imaginative travels of both human tourist and iceberg are made possible through Iceberg Finder. Lastly, the tourist gaze, enabled by Iceberg Finder, privileges a distanced mode of spectatorship, much like the detached viewing of the penal spectator. For Michelle Brown (2009: 21), the penal spectator, by definition, voyeuristically ‘looks in on punishment yet is also its author,’ observing other people’s pain as an outsider or bystander rather than as an engaged participant. Iceberg tourists, too, are often outsiders (i.e., not locals) who take pleasure in looking at and consuming icebergs because the ice-forms are alien and unfamiliar to their everyday experience. As vibrant as icebergs are, in their movement and physical transformation, they can never look back at us or return the tourist’s gaze. They can never destabilize the

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hierarchy of the gaze, which operates by differentiating human tourists from nonhuman objects. Because it is not safe for humans to get too physically close to the iceberg—a hard lesson that can be traced back to the sinking of the Titanic among other iceberg disasters—icebergs are to be seen by humans from a distance and at a distance. As a result, they are purely gazed upon objects. Because the detached, disinterested gaze has been praised as necessary for aesthetic (Kant 1781/1900), as well as objective and impartial judgments (Hibbitts 1995), it generates pure appreciation. Such a ‘pure gaze’ or ‘pure aesthetic,’ according to Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 4–5), implies ‘an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world.’ By separating humans from nature, and as importantly a life of ease from that of necessity (Bourdieu 1984), the tourist gaze confers upon the iceberg consumer a mark of sophisticated distinction. But the purity of their gaze conceals the tourists’ complicity in hastening the demise of iceforms. It obscures the hidden, ecological costs that make iceberg tourists both consumers and producers of increasingly more icebergs.

 easuring the Hidden Ecological Costs M of Iceberg Tourism While dark tourist attractions are manifestly about human suffering and death, iceberg tourism has flourished in the wake of global warming, even though the causal chain exacerbating the death of ice-forms has been concealed in Newfoundland and Labrador’s tourism campaigns. Indeed, the environmental harms associated with iceberg tourism are conspicuously absent from official promotional narratives of berg watching. For one, tourism promoters have obscured the fact that it is because of anthropogenic climate change that the province of Newfoundland and Labrador has economically benefited from a robust iceberg tourism industry. Secondly, the province enables a significant increase in carbon emissions in order to sustain and encourage growth in iceberg tourism. To double tourism spending by 2020, the expected increase in tourists comes at a carbon cost. To illustrate some of these carbon costs, Table 5.1 estimates the average tonnage of carbon dioxide emissions (CO2e) generated by air travel to and from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Drawing on visitor data, collected

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Table 5.1  Estimated carbon footprint for air travel to and from St. John’s, Newfoundland Carbon footprint calculators

Proxy airports as points of departure

Atmosfair. dea Offsettersb myclimatec

Average tonnage of carbon dioxide emissions (t/CO2e) per traveller

Halifax (YHZ) 0.44

0.33

0.42

0.40

Montreal (YUL)

0.93

0.58

0.66

0.72

Toronto (YYZ)

1.14

0.77

0.85

0.92

Edmonton (YEG)

2.22

1.40

1.6

1.74

New York (JFK)

1.03

0.68

0.74

0.82

London (LHR) 1.45

1.23

1.4

1.36

Frankfurt (FRA)

1.44

1.6

1.79

2.34

Cumulative total for air vacationers to Newfoundland and Labrador Cumulative total for air vacationers who engaged in iceberg viewing (44% of air vacationers engaged in iceberg watching in 2016)

Cumulative impact calculation for air vacationers (t/CO2e) 0.40 × 10,866 travellers = 4346.40 0.72 × 4346 travellers = 3129.12 0.92 × 47,809 travellers = 43,984.28 1.74 × 24,991 travellers = 43,484.34 0.82 × 11,952 travellers = 9800.64 1.36 × 4346 travellers = 5910.56 1.79 × 4346 travellers = 7,779.34 118,434.68 t/ CO2e 118,434.68 × 44% = 52,111.26 t/ CO2e

Atmosfair is a German non-profit climate protection organization with a broad mandate to curb CO2 emissions by supporting carbon offsetting projects. It offers a carbon-offsetting tool that enables users to calculate and offset CO2 emissions generated by air travel: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/offset/flight/ (accessed 10 January 2020)

a

(continued)

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Table 5.1 (continued) Offsetters is a Canadian organization that aims to help a range of partners across North America, including Canada’s Olympic team, reduce and offset their environmental impacts. It has developed a flight calculator that allows users to determine the total emissions generated by a flight: https://www.offsetters.ca/ education/calculators/flight-emissions-calculator (accessed 10 January 2020) c myclimate is a Swiss non-profit organization that has developed a range of climate projection programmes and services designed to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, including a carbon footprint calculator: https://co2. myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=1310358 (accessed 10 January 2020) b

by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism, we identify proxy airports representing seven main points of origin for non-resident vacation flights (Newfoundland and Labrador 2016b). The four airports we use as proxy points of departure for domestic air travel are Halifax, Montreal, Edmonton and Toronto. We also calculate the carbon footprint for international flights originating in three main hub airports: New York (JFK), since vacation flights from the US accounted for 13% of non-resident air travel; as well as London (LHR) and Frankfurt (FRA) to account for non-resident vacation travel from European countries (6%). Based on data from the province’s most recently published Visitor Exit Survey (Newfoundland and Labrador 2016b: 5), a total of 108,656 non-resident vacation visitors travelled by air to St. John’s in 2016: 10,866 travelled from the Maritime provinces of Canada (Halifax as proxy), 4346 from Quebec (Montreal as proxy), 47,809 from Ontario (Toronto as proxy), 249,991 from other Canadian provinces and territories (Edmonton as proxy), 11,952 from the US (New York as proxy) and 8693 from other countries (London and Frankfurt as European proxies, with an assumed 4346 travellers from each country). We measure the cumulative impact of these air vacationers by estimating the combined output of their carbon emissions for each of the seven proxy locations. The cumulative impact estimate is calculated as the average of three different carbon footprint calculations, each provided by a different carbon footprint calculator. Each carbon footprint calculator uses a slightly different method to determine the size of carbon emissions, which is why we average their calculations before providing our own cumulative carbon estimates.

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It should be noted that these cumulative estimates do not take into account additional carbon emissions that can be generated by visitor accommodations, or transportation to and from iceberg viewing sites. Because the 2016 Visitor Exit Survey concluded that 44% of air vacationers engaged in iceberg viewing, we could calculate a cumulative estimate of carbon emissions that iceberg watchers produced from air travel alone. As a group, air vacationers who engaged in iceberg viewing generated 52,111.26 tons of CO2e, which is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity use of 8004 North American homes.8 Another way to measure the climate impact of air travel would be to consider the amount of Arctic ice cover that is melted by 52,111.26 tons of CO2e. Notz and Stroeve (2016) have observed that three square metres of Arctic sea ice disappear for each ton of CO2 that is emitted on Earth. Consequently, air travel to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2016 alone was responsible for melting an estimated 156,333.78 square metres of ice, which is roughly the size of 103 hockey rinks.9 If we factor in the carbon emissions related to iceberg tourism in the region, including car, ferry and special boat travel (e.g., cruises and tour boats), the cumulative amount would be much higher. Hence, the province can arguably be seen as issuing death sentences, inadvertently or not, to glaciers like the Greenland ice sheet, by encouraging high carbon emissions without any plan to offset these emissions. These carbon emissions contribute to calving events thousands of kilometres away (Bigg et  al. 2014). These calving events, in turn, make possible the hunting and consumption of icebergs as a ‘unique’ Newfoundland and Labrador experience. Ultimately, then, the carbon footprint created by iceberg tourism contributes to a negative feedback loop that is hastening the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This accelerated melting will bring more bergy bits to Iceberg Alley, acting as a boon for the local tourism industry; the growth of this industry, in turn, will encourage the generation of a larger carbon footprint, keeping the Arctic locked in a warming trajectory that will continue to diminish its ice cover.

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Consuming Icebergs While tourists track and visually consume icebergs through photography and sightseeing tours, they might not always encounter icebergs during their visit. Because icebergs both move and melt, they can elude even visitors who intend to see them on berg-viewing boat tours. Yet in the words of one tourist who ‘didn’t actually see icebergs,’ both he and his family could ‘still have icebergs’ nonetheless; they ‘had iceberg beer on the boat which were [sic] delicious’ (McGregor 2018). As this tourist’s experience highlights, visual consumption is not the only way icebergs are routinely consumed in Newfoundland and Labrador. By enjoying the various beverages made from harvested icebergs, tourists interact with the icy nonhumans through their stomachs. Consequently, we shift in this section from considering the ocularcentrism of the tourist gaze (e.g., Urry 1992; Urry and Larsen 2011) to the bodily process of consumption; in so doing, we examine icebergs as more than just moving objects that physically move us to gaze upon them as spectacles. Here, they also move within us because of an act of consumption. In this case, consumption is literal, doubling as acts of ingestion and digestion. As a result, consumption is also constructed through the notion of taste. Taste, in this case, slips between being a particular mode of sensory engagement, and a distinctive aesthetic and lifestyle preference. Since Iceberg Vodka began harvesting iceberg water off the Newfoundland coast in 1995, commercial harvesting of iceberg water has rapidly expanded in the region (Birkhold 2019; Curtis 2002). Today, many companies compete to harvest and bottle iceberg water for a stake in the burgeoning market for high-end bottled water products. This section examines how icebergs, as vibrant, edible matter, are constructed by luxury water brands to attract those with a taste for sophistication. In examining the commodification of icebergs as edible matter, we continue to reveal the hidden ecological costs associated with this extractive industry.

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 asting Luxury: Harvesting Icebergs and Making T Iceberg Water Working far from tour boat routes as well as tourist-heavy coastal villages, iceberg harvesters operate in areas out of the sightlines of tourists, so that they do not threaten the unspoiled beauty of the icebergs. According to local tour operators, ‘nobody [should] see [the harvester] tearing the iceberg apart’ (Connors 2013) because it is a violent extraction process, which has been said to resemble open-pit mining (Curtis 2002). During the harvesting process, the iceberg’s body is split and torn apart before being chomped and crushed. It is then melted and boiled to produce iceberg water for local vodka makers, breweries, wineries and bottled water companies. In order to produce iceberg water for commercial use, iceberg beverage companies need to be granted a water use license by the province. Their license, however, explicitly states that [t]he time of harvesting activities shall not interfere with tour boat operations or other recreational activities. Also, harvesting activities or collection of bergy bits shall not be carried out within visible distance from known locations frequented by tourists. (Newfoundland and Labrador 2016c)

Although their activities are legally regulated through licensing, iceberg harvesters see themselves as ‘iceberg cowboys,’ as they transition from being fishermen to working at the dangerous frontier of iceberg capture. Using Iceberg Finder (Connors 2013; Scarrow 2014), they track bergy bits and growlers (i.e., pieces of icebergs, less than three feet above the sea surface and occupying an area of roughly 215 square feet, that grunt and groan in the water). To turn an iceberg into the catch of the day, harvesters need to avoid the rolls that signal an iceberg tantrum (Jacobs 2012; Wallace 2006). When an iceberg shifts its unbalanced weight, its roll can entail a violent shearing or splitting of the berg itself, which in turn can endanger the lives of iceberg harvesters (Eifling 2017). Because of the danger and unpredictability associated with the task of harvesting icebergs, iceberg water is marketed as exclusive. The limited supply of iceberg water is also due to the ‘extended winters and the harsh conditions of the North Atlantic’ (Fine Waters n.d.).10 In the promotion

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of iceberg water, nature appears as a capricious force that can threaten the success of a harvest. It can create climate and weather conditions that make icebergs inaccessible to humans. Yet nature is also domesticated in the water production process, featured in promotional materials as a tool that humans can innovatively use to more effectively filter iceberg water. Iceberg water promoters declare nature to be ‘the world’s best and oldest [water] filter’ (Berg n.d.), and one of the reasons why the resulting water is the purest on the planet (Eifling 2017). Taken from deep inside an iceberg, this water is described as ‘naturally purer than regular water’ because it has been ‘protected for centuries from impurities in the air and sea’ (Connors 2013). It is ‘the clearest and cleanest water that [humans] have available on the planet’ (AFP 2019). Thus, the marketing of iceberg water reveals how the iceberg becomes edible matter, animated by a desire for purity and animating a criminal anthroposcene that is significantly shaped by the aspirations of a particular socioeconomic class. For example, Berg (bergwater.ca) is a luxury brand of bottled iceberg water. Created by a Newfoundland and Labrador manufacturing company in 2005, Berg remakes iceberg water into an aspirational consumer product for sophisticated taste tourists—that is, those with adventurous, globe-trotting palates even if they do not themselves physically travel away from home. Situating icebergs as ‘an intrinsic part of Newfoundland’s way of life and culture’ (Berg Water 2019a), as common to Newfoundlanders as snowstorms, the company ‘appreciate[s] the captivation that these icebergs can have on those that are not lucky enough to have them on [sic] their backyard and […] feel[s] the responsibility to bring a piece of them to the rest of the world’ (Berg Water 2019a). To that end, Berg introduces icebergs to a global market of consumers as ‘some of the best water produced in Canada’ (Berg Water 2019a). Designed for the high-end market, and listed by Forbes Traveler as one of the world’s most expensive bottled waters (Alvinology 2008),11 Berg Water only travels in exclusive settings, differentiating itself as a luxury item in the increasingly competitive marketplace of bottled waters. Indeed, bottled waters are part of the fastest-growing drink market in the world, where the value of this market has grown from $157 billion in 2013 to an estimated $280 billion by 2020 (Elmhirst 2016). With more than 2900 different brands of bottled waters sold globally in the

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twenty-­first century (Connell 2006), this drink market is also a highly segmented one, in which brands target specific niche markets that are associated with higher or lower socioeconomic statuses. At first glance, this market fragmentation might appear perplexing, particularly in light of Western culture’s ‘stubborn category in modern thought of a single, clean, and nourishing version of drinking water’ (Robertson 2016: 669). As a consumable good, water is considered homogeneous and undifferentiated in its colourlessness, odourlessness and tastelessness, summed up by modern science as H2O (Linton 2010). Further, consumers in blind taste tests fail to distinguish between the tastes of different waters (Wilk 2006), even though they may pay more for a bottled water that tastes no different to them than its cheaper tap water alternative. However, drinking water is far from homogeneous in the world of advertising, where it has been increasingly valued for its exchange value rather than use value (White 2003). In nearly all cases, the marketing of bottled water plays into shared and popular fantasies about the purity of unspoiled environments (Brisman and South 2014), so that taste is activated as a matter of imagination rather than as a sole matter for the palate (Connell 2006). By appealing to consumers’ imagination of the pristine Arctic, Berg constructs itself on the basis of ‘good’ taste. However, Berg’s ‘unmistakable taste’ (Berg n.d.) conflates the taste of iceberg water with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptualization of taste. For Bourdieu (1984: 6), taste is as much a sociocultural concept as it is a gustatory sensation, so that ‘[t]aste classifies and it classifies the classifier.’ In the process of cultural consumption, taste ultimately serves as a mechanism for communicating class distinction, so that water—like a work of art—‘has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded’ (Bourdieu 1984: 2).12 While Bourdieu grounds the human judgment of taste in an opposition between nature and culture, so that social classes progress from nature to culture as they evolve, ‘good taste’ in bottled water consumption is measured less by distance from nature, and more by a desire to acquire experiences of non-anthropogenic nature (Biro 2019). By moving closer to nature, as we will soon see in Berg’s mobilization of the image of purity, consumers sip what Bourdieu has called the taste of luxury. As a socially constructed taste preference, the taste of luxury is placed in a binary opposition with

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the taste of necessity. Associated with the lower socioeconomic classes, the taste of necessity describes lifestyle preferences that are necessary for survival. Because water is necessary to the survival of living beings in general, it exemplifies how drinks can fundamentally fulfil such a taste of necessity, particularly with the introduction of drinkable tap water and full-scale water chlorination of public water supplies in advanced countries since the twentieth century. Yet despite being readily available as a free public good in advanced countries, water has also become a privatized and branded commodity that enables particular classes to gain distinction through their lifestyle and taste preferences. Like other luxury waters, Berg water, then, is enmeshed in a process through which classes construct themselves by their consumption choices, transforming the taste of luxury into a flavour for the distinguished palate.

Cleaning Palate and Conscience with Pure Water To taste luxury bottled water, the palate must be kept clean in order to fully experience its subtle flavours (Ricchio 2013), and iceberg water’s flavours are more subtle than those of other waters. While purity is cited as a main selling point of many bottled water brands (Connell 2006; Opel 1999), Berg’s ‘clean, light and pure’ taste is sold as an effect of the water’s journey, which began ‘over 15,000 years ago in the ancient glaciers of western Greenland’ (Berg Water 2019b). Billed as a vintage water (Vintage: 15,000), iceberg water is unique because ‘it comes from snow that fell […] millennia before the Industrial Age filled the atmosphere with impurities’ (Zajac 2010). It has ‘been frozen for, minimum, 10,000 years… [before] [a]nything that is in the air currently that us buffoons as humans have made’ (Dan Meades, St John’s resident, quoted in Eifling 2017). By placing the origins of the water before the Anthropocene’s emergence, and before the contaminating spread of industrial pollutants, Berg returns its tasters to a time when nature’s purity was unspoiled by human presence or by human action. Indeed, ‘[t]he last mammal to drink it did so about 10,000 years ago’ (the world’s first water sommelier, Martin Riese, quoted in Ricchio 2013). Through their mouths and stomachs, human tasters can now access a natural world that no longer exists;

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they are promised a taste of pre-industrial purity. By choosing to consume iceberg water, then, they can avoid tasting the industrial effects of the Anthropocene on the natural world. In addition to highlighting the water’s origins in a pre-modern, pre-capitalist past, Berg’s marketing relies on the water’s geographical distance from urban, industrial centres, positioning the dying, ancient glaciers of western Greenland as isolated and ‘totally inaccessible to man’ (Berg Water 2019b). Thus, Berg’s purity discourse is animated by an underlying discourse of risk, one that is concerned about the safety and quality of ‘common’ water (see also Race 2012). Not only is tap water conceived as potentially contaminated, so, too, are mass-produced bottled waters from springs, artesian wells, or other water sources that have been touched by human action or have themselves touched the human-contaminated ground.13 In contrast, iceberg water never comes into contact with the land, and is also ‘virtually untouched by man,’ according to the world’s foremost, albeit self-­declared, water sommelier (Riese n.d.). As a result, its cleanliness is aligned with the notion of ‘virginality.’ Branded as ‘truly virginal’ (Berg Water 2019b), iceberg water is engendered as virtuously feminine for consumers in pursuit of personal, bodily purity.14 In contrast to the masculine ruggedness and harshness of the iceberg harvesting process (i.e., ‘the man’ at the heart of accessing, touching and conquering nature in Berg’s marketing material), the resulting iceberg water is associated with softness. Specifically, it is described by Michael Mascha, former food anthropologist and now author of finewaters.com, as ‘very neutral, very soft … perfect for very subtle foods like sushi and sashimi’ (Zajac 2010). Unlike ground water, iceberg water’s softness is a product of the water’s superior virginality. Virginality is determined by the water’s level of nitrate, which comes from sources such as human and animal waste (Mascha 2013). Nitrate, as one of the total dissolved solids (TDS) found in water, is perceived as a ground contaminant that can be harmful to humans in high concentrations.15 By mobilizing fears about toxicity in ways that remind us of our old fears about filth (Biss 2014), iceberg water is promoted as a matter of bodily hygiene. Thus, when Berg boasts that its water has a TDS of less than 10 ppm (Berg Water 2019c), it suggests that its water is doubly clean: it is both

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free from any detectable traces of waste and has a distinctly clean taste. By eliminating the taste of contaminants as well as any traces of minerals, iceberg water is ‘so tasteless that it actually creates a taste. The tastelessness is its own taste’ (Ron Stamp, founder of Glace Rare Iceberg Water, quoted in Zajac 2010). Because ‘[y]ou don’t taste anything’ (Tak Ishiwata, a chef who runs a Newfoundland-Japanese fusion restaurant, quoted in Jacobs 2012), iceberg water ‘will give you a very clean, very pure taste of whatever it is paired with’ (Elizabeth Gleason of Auk Island Winery, quoted in AFP 2019). Compared to ‘drinking air’ (Zajac 2010), iceberg water reasserts a top-bottom hierarchy, by being the airy, pure alternative that never touches the dirty, toxic ground. Further, its low nitrate level contributes to a PH that ‘gives iceberg water a light, sweet and soft perception’ (Berg n.d.). With such a taste, Berg recalls Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century definition of perfection as sweetness and light, the very characteristics that could morally and socially compel the human race to move towards the pinnacle of civilization. For Arnold (1875/2006: 5), the pursuit of total perfection came to characterize culture in terms of ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world.’ As critics have since redefined Arnold’s conception of culture as high culture (e.g., Storey 2006; Peterson 1997), it is worth noting how expensive taste and high culture have combined in the marketing of iceberg water as ‘the best’ that has been made for drinking, and as pure perfection for the ‘soft palette [sic]’ (Black 2010). By bathing the world of the human taster in the colours and flavours of a ‘soft palette,’ the irony of producing and consuming Berg lies, once again, in what is concealed by these practices rather than in what they reveal. Namely, the harvesting and packaging of iceberg water creates a considerable amount of carbon emissions and waste by-products. While it cost $1 a litre to get a 20,000-litre tanker of iceberg water to a St John’s distillery in 2005 (Delap 2005), the high financial cost of iceberg harvesting does not even consider the carbon and energy footprints required to haul a large, stable iceberg closer to the shoreline. Hauling such an iceberg would require at least 40–50 metric tons of fuel per day per vessel (Smedley 2018). Further, by packaging Berg in PET bottles (Berg Water 2019b), this ‘all natural’ water comes with a plastic footprint, particularly

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at a time when plastic bottles have been contributing to a global environmental crisis that can rival climate change (Hawkins et al. 2015; Laville and Taylor 2017). Paradoxically, the plastic packaging of Berg has been integrated into a tourism experience in Newfoundland and Labrador that was meant to move away from ‘packaged, “plastic” tourism’ (Hospitality Newfoundland and Labrador n.d.). Unsurprisingly, the environmental costs tied to plastic bottle disposal do not appear in the marketing of Berg water. Nor are there accounts that clarify just how much energy—primarily in the form of fossil fuels—is expended to transport these bottled water products to the exclusive settings in which they are primarily consumed. None of these environmental costs are acknowledged in the purity narratives written by iceberg water promoters. On the contrary, in order to cleanse the consumer’s conscience, some purveyors of berg water products have insisted that ‘collecting icebergs protects the environment, because the icy masses can scrape the seafloor, harming marine environments’ (Fine Water Society, quoted in Birkhold 2019). Here, we see (again) the pitting of (icy) nonhumans against (marine) nonhumans, in order to leave the effects of human activity out of the picture. Other companies argue that, by harvesting icebergs instead of leaving them in the ocean, the industry is in fact ‘helping combat global sea-level rise’ (Birkhold 2019). Taking this cleansing logic even further, Svalbarði reassures consumers that their line of iceberg water, retailing at US$88 per bottle, is not only ‘Carbon Neutral certified, but goes beyond to carbon negative. Meaning every bottle sold saves 100kg of the North Pole ice cap from melting’; thus, prospective consumers are invited to ‘[h]elp us [Svalbarði] save the Arctic by enjoying a taste of the Arctic’ (Svalbardi n.d.). To cleanse both palate and conscience, these companies sell iceberg water by greenwashing the environmental costs associated with the commodification of iceberg deaths (Wilk 2006). They associate the natural purity of iceberg water with the moral purity of potential and actual consumers, suggesting that their consumption helps save rather than harm the Earth.

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Conclusion I peered through my binoculars and saw it, a white apostrophe punctuating the hazy line between sky and sea. It looked uncommonly small—not only physically but metaphorically as well. What was once a terror of the sea, inciting awe in landscape painters of the nineteenth century, balefully stalking shipping lanes in the twentieth, now seemed captive and defeated— destined to end up in dreamy snapshots or decanted into plastic half-liter bottles. (Curtis 2002)

Icebergs populate Iceberg Alley, whether as ‘terrors of the sea,’ or as increasingly fragmented, and commodified products of global warming. By investigating iceberg tourism as an emerging criminal anthroposcene, this chapter revealed how iceberg ‘goods’ are sold and consumed today in ways that conceal the environmental costs tied to their cultural commodification. By conceiving of icebergs as vibrant, active matter, we considered how their deaths have been turned into both a tourist spectacle and a taste of luxury. Deploying a symmetrical analysis, we aimed to make strange the death spectacles of icebergs, by placing them on par with the human death spectacles that have been labelled dark tourism. Through their focus on the commodification of human death spectacles, scholars of dark tourism have demonstrated how the practice’s constructed consumerism sells the consumption of past acts of human violence as occasions for education. Grounded by a teleological reading of history, sites of dark tourism are framed as sites for active learning about past misdeeds, so that a more ‘enlightened’ present and future can be crafted by breaking away from the ‘dark’ deeds of an earlier time. But what if dark deeds are not simply relegated to history? What if present deeds are dark because they are hidden in the shadows of a search for natural purity? What if dark tourism in the Anthropocene stages future sites of ecological ruin and ecocide in the present, making them seem pleasurable even as they serve as terrifying signs of the world’s unmaking? These are the questions we raise by exploring iceberg consumption, a booming industry that hides the slow and perpetual terror of climate change in the pure gaze of iceberg tourists and the pure taste of iceberg water. Human-induced climate change does not exist in Newfoundland

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and Labrador Tourism’s promotional narratives, even though it is a root cause for the heightened presence of icebergs drifting through Iceberg Alley. The province’s tourism practices do not require tourists to reflect upon the carbon traces they impress upon the ice, billing their icy landscapes as purely and naturally ‘creative’ (Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism 2019d). While conventional dark tourists must at least reckon with their role as consumers of human suffering and death, those that promote and consume iceberg products do not need to acknowledge their own complicity in the suffering and deaths of ice-forms. Because iceberg consumption has been informed by an ethos that natural purity can be bought—that consumers can return to a time before industrial pollution, and the coming of the Anthropocene—we conclude this chapter by considering what it might mean to be ‘against purity.’ With our symmetrical analysis, we were moving towards a position that refused to reconstruct or reproduce a hierarchy of being that privileged human superiority. We aimed to highlight the effectivity and vibrancy of nonhuman matter, and in doing so, dismissed claims and desires for material purity. As an orientation against material purity, our position enabled us to consider scenes as the coming together of heterogeneous actors, and digestion as the mixing of human and nonhuman. To be against purity is to recognize the intermingling and entangling of matter and systems—in this case, the ways in which economic and environmental systems are inextricably intertwined in Newfoundland and Labrador. There is no environmental system that can exist today as a distinctly pure, homogeneous realm separate from social, cultural and economic systems. In addition to being against material purity, our analysis reveals the pitfalls associated with claiming moral purity in the Anthropocene. While the binary format of the juridical system might separate legal guilt from legal innocence into two dichotomous categories, it is not possible to avoid moral complicity and compromise when living and working in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene has made dark tourists of us all, as we stand as both voyeurs and participants in the world’s unmaking. We consume the ‘natural’ ruins of the world, even as our actions escalate the frequency and pace at which these ruins are produced. In this Anthropocene noir, no one is completely innocent, for there is no way to truly do no harm to vibrant things when living in our

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world. Rather than persist in constructing ourselves as morally pure beings, Alexis Shotwell (2016: 8) suggests that ‘if we want a world with less suffering and more flourishing, it would be useful to perceive complexity and complicity as the constitutive situation in our lives, rather than as things we should avoid.’ Like Rose (2013), she argues that we should assume that everyone is implicated in situations that we, in some way, repudiate, tangled as we are in a web of guilt and responsibility for which we cannot escape unscathed. In our consumption practices, we are all suspicious, for ‘[w]e are compromised and we have made compromises, and this will continue to be the way we craft the worlds to come, whatever they might turn out to be’ (Shotwell 2016: 5). To craft a world to come—a world in which ice hopefully still exists in abundance—we need to first acknowledge how consumption practices, based on a desire for purity, are complicit in the exacerbation of climate change’s effects and the increased demise of ice-forms.

Notes 1. For example, Naremore (2008: 19) writes that The Set-Up (1949) ‘becomes a film noir in the sequence where accounts are settled by a savage beating in a blind alley.’ The alley, then, has been an integral part of representing crime in the city. 2. The last recovered corpse from the Titanic was returned by rescue ship to St. John’s, Newfoundland, in June 1912, as other relics, wood panelling and deck chairs continued to wash up on its coastline for months after the shipwreck. Consequently, St. John’s, Newfoundland, is home to ‘the Titanic story,’ an exhibit at the Johnson GEO Centre, among other important sites that make up ‘the Titanic trail,’ all of which have become a key source of attraction for tourists (for more details, see Rushby 2012). 3. As defined by Bigg and Billings (2014: 7), bergy bits refer to ‘bits’ of ice that have fallen off the main body of an iceberg, ranging in size from 1000 to 3000 square feet. 4. Rising surface temperatures and warmer Arctic ocean waters are among the variables that have led scientists to conclude that the Greenland ice sheet has been rapidly melting since the 1990s (Bigg et al. 2014; Chen et al. 2006; van den Broeke et al. 2009). As a result, more calving events

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are projected in the future, which would increase the subsequent discharge of icebergs from the Greenland ice sheet (Bigg and Billings 2014). This, in turn, will increase the frequency of iceberg sightings off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. 5. Notably, Timothy Morton has argued that the Anthropocene has produced a new kind of object: the hyperobject. To describe it, he compares it to an encounter in which ‘the Titanic of Modernity meets the iceberg of hyperobjects’ (Morton 2013: 14). Here, the iceberg appears as an exemplar of his conceptualization of hyperobject—an object so huge, and with such a temporal and spatial distribution, that it cannot be fully comprehended by current ways of thinking. It is striking how Morton mobilizes the Titanic’s iceberg in the name of reconceptualizing objects in the age of the Anthropocene. 6. According to a Visitor Exit Survey (Newfoundland and Labrador 2016b), 77% of visitors to Newfoundland and Labrador are older than the age of 45, 81% have at least a university degree, and 48% have household incomes of at least $100,000 (i.e., higher than average incomes). 7. To view round one of the Battle of the Bergs, as it played out on Iceberg Finder’s Instagram, please visit https://www.instagram.com/p/ Byab7NBnrDo/ (accessed 9 January 2020) 8. The comparison is provided by the Environmental Protection Agency’s equivalency calculator, which can be found here: https://www.epa.gov/ energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator This greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator helps users translate abstract measurements of CO2 emissions into concrete, everyday examples, such as the annual emissions generated by household appliances, cars and other common examples. 9. According to the National Hockey League’s Official Rules, a hockey rink should measure 60.96 metres long and 25.908 metres wide with a corner arc radius of 8.5344 metres. The total area of a hockey rink is roughly 1516.83 square metres. 10. The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador places a regulatory limit on the amount of iceberg water that can be harvested and commodified each year. For example, in its 2019 licensing agreement Berg Water was limited to a harvest of one million litres of iceberg water (Birkhold 2019). 11. For example, Luxury London hotel, Claridge’s, sells a 500 ml bottle of Berg for about £15. It sells in Europe for about 5 Euro. Berg also appears as the priciest luxury water on the water menu at Ray’s & Stark Bar (Ricchio 2013).

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12. Similarly, Baudrillard (1988) argues that the system of consumption has a grammatical code, in which individual consumption choices serve as utterances that communicate individual identity and social status to others. 13. Berg Water (2019c) even distinguishes itself from the source of glacier water. While iceberg water is harvested directly from icebergs, glacier water is bottled after it melts at the glacier’s base as pools. As a result, glacier water comes into contact with the land and can be altered by potential ground contaminants. 14. As a local rival to Berg, Glace Rare Iceberg Water was so named by its native Newfoundlander founder, Ron Stamp, because ‘“Iceberg” is too masculine a sound. This is water your wife’s going to bug you to get because it matches the dishes’ (quoted in Zajac 2010). For Stamp, the French term for ‘ice’ not only evokes feminine softness in its articulation, but also domestic visions of a traditionally feminine housewife in the kitchen. 15. For example, the World Health Organization recommends that exposure to nitrate should not exceed 50 mg/l for short periods.

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6 Passenger Security and Spacetime: Touring the Northwest Passage in the Wake of Colonialism and Climate Change Anita Lam and Matthew Tegelberg

‘Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost’ (Shelley 1818/1993: 156), entreats Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For a long time, we—as readers and criminologists—have typically not followed Frankenstein’s creature to explore the icescapes of the North Pole. While we might continue to revere the works of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle as integral to the construction of crime fiction as a popular genre, we seldom read or even remember their Arctic-bound writings (Schulz 2017). By marginalizing their Arctic works, we have ignored the climate scenes that have informed their imagination and shaped the ways in which they handle scenes of insecurity. Compared to the temporary insecurity brought about by an act of crime, the Arctic is staged as a site of perpetual danger, disaster and death: humans die by drowning, hypothermia, cannibalism, hubris, freezing or by becoming prey to ghosts, monsters and madness. As a site of insecurity, often due to hidden, invisible crimes, today’s Arctic continues to be represented through the imperial eyes of nineteenth-century European explorers and in relation to spectacularly imagined historical disasters. Thus, this chapter examines the Arctic as a criminal anthroposcene, one frozen in the imagination by © The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_6

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Holocene-bred understandings of (in)security1 even as it is currently being reshaped by the effects of global warming in the Anthropocene. With the melting of Arctic ice, the Northwest Passage has become increasingly accessible to Arctic cruise ships. These Arctic expedition cruises offer affluent tourists a ‘last chance’ to tour the Holocene—that is, to tour a region of the world as though it were a ‘safe operating space of Holocene-like conditions’ (Huijbens and Gren 2016: 5). We argue that the Arctic has been staged for last chance tourists as a scene of overlapping and multiple insecurities, where such insecurities emerge at the intersection of colonialism and climate change. The present Arctic serves as a temporal hinge shaped by a past that has not passed (the effects of imperial dreams and colonial practices haunt the region) and a future that has yet to pass (the effects of climate change are altering the geophysical and material futures of those who inhabit and visit the area). Thus, in this chapter, we implicitly date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the colonization of the Americas (for more explicit justifications, see Davis and Todd 2017; Koch et al. 2019; Lewis and Maslin 2015) in order to make visible the enduring power of Eurocentric narratives to shape Arctic exploration as though they constituted a universal, neutral or global perspective. The slow violence of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change have, together, left their mark on the past, present and future Arctic. Theoretically and methodologically, this chapter enriches our study of criminal anthroposcenes in two ways, both of which extend scene thinking. One, we turn our attention to the ways in which scenes are staged, having already considered how scenes are dramatically sculpted by darkness (Chaps. 3 and 4) and assembled through the performances of a diverse cast of actors (Chap. 5). Notably, the stage has been a crucial way of representing the Arctic for empire-building projects. Historically, the Arctic has been staged as a ‘blank’ landscape (Hatfield 2016) or an ‘empty room’ (Hill 2009), awaiting both the entrances and exits of history’s human actors. In the nineteenth-century British imagination, ‘the Arctic is important as a geography that is not a geography (because perceived as blank), as an imperial space that is not part of empire […] and as a place that is everywhere […] because it is nowhere’ (Hill 2009: 16). Like the location-less ice that forms Frankenstein’s Arctic, nineteenth-century Britons engaged with an imaginary Arctic, and not the complex material

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realities of an Arctic environment. As such, the Arctic appeared as an empty stage (Craciun 2016), primarily conceived as a territory to be claimed, and ‘heroically’ conquered through human action. Such a geographic vision of stage lends itself to both imperial history (e.g., Carter 1987) and contemporary Arctic tourism, so that spaces are imagined as timeless environments to be ‘discovered’ by Western explorers.2 But what happens if we complicate the stage3 by considering it as a chronotope? Two, we deploy the concept of chronotope, because in doing so, the stage becomes more than just a timeless space, or a time period without specific spatial implications. Defined as spatiotemporality, the chronotope entangles time and space in irrevocable ways. To highlight the chronotope in our analysis of criminal anthroposcenes is to think about scenes as they are embedded in multiple and multifaceted spatiotemporal assemblages. Depending on the ways in which time and space come together, security and its shadowy counterpart, insecurity, take specific forms, particularly for passengers on a cruise ship. We examine chronotopes of (in) security in relation to passengers, precisely because they have been metaphorically used by Harrington et al. (2017) to understand how we ought to change our understandings of security in criminology.4 Citing Marshall McLuhan’s (1974: 50) declaration that ‘[o]n Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew,’ Harrington et al. argue that we are not simply passengers in the age of the Anthropocene, but rather significant crewmembers who have all the force of geological agents (Chakrabarty 2009). Yet they seem to neglect how class and privilege enable some humans to remain passengers on Earth, often at the expense of others. To the extent that security refers to a state of being ‘without care’ (Hamilton 2013), and safety can be defined as ‘freedom from care’ (Zedner 2009: 16), passengers are a protected class; they are permitted to enjoy their holidays without having to care about issues pertaining to insecurity. They can afford to be carefree because they will be taken care of by a ship’s crew. Thus, the passenger’s security is prioritized in ways that introduce new insecurities or amplify existing ones in the Arctic. This chapter begins with a discussion of security as a theoretical concept, highlighting how our understandings of security are Holocenebred. As such, they play into imperial dreams of conquest, which have an

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often-overlooked history that brings together colonialism and climate change. We review how the Arctic has been imagined from a colonial perspective, in order to trace an imaginative continuity from nineteenthcentury writings to twenty-first-century last chance tourism. In this chapter, the imagination of the Arctic has tangible effects, so that matters of fiction shape the North as much as factual concerns and lived experiences. Introduced as an organizing principle in fiction, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope is then reviewed in relation to how it can be productively applied to an analysis of Arctic cruise itineraries, which are themselves crucial, constitutive elements of contemporary travel writings about Arctic exploration. We treat Adventure Canada’s ‘Into the Northwest Passage’ cruise as representative of the routes and itineraries used by Arctic expedition cruises currently operating in the Canadian Arctic. This itinerary is strikingly constructed to follow in the wake of Arctic explorers with imperial agendas, rehearsing past journeys in the present and in anticipation of a future without ice. Holocene-bred assumptions about security are woven into specific chronotopes of (in)security at different excursion sites along the Arctic cruise itinerary, so that big stories—whether of colonialism or climate change—take their form as seemingly minor moments of tension, or as asymmetrical encounters on route. To conclude, we propose an ethics of attention and care. Carefree passengers do not need to be careless passengers; they can become attuned to noticing worlds that have been harmed in the name of progress, profit and pleasure.

Weathering Security While security has now been recognized as a ‘promiscuous concept’ that masks multiple identities and projects under the illusion of a single, immutable concept (Zedner 2009: 9), its traditional formulation as national security can be traced back to seventeenth-century England, where it was most fully articulated in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. In Leviathan (1651/1988: 185), Hobbes associated the law-less ‘state of nature’ with a constant level of insecurity, where humans were embroiled in a perpetual war ‘of every man against every man.’ In the time of

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constant war, there is ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1651/1988: 186). In Hobbes’ theorization of security, nature is primarily reduced to human nature. The nation-state appears as the object of protection, and protection is extended to human societies against real or perceived natural threats. Embedded into modern security architecture through classical theories of security, such as Hobbes’, the natural world is envisioned as a fixed, stable backdrop to human drama, with humans considered the only beings that make history. Such an anthropocentric notion of security is what Harrington and Shearing (2017) call Holocenebred—that is, it is dependent on (Western-centric) Holocene understandings of the natural environment as primitive and as something to be claimed, controlled, exploited or preserved for human interests. Such a Holocene-bred sense of security also has important temporal qualities that should not be dismissed. Given the importance granted to Hobbes’ conceptualization of security in security studies and criminology, it is worth examining his passage on the insecure condition of war, and the analogy he formed between war and weather: For Warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. (Hobbes 1651/1988: 185–6)

For Hobbes, weather and war are both temporal dispositions. Each can be subjected to a measurable and abstracted ‘tract of time.’ Things that come to bear the name of security, then, are temporally extended affairs, for which the future can be predicted and action can be calculated (Valverde 2001, 2014). Thus, security practices embed and are embedded within distinct temporal registers (Crawford 2017), as well as spatial imperatives. Following in the tradition of Hobbes’ anthropocentric conception of security, actions taken under the banner of national security

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have been historically tied to not only securing homelands but also other lands. As a result, national security was conceived in relation to imperial expansion, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this time, war and weather merged in the construction of British imperialism, both appearing as sources of insecurity that needed to be controlled. In the case of the Arctic, imperial domination entailed both the securing of territory as well as of pleasantly warm weather, so that colonialism was inextricably bound to early interest in climate change. Since Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), Arctic ice and its role in global cooling was seen as an obstacle to forging new cosmopolitan utopias of temperate climate. In the late eighteenth century, the effects of polar ice were often described in imperial terms: the empire of ice spread its dominion of frost in ways that not only constituted a natural check on European ambitions, but also tested the efficiency of European administrations in territories that were vulnerable to polar influence (Carroll 2013). Testing their mettle against the polar empire and armed with a ‘superior’ understanding of climate, European nations needed to—according to William Robertson’s The History of America (1777)—deliver America from the cold, by colonizing the New World. Dubbed by Thomas de Quincy (1846: 345) as ‘crusades against frost,’ geoengineering schemes to melt the cold placed science and empire at the heart of initiatives for globally re-ordering nature. In these early debates about the merits of human-directed climate modification, ‘“Green concerns” […] helped fuel the resurgence in nineteenth-century polar exploration’ (Wheatley 2011: 571), so that government-financed Arctic expeditions were repeatedly promoted (Cameron 2007). Headed by ‘ships of war, destined for the north for the ostensible purpose of discovery’ (L.M.U.B. 1818), these proposed Arctic expeditions were suspiciously described by others as part of a conspiracy to destroy polar ice in order to enable ‘the future amelioration of climate’ in Britain and Europe (Leslie 1818: 5). While human-induced climate change was positively associated with national security in its mitigation or elimination of ‘foule weather’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anthropogenic climate change in

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the twenty-first century has been viewed quite differently. Today, climate change has been associated with the creation of new insecurities or amplification of existing ones across the globe (e.g., Agnew 2011; Lynch and Stretesky 2010; White 2018).5 Through its destruction of polar icescapes, however, climate change has ironically fulfilled the nineteenth-century imperial dream of opening the Northwest Passage for colonial expansion and domination. By melting all kinds of ice over time, global warming has removed one of the most significant obstacles to travelling through Arctic waters. Today, tourists travel on Arctic cruise ships, no longer hampered by the natural threats that once challenged the very existence and survival of European explorers. While the tourism industry flourished under stable, Holocene-like planetary conditions, the unstable Earth system of the Anthropocene provides new opportunities as well as an implicit deadline for sightseeing. The prospect of mass extinctions and vanishing natural landscapes has driven a new6 kind of tourism practice: last chance tourism. Last chance tourists rush to see rapidly vanishing icescapes and endangered flora and fauna7 before these natural wonders disappear. Tourism promoters hasten to exploit this ‘short-term boom from the doom’ of climate change-induced tourism (Lemelin et  al. 2010: 488). Given this booming tourism industry, travellers have—on the whole— attained the status of a geo-force (Huijbens and Gren 2016: 4), generating nearly 8% of the annual, global greenhouse gas emissions through their long-distance travels and touring activities (Lenzen et al. 2018). Yet they remain curiously ignorant of their massive carbon footprint and how it contributes to the demise of the natural wonders they seek to visit (Dawson et  al. 2010, 2011; Hall and Saarinen 2010; Lemelin et  al. 2010). For them, the Arctic continues to be a place of adventure, where humans are imperilled by foul weather but are not necessarily the cause of it. In general, tour operators elide the fact that human-induced climate change has made the Northwest Passage more accessible to cruising expeditions. They promise instead that passengers will cross the Northwest Passage—the very ‘pinnacle of Arctic exploration’—‘like the explorers before [them]’ (AC8 2018: 3).

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 he Privilege of Arctic Travel: Studying T Chronotopes and Itineraries Venture with us through the famed Northwest Passage! The epic quest for a northern route west to silk and spice producing Asia occupied some of the best minds of European civilization for half a millennium. Until recently the ice-choked waters of the passage provided extreme challenges to navigators; it still remains an elusive route that few have had the privilege of travelling. (AC 2012: 21)

What does it means to be among the few who have had the privilege of travelling through the Northwest Passage? First and foremost, the privilege of such Arctic travel is primarily extended to affluent passengers. To sail the Northwest Passage on an expedition cruise costs between US$11,000 and US$25,000 per person (AC 2019/20: 26–7), ensuring that Arctic travel remains a distinctive class privilege (Lasserre and Têtu 2015). Insofar as education is also a proxy for class distinction, it is worth noting that more than half of these Arctic tourists have obtained a graduate degree or professional designation. Nearly half of them have an average household income of over $150,000 (Insignia 2016: 43). It is this socioeconomic security that affords them the opportunity to consume the Arctic as a safe adventure. During their trip, they will be safe and secure; and as such, will have the luxury of enjoying themselves as carefree passengers. Here, security and care are defined in relation to each other. Passengers are secure in the sense of being separated or removed from care. After all, security refers to ‘a state wherein concerns and worries have been put off to the side’ (Hamilton 2013: 5), while safety refers to ‘freedom from care’ (Zedner 2009: 16). As a protected class, passengers do not need to care about the ‘foule weather’ that could disrupt their trip, because they will be well taken care of by the ‘experienced and friendly’ members of the ship’s crew (AC 2018: 10). Freed from having to care, affluent passengers are privileged in ways that allow them to be mere spectators, seeing sights that few will actually get to see firsthand. Yet they are not completely without care per se: their care is reserved for that which one day may disappear. Their will to secure—as Hamilton (2013: 6) describes—is tied to rendering the future

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motionless. They aim to wrest the future from the contingencies and flux of time itself. This longing to secure the future can underlie a desire to participate in last chance tourism. Like the desire for security, last chance tourism depends upon temporal concerns (Fisher and Stewart 2016): if landscapes, people, flora and fauna were not subject to time, and consequently death, there would be nothing to care for and care about—nothing that must be seen now, and not later. Because last chance tourism implicitly predicts catastrophic doom in the future, it secures the future by fixing it in place in the present, where it could be safely assessed and safely enjoyed. Motivated by a last chance to see the Arctic before it disappears, tourists embark on trips that ultimately repeat the ‘first’ voyages into the region by European explorers, blurring ‘first’ and ‘last’ as the cruise traverses the Northwest Passage. As such, their motivations exemplify an emerging shift in tourism narratives, whereby narratives about ‘firsts’ (e.g., the first to reach the North Pole) are increasingly replaced by desires to be ‘the last’ (Dawson et al. 2011)—namely, the last to see and behold an untrammelled frontier before the devastating effects of global warming destroy it (Salkin 2007). In conceiving of firsts and lasts, last chance tourism in the Arctic operates within shifting temporalities. These temporalities can be broadly conceived in relation to time’s arrow, and as importantly, converge with space as chronotopes.

Time’s Arrow The notion of a ‘last chance to see’ is yoked to time’s arrow. According to Stephen Jay Gould (1987: 10–11), time’s arrow refers to a linear passage of time, wherein history ‘is an irreversible sequence of repeatable events. Each moment occupies its own distinct position in a temporal series, and all moments, considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events moving in a direction.’ As a one-directional sequence of distinct episodes, the Judeo-Christian conception of time’s arrow allows for the delineation of firsts and lasts (Delumeau 1999), particularly in relation to our experience of ‘deep time’ (McPhee 1991). Difficult to comprehend within the human timescale or even human perception, deep time relegates human habitation to a millisecond at the very end of geological time (Gould 1987: 2). Despite characterizing both the Holocene and Anthropocene,

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deep time’s incomprehensible immensity can only be captured and understood through metaphors such as time’s arrow or time’s cycle. In contrast to time’s arrow, cyclical time has no single direction and is governed by Nature’s circular repetitions, including seasonal, solar or hydrological cycles, among others. As we have become increasingly detached from the natural world (e.g., by relying on technology to provide water and light at our own convenience), we have unlearned how to think in accordance with intemperate weather’s scope and rhythms (Serres 1995). When we are—in the words of Michel Serres (1995: 29)—‘reduced to living only in time, not in weather,’ time’s arrow is foregrounded. In the Western world, time’s arrow is also the time deployed by settlers and colonizers (Rose 2004). When colonial agents committed to the project of modernity by resolutely looking ahead to a future, they imagined their temporal trajectory as a singular path of progress and optimism. Headed onwards and upwards, progress trained us to look and move forward. It synchronized the movement of colonial expeditions, the circulation of global capital and the spreading effects of climate change to time’s arrow. Marked by a beginning and an ending, the linearity of time’s arrow enables us to conceive of the end of the world, and the end of time.

Chronotopes In last chance tourism, the end of a time to sightsee converges with the end of the world-as-we-know-it, especially when that world is understood spatially in terms of landscapes. This entanglement of space and time would be described by Mikhail Bakhtin as a chronotope (literally ‘timespace’). For him, the chronotope is the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). Time and space, then, are not considered as separate and isolated dimensions of the world. Rather, they come together and form spacetime: ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh […]’ while ‘space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin 1981: 84). Constitutive of specific literary genres, the chronotope fuses spatial and temporal relationships into a single, carefully composed whole. Strikingly, Bakhtin proposes that multiple chronotopes can co-exist in a single work. While one chronotope may come to ‘envelope or dominate the others,’

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chronotopes within a text do not need to be internally cohesive; they ‘may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships’ (Bakhtin 1981: 252). Or rephrased in Mariana Valverde’s (2015: 23) terms, there can be multiple ‘mini-chronotopes’ and shifting scalar logics embedded in a single scene. In their multiplicity, chronotopes inform Arctic exploration in two ways. One, spacetime in the Arctic takes on the material form of ice. Arctic sea ice is the nonhuman matter through which flows the convergence of space and time. It is how time is materialized in space. Over time and during particular seasons, sea ice can thicken, fleshing out the space occupied by frozen water. As frozen land, ice becomes a constitutive element of territory, particularly from the perspective of the Inuit who call the Canadian Arctic their home (ITK n.d.). In contrast, when the ice melts into water, the lands thin out in the Arctic, becoming an open passage through which ships can traverse. Two, chronotopes appear in the narratives of Arctic exploration as the ‘primary point[s] from which “scenes” […] unfold’ (Bakhtin 1981: 250). Here, too, scenes unfold in relation to ice, which we will demonstrate in the next section. In our ensuing chronotope analysis, we treat the promotional narratives of Arctic cruise tourism as contemporary, generic examples of Arctic travel writing. While Bakhtin studied chronotopes by focusing on the starting and end points for plot movement in a story, arguing that ‘[a]ll the action…unfolds between these two points’ (Bakhtin 1981: 89), we take into consideration the starting and end points of a passenger’s journey. More specifically, we examine how time and space are plotted across the route of the Northwest Passage in an itinerary prepared by one of the foremost specialists in Arctic cruise tourism, Adventure Canada.

In the Wake of Arctic Exploration: Seeing the Arctic with Adventure Canada While there are six9 major cruise operators that travel through the Canadian Arctic, Adventure Canada is an award-winning tour operator, recognized by National Geographic, USA Today, Trip Advisor and the

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Canadian government for being one of the leaders in Arctic cruise tourism (AC 2005, 2020a). Established in 1987 by three young entrepreneurs seeking to turn their adventurous way of life into a tourism business (AC 2020b), Adventure Canada began leading Environmental Discovery Voyages to Canada’s northern ‘blank spaces’ since the late 1990s (AC 2005). Since then, the company has grown in tandem with an increasing global appetite for cruise tourism in general, and polar cruises in particular (Lück et al. 2010).10 While environmental and regulatory constraints have slowed the growth of cruise tourism in Canadian Arctic waters (Lasserre and Têtu 2015; Palma et al. 2019), more than 70% of annual leisure-based tourism in the Canadian Arctic has been cruise-based (Insignia 2016). Moreover, the number of overall passengers that have travelled the Northwest Passage on cruise ships has increased exponentially from 124 passengers in 2008 to 1199 in 2017 (Palma et al. 2019: 218). Many of these passengers have sailed with Adventure Canada. Involved in setting the standard for Arctic cruising in the Northwest Passage,11 Adventure Canada has offered narratives about Arctic exploration that have been compelling to both actual and prospective tourists for over 20 years. Thus, we analyze in this section the promotional material and itineraries for Adventure Canada’s expeditionary cruises as a form of Arctic travel literature. We use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to collect a comprehensive sample of online brochures for each of the expedition cruises Adventure Canada has led into the Canadian Arctic since the creation of its website in 1998. Self-described as a digital library of Internet sites, the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) began in 1996 as a means for capturing and saving the Internet’s ephemeral content through automated crawling algorithms (Internet Archive n.d.). While it remains unclear how exactly the Wayback Machine constructs its archive (Leetaru 2015), resulting in methodological challenges for studying the historical evolution of websites (Arora et al. 2016; Murphy et  al. 2007), it is nevertheless a useful tool for accessing the changing content of a specific website across a total of 21 years (from 1998 to 2019/2020). Through close textual readings,12 we examine Adventure Canada’s promotional material alongside the following media representations of its Northwest Passage itinerary: an episode of the Discovery

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Channel’s Mighty Cruise Ships (Discovery 201713) and write-ups by journalists and travel writers for major news outlets. Promoted both within Canada and internationally, Adventure Canada represents the ‘spirit of exploration’ for visiting ‘places seldom seen, off the beaten trail – even off the map!’ (AC 2020c). On its signature expedition cruises,14 passengers ‘sail living history’ when they traverse the historically treacherous Northwest Passage (AC 2016: 2). ‘On this voyage, like explorers before us,’ Adventure Canada (2016: 2, 3) writes, ‘we go where the ice allows,’ joining ‘the select few who have travelled this legendary route.’ Although the exact route ‘may be subject to change without notice due to weather, ice, and sea conditions’ (AC 2019/20: 5), insecurities introduced by foul weather are part of the adventure. After all, ‘exact itineraries contradict the spirit of an exploratory voyage’ (AC 2002). Moreover, the dangers presented by Arctic ice are mitigated for tourists sailing in the safety of Adventure Canada’s ice-strengthened expedition ship, the Ocean Endeavour.15 Promoted in the documentary series Mighty Cruise Ships (2017), the Ocean Endeavour is described as ‘the perfect vessel for adventure,’ shielding passengers from moving icebergs and even dangerous wildlife. The technologically advanced ship can venture ‘to some of the world’s last great frontiers’ while providing tourists with all of ‘the class and comfort of a boutique hotel’ (AC 2018: 10). Aboard the small expedition ship, Adventure Canada’s tourists mimic the Arctic explorers before them, by not only pursuing (class) distinction and heroism through the conquest of ‘uncharted’ and dangerous lands (Lewis-­ Jones 2017), but also because professional explorers were themselves consumer products of the early travel and tourism industries that developed in the nineteenth-century age of empire (Craciun 2016). Assuring tourists that they will ‘[f ]ollow in the wakes of Franklin, Rae, Amundsen and many more explorers’ (AC 2019/20: 5; our emphasis added), Adventure Canada constructs, in effect, an itinerary that follows in the wake of colonial exploration and domination. Here, the wake not only denotes the visible track left on the water’s surface by a ship, but also metaphorically serves as clues to follow in search of both new and old chronotopes of (in) security. In resurrecting the ghosts of past explorers as models to follow, Adventure Canada’s expedition cruise ultimately fixes the future Arctic in

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a historical past marked by Holocene-bred assumptions of (in)security. As we will demonstrate in the ensuing analysis, Adventure Canada’s itinerary takes passengers from sites that promote awareness of climate change and its future effects in the Anthropocene to those frozen in the historical past, temporally moving them from thinking about the future to being immersed in a colonial past as the ship travels into the Northwest Passage. Anchored to a backward-looking time’s arrow, passengers are given a ‘last chance’ to return to a world characterized by the romance of colonial adventure. At the end of their voyage, they visit relics, shipwrecks and graves associated with the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845, ultimately returning to the disaster at the heart of the modern imagination of the Arctic. Insofar as Sir John Franklin stands ‘at the heart of every Arctic story’ (Lambert 2011: 22) and Adventure Canada continues to promote the Northwest Passage through the imperial eyes of the age of exploration, tourists conquer the Passage in a cruise ship that has made contemporary expeditions ‘safe’ and ‘secure.’ While the forces of nature, in the form of weather, ice and sea conditions, waged war and mostly triumphed over historical explorers, such as Franklin, tourists conquer both the Passage and the natural threats associated with it. In so doing, they fulfil the dreams of Arctic exploration first dreamt in the name of European imperialism and under Holocene-bred assumptions of security. We make this argument by following the trajectory of what Adventure Canada calls ‘highlights’—that is, port excursions that take tourists to historical, natural or cultural landmarks. To travel into the Northwest Passage, tour operators construct a route that allows their passengers to see four main highlights: (1) glaciers and icefjords, (2) Arctic wildlife, (3) Inuit villages and (4) the remnants of the lost Franklin expedition. Notably, Adventure Canada’s itinerary is representative of both the Northwest Passage cruise route and the standard highlights of a Canadian Arctic tour (Lasserre and Têtu 2015). In what follows we explore Adventure Canada’s itinerary as a sequence of port excursions. Since opportunity implies moving towards port in Latin (Sharpe 2016), each port excursion is treated as an opportunity to highlight the mini-­ chronotopes of (in)security that shape it. To the extent that opportunity also refers to a timeliness of action (Oxford English Dictionary), the activities of cruise passengers are situated in relation to a tourist site’s specific

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spatiotemporalities. Although cruise-based tourist time scatters and fragments the experience of the Canadian Arctic into an assemblage of highlights, these seemingly isolated and self-sufficient episodes are constructed by a number of different chronotopes of (in)security. It is to these overlapping, intermingling and sometimes contradictory chronotopes that we now turn.

Ilulissat: Beginnings and Endings at Ground Zero As the first stop of Adventure Canada’s expedition cruise (Discovery 2017), the tour company takes its passengers to Ilulissat, Greenland. Originally named Jakobshavn, the town of Ilulissat was first established as a Danish colony in the late eighteenth century, after serving as a trading post since 1741. It is also notably the birthplace of Knud Rasmussen, the ‘father of Eskimology’ (Brown 2015; Malaurie 1982) and the first polar explorer to cross the Northwest Passage by dogsled in the 1920s. Doubling as a birthplace of icy nonhumans, Ilulissat also refers to ‘icebergs’ in the Kalaallisut language spoken by the majority of Inuit people who live in Greenland. Its icefjord is described by Adventure Canada as ‘the mother of all glaciers’ (Discovery 2017) because it is ‘where 90% of the North Atlantic’s icebergs are born’ (AC 2016: 3). According to the tour company’s experts, it is likely that the iceberg that sank the Titanic also originated in Ilulissat (Olsen 2018). Characterized as the most productive glacier outside of Antarctica, the Ilulissat glacier has given ‘birth to 90 percent of the icebergs that travel down the Canadian coast of Newfoundland and Labrador’ (Morphet 2016). Whether designated as the ‘iceberg factory of the world’ (Bailey 2019) or ‘iceberg heaven’ (Olsen 2018), the Ilulissat icefjord is a tourist destination—perhaps, ‘the greatest tourist attraction in the Arctic’ (Discovery 2017)—that revolves around a chronotope of zero. As a symbol made by humans and for humans (Kaplan 1999), zero blurs firsts and lasts by entangling births with deaths, beginnings with endings,16 and starting points (in space, according to the cruise’s itinerary) with end points (of time). Indeed, overlapping experiences of ‘zero’ are built into Adventure Canada’s activities at this UNESCO World Heritage site (UNESCO

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n.d.). As iceberg consumers, passengers reduce small handfuls of Ilulissat’s ancient icebergs to zero, as they place their scoops from the icefjord into upcoming drinks in the ship’s lounge (Stalker 2019). When travelling amongst floating icebergs, passengers are promised that ‘Ilulissat is what you’ve always imagined the Arctic to be. […] With [Disko Bay’s] mirror-­ like water and such dramatic scenery, the silence here can be truly deafening’ (AC 2002). In a place of zero sound, tourists can retreat into their imagination of the Arctic, so that Ilulissat is also the birthplace of an Arctic imaginary that will hold the passengers in thrall across the entire duration of the cruise. With Adventure Canada’s Nikon Camera Trial Program (AC 2019/20: 23), passengers can ‘zero in’ on nature, by zooming in on distant icebergs with their use of professional quality photography equipment. During their cruise among the icebergs at Ilulissat Icefjord (AC 2019/20: 5), passengers get so physically close to different ice-forms that they might themselves be turned to zero by turning icebergs. Indeed, it is the danger of calving glaciers and moving icebergs that, according to one passenger, ‘makes this place so cool’ (quoted in Discovery 2017). For passengers, the slight possibility of physical insecurity is transformed into a thrilling experience because the tour operator’s promised proximity to icebergs is balanced in relation to safe viewing distances. For example, tour guides ‘view icebergs from a distance (equal to no less than two to three times their height), knowing that they can flip at any moment, creating a deadly wave in the process’ (Newland 2015). As a result, Adventure Canada’s safe viewing distance has the effect of producing an aesthetic distance from which Ilulissat’s icebergs are photographically captured; so that ‘[w]hat passengers are seeing here is really just the tip of the iceberg’ (Discovery 2017). Below the warming water lurks not only the rest of the iceberg’s body, but also a looming insecurity that is rendered nearly invisible in Adventure Canada’s written descriptions of Ilulissat. Absent from the tour operator’s promotional material is how Ilulissat is being reshaped as the ground zero of climate change. While glacier and iceberg viewing are not explicitly linked to climate change in Adventure Canada’s promotional narratives, Ilulissat has been an important research hub for glaciologists trying to understand climate change (UNESCO n.d.). It has also been recently featured in a 2016 report by the United Nations as a World Heritage

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tourism destination endangered by global warming (Markham et  al. 2016). In contrast to Adventure Canada’s promotional narrative, Greenland Tourism has shifted towards representing Ilulissat as the site for last chance tourism (Bjørst and Ren 2015): Visiting the icefjord ‘is not only about seeing a large calving glacier or melting icebergs before it’s too late. It is a unique opportunity to be active in the climate change conversation here at “ground zero”’ (Greenland Tourism n.d.). In Greenland’s tourism promotion, space and time converge again on the notion of zero; visiting Ilulissat now entails seeing a major scene in the Anthropocene with one’s own eyes before the future time of zero ice. By travelling to ‘unspoiled’ natural environments in the present, last chance tourists foresee the disappearance of these ‘last must-see’ places in the future (Lemelin et al. 2010). For Ken Shapiro, editor-in-chief of TravelAge West, a magazine for travel agents, last chance tourism is ‘about [people] going someplace they expect will be gone in a generation’ (quoted in Salkin 2007). It is about being present in a place that will soon be absent because of global warming. The future and present collide at ground zero under the presumption that time is running out. Not unlike the ticking time-bomb scenario that animated fears of post-9/11 terrorism (Hudson 2009; Luban 2005; Manderson 2010; Zedner 2008), ground zero entangles past, present and future in a catastrophic imagination. It also brings together last chance tourism with dark tourism (Lisle 2004; Stone 2012), by remaking time horizons in anticipation of mass deaths. In so doing, Ilulissat is not simply a birthplace but also a place of death. It is a future memorial site to the Arctic iceforms that were once conceived in its realm. Death and crime17 haunt places designated as ground zero, as does violent, technologically mediated human action. Indeed, the term ‘ground zero’ originated with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The US Strategic Bombing Survey used ground zero, as a term of convenience, to ‘designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation’ (Chairman’s Office 1946: 5). By analogizing Ilulissat to the origin points of an explosive, nuclear detonation, Greenland Tourism highlights how the slow violence of human-induced climate change is now intertwined with an apocalyptic imagination that heralds the end of time. As a result, the Doomsday Clock18 is reset ever-closer to the zero hour19 of midnight.

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Further, the chronotope of zero suggests the end of a nonhuman time that is undisrupted by human action. While Adventure Canada highlights the silence of being in the presence of majestic, frozen towers, it is hard to ignore ‘the thunderous roar of a calving Jakobshavn Glacier’ (Vermillion 2019). In the roar, Ilulissat is transformed into a convergence point of what were once distinct temporal regimes; it becomes a place where glacial time meets clock time. According to John Urry (2009), glacial time describes the long temporality of the natural environment, spanning cycles of change that are only measurable by the passing of generations over millennia. In contrast to this nonhuman time, which is imperceptible to the instantaneous and short timespans of human (tourist) perception, clock time is generated solely by humans (Urry 2009). It is the linear segmentation and standardization of clock time that makes possible tour itineraries (for tourism more generally, see Hall 2009), the presumed assembly line of ice-forms at the world’s ‘ice factory,’ and the timestamps of photographs taken on site. Moreover, this supremely human temporality has come to supersede glacial time at Ilulissat. In response to climate change, Ilulissat is ultimately resituated in a human timescale. It is wrested from deep time and repositioned within the human lifetime as a sight to see before one’s own death.

Arctic Safari Between visiting the fjords of Greenland and the northernmost islands of Canada, the Adventure Canada expedition promises ‘access to pristine wilderness areas’ (AC 2018: 11), in order to ‘seek polar bears, sea birds, and other Arctic wildlife’ (AC 2019/20: 5). By promoting ‘pristine natural environments’ (AC 2019/20: 5), the tour operator markets Nature as purity (Harrington et al. 2017: 68). That is, it removes Nature from the realm of human action and represents it as unmarked by human activities, such as those associated with modern industrialization and urbanization. Here, the Arctic is sold as eternally natural and timeless, excavated from human history and existing in deep time. Tourists visit an Arctic located in a pre-human time when megafauna ruled the Earth undisturbed. As such, this segment of the tour operates as an Arctic safari,20

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which is itself billed by travel agencies as the new African safari (e.g., McCaffrey 2017). Placed against the awe-inspiring panoramas of the Arctic, the Arctic ‘Big Five’—polar bears, walruses, narwhals, bowhead whales and beluga whales—are hunted through the lenses of travellers’ cameras. For passengers on the Adventure Canada cruise, spotting a polar bear21 in its natural habitat is more exciting than any relic of human history encountered on the trip. It becomes a human–nonhuman encounter for which tourists hasten to ‘throw parkas over PJs and hurry onto ship’s decks’ to make happen (Morphet 2016). Even tour guides acknowledge that ‘the big prize is obviously the polar bear. If we can spot polar bears, that’s going to be a life-list kind of check-off for many people’ (quoted in Discovery 2017). Upon seeing a polar bear from the ship, the Ocean Endeavour’s captain ‘pulls out all the navigational stops’ to reposition the ship close to the shoreline, while keeping a safe distance from the bear (Discovery 2017). Safe navigation in precarious polar waters is balanced against the need to maximize passenger’s wildlife viewing experiences. Indeed, the ship captain defines an ‘actually, really expedition situation’ in relation to polar-bear watching (Captain Radja, quoted in Discovery 2017). The ship needs to be manoeuvred in ways that enable passengers to get their desired photographic shots of the animal. While the Arctic safari revolves around a chronotope that constructs nature in the Arctic as timeless, this chronotope sits in tension with two chronotopes of (in)security—one that names nature as a threat to human travellers, and one that names humans as a threat to nature. Both operate in relation to Holocene-bred security thinking and colonial logics. Both seek to secure through containment. As a result, people are contained within safe zones, and environments are contained within conservation zones in the name of security.

Nature as Threat to Humans In contrast to the human-less, wilderness mythology promoted by Adventure Canada, their passengers introduce ‘tourist time’ into the animal zone when they are brought into closer proximity to polar bears. For passengers, the possible dangers associated with a polar bear encounter

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are deemed thrilling, especially because Adventure Canada makes such an encounter ‘safe.’ The tour operator manages the risk of human-polar bear encounters by ensuring the presence of certified bear monitors during all land excursions. Armed with 12-gauge Remington 870 shotguns,22 bear bangers and other nonlethal deterrents, licensed bear monitors scout and clear the area before allowing passengers to come ashore and explore it. Once on land, passengers must travel with the expedition team and move within the boundaries of a roving ‘safety perimeter’—described as a ‘kind of safe zone for people’ (bear monitor Jason Edmunds, quoted in Discovery 2017). Upon spotting a polar bear, passengers are corralled for a rapid evacuation and are returned to the ship as soon as possible: ‘Though every passenger is keen to see a polar bear, if one is spotted, the expedition will be called off’ (Discovery 2017). At first glance, Adventure Canada’s security method appears to prevent humans from ‘pushing the bear off its own territory’ (Edmunds, quoted in Discovery 2017), largely because such a confrontation could turn lethal and deadly for both human(s) and bear. However, the creation of localizable, area-bound zones of human safety has been crucial to the bulk of Holocene-bred security practices (Harrington and Shearing 2017); and as importantly, has been tied to colonial ways of arranging space. The processes of marking, defining and controlling space have been central to the establishment of colonial outposts, especially in relation to securing ports for landing (Smith 1999). Written with the specific spatial vocabulary of colonialism (Smith 1999), Adventure Canada’s safety perimeter depends upon lines, maintained by an expedition team and bear monitors, to establish the boundaries of inside and outside. Tasked with ‘keeping passengers inside of the perimeter’ (Edmunds, quoted in Discovery 2017), bear monitors position passengers at the centre of their safekeeping. Orientation to the centre doubles as an orientation to a system of power, where power rests inside the (colonial) centre. For Adventure Canada’s tour guides, power can be locally traced to the affluent passengers, for they are central to the tour company’s economic survival and reputation-building initiatives. Through the delineation of the safe zone’s boundaries, these passengers are also situated in an oppositional relation to Nature (in this case, polar bears), as natural threats are deemed to exist outside of the safety zone. Thus, the safety zone is

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embedded in tourist time, even as its underlying impetus—the action of securing nature for the protection of humans—drives the Hobbesian foundation of human society. When tourist time and safety zone are assembled together, they form a colonially inflected chronotope of security.

Humans as Threat to Nature While the Arctic is typically marketed as existing in deep, pre-human time by tour operators, ‘[u]nchanged for thousands of years’ (WWF-­ Canada 2017: 5), it is also now threatened by human-induced climate change in the age of the Anthropocene. As such, it can no longer exist beyond or outside of the human timescale. Unlike the immediacy of tourist time, concerns about climate change position the future of the Arctic as inextricably bound to both local and global human activity. As Nature has been made insecure by human (in)action, the time for conservation has come upon the Arctic. Here, security and conservation become entangled, particularly in relation to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF’s) promotion of an Arctic safari tour in partnership with Adventure Canada. In line with the forward-looking approach of security thinking, conservation has been characterized by the WWF as ‘securing a healthy future for this unique region’ (WWF-Canada 2017: 5). Conservation efforts have concentrated on preserving natural wildlife in the Canadian Arctic, culminating most recently in the 2019 designation of Tallurutiup Imanga as a national marine conservation area. Taking advantage of the newly designated national park, Adventure Canada’s recent and upcoming Arctic expeditions spend three days exploring the conservation zone in Lancaster Sound, where they will ‘cruise by ship and Zodiac [i.e., a smaller, inflatable, open-air boat] in search of wildlife’ (AC 2019/20: 7). As a means of colonizing the future for the purpose of conservation, Tallurutiup Imanga, however, evokes other national parks that have been established worldwide as safari sites, such as those in southern and east Africa. Adopted by global environmental organizations, like the WWF, the economics of biodiversity bring together conservation policies with the economics of tourism (Munt 1994). Under the economics of

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biodiversity, Africa—like the Arctic—has long been marketed to tourists as timeless, even though its national parks are products of a colonial time that has yet to pass. Notably, the creation of game parks in Africa has been rationalized through a particularly dominant narrative, one produced and circulated by white Western conservationists who have positioned themselves as the civilized stewards of nature (Nixon 2011). This narrative demonizes poor, rural Africans as poachers who threaten wildlife and relate to wildlife illegally, even as it erases the colonial history of South Africa. Rereading this history reveals how the butchery of elephants and lions resulted from an imported European ethos of killing—namely, an ethos where game could be killed for sport rather than for subsistence and sustenance (Carruthers 1995). In this dominant conservationist narrative, however, human exceptionalism is only extended to privileged Western conservationists, even though human cruelty—killing animals for entertainment—lies at the heart of such exceptionalism (Rose 2017). Human cruelty is erased from narratives about the last chance safari. Instead, the last chance safari emphasizes the future extinction of charismatic megafauna (Dawson et al. 2011).23 The focus on large animal species is implicitly justified by a hierarchical metaphor for ordering living beings. Whether expressed as a ladder or a tree in biology, the hierarchical order—what Aristotle (350  BCE/2014; see Lovejoy 1936) called the ‘Scala Naturae’ (Great Chain of Being)—presumes that life progresses in a linear movement from simple, lower organisms to more complex, higher beings, with humans positioned as the most advanced beings. Yet this hierarchical metaphor blinds passengers and conservation organizations, such as the WWF, from thinking about the value of ‘lower’ organisms, whose simplicity can actually be a more evolved adaptation than the supposed complexity of higher beings (Hejnol 2017). Protecting the Arctic environment does not need to begin with animals presumed to be at the top of the evolutionary ladder, especially since extinction will not be isolated to a single species in an ecosystem. Rather extinction cascades can unravel the interdependent relationships between nonhumans in an ecosystem, so that the eventual world of loss amounts to more than just the future loss of Adventure Canada’s mascot: the polar bear. Consequently, the spillover effects associated with ecological insecurities, such as extinction, cannot be easily contained within a conservation area designated by

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fixed spatial boundaries and imagined through Holocene-bred security thinking. When Adventure Canada’s promotional narratives construct the Arctic Safari through colonially inflected practices and narratives, they have spatiotemporal effects: they link future environmental time to both animal time and tourist time. However, they do so in ways that impose a ‘natural wilderness’ to ice-dependent lands that were already inhabited, claimed and defined by Indigenous peoples (for another Canadian example, see Mawani 2003).

Settling at Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) After crossing the Davis Strait, Adventure Canada offers passengers the opportunity to visit vibrant Inuit communities, such as Mittimatalik, in order to ‘[m]eet the Inuit who call the Arctic home’ (AC 2019/20: 5) and ‘[l]earn about Inuit communities, culture and worldview first hand’ (AC 2016: 3). As a possible first stop in Nunavut, Canada, before sailing into the Northwest Passage, Mittimatalik is described in the tour operator’s brochures as a ‘picturesque community,’ where tourists will ‘be treated to a cultural presentation there, including throat singing and traditional Inuit games, before exploring the town’ (AC 2011: 21). In the ‘thriving community,’ tourists can ‘partake in a community barbeque, shop for art and celebrate with singing and dancing in the community centre’ (AC 2010: 5). Unravelling in tourist time, these cross-cultural interactions revolve, at first glance, around a chronotope of encounter (Bakhtin 1981: 244), in which the spatial and temporal paths of people otherwise geographically and socially separated come into contact, if even for a moment. Yet these are also entangled trajectories taking place in a contact zone— that is, at a ‘colonial frontier’ where contact is made under conditions of coercion, conflict and inequality (Pratt 1992: 6). In the history of colonial encounters between the Inuit and Western explorers, European narratives about progress and civilization have been constructed in opposition to the ‘primitive nature’ of Indigenous peoples and traditions (Trigger 1989). Developed to rationalize European imperialism, colonial tropes reshaped the Great Chain of Being as a means for classifying cultural and racial diversity according to a hierarchical chain of racial being

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(Mawani 2010; McNiven and Russell 2005; Thobani 2004). Races were categorized by nineteenth-century Victorians in relation to their relative progress in ascending an imaginary ladder of ‘civilization’ (Beasley 2010; Francis 1998; Good 2011). Occurring in the shadow of this lingering colonial legacy, encounters between Adventure Canada’s passengers and the Inuit of Mittimatalik can be fraught with intense emotions and implicit values, reshaping the chronotope of encounter to one of settlement. Rewriting or rehearsing past colonial encounters, the chronotope of settlement serves to highlight the prioritization of passengers’ security, even as it brackets the ways in which the Inuit have been forced to settle in Mittimatalik.

Settling Adventure Canada’s Passengers By watching cultural performances that have been deliberately staged for their enjoyment, Adventure Canada’s passengers can appreciate ‘a great shindig’ thrown by Inuit villagers; they are no longer ‘depressed at the town’s dilapidated homes, an abandoned baby doll on the rocky shore,’ when the dance party in the community gym ‘yielded to a joyous kind of square dance, bringing together Inuit, tourists, and even a locally stationed Mountie’ (Rodrick 2018, writing about his experiences aboard the cruise for CNN Traveler). Buoyed by such celebrations of cross-cultural encounters, especially since they align with National Geographic’s images of the Inuit as smiling and colourful entertainers (Beaudreau 2002), passengers are made to feel a warm welcome during their visit. By prioritizing the emotional security of passengers, Adventure Canada reassures its travellers that these visits will ultimately lead to the Inuit community. By prioritizing the emotional security of passengers, Adventure Canada reassures its travellers that these visits will ultimately lead to the ‘making [of ] new friends along the way [as they] meet with local elders, school kids, community leaders – all eager to showcase their home’ (AC 2012: 9). While Adventure Canada’s culturalists aboard the Ocean Endeavour highlight how it is important, for Inuit communities, ‘to find ways to celebrate family, to celebrate community, to enjoy the music of our lives and the stories we tell each other’ (quoted in a write-up of the Adventure Canada cruise for USA Today’s 10Best, in Schrandt 2018), they also suggest that

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[t]he best things visitors can do is just acknowledge the responsibility you have to be a welcoming visitor. Sit down and listen. Step away from the need to fix things. Go farther than saying, ‘Oh my god, that’s so terrible,’ and say, ‘Okay, how do I learn more? How do I learn about these mechanisms that I benefit from?’ Even if it’s just one person, that person can go home and start to dismantle the system they benefit from. (quoted in Schrandt 2018)

Imparted by American journalists in their travel writing, such a message fuels a chronotope of settlement. Playing out on an affective register, this chronotope of settlement settles passengers’ potential anxieties over past traumas and crimes that the Inuit have suffered as a result of colonial regimes and settler cultures. They are excused from having to feel terrible in the moment by the possibility of future education. It is in this way that Adventure Canada generates a ‘feeling of security’ by reassuring and protecting, rather than by disturbing and worrying, its group of passengers (Delumeau 1989). In so doing, the tour company returns to the (European) origins of ‘security.’ Before the early modern period and its Hobbesian conception, the term denoted a psychological need and its fulfilment instead of a material or physical condition (Schneider 1991). Such a feeling of security, however, is enmeshed in a strategy of representation that Mary Louise Pratt (1992) calls ‘anti-conquest.’ Representations of anti-conquest allow bourgeois subjects—in Adventure Canada’s case, passengers of predominantly European descent and from Western countries (Insignia 2016)—to ‘secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert their European hegemony’ (Pratt 1992: 7). As the main protagonist of the anti-conquest, the ‘seeing-man’ passively looks out and possesses with his imperial eyes, even as he presumes himself innocent of the damage caused by imperial conquest in earlier historical periods. As contemporary versions of Pratt’s ‘seeing-man,’ Adventure Canada’s passengers see what they have been permitted to see by the tour company and the Inuit of Mittimatalik (LeTourneau 2018). Despite assuming the role of a ‘seeing man,’ the passengers are strikingly blind to the ways in which the Inuit have been settled in a colonial taxonomy that links European civilization and the superiority of white, liberal subjects, such as themselves, to the time of (future) progress, while

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relegating the ‘natives’ to a pre-modern past. In their brief, one-day encounter with the Inuit of Mittimatalik, the tourists will ‘learn about centuries of traditions, the impact of modernity in the north and how communities are searching for a balance of old and new’ (AC 2012: 9). The tour company’s description situates the Inuit community of Mittimatalik in a past that spans centuries, so enmeshed in tradition that it has yet to reconcile with the ‘impact of modernity’ and properly balance the old with ‘modern amenities such as satellite television’ (AC 2006). The implied primitiveness of the Inuit residents places them in closer and continual proximity to nature, so that Mittimatalik’s ‘fjords and floe edge are favoured camping and fishing areas for locals.’ While locals continue to live, subsist and hunt on the land, as they have for thousands of years, passengers treat ‘one of the most dramatic settings in the Arctic’ as ‘excellent sites for photographic opportunities’ (AC 2006). These guests become ‘cultured’ in their encounter with the Inuit by consuming Inuit culture (e.g., by buying Inuit carvings or handicrafts at the gift shop), but never unsettle the nature–culture dichotomy, or the asymmetrical power relations at the heart of their encounter.

Settling the Inuit In its itineraries and promotional material, Adventure Canada literally brackets the colonial legacy that has shaped Mittimatalik, identifying it as ‘Pond Inlet’ in parentheses beside the town’s original Inuktitut name. Pond Inlet was named by British explorer, John Ross, in 1818 after the English astronomer, John Pond. In the years that followed, the first white settlers in the town’s present location would call it Pond Inlet. Continued references to Pond Inlet, however, speak to a history of colonial nominalism in the high Arctic (Kulchyski 2005). Indigenous place names were replaced with those provided by foreign explorers, so that the blank spaces on British maps were not only redefined as terra nullius, but also subsequently identified only by the names of European ‘discoverers.’ As importantly, the bracketing of Pond Inlet shifts prospective tourists’ attention away from the town’s history of forced settlement. It puts aside the chronotope of settlement that has anchored the Inuit in place, as

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though it were supplemental information rather than the reason for why Mittimatalik exists in its current form. Like the Thule ancestors before them, the Inuit had been semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherers until the mid-­ twentieth century, living, hunting and travelling where the ice permitted them to go (Qikiqtani Inuit Association 2013a; see also Brody 2000). Their physical mobility was tied to spatiotemporal flows, which were, in turn, determined by the cyclical and seasonal fluctuations in sea ice. Their traditional way of life was significantly disrupted by Canadian policies that would force them to settle down in a single place over time. In the 1950s, Canadian policies ushered in intensive efforts to establish permanent settlements across the high Arctic (Kulchyski 2005), effectively immobilizing and containing the nomadic Inuit.24 Grounded in emerging Cold War national security concerns, these colonially inflected policies were put in place to defend put in place to defend Canada’s Arctic sovereignty against territorial claims made by the Soviet Union, by refuting the notion that the region was terra nullius. Pointing to the Inuit, the Canadian government argued that people had lived on the land for millennia and continued to do so, including Inuit children who were enrolled in residential schools and hostels. From 1962 to 1970, the Federal Hostel at Pond Inlet separated children from their experiences of being Inuk25 and compelled nomadic Inuit adults to move into the Pond Inlet settlement. In doing so, the residential school unsettled and destabilized the Inuit’s traditional way of life, their cultural identity and the legitimacy of their worldview. In 1965, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer described how the residential school unexpectedly changed Inuit mobility patterns: The only foreseen problem in the immediate future […] will be the mass migration from the [nomadic Inuit] camps to the settlements. This has been quite noticeable this year in Pond Inlet […]. This is brought about mainly by the parents wishing to be close to their children, when they leave the camps to attend school in the settlement. Because of the close-knit Eskimo family, this will continue to be a problem, and in the future, I would imagine a very great one. This past year a whole camp moved into the settlement, the only reason given, to be close to their children attending school. (quoted in Qikiqtani Inuit Association 2013b: 20)

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By introducing emotional, cultural and psychological threats to Inuit identity and family relationships, the Canadian government put the Inuit in place at Pond Inlet, and also put the Inuit in their place, according to the operation of a colonial taxonomy of race. Today, Mittimatalik can still be characterized as a chronotope of settlement for its Inuit inhabitants, since they are now additionally stuck in place as an effect of anthropogenic climate change. Bound to the cyclical and seasonal fluctuations in ice, as both land and water, the Inuit treat the ice as a ‘highway’ that connects communities, and as an ‘extension of the land’ in their pursuit of animals over vast distances (Wright 2014: 9). Warming surface and ocean temperatures, however, have made it more dangerous to move on and across the ice, restricting the ability of Inuit to travel in time (e.g., by shortening the months during which the ice is as solid as land) and space (e.g., by shortening the distances that can be travelled safely). Attentive to the ways in which climate change is restricting their mobility and threatening their traditional way of life, Inuit leaders have made a legal case in the international arena that they have ‘the right to be cold’ (Watt-­ Cloutier 2015). That is, anthropogenic climate change presents risks that violate the human rights of the Inuit people, by severely disrupting their ‘use and enjoyment of [the] land and ice that they have traditionally used and occupied in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions’ (Inuit Circumpolar Council, quoted in Wright 2014: 246). Thus, the uneven distribution of mobility between cruise passengers and Inuit inhabitants in Pond Inlet, and by extension the Arctic, is haunted by a history of colonial policies, taxonomies and practices, which now amplify the immobilizing effects of climate change in the region. The melting Arctic sea ice compels the once-nomadic Inuit to physically settle in the face of ecological insecurities, while enabling affluent passengers to cruise through the Northwest Passage with a feeling of security.

F rozen: Paying Respects in the Wake of the Doomed Franklin Expedition Located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Beechey Island was the site of multiple significant events in the history of Arctic exploration, becoming a convergence point for all those who travelled to the

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Arctic in search of the lost Franklin expedition. While John Franklin presided over two Arctic disasters, the first occurring during his first Arctic command between 1819 and 1821 when only 6 of his 16 men survived, it is his 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage that has been remembered as the largest Arctic disaster in exploration history (Craciun 2016). Motivated to fill in one of the last blank spaces on the map, Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage was aimed at discovering a more efficient trade route to Asia, while also demonstrating Britain’s newfound status as a dominant colonial power in the nineteenth century (Hatfield 2016). On the morning of May 19, 1845, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror set sail from Greenhithe, England, under the command of Franklin, on a voyage to discover an uncharted section of the Northwest Passage. After spending a winter on Beechey Island, both captain and 129 crewmembers disappeared upon entering Baffin Bay on July 26, 1845, never to be seen alive again. Offering a tale with new heights of suffering and whispers of forbidden crimes, such as murder and British cannibalism,26 the Franklin disaster became a mystery that sustained the next hundred years of recovery voyages (Potter 2016; Watson 2017). The Franklin mystery also reveals how the (Western) world continues to imagine the Canadian Arctic through the eyes of nineteenth-century colonial explorers (Craciun 2016). The Franklin exploration narrative visualized and mythologized the North as a harsh, ominous landscape of snow and ice, where human survival was precarious and a traveller’s (physical and psychological) security was constantly under threat by hostile natural forces (Sandlos 2001). Overwhelmed by the coldness of the Arctic snowscape, visitors to the Arctic perished in what Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1897: 389) called the ‘empty waste of white.’ Since the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, (southern) explorers have repeatedly returned to the Northwest Passage, treating it as a crime scene that haunts both the imagination and the Arctic. They have looked for traces of Franklin’s men, finding some of their dead bodies on Beechey Island. Discovered in 1850, three graves populate the otherwise uninhabited Beechey Island. Its occupants are described as eternally locked up in a ‘Polar dungeon’ (Parsons 1857: 70) and ‘chained up by the Polar Spirit’ (Simmonds 1852: 196). Imprisoned by the ice and consequently, ‘frozen in time’ (Beattie and

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Geiger 1988, 1998), the three graves have since been designated as not only a tourist attraction, but also as evidence that can solve the Franklin mystery (Potter 2016). For us, these graves are signs of a static chronotope. More specifically, we argue that a frozen chronotope characterizes the Arctic icescape associated with Franklin’s expedition, one that immobilizes human bodies in both space and time. For sailors accustomed to the never-ending motion of the sea, the stillness of Arctic ice—that which trapped Franklin’s ships near King William Island for over eighteen months—destroyed them (Wiebe 2003). Accustomed to mobility, these human explorers were forced into motionlessness at a place far removed from the warm centres of (European) civilization. Analogized as a prison, the Arctic ice is imagined as a permanent container: it separates humans from the rest of society and can also ‘break’ great men, such as Franklin (Atwood 2017). While the stability of Arctic ice belongs to the Holocene, along with the frozen chronotope of insecurity that it inspires, Adventure Canada’s expedition capitalizes on this way of seeing polar ice, even though its travel is made possible by the melting and thinning sea ice associated with the Anthropocene.27 Deliberately stopping at Beechey Island, Adventure Canada’s one-directional voyage into the Northwest Passage locates the heart of the mythic Passage in the doomed Franklin expedition. The Ocean Endeavour travels to the historical crime scene at the climax of the tour company’s itinerary. What was once a graveyard of Victorian explorers becomes a destination for Adventure Canada’s group of adventurous, well-financed passengers (Mulvaney 2019). Amateur historians aboard the ship are ‘eager to retrace Franklin’s footsteps’ all the way to ‘the island where the Franklin expedition began its descent into hell’ (Discovery 2017). Described as the place where the historic graves of the doomed Franklin expedition ‘stand watch’ (AC 2016: 2), Beechey Island becomes the site at which passengers ‘pay [their] respects’ (AC 2017: 2, 2018: 3). The emphasis on ‘paying respects’ at the Franklin grave site suggests the operation of a mediator in the frozen chronotope: the ancestor. While Arctic ice fixes time and space, the region is also frozen in a past that has not passed, as both the present and future unfold ‘in the wakes of Franklin’ (AC 2019/20: 5). Paying respects to the Beechey Island stand-ins for Franklin (whose body has yet to be found) amounts

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to paying homage to the ancestral figure who has become synonymous with Arctic exploration (Neatby and Mercer 2018). Further, it serves to recognize Franklin as an ancestral ‘Canadian.’ While all places are ‘haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not’ (De Certeau 1984: 108), the spirit of Franklin is invoked in the creation of Canada’s mythic past—in this case, by a Canadian-­ owned and operated tour company, such as Adventure Canada, with ties to the Canadian government.28 Despite being a British naval officer, Franklin himself has been transformed into both a Canadian icon (Atwood 2017) and victim (Grace 2002). As part of a ‘haunting inheritance’ (McCorristine 2013), Canada has adopted Franklin as an ancestor for the purpose of staking territorial claims in the Arctic. As the Arctic ice retreats due to human-induced climate change, the Canadianization of Franklin is tied to Canada’s claim to Arctic sovereignty, as the Northwest Passage becomes disputed territory between nations trying to secure the right to access and control it (Borgerson 2008; Carnaghan and Goody 2006; Gerhardt et al. 2010; Huebert 2003; Lackenbauer 2011). By tracing Canada’s origins and history back to an Arctic genealogy, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper took ownership over Franklin and his expedition, launching in 2008 a major effort to find the wrecks of Terror and Erebus. Upon the Canadian search team’s discovery of Erebus in 2014, Harper (2014) declared that ‘Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history given that his expeditions, which took place nearly 200  years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.’ With the Terror found in 2016, this new chapter in the ongoing search for the lost Franklin expedition is written into Adventure Canada’s itinerary. The tour company now promises passengers the opportunity to ‘[s]ail the waters where the Franklin’s ships…were discovered’ (AC 2018: 4). In 2019, Adventure Canada’s passengers became the first visitors to visit the Erebus wreck site, watching as underwater archaeologists retrieved artefacts from the unseen ship below on a day where ice was nowhere to be seen (Mulvaney 2019). And while the absence of ice in the Anthropocene seems to signal a stark departure from the abundance of immobilizing ice in the nineteenth century, the Franklin artefacts are part of the ‘living history’ of Canada’s Arctic genealogy (AC 2016: 2, 2017: 2, 2018: 3). Indeed, the past becomes a historical

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gift that keeps on giving. All future, yet-to-be-discovered artefacts from the Franklin wrecks are considered ‘historical gifts’ to be transferred from Her Majesty’s Government of the UK to the Government of Canada (Parks Canada 2018). Thus, the investigation ‘to unravel the mystery of the Franklin expedition’ continues (Parks Canada 2018), by prioritizing a frozen chronotope. Enmeshed in a backward-looking approach, not unlike that of the classical detective (Chap. 3), the chronotope formed around the lost Franklin expedition is oriented towards the past. Even recent reassemblages in space and time at the shipwreck sites are bound by the desire to solve a past crime, whether that crime is perpetrated by humans (e.g., murder and cannibalism) or nature (e.g., the inhospitable Arctic conditions that make possible starvation and human death). Bound by the weight of history and (re)shaped by national security concerns raised by the race to claim Arctic sovereignty, the sites touched by the Franklin expedition are revisited by Adventure Canada’s passengers. While the Ocean Endeavour, unlike Franklin’s wooden ships, has more sophisticated navigational tools and powerful engines to guide it through the Northwest Passage, it follows the path of voyages that were predicated upon colonial expansion and exploration. As the Franklin expedition tried to cut through the ice in the name of trade and imperial expansion (Lanone 2013), the Ocean Endeavour cuts through the ice today for the sake of tourism and capitalist consumption, allowing its passengers to triumph where Franklin ultimately failed.

Conclusion Disembarking from a cruise into the Northwest Passage, we reflect upon how the passenger’s journey was constructed as a sequence of Arctic ‘highlights’ by a tour operator. As the Arctic is being materially and physically reformed by the effects of climate change in the age of the Anthropocene, it is a criminal anthroposcene worth seeing by last chance tourists aboard expedition cruises. To the extent that the Anthropocene creates multiple chronotopes with multipolar time–space configurations (Pratt 2017), we have engaged in a chronotope analysis of a cruise

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itinerary that takes passengers deep into the Canadian Arctic. As constructed in the itinerary, the Arctic is an assemblage of small, situated chronotopes of (in)security, heavily shaped by the forces of climate change and colonialism. Exemplary of a landscape of entanglement, in which time is knotted with space, and human-induced climate change is interwoven with imperial dreams, the Arctic is both a space of beginnings and endings. It is a site at which we can trace the origins of the Anthropocene to the slow violence of European colonization, which arrived on Canadian Arctic shores in tandem with colonial exploration. When we consider the long-term decline of sea ice in the region, we note that the future Arctic is currently being (re)moulded by the slow violence of anthropogenic climate change, generating new fears about the end-of-the-world-as-weknow-it as well as new opportunities. In this chapter, these emerging insecurities and opportunities converge in the rise of Arctic cruise tourism, as overlapping chronotopes arise from the ways in which space and time flow through the Arctic ice. Between melting and freezing, chronotopes of (in)security appear. While the chronotope of zero heralds an apocalyptic time of zero ice at Ilulissat, concerns about the Anthropocene gradually disappear as passengers are returned to a Holocene-bred imaginary once the ship moves towards and into the Northwest Passage. There, chronotopes of safari and settlement ground passengers’ encounters with humans and nonhumans in colonially inflected practices, narratives and tropes. In so doing, they rehearse and reify a separation between nature and culture and, as such, enact the ethos underlying Holocene-bred security thinking (Harrington and Shearing 2017). Finally, a frozen chronotope characterizes passengers’ visit to the ruins of the Franklin expedition. At the site of the largest and most memorable disaster in Arctic exploration, (southern) visitors are reminded of Nature’s threat and hostility to human explorers. Passengers of expedition cruises triumph in their mobility where once John Franklin—described with great admiration by Joseph Conrad (1924/2010: 9) as the most ‘dominating figure among the seamen explorers of the first half of the nineteenth century’—became immobilized by the ice. Although the Arctic’s empire of ice once rendered seafarers motionless, it is now itself imaginatively frozen in the time of nineteenth-­ century colonial exploration. In short, Adventure Canada’s promotional

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material represents the Arctic—its purity and its threat—according to Holocene-bred assumptions that reduce Nature to a backdrop for human drama. Passengers, in turn, are encouraged to see the Arctic through nineteenth-century imperial eyes. As the amateur explorers aboard the Ocean Endeavour follow in the wake of historically significant colonial expeditions, these last chance tourists repeat the voyages of those ‘first’ European ‘discoverers’ of the Northwest Passage, appropriating not only the colonial emphasis on discovery, but also its representation of untouched frontiers. In effect, the cruise itinerary spatializes an inverted version of time’s arrow, so that passengers—motivated by the last chance scenarios of the Anthropocene— ultimately (re)discover the security of Holocene-like conditions. While living in the Anthropocene might demand that we acknowledge our status as crewmembers on ‘Spaceship Earth’ (Harari 2014; Harrington et al. 2017; McLuhan 1974), there are those who continue to experience life as though they were still living under the stable conditions of the Holocene. Their affluence affords them the privilege of travelling the world—and more specifically in this chapter, the Northwest Passage—as secure passengers. Their security and safety are prioritized by the ship’s crewmembers, so that they can remain carefree. For these passengers, the Arctic is reduced to a timeless stage awaiting their arrival, where they can thrillingly discover glaciers, graves, wildlife and Inuit—albeit at an aesthetic distance. This aesthetic distance is maintained because it is the ‘safe’ distance from which to view the Arctic’s inhabitants. Normatively informed by a Eurocentric, hierarchical ordering of life as well as by Holocene-bred security thinking, ‘safe zones’ are created for people (to capture glaciers and polar bears through their camera lenses) and for ecosystems (in the designation of conservation areas). This spatiotemporal logic of containment works to also fix people (the Inuit in particular) into settlements, as well as affectively settle passengers. Negative emotions are contained, so that passengers are reassured that they need not bear any overwhelming anxiety over the ongoing effects of colonization and climate change in the region. Whether security takes the form of reassurance (Delumeau 1989), or entails striving towards a mode of timelessness, the will to secure ‘bespeaks a desire to fix or set in place that which is shifting and shifty, constantly in motion’ (Hamilton 2013: 27). Thus, in our case study, the

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Arctic’s inhabitants have been set in place as port attractions, while passengers retain the privilege of mobility; passengers’ socioeconomic mobilities enable their geographical and physical mobilities, freeing them from the possibility of being frozen in place. Cruising comfortably, with continued reassurances of their safety during their voyage through the Northwest Passage, these passengers are blind to their own collective agency as an important geo-force, at least partially responsible for the ecological devastation that they desire to consume. In this chapter, we treat the passenger as a metaphoric figure par excellence for considering security in the Anthropocene. By living in time—as defined in the short term as tourist time—rather than in weather, the passenger was secure in the sense of being without concern or being removed from having to care. Insofar as there will always be a class of passengers on ‘Spaceship Earth’—that is, people who cannot or otherwise refuse to be a crewmember—how might they be enabled to care? After all, carefree passengers do not necessarily need to be careless. In addressing the formation of an ethics of care, some scholars have pointed to the value of taking into consideration Indigenous cosmologies, which have long emphasized the webs of relationships drawn between humans and nonhumans in interdependent communities (e.g., Harrington and Shearing 2017; Rose 2017; Todd 2015; Valverde 2017). We echo these sentiments: we encourage efforts aimed at decolonizing the way human– nonhuman relationships are conceived and support the proper crediting of object-oriented ontologies, some of which have been used in this book, to Indigenous thinking (Todd 2016). However, as non-Indigenous scholars, we do not feel as though we are in a position to do justice to Indigenous thought and its nuances. As a result, we turn in this conclusion to thinking about an ethics of care in terms of attention. Care can compel us to act responsibly in relation to others (Harrington and Shearing 2017). But before we can demonstrate caring, we must first learn to attend to things that we might otherwise not care about. We must learn, or perhaps relearn, how to live out in weather, by caring about its long-term rhythms rather than short-term pleasures and profits. Care is a product of being attuned to the world as it is, rather than as it has been imagined. And it is this noticing that can also attune us to worlds otherwise. The humble yet difficult practice of noticing can make

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visible worlds that have been ignored or damaged in the name of progress (Gan et  al. 2017). In our chronotope analysis, we demonstrated how such noticing entails attending to the contradictory tensions held within a single chronotope. Like the hybridity that shapes Frankenstein’s monster, a chronotope can entangle life and death—progress and extinction—in the collision of past, present and future. Here, noticing attunes us to monstrous ghosts, for they point the way (Gan et al. 2017). While Adventure Canada returns passengers to a historical past that valorizes colonial exploration, our chronotope analysis has made visible the ghosts that haunt their port excursions, so that the ghosts of colonization trouble the chronotopes of settlement and safari. Such careful attention to ghosts, however, is not meant to solely be an academic, analytical activity. Rather, it is the basis for a relational, ethical response that can be lured out of us, as we encounter and hold ourselves responsible for both human and nonhuman others (Rose 2017). In this ethics of care, we focus our attention on the entanglements, and not separations, that bring together nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, and time and space. By seeing landscapes of entanglement as they appear, concern is directed towards the lived experiences of insecurity that emerge at the intersection of colonialism and climate change. By attending to ghosts, one follows the tracks, traces and clues of a past that should not be forgotten, not necessarily in an effort to preserve a particular past and securely remove it from the contingencies of time. Rather, one experiences and lives with the ghosts and unpredictable ‘winds of the Anthropocene’ (Gan et  al. 2017: G1) in defiance of perfect security. In the name of security, violence has been done to human and nonhuman others in ways that have placed cruelty and hubris at the heart of human exceptionalism, ultimately stripping us of our humility. Once we voluntarily remove ourselves from the top of the Great Chain of Being, we can notice the complexities and mutualities of our entangled existence. As humble beings chained to other living beings on Earth, we can act without the hubris of the colonial explorers before us, or even Frankenstein’s creator. We can carefully notice and relate to others in landscapes of entanglement, caring as much about how we see as what we can see, whether for the first or last time.

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Notes 1. Because perfect security is understood as an unattainable state (Zedner 2009), or a state only attainable in death (Hamilton 2013), security tends to also imply insecurity. Even when one appears more visibly than the other, security and insecurity are invoked simultaneously. For this reason, we refer to (in)security in our analysis of chronotopes. 2. European explorers have staged their ‘discovery’ of the ruins of ancient civilizations. These stagings have functioned as powerful tropes within imperial travel and exploration writings (Pratt 1992). Enticing global tourists to follow the footsteps of European ‘discoverers,’ such colonial travel narratives have been consistently reproduced by tourism promoters from Southeast Asia to Central America (e.g., Tegelberg 2010). 3. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman (1959), there is an extensive body of literature in critical tourism studies that explores the role of the stage (e.g., MacCannell 1973) and how performances are produced and staged within tourist spaces (e.g., Edensor 2000, 2001). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage with this literature, it is worth noting that most of the scholarly attention to staging practices in tourism studies has centred on encounters between human actors (e.g., the tourists and hosts that meet and form perceptions of one another in tourist space). In this chapter, we have complicated the stage, as a conceptual metaphor, by drawing attention to the role played by nonhuman actors in the staging of tourism. 4. Elsewhere, Holley and Shearing (2017) have argued that the Anthropocene requires a fundamental rethinking of safety and security, following Shearing’s (2015) proposal to reconfigure criminology as security-ology in its engagements with the Anthropocene (for a critique of Shearing’s proposal, see Floyd 2015). We make no claims about the centrality of security-­ology or security studies for the future of criminology in this chapter. Instead, we examine chronotopic representations of (in) security as they relate to a tour operator’s marketing of passenger security aboard an Arctic cruise. We recognize that this is a very specific assemblage of image and narrative in relation to Arctic (in)security. However, we prefer to proceed by way of a concrete analysis rather than by theoretical generalization because theory alone is not an adequate substitute for empirical analysis.

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5. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider how climate security has emerged in contemporary geopolitics as a response to living in the Anthropocene (see, e.g., Dalby 2014, 2016). This chapter is also not focused on the definition or governance of environmental security (see, e.g., Brisman et al. 2018; Floyd 2015; Holley and Shearing 2017; Holley et al. 2018). 6. While tourists have long been motivated by a desire to visit vulnerable and vanishing attractions, tourism scholars and promoters have only recently turned their attention to how such interest has been heightened by global warming and the impacts of anthropogenic climate change (Dawson et al. 2011). 7. For example, Last Chance to See was a BBC radio documentary series written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Broadcast in 1989, it followed the two men as they travelled to various remote locations in search of encounters with species facing extinction. The notion of a ‘last chance to see’ was further explored in an accompanying book and a follow-up television series. 8. AC is used as a shorthand reference to Adventure Canada. 9. To our knowledge, these are the six major cruise line operators that currently offer trips to the Canadian Arctic: Adventure Canada (with passengers aboard the Ocean Endeavour), Silversea (Silver Cloud), Compagnie du Ponant (Le Boreal), National Geographic Expeditions (National Geographic Explorer), One Ocean Expeditions (Resolute), Aurora Expeditions (Greg Mortimer) and Quark Expeditions (Ultramarine). 10. By 2009, it was estimated that the cruise tourism industry had experienced an 1800% rate of growth since 1970, with a vast majority of ­leisure-­based travel in the polar regions taking place aboard cruise vessels (Lück et al. 2010). 11. A representative from Adventure Canada currently sits on the executive committee of the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators (https://www.aeco.no/about-aeco/) 12. Methodologically, close textual readings are unable to capture what a tour operator might actually discuss with actual passengers aboard the cruise. As such, these readings are most suited for demonstrating how the tour operator promotes its cruise to prospective passengers. 13. Produced by the Discovery Channel and also broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel (US), and Quest (UK), Mighty Cruise Ships featured the Ocean Endeavour in episode 5 of its second season in 2017.

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14. Expedition cruise line operators, such as Adventure Canada, can be differentiated from luxury cruise line operators, such as the former Crystal Serenity. Expedition cruises tend to operate with a smaller number of human passengers and with a potentially different fuel source. In 2019, the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators, for instance, banned its members from using and carrying heavy fuel oil (HFO) in the Arctic (Sevunts 2019). This self-imposed ban comes ahead of the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 ban on the use and carriage of HFO by ships operating in the Arctic. Accounting for 80% of all fuels used in maritime shipping (ICCT 2017), HFO is the dirtiest and cheapest marine fuel. Not only is it toxic, its extreme viscosity means that it breaks down more slowly in marine environments than other fuels, especially in colder regions like the Arctic. 15. Nowhere in Adventure Canada’s promotion does it suggest that the Northwest Passage is a risky environment to traverse because of the region’s lack of maritime infrastructure. While placing emphasis on shifting sea ice and weather conditions allows Adventure Canada to align itself with the historical concerns of Arctic explorers, in whose footsteps they purportedly follow, it a disingenuous marketing manoeuvre that sidesteps other risks in the Canadian Arctic, some of which may be connected to Adventure Canada’s cruising. As Bourquin (2015) has noted, travel in Canadian Arctic waters comes with overlapping insecurities: of the 10% of Canadian Arctic waters that have been charted, the existing charts have been deemed unsafe and dated. Support services, such as navigation aids, telecommunications and oil spill response plans, are minimal even though they are required for safe shipping in the region. Currently, bandwidth capabilities to accommodate reliable and safe maritime communication are inadequate. These issues ought to be foremost in Adventure Canada’s planning, given their disastrous 2010 outing into the Northwest Passage. In 2010, the Adventure Canada ship, carrying 128 passengers and 69 crewmembers, hit an underwater rock shelf near Kugluktuk, Nunavut. The company was fined nearly half a million dollars in 2017 for environmental damage caused by the breach of 13 tanks, carrying fuel, water and sludge, during the incident. In response, Adventure Canada attempted, rather unsuccessfully, to sue the Canadian government for $13 million over what they claimed was ‘a blank spot on the map’—namely, the unmarked shelf that their ship hit (Thompson 2018). Discovered in 2007, the rock shelf had yet to make it the ship’s

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charts. As an increasing number of vessels travel the Northwest Passage, including a growing number of commercial cruise ships in addition to cargo ships and tankers, the lack of maritime infrastructure, particularly in relation to oil spill response, creates potentially devastating ecological risks in the region. 16. In physics, the black hole is a zero in the equations of general relativity, and the energy of the vacuum is a zero in the mathematics of quantum theory. The Big Bang—the origins of the universe as well as the clue to the future of the universe—is notably a zero in both theories (Seife 2000). 17. For example, we can consider the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Not long after the attacks, the office of former mayor of New York City, Rudolf Giuliani, explained that the site of the World Trade Center’s destruction (i.e., ‘ground zero’ in the terrorist attacks) ‘was a crime scene, not a tourist attraction’ (quoted in Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett 2003: 12), and banned amateur photographers from documenting the ruins. 18. Greenland Tourism is not alone in thinking about climate change in tandem with nuclear threats. For example, the Doomsday Clock was set at two minutes to midnight in 2019 and reset to 100 seconds to midnight in 2020, in light of the twin threats of climate change and nuclear warfare to planetary security (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2019, 2020). 19. On the 24-hour clock, zero hour marks midnight, which functions as the end of one day and the beginning of the next. This measurement of clock time is also expressed in military time, continental time, railway time and the international standard notation of time. 20. As another Arctic expedition tour, Adventure Canada ran excursions explicitly titled ‘Arctic Safari.’ 21. The polar bear encounter is also crucial to the design of an Arctic safari tour by rival company, Arctic Kingdom. Arctic Kingdom has named its numerous Arctic safari tours in relation to polar bears, such as ‘Polar bear mother and newborn cubs’ safari, ‘Spring polar bears and icebergs of Baffin’ safari, ‘Polar bears and glaciers of Baffin Island’ safari, ‘Polar bear migration fly-in’ safari and ‘Nanuvik polar bear cabin migration’ safari, among others. 22. The guns are not simply ornamental accessories for the bear monitor. They have been used to protect humans from polar bears, demonstrating the lengths that cruise operators will go to protect passengers against the

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wildlife they have come to see. In July 2018, a polar bear was shot dead by a polar bear monitor working for a cruise ship visiting Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago in Norway. Upon landing to scout the area, one polar bear guard was attacked and injured by a polar bear, justifying the second guard to kill the bear in an act of self-defence. Photographs of the dead polar bear were circulated online, prompting criticism of Arctic wildlife tourism (Associated Press 2018). 23. Dawson et al. (2011) have observed how last chance tourism emphasizes large, charismatic species. This draws attention away from less charismatic species, such as the Arctic cod, even though these species are critically endangered and closer to extinction than some charismatic megafauna. 24. For a critical account of the Canadian government’s policy towards the Inuit during this period and its enduring legacy for Inuit families, see Tester and Kulchyski (1994). 25. Speaking to the Qikiqtani Inuit Association (2013b: 29) about his experiences as a child in Pond Inlet, Kaujak Kanajak recalls: ‘We weren’t allowed to draw dogs or tell stories about them, anything that had something to do with being Inuk, about iglus or anything, as soon as we came [to Pond Inlet].’ 26. In response to John Rae’s (1875) account of British cannibalism among members of the Franklin crew, Charles Dickens (1854: 362) argued, without any evidence, that ‘no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves.’ So incomprehensible was the possibility of cannibalism among British crewmembers that Dickens began a mythic reimagining of the Inuit as cannibalistic Others, so as to not tarnish the Franklin expedition as a powerful symbol of empire. The legacy of Dickens’ negative stereotyping of the Inuit has been devastating (McGoogan 2017). 27. While Arctic sea ice undergoes temporal and spatial fluxes from summer to winter, it is, on average, in long-term decline due to climate change’s effects (Serreze 2011; Stroeve et  al. 2007; Vardy 2014). In its Arctic Report Card for 2019, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency scientists registered the second highest levels of decline in the extent and thickness of sea ice cover since they began keeping satellite records of Arctic ice cover in 1978 (NOAA 2019). 28. Adventure Canada lists Parks Canada as a partner (https://www.adventurecanada.com/partnerships).

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7 Conclusion Anita Lam

The main task of this book has been to introduce and develop the concept of criminal anthroposcene. For us, criminal anthroposcenes are constituted by and represent the entangled relationships between crime scenes and scenes of anthropogenic climate change. While crime scenes have been primarily visualized through media images as disastrous scenes of spectacular human-on-human violence, they can be drawn on top of other less visible, or even invisible, forms of slow violence that characterize the harmful happenings of the Anthropocene. Those non-linear trajectories of environmental harm, including harm to nonhumans whether in animal or ice form, can gradually morph into the suspicion of criminal activities or wrongdoings. While thinking and writing about scenes is not exactly unfamiliar territory in cultural criminology, thinking through scenes—or scene thinking—enables us to document the ways in which humans, nonhumans, institutions, texts, sites and images have been contingently brought together in loosely bound, heterogeneous assemblages that can be given the name ‘criminal anthroposcene.’ As a way of seeing the world, scene thinking—or more precisely, thinking in terms of criminal anthroposcenes—allows us to see how the effects that make up the Anthropocene are mediated through optical technologies, such as the camera, and © The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_7

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scaling activities, such as those that stage scenes for particular audiences. To make sense of the shifting stages and multiple scalar logics at work in producing these scenes for mass consumption, we have taken cues from scenography: we pay attention to how criminal anthroposcenes have been shaped by lighting, performances and the physical locations of stages; we examine criminal anthroposcenes as they have been made by and for a general public, which includes readers (of crime fiction and tabloid news), social media users and tourists. In light of the elasticity of scene thinking, however, we have not provided a static definition of criminal anthroposcene, preferring to show rather than tell readers what we mean by the term. Using the term, we explore the morphing of crime scenes into climate scenes, and vice versa across different case studies, all of which highlight how the Arctic is rapidly being transformed by anthropogenic climate change. We set our criminal anthroposcenes in the Arctic or in sub-Arctic areas to encourage criminologists to extend their analytic gaze to the Far North, and away from their conventional areas of focus—namely, the streetscapes of major cities that have been central to the Global North. Because the northern polar region is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the Earth, its ice has been rapidly melting in unprecedented ways. With the loss of albedo, the long-term decline of ice in the Arctic is associated with a chain of feedback loops and knock-on effects that will alter the rest of the planet, such as the global rise in sea levels, increased ocean acidification and significant release of greenhouse gases. As Arctic icescapes begin to vanish, these northern climate scenes intersect with our imagination of crime scenes, especially as they are shaped by the overlapping forces of spectacular and slow violence. Let us review some of the key ways in which criminal anthroposcenes have been studied in each chapter, followed by a few more future-oriented reflections. Chapter 1 discusses the polar bear jail in Churchill, Manitoba, as a criminal anthroposcene, where polar bears are implicitly treated as criminals and incarcerated in the name of conservation, even though their offending behaviours are a consequence of declining sea ice. In Chap. 2, we juxtapose the explosive ending of a seminal gangster film White Heat with the melting of permafrost in northern Siberia, in order to explore how the underworld—imagined as a source of criminal gangs in both

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Hollywood film and criminological study—can be studied anew in the Anthropocene as a dirty site full of vibrant matter. In Chap. 3, we examine how crime scenes have been photographed by police and news photographers during a period that roughly coincides with the first stage of the Anthropocene. When viewing photographs of murder, our forensic gaze has been trained, through a combination of criminalistics and classical detective fiction, to look for and scrutinize the human body at the crime scene, failing to see how the body lies amidst anthropogenic environmental degradation. Using an AI detective, Chap. 3 experimentally draws out the anthropogenic fog of darkness that has characterized crime scene photography, deploying computer vision to re-view images that have shaped the contours of our current popular imagination of crime. While Chap. 3 revolves around seeing the Anthropocene in crime scenes, Chap. 4 uses the AI detective to trace how climate scenes are increasingly photographed in ways that borrow from the aesthetic vocabulary of representing crime. Not only are polar bears represented as ideal, nonhuman victims of the ‘invisible’ crime of climate change during the second stage of the Anthropocene, sick bears are visualized in accordance with an emerging noir aesthetic. This noir aesthetic has been central to Deborah Bird Rose’s (2013) argument that we are now living in the Anthropocene noir, experiencing the ecological ruins of a world-we-once-knew as though we were the classic protagonists of films noir and dark tourists. Dark tourism is explored in relation to iceberg consumption in Chap. 5. Travelling to Iceberg Alley to capture the deaths of icebergs, ‘sophisticated’ consumers photograph these nonhuman death spectacles through a ‘pure’ tourist gaze, and consume iceberg water in their search for preindustrial purity. Yet iceberg consumption is an emerging criminal anthroposcene: it is a scene made by anthropogenic climate change, including the effects associated with global warming and the carbon footprints of iceberg tourists and iceberg water producers; it entails the commodification of an anthropogenic effect (i.e., the accelerated thawing of glaciers and icebergs) by appealing to an ethos that marks the beginning of the Anthropocene—namely, the desire and search for purity. Like Chap. 5, Chap. 6 examines tourists as geo-forces that both produce and consume ecocide. In this case, passengers travel through the Northwest Passage aboard cruises, motivated to see the Arctic’s icescapes before they

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vanish. Even as the Arctic is being reshaped by the effects of global warming, it is sold to prospective last chance tourists as a criminal anthroposcene, frozen in the imagination by Holocene-bred understandings of (in)security, and still seen through the eyes of nineteenth-century European explorers with imperial agendas. On these voyages, the present Arctic is shaped by the threat of climate change in a future that has yet to pass and colonialism in a past that has not passed. To make visible the enduring power of Eurocentric narratives to shape and stage Arctic exploration, we date, in this chapter, the beginning of the Anthropocene to the colonization of the Americas. In so doing, we highlight how the slow violence of colonialism, with its attendant, hidden ‘crimes,’ can amplify the insecurities associated with human-induced climate change in the (Canadian) Arctic. Across these chapters, we analyze the representation, production and consumption of specifically situated criminal anthroposcenes. We offer these examples because we hope that the concept of criminal anthroposcene will enrichen and sharpen the intellectual toolbox used by green-­ cultural and visual criminologists, especially when it comes to analysing mediated images and narratives of environmental harms. Our study of criminal anthroposcenes has been centrally concerned with the ways we see or fail to see, and as such, it includes some theoretical and methodological tools for attending to intersecting representations of crime and anthropogenic climate change. Here, we review two of the book’s key themes in relation to their theoretical and methodological implications for expanding the criminological imagination. One key theme has been the inclusion of nonhumans in our criminological analyses. In this book, we treat nonhumans as vibrant agents that have their own propensities, competencies, mobilities and trajectories, which can intersect, overlap and collide with our own. This inclusion is not meant to simply be an additive gesture—another and that we insert into examinations of mediated crime-images. Rather, our call to include nonhumans requires not only a recognition that they are participants in our processes of meaning-­ making (as our AI detective was in Chaps. 3 and 4), but also a dissolution of the binary logic of representation that underlies criminological aesthetics. The binary distinctions between nonhumans/humans and Nature /Culture, for instance, are destabilized in the Anthropocene: the separation between humans and nature no longer makes sense in light of the

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entanglements of Earthlings with each other, and the Earth system in which they live (Harrington et al. 2017; Holley and Shearing 2017). To understand landscapes of entanglement (Gan et  al. 2017), in which humans and nonhumans encounter each other and are assembled together into criminal anthroposcenes, we need to see nonhumans in similar analytic terms to the ways that we see humans. To that end, we borrow the principle of symmetry, first introduced in Science and Technology Studies, in order to place nonhumans on the same conceptual footing as humans (Chap. 5). Nonhumans are conceived as performative, animate protagonists that are as capable of action as their cultured, human counterparts. Nonhumans, such as ice, are not inanimate, uninteresting matter; rather, they are made of the same vibrant, vital stuff as humans (Bennett 2010). By claiming that humans and nonhumans are made of the same stuff, it compels us to care about the deaths of lively nonhumans because we can no longer presume that they are already ‘dead.’ Such an ecological sensibility also encourages us to methodologically flatten the world, so that our analyses move horizontally through juxtapositions and comparisons rather than vertically through hierarchies of being, such as the Great Chain of Being (Chap. 6). In exploring criminal anthroposcenes, nonhuman actors are materially and imaginatively foregrounded. For example, we consider how ice is the material through which space and time flow in the Arctic, giving rise to multiple chronotopes (Chap. 6). Defined as spatiotemporalities, these chronotopes entangle space and time into its own hybrid assemblage, demonstrating how other kinds of entanglements can dissolve the traditional binary distinctions that have been used to make sense of our world. Throughout the book, we have also not separated fiction from nonfiction in our criminal anthroposcenes—treating the fictional Sherlock Holmes, for instance, as an influential figure in criminalistics, on par with the other ‘fathers’ of criminalistics, such as Edmond Locard and Alphonse Bertillon (Chap. 3). For us, fiction is entangled with nonfiction, coming together to form intertextual assemblages that shape our imagination of crime, climate change and the Arctic. To the extent that the conventions of crime fiction—specifically, noir fiction—can help us make sense of what it means to live and die in the Anthropocene, fiction provides a lens through which to see ecological ruins, especially as we experience the

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intertwining of what were once conceived as mutually exclusive roles in criminal investigation. In the Anthropocene noir, we are living a fatalistic story without a known ending, in which we are all ‘part criminal, part detective, part victim’ (Rose 2013: 6). The other key theme has been anaestheticization—more specifically, the anaestheticizing effects linked to both representations of criminal anthroposcenes and images of suffering. Visualizations of environmental degradation can be aestheticized at the same moment that the physical and material conditions of degradation are anaestheticized (Mirzoeff 2014). Engaging with crime fiction can anaestheticize readers to the modern anxieties that surround them (Benjamin 1913/2016), including the anthropogenic effects underlying the drive towards technological progress. In a world hyper-saturated with images of suffering, viewers can develop emotional or moral anaesthesia, manifesting as feelings, such as sympathy, that exonerate them as accomplices to what caused the suffering (Sontag 2003). To counter these anaestheticizations, we have offered two methodological ways of seeing crime or harm in the Anthropocene. In Chaps. 3 and 4, we turn to computer vision by building our own AI detective to analyze, with us, mass visual data. In so doing, we are not suggesting that computer vision is superior to human vision; after all, we have aimed to proceed horizontally by way of comparing humans to nonhumans (e.g., AI) rather than through vertical hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. In its data visualizations, the AI detective’s mode of analysis makes visible what might otherwise be unnoticed by our human eyes. By systematically documenting the visual features of large datasets—sets of images that are much larger than those used so far in visual, or green-­ cultural criminologies—our AI combines scene understanding in computer science with a clue-driven semiotic approach, particularly since semiotics has methodologically grounded popular criminology (e.g., in the form of classical detective fiction), criminalistics and visual criminology. A computer-mediated forensic gaze is deployed to render slow violence visible, attuning our investigative lines of sight with the conditions that structure an image’s composition, such as the distribution of light and darkness, as well as colour and object size. By providing an empirically driven vocabulary for describing images, cultural analytics is a response to the growing demand for new modes of analysis in visual and cultural

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criminologies, where much work has focused on unseeing conventional perspectives and unlearning dominant modes of seeing. To the extent that criminal anthroposcenes are shaped by a forensic gaze, the logic underlying our AI detective’s method has gained prestige as a knowledge practice in our age of ethical uncertainties, even in fields outside of criminology. Tracing ‘human influence’ fingerprints to the Earth’s atmosphere (e.g., Santer et al. 2018), climate scientists track human fingerprints and carbon footprints in analogous ways to Sherlock Holmes’ scrutiny of physical clues. Implicitly, climate scientists assume that the Earth is a crime scene, from which clues can be identified and traced back to offenders. By emphasizing physical clues, the truth of crime or harmful human action can be made visible for our own eyes to see. When visualizations of climate change are mediated by the criminological imagination, criminal anthroposcenes can have important material implications. They can show us the material and physical traces of environmental degradation and how we—as humans—have left our imprints on the planet as geoforces. Focusing on the otherwise invisible, ‘criminal’ traces within climate scenes, criminal anthroposcenes have the potential to mobilize more urgent public and policy responses to climate change. As the second methodological way for countering anaestheticization, we have turned to what Anna Tsing has called ‘the art of noticing on a damaged planet’—that is, a mode of attention that stems from a practice of nonteleological care (Shotwell 2016). Care, in turn, is a product of being attuned to the world as it is, including the ways in which we relate to and are responsible for other humans and nonhumans. And it is this noticing that can attune us to worlds otherwise. The humble yet difficult practice of noticing can make visible worlds, whether in our everyday lives or while on tour (Chaps. 1, 5 and 6), that have been ignored or damaged in the name of progress (Gan et al. 2017). While care is not a mode of analysis per se, it is the basis for an ethical, relational response to those we encounter. It encourages us to attend to how we see as much as what we can see. Over the course of the book, our embrace of scene thinking, with its attendant heterogeneities, multiplicities and elasticities, has also oriented us to the work of taking care, which is far more complex than shoring up our sense of moral and bodily purity. Indeed, in Chap. 5, we argue, following Alexis Shotwell, that the search and desire for material

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purity—for some pre-toxic body that recovers some natural state before pollution—is misguided, precisely because these searches are undertaken in complex webs of suffering. To interrogate these webs, we ultimately need to question who constitutes the ‘we’ at the heart of this book, as well as in criminology’s future engagements with the Anthropocene. In this book, there is the ‘we’ that is meant to include scholars working in criminology; there is the ‘we’ that is meant to include the reader; and there is the ‘we’ that assumes our audience (including ourselves) might very well be comprised of people with certain socioeconomic privileges, living and working in countries that benefit from and contribute to globalized inequalities, including the unequal distribution of pollution (plastic, waste and carbon emissions) across the world. However we delineate the boundaries of ‘we,’ we are not pure, nor have we ever been. In the tangling of political, cultural and economic systems that make up our (late capitalist) world, we have made compromises—most notably, in our consumption choices and habits—and are compromised. When we look at others in pain, particularly from a distance, our privilege enables us to feel safe—to simply be detached spectators, as though we have not participated in ways that have indirectly caused another’s suffering. As Susan Sontag (2003) reminds us, our privileges are drawn on the same map as another’s suffering. This is not to say that we need to embrace pollution and that we are equally responsible for the environmental degradation and suffering that characterize living and working in the Anthropocene. We can clearly recognize that there are people, states and corporations that gain both power and profit from engaging in practices that ultimately harm the environment; they are worthy of blame. At the same time, we should not be so quick to protest our own innocence, for we also hold some blame—some more than others—for the current state of the environment. Like Deborah Bird Rose and Alexis Shotwell, we urge criminologists to consider how complicity and compromise could be useful starting points for critical and (self-)reflexive projects about crime and the Anthropocene in the future. While we have looked outside criminology—as Holley and Shearing (2017) urge—to other interdisciplinary work that has made sense of what it means to live in the Anthropocene, we end with a few musings about how complicity might alter the way

7 Conclusion 

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criminologists take up—what Rob White (2018: 149) calls—‘the mantle of stewards and guardians of the future.’ For White, addressing climate change in criminology requires not only future research that exposes corrupt institutions and systemic inequalities, but also media interventions by criminologists. Criminologists ought to serve as public intellectuals in the spheres of political action, in order to make demands for more effective policies that safeguard the environment for the sake of future children and the nonhumans who share our planet. In contrast to White’s media approach, our book offers different ways of visualizing criminal anthroposcenes as a potential strategy for media intervention, so that media images of climate change can counter some of the anaestheticizations that blind and numb us to seeing the significance and salience of climate impacts. It makes no claims about how criminologists ought to guard the future, aside from a recognition that their guardian status may be compromised. In the Anthropocene noir, there are no crusading white knights, whose moral purity can save us from ourselves. Instead, we—as criminologists and earthlings—are all fumbling in the dark of the Penumbral Age (Oreskes and Conway 2014); we are all in some way implicated in the making of the Anthropocene. To think about complicity, however, is not completely unfamiliar terrain in criminology, given criminology’s own suspicious history of complicity. As critical criminologists have long highlighted, the discipline of criminology has not been an ‘innocent’ one: at the very least, it has helped rationalize state practices associated with racism and sexism (e.g., from its part in nineteenth-­ century eugenics movements to the mass incarceration of racialized persons in Western countries in the twenty-first century). Thus, a critically engaged criminology that takes up the Anthropocene as its object of analysis does so in the wake of a history of complex webs of suffering, some of its own making. For criminology, then, the ethics of engaging with the Anthropocene requires that the discipline see itself as co-constituted by the ethea and underlying drives that helped create our current world, many of which continue to structure the world to come. Consequently, our invitation to see criminal anthroposcenes is also a call for criminologists to consider their role in the crafting of criminological anthroposcenes to come.

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References Benjamin, W. (1913/2016) The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, London: Verso. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, H. and Bubandt, N. (2017) ‘Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.’ In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N.  Bubandt (eds.) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: G1–14. Harrington, C., Lescavalier, E. and Shearing, C. (2017) ‘From Passengers to Crew: Introductory Reflections’, Crime, Law and Social Change 68(5): 493–498. Holley, C. and Shearing, C. (2017) ‘Thriving on a Pale Blue Dot: Criminology and the Anthropocene.’ In C. Holley and C. Shearing (eds.) Criminology and the Anthropocene, New York: Routledge: 1–24. Mirzoeff, N. (2014) ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Public Culture 26(2): 213–232. Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. (2014) The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, New York: Columbia University Press. Rose, D.B. (2013) ‘Anthropocene Noir’, Arena Journal 41/42: 206–219. Santer, B.D., Po-Chedley, S., Zelinka, M.D., Cvijanovic, I., Bonfils, C., Durack, P.J., Fu, Q., Kiehl, J., Mears, C., Painter, J. and Pallotta, G. (2018) ‘Human Influence on the Seasonal Cycle of Tropospheric Temperature’, Science 361(6399) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aas8806 Shotwell, A. (2016) Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. White, R. (2018) Climate Change Criminology, Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Index1

A

Aesthetics anaesthetics, 54 criminological aesthetics, 28–30, 246 Algorithm, 60–61, 89, 117, 120, 200 Anaestheticization anaesthetics, 52–55 (moral and emotional) anesthesia, 132 Animal as nonhuman victim caribou, 108, 110 polar bear, 108, 110, 111, 117, 125, 131, 207 safari, 210 Anthrax, 36, 39

Anthropocene Anthropocene noir, 135, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 174, 245, 248, 251 definition, 12 ethos, 148, 174, 245 origins, 169, 170 stages, 5, 9, 12, 34, 53, 55, 68, 69, 83, 88, 92n7, 108, 222, 225n3, 244–246 Arctic Canada (Northwest Passage), 14, 115, 190, 192, 195–197, 199–222, 226n9, 226n11, 227n15, 228n20, 245 cruising, 12, 14, 195, 200, 223, 227n15 Greenland, 4, 175n4, 206

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Lam, M. Tegelberg, Criminal Anthroposcenes, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4

253

254 Index

Arctic (cont.) in imagination, 24, 133, 189, 190, 192, 202, 204, 205, 217, 244, 247 Russia, 3, 15, 35 sovereignty, 219, 220 B

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 192, 198, 199, 211 Barthes, Roland, 57, 65, 90 Benjamin, Walter, 52, 54–56, 69, 80, 87, 95n27, 248 Bennett, Jane, 32, 37, 38, 154, 247 Bertillon, Alphonse, 56, 71–73, 76, 83, 85, 94n19, 95n25, 247 Bottled water, 165–170, 172, 177n12 Bourdieu, Pierre, 161, 168 Brisman, Avi, 6, 7, 10, 26, 27, 52, 108, 149, 150, 168, 226n5 Brown, Michelle, 7, 13, 30, 53, 89, 114, 160 C

Canada Arctic, 115, 192, 199–220, 222, 226n9, 228n20 imagination (Franklin), 201, 202, 218–220 Newfoundland and Labrador, 145 Carbon emissions, 34, 69, 115, 124, 134, 161, 163, 164, 171, 250 carbon footprint, 163, 164

Care ethics, 223, 224 in relation to attention and noticing, 192, 223 security, 191, 192, 196, 197, 223 Carrabine, Eamonn, 7, 9, 13, 27, 29, 53, 57, 58, 74, 78, 89, 110, 114, 118, 151 Christie, Nils, 110, 112–114, 118 Chronotope, 14, 191, 192, 196–199, 201, 203, 206, 207, 209, 211–214, 216, 218, 220, 221, 224, 225n1, 247 Climate change, 3–5, 7–14, 24–26, 33, 36, 39–41, 52, 53, 69, 91, 108–115, 118–121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130–135, 148, 150–152, 156, 161, 172, 173, 175, 189–224, 226n6, 228n18, 229n27, 244–247, 249, 251 climate change communication, 10, 11, 14, 108–114, 119, 131 Clues, 2, 52, 55, 57, 58, 65, 71, 72, 90, 201, 224, 249 Colonialism, 14, 189–224, 246 Commodification of nature, death, 14, 172, 173 Common Objects in Context (COCO) database, 62–64, 67, 93n13, 93n15, 117 Complexity, 10, 175, 210 moral responsibility, 6 Computer vision, 13, 53, 58–67, 75, 89, 92n10, 93n14, 109, 114, 117, 118, 120, 245, 248

 Index 

Conan Doyle, Arthur, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 71, 107, 108, 122, 130, 189 Conservation, 2, 111, 115, 137n14, 207, 209, 210, 222, 244 Constructed consumerism, 149, 150, 173 Consumption constructed consumerism, 149, 150, 173 as pattern, 7, 149 Counter-visuality, 89 Crime scene photography, 8, 13, 51–91, 109, 121, 124, 133, 245 Criminal anthroposcene, 7–9, 11–14, 23–41, 52–55, 79, 88, 109, 121, 130, 133, 135, 136, 145, 148, 149, 155–164, 167, 173, 189–191, 220, 243–249, 251 Criminalistics, 7, 52, 55–58, 71, 79, 88, 90, 96n30, 245, 247, 248 Criminological aesthetics, 28–30, 246 Cultural analytics, 53, 58–67, 87, 89, 109, 114, 248 Cultural criminology, 13, 26–28, 32, 35, 36, 40, 243 D

Darkness aesthetics/noir aesthetic, 13, 53, 76, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 109, 119, 121, 124, 128–131, 133–135, 245 tourism, 149, 156 Dark tourism, 13, 145–175, 205, 245

255

Data Big Data, 158 cultural analytics, 65–67 data visualization, 13, 53, 83, 122, 248 De Quincey, Thomas, 73, 151 Death dark tourism, 145–175, 205, 245 ground zero, 203–206 icebergs, 14, 145–175, 245 Delumeau, Jean, 197, 213, 222 Detective AI detective, 13, 52, 53, 58–67, 75, 76, 79, 80, 83, 87, 89, 90, 117–120, 131, 133, 245, 246, 248, 249 classical detective fiction, 52, 55, 60, 245, 248 Dickens, Charles, 51, 189, 229n26 Dirt soil, 40 toxicity, 171 Disaster Franklin expedition, 202, 216–221, 229n26 Titanic, 145, 155, 203 Disease Anthrax, 36, 39 toxicity, 170 Distance aesthetic, 204, 222 psychological, 118 Durkheim, Emile, 15n5, 133 E

Ecocide, 14, 148, 173, 245 Entanglement of economic and environmental systems, 150, 174

256 Index

Entanglement (cont.) as human-nonhuman hybrids, 7, 38, 247 landscapes of, 12, 221, 224, 247 of space and time, 198, 247 Environmental harm, 6, 7, 10–12, 16n8, 26, 27, 36, 42n4, 87, 132, 149, 161, 243, 246 Extinction, 110, 195, 210, 224, 226n7, 229n23 species, 210, 226n7, 229n23

Gothic, 137n16 travel writing, 199 Glaciers, 4, 147, 148, 152–155, 164, 169, 170, 177n14, 202–205, 222, 228n21, 245 Goffman, Erving, 8, 15n7, 225n3 Gould, Stephen Jay, 197 Green criminology, 6, 26, 27, 35, 42n4, 110, 131 Green-cultural criminology, 7, 13, 27, 35, 41, 149, 248 Ground zero, 69, 203–206, 228n17

F

H

Ferrell, Jeff, 7, 27, 30–32, 40, 58, 146 Film noir, 78, 83, 86, 135, 137n16, 146, 175n1, 245 Flashbulb, 74, 85, 86, 91 Fog, 8, 51–91, 107 anthropogenic, 13, 51–91, 245 Forensics criminalistics, 52, 56, 245 forensic gaze, 57, 59, 77, 109, 245, 248, 249 Frankenstein, 189, 190 Franklin expedition, 202, 216–221, 229n26

Hamilton, John T., 191, 196, 222, 225n1 Haraway, Donna, 13, 26, 27, 29, 34, 35, 41 Hayward, Keith, 7, 30, 31, 53 Hobbes, Thomas, 192, 193 Holocene, 5, 36, 68, 190, 193, 197, 218, 222 Holocene-bred security, 190, 191, 193, 202, 207, 208, 211, 221, 222, 246 Human exceptionalism cruelty, 210, 224 Great Chain of Being, 210, 224 hubris, 37, 147, 224 vibrant matter, 13, 150, 154

G

Gaze forensic, 57, 59, 77, 109, 245, 248, 249 tourist, 159–161, 165, 245 Genre film noir, 137n16 gangster films, 42n1

I

Iceberg commodification, 147–149, 156, 165, 172, 245 consumption, 13, 148–155, 173, 174, 245

 Index 

death, 14, 145–175 tourism, 148–153, 156, 161–164, 173 water, 13, 148, 149, 165–173, 176n10, 177n14, 245 Iceberg Finder, 157–160, 166, 176n7 Ideal victims, 110, 112, 118, 120, 132 Illness, 131, 135 Ilulissat, 203–206, 221 Industrialization, 52, 68, 69, 107, 129, 146, 157, 206 Instagram, 13, 109, 112, 114–120, 122, 123, 125–128, 132, 133, 135, 136n7, 137n11, 156, 159, 176n7 Inuit, 199, 202, 203, 211–216, 222, 229n24, 229n26 Itinerary, 192, 196–203, 206, 214, 218, 219, 221, 222 L

Last chance tourism, 14, 152, 192, 195, 197, 198, 205, 229n23 Latour, Bruno, 9, 10, 30, 32–34, 37, 38, 87, 127, 153, 154 Lighting, 71, 80, 85, 86, 91, 244 Locard, Edmond, 56, 247 M

Manovich, Lev, 65–67 Matter, 2, 4, 13, 14, 23–41, 107, 150, 153, 154, 159, 165, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174, 192, 199, 247 vibrant matter, 13, 26, 41, 150, 153–155, 245

257

Media photography, 8, 13, 51–91, 108–114, 116, 121, 124, 129, 131, 133, 156, 160, 165, 204, 245 social media, 93n14, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 131, 133, 136n2, 148, 159, 244 travel literature, 200 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 54, 69, 87, 129, 248 N

Newfoundland and Labrador, 145, 147, 149, 152, 155–157, 161, 163–167, 172, 174, 176n4, 176n6, 176n10, 203 Nixon, Rob, 3, 8, 12, 13, 24, 26, 88, 109, 110, 121, 130, 133–135, 146, 152, 190, 205, 210, 221, 243, 244, 246, 248 Noir aesthetic, 13, 53, 76, 83, 86, 87, 89–91, 109, 119, 121, 124, 128–131, 133–135, 245 Anthropocene noir, 135, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 174, 245, 248, 251 film noir, 78, 83, 86, 135, 137n16, 146, 175n1, 245 Nonhumans as actors, 12, 26, 35, 39, 60, 150, 155, 225n3, 247 in training, 62–63, 117 victims, 4, 13, 107–136, 245 Northwest Passage, 14, 189–224, 245

258 Index P

Permafrost, 4, 23, 25, 26, 35, 36, 38–41 melting, 26, 35, 40, 41, 244 Photography crime scene, 8, 13, 51–91, 109, 121, 124, 130, 133, 245 wildlife, 109–114, 131 Poe, Edgar Allan, 57, 59, 92n5, 95n27, 189 Polar bear endangered species, 125, 127, 131, 229n23 jail, 2, 3, 15n4, 244 photography, 109, 111, 133 tourism, 229n22 Pollution, 54, 148, 174, 250 See also Carbon emissions; Environmental harm Prison Franklin expedition, 218 immobility, 1, 14n2, 151 polar bear jail, 2, 3, 15n4, 244 Privilege as passenger, 191, 196, 199, 222, 223 spectator, 134, 160, 196, 250 Purity, 14, 113, 135, 148–150, 157, 161, 167–170, 172–175, 206, 222, 245, 249–251 R

Rafter, Nicole, 7, 24, 30, 53, 59, 72, 146 Responsibility as distributed responsibility, 61, 120 moral responsibility, 6

Rose, Deborah Bird, 135, 146, 151, 175, 198, 210, 223, 224, 248, 250 Russia, 3, 35, 244 Siberia, 35, 38, 244 S

Safari, 206–207, 221, 224, 228n21 Safety, 6, 14, 127, 170, 191, 196, 201, 208, 209, 222, 223, 225n4 Scales and scaling, 5, 10, 11, 26, 33, 34, 38, 40, 41, 66–68, 71, 76, 81, 119, 158, 159, 244 zooming, 33, 38, 204 Scenes climate scenes, 4, 5, 7–12, 121, 130, 133, 135, 189, 244, 245, 249 crime scenes, 2, 5, 7–11, 13, 14, 15n5, 29, 51–91, 109, 121, 124, 130, 133–135, 145, 151, 217, 218, 228n17, 243–245, 249 scene thinking, 13, 25–41, 42n5, 156, 190, 243, 244, 249 scene understanding, 62, 248 scenography, 9, 244 Security and the Anthropocene, 41 related to passengers, 189–224 Semiotics, 29, 34, 52, 53, 55, 57–60, 65, 114, 120, 248 Serres, Michel, 10, 39, 198 Shearing, Clifford, 6, 14, 193, 208, 221, 223, 225n4, 226n5, 247, 250

 Index 

Sherlock Holmes, 51, 55–58, 60, 70, 71, 79, 88, 107, 247, 249 Shotwell, Alexis, 148, 175, 249, 250 Slow violence, see Nixon, Rob Sontag, Susan, 90, 109, 121, 132, 134, 248, 250 South, Nigel, 6, 7, 10, 16n8, 27, 36, 110, 146, 149, 150, 168 Stage Arctic, 1, 23, 107, 164, 189, 244 scenography, 9, 244 staging, 12, 33, 34, 225n2, 225n3 Straw, Will, 32, 33, 155 Subcultures, 31, 32 subcultural criminology, 28, 30–32 Suffering, 12, 108–111, 114, 124, 127, 131–135, 150–152, 161, 174, 175, 217, 248, 250, 251 images of, 109, 248 Surveillance Iceberg Finder, 157–160, 166, 176n7 Newfoundland and Labrador, 157 Symmetrical analysis, 149, 150, 153, 173, 174 T

Taste, 168 Bourdieu, 168 class distinction, 168 luxury, 153, 165–169, 173 palate, 167–169 Time animal, 211 deep, 197, 198, 206

259

glacial, 206 related to security, 224 as spatiotemporality, 12, 191, 203, 247 time‘s arrow, 197–198, 202, 222 time’s cycle, 198 tourist, 203, 207, 209, 211, 223 Titanic, 145, 147, 148, 154, 155, 161, 175n2, 176n5 Tourism dark tourism, 13, 145–175, 245 last chance tourism, 14, 152, 192, 195, 197, 198, 205, 229n23 Tourist gaze, 159–161, 165, 245 U

Underworld, 38, 41, 244 Urbanization, 52, 69, 108, 146, 206 Urry, John, 152, 154, 159, 160, 165, 206 V

Valverde, Mariana, 33, 57, 80, 193, 199, 223 Vibrant matter, 13, 26, 41, 150, 153–155, 245 Victims nonhuman victims, 13, 110, 245 representations of human victims, 147 Violence images of, 7 slow violence, 3, 8, 12, 13, 24, 26, 88, 109, 121, 130, 133–135, 146, 152, 190, 205, 221, 243, 244, 246, 248

260 Index

Violence (cont.) spectacular violence, 5, 8, 24, 51, 75, 88 Visual criminology, 7, 13, 53, 55–60, 65, 67, 72, 88, 89, 114, 248

White, Rob, 6, 14, 16n8, 26, 27, 36, 80, 110, 148, 168, 195, 251 Wildlife photography, 109–114, 131 National Geographic, 111, 127, 128, 131, 199, 212

W

Water commodification, 149, 172, 245 iceberg, 13, 146, 148, 149, 165–173, 176n10, 245 purity, 168–170, 172 Weather, 167, 193–195, 198, 201, 202, 223, 227n15 Weegee (Arthur Fellig), 64, 73, 74, 83, 85, 86, 90, 94n21 White Heat, 24–26, 35, 42n1, 244

Y

Young, Alison, 7, 28, 29, 40, 58, 91n2, 146 Z

Zedner, Lucia, 191, 192, 196, 205, 225n1 Zero, 203–206, 221, 228n16, 228n19