Aidan Dahlin Nolan

November 1, 2010

Reactivating Amphibious Ways of Knowing: heeding the call of the wetlands

It’s the green, it’s the green, it’s the green you need…and when I look into your future, it’s the green that I see.– Doctor Facilier, the vodun “Shadow Man” in Walt Disney’s The Princess and the Frog

            Over the past year, I have become obsessed with frogs.  This obsession has transformed both my academic work and my personal life.  I have always had a soft spot for these slippery amphibians, but through learning more about them, I feel as though my entire relationship to the quotidian has changed.  My new everyday is wetter.  My new everyday feels more urgent, yet, it is still hopeful.  My new everyday is amphibious…and I hope yours might be, too. 

In an increasingly violent world where the “present crisis of neoliberal circulation has now become interactive with the climate crisis”[i] threatening to flood both small island nations in the Pacific and major cities like New Orleans and New York, people living in the neo-liberally transfigured world seem to have forgotten how dependent we are on water.  Over the course of its history, capitalism has increasingly commodified this liquid life-blood changing its character from that of a commons for both humans and nonhumans into that of a privatized marketable resource[ii].  As discussed by Tara Haskins in another post on this cluster, we now simply drink it, pollute it, and flush it, for pennies a litre, to sanitation facilities that most of us never see, miles and miles away. 

Our relationship to wetlands in this system is similar.  These critical habitats can act as the primary defense against powerful storm surges for those living in low-lying areas while simultaneously mitigating the effects of climate change through carbon capturing.  Yet, though we could be working to preserve and to expand wetlands, perhaps to avoid our fear of the rising waters induced by climate change and the necessary adjustments they entail, we continue to bury these vibrant ecosystems, quite literally, to serve the flight of capital.  All three major airports in the New York City area, for example, are built on filled in coastal marshland[iii]. 

When considering the effects of global climate change, our shared future seems bleak, and in discussing it, one often encounters a certain ambivalence emerging not out of total ignorance, but from a sense of paralysis and despair.  As the climate changes, though, we must change our relationship to wetlands if we wish to live in a stable biosphere.  But how might we accomplish this task?

Before venturing any answers to this question, I want to tell you about why I became obsessed with frogs.  I need you to know how it is that they called me to join them in the water, how it is that they called me to become amphibious – which I define, for the purposes of this post, as either living in a wetland or actively working for wetlands’ survival through political action.  Perhaps, by telling you this story, my words will act as a medium through which these amphibians might call you, too.

In August of 2009, I attended a conference in Bogotá Colombia and while walking the sidewalks of the city, I could not help but notice the presence, or more often than not, the potentially ankle-twisting absence, of municipal utility grate covers, for hydro and water lines, leading into buildings at regularly spaced intervals; these grate covers were often ensconced with the image of a frog.  This phenomenon puzzled me, as I couldn’t understand what possible connection this sprawling urban landscape might have to frogs.  “Where would a frog live around here?” I thought to myself. There didn’t seem to be any streams, rivers, or marshlands nearby.  Later, on a walking tour of the city[iv], I learned that at the beginning of the 20^th century, nearly every stream, river, and lagoon in Bogotá had been buried in order both to deal with the smell coming from their industrially polluted waters, and to generate revenues from the sale of new downtown real estate.  This revelation piqued my curiosity because, though I wasn’t sure where, I had heard this story before.  I started to wonder, “What other cities have buried their wetlands?  From where else have frogs disappeared?”  And when I returned home to New York, I soon encountered answers I did not expect.

Whether providential or simply a coincidence, my investigations into the disappearances of frogs and their wetland homes were made infinitely easier by two exhibits held in New York City last fall, as well as by the guidance of knowledgeable faculty members at NYU[v]. Mapping New York’s Shoreline 1609-2009: celebrating the quadrientennial of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the waterways of New York, hosted by the New York Public Library, provided me with a glimpse into the history of wetlands destruction in one of the nations busiest harbours; and Frogs: A Chorus of Colors, curated by the organization Amphibian Ark, at the American Museum of Natural History offered me an image that served as my next beacon.  Sitting in a small viewing room watching a blurry screen, I saw a disturbing apparition for the first time: bodies floating in the water.  These bodies were the bodies of frogs floating belly up in a Panamanian lagoon. 

Amphibian populations, globally, have declined by over forty percent in the last fifty years.  While much of this decline may be linked to habitat destruction, toxic pollutants, and over exposure to UV radiation, recently scientists have determined that a major factor has been the spread of a lethal fungus known as chytrid[vi].  Studies have demonstrated that this fungus kills frogs by inhibiting their capacity to absorb electrolytes.  Without electrolytes, whether one is human or frog, one’s muscle functions are impaired as messages are unable to travel throughout one’s nervous system.   The result: asystolic cardiac arrest.  At first, frogs suffering from chytridiomycois experience an irregular heartbeat; then, as the fungus grows their heart stops altogether.  The film I watched repeatedly at Frogs outlined the spread of chytridiomycosis around the globe, but it didn’t tell me where the fungus originated.  To answer this question, I turned to journals and magazine articles and what they told me was both strange and alarming.

            The spread of the chytrid fungus is directly linked to a history of human interactions with the African Claw Frog.  Chytrid is a naturally occurring fungus in the habitat of this species, yet this frog possesses a defense mechanism that other amphibians don’t have.  A bacterium known as Janthinobacterium lividum lives on its skin and eats any fungus that it encounters[vii].  So how did this fungus escape and kill other amphibians?

            In the 1930s, scientists around the world were searching for a reliable pregnancy test when a South African named Lancelot Hogben discovered that if he injected ox hormones into the dorsal lymph sac of the African Claw Frog, in eight to twelve hours it would produce either eggs or sperm depending on the sex of the frog[viii].  Soon after, scientists adjusted this procedure for humans, injecting female urine into these lymph sacs to test for the presence of pregnancy hormones.  If the frog produced eggs or sperm after being injected, the woman was pregnant.

Over the next two decades, knowledge of this test spread rapidly throughout the world and thousands of African Claw Frogs were exported from South Africa to pregnancy centers in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.  In the 1960s, though, the “Hogben test” became obsolete as scientists managed to create synthetic substances with which they could test for the pregnancy hormone hCG.  Big testing centers housing thousands of frogs closed their doors and humans, once again, became oblivious to the existence of these creatures.  But somehow, some of these frogs escaped, and infiltrated other amphibian habitats, carrying the fatal fungus with them[ix]. 

As I considered these circumstances further, however, chytrid fungi spores seemed to be but minor contributors in the overall decline of amphibians.  Their deaths seemed irrevocably linked to the spread of another kind of fungus altogether – that of frontier capitalism[x].  Only, the frontier, in this instance, had moved from the wetland locales of Bogotá and New York Harbor onto the bodies of frogs themselves.  This movement prompted me to ask, “Onto what other bodies has the circulation of capital projected a frontier?” And I soon received a response to this query too… from other bodies in the water… the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina[xi].

This past spring, I watched Spike Lee’s film document When the Levees Broke[xii].  I could discuss it for pages, but in this context I believe a brief description of two images contained within it will be enough to conjure these ghosts in your mind.  The first, a heavy set African American man floating facedown, motionless, in dirty, oily[xiii], foul water; and the second, a vast coastal marshland habitat carved into deep channels by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in order to facilitate more efficient shipping.  As I watched the film, these two images merged in my consciousness and mirrored the images of the frogs that I saw floating belly up in a lagoon.  The same capitalist fungus had resulted in the deaths of both frogs and humans.

The frogs called me next when I sat down one night in April to watch Disney’s new rendition of the classic Brother’s Grimm tale “The Frog King”; this time entitled, The Princess and the Frog[xiv].  With much of the action set in the wetlands in and around New Orleans the movie evoked thoughts of Katrina, but then I noticed something else.  The dark green markings on our hero, the transfigured and amphibian Prince Naveen, resembled a particular kind of frog, one that I had been studying.  I remembered an e-mail from a person whom I had contacted concerning wetlands in New York City.  The subject line read, “Save one of Staten Island’s last coastal wetlands.  Save Arlington Marsh. Stop the New York Container Terminal Expansion Project.”  As I re-read the e-mail, I realized that New Yorkers are facing a Katrina-type situation, for both frogs and humans, in their own backyard.  Staten Island’s North Shore encompasses many of the same types of communities that lived in New Orleans pre-Katrina:  a marginalized community of color, container shipping, waves soon to rise with rising temperatures, a squadron of United States Army Corps of Engineers bent on dredging channels, and a population of Southern Leopard Frogs.

They have not started to dredge Arlington Marsh yet though, so what might we do to prevent a potential catastrophe?  What alternatives might we offer?  How can we transform this watery landscape, and our relationship to it, through the figure of the frog?  Flawed though this Disney movie may be, we might be able to turn to it for help in transforming the cinematic trope of “bodies in the water”, from one metonymic of being immersed in a larger crisis, constituting what Nicholas Mirzoeff would call an “immersed subjectivity”[xv], into an ecologically reparative ontology.  The ideological underpinning of this movie and the neo-liberal order that manages conditions along the North Shore are identical.  In both instances, a body’s social standing in a hierarchical system is constructed as deriving from meritorious actions; in each case, structural inequalities are brushed aside.  In Disney’s fairytale, Tiana, a hardworking African American woman from New Orleans with big ambitions, is able to become a princess and to have all of her dreams come true, but the fate of the other members of her socially marginalized community remains untold.  Looking to Staten Island, we might surmise that, like the hardworking blue collar community that inhabits its North Shore, Tiana’s community has seen few of its aspirations fulfilled.  Yet still, while transformed into frogs, Tiana and Prince Naveen seem to embody an amphibious mode of agency that was previously unavailable to them. By wading into the swampy Bayou surrounding New Orleans and collaborating with the other creatures that they meet, they manage to act as reparative bodies in the water through reshaping their relationships with the nonhuman world.  What might happen if we follow their lead?  What if, instead of avoiding the rising water, we wade into it before we are engulfed? 

In what remains of this post, I briefly discuss two ways in which immersing ourselves in a watery world with frogs might serve as reparative.  First, I examine the frog’s relationship to cosmology.  Following that, I propose that we advocate for more generative human-human, as well as human-frog, relations through shared habitats.  Using the Princess and the Frog and the situation on Staten Islandas touchstones, I argue that living amphibiously, in and through wetlands, may offer one solution to stemming the rising tides while simultaneously addressing social and environmental inequalities.

            Disney’s version of this classic Brothers Grimm tale lies at the nexus of three interweaving cosmologies.  I have already referred to the capitalist cosmology of private property and individualized meritorious action for which the film advocates, yet, I believe that the other two cosmologies contained within it may serve as infinitely more generative sites from which to act in the years ahead.  Metamorphosis is the central trope of this story, and while capitalist metamorphosis seems intent on transforming away from water, the other two cosmologies presented in the film rely on transformations in and through water.

            As Robert Farris Thompson describes, the Kongo cosmogram – from which many of the exoticized vodun, or “voodoo”, practices in the movie are derived – uses the sea as a plane of transformation between the world of the living and the world of the dead[xvi].  In this depiction of the universe, circulation between these two worlds is constant, and this cosmology suggests that, though we transform, we remain always already a part of the material world.  Working in concert with this understanding, the other cosmological presence is that of amphibian zoopomorphism.  While western tales of human to amphibian transformation are most readily imagined through the Grimms’s story, as I learned while in Bogotá, this form of metamorphosis is present elsewhere.  People living in the Magdalena River Valley of central Colombia circa 1400, for example, believed that amphibians and reptiles “were animals associated with passing from life on earth to the land of the dead.”[xvii]  By thinking through these alternative cosmologies referenced in the Princess and the Frog, we might gain a greater understanding of both the actual as well as the symbolic violence being perpetrated upon the human and nonhuman communities in the vicinity of Arlington Marsh.  The dredging of the marsh required to expand the New York Container Terminal facilities, will increase the risk of Katrina-like toxic flooding, taking these communities not only one step closer to Death’s door, but bringing Death right under their doors as well[xviii].

            Now, what might be gained from cohabitating with frogs in a flood mitigating, potentially vibrant coastal wetlands ecosystem like Arlington Marsh?  The benefits for everyone, human and nonhuman, could be quite substantial.  Some estimates suggest that wetlands store 300 to 700 billion tons of carbon globally, more than any other ecosystem, and an amount equal to or greater than what is in the atmosphere today[xix].  By performatively cohabitating in wetlands with frogs through amphibious living, we might greatly reduce our collective carbon footprint and stem the rising tides.  But sharing wetland habitats with our amphibian cousins, instead of burying them, can have other benefits, too.  Wetlands are excellent ecosystems in which to forage for wild foods.  In fact, if properly restored and respected, Arlington Marsh could act as a wonderful outdoor “free food co-op” and environmental education center for a North Shore community with few grocery stores.  And as mosquito season approaches next June, wouldn’t you love to have a frog as a roommate?  As I learned from Natalie Jeremijenko, a professor of Art, Computer Science and Environmental Studies at NYU, West Nile Virus emerged out of New York City’s degraded watershed because there were no amphibians to control the pathogenic breeding of mosquitoes.  Knowing this, wouldn’t it be nice to have a little green friend sitting on your shoulder?  Together, you and your roommate might perform a reparative intersubjectivity, by constituting each other as actively sharing bodies in the water.

Yet, when decisions have to be made, you need not feel compelled to share you entire life with a roommate who may be a little too slimy for your liking.  The only question you need to answer is:  Which green calls out to you?  The green of capital, or the green of the frog?  When you look into your future, which green do you see?  Which green do you really need?

Notes