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ABSTRACT
Has the US military been weaponising the weather? On what evidence might we begin to know? This essay begins by acknowledging the obstacles a classified military facility imposes on what we can know of it. Yet such State-sanctioned obstructions of knowledge are merely official iterations of a much broader problem basic to vernacular environmental knowledge: that we denizens of the Anthropocene now routinely face epistemological challenges in relation to earthly signs and their ambiguous production in ways quite independent of security protocols. In order to parse the visual and popular cultural responses to HAARP that follow, this essay turns to the ancient practice of geomancy (through which sensitive interpreters ‘flesh out’ natural signs). I repurpose geomancy to describe a model of anxious environmental reading, one that fuses the material and symbolic into an uncanny symbiosis with Earth. The new geomancy is best regarded as that structure of feeling that addresses itself to our planet’s ungraspably complex changes. In this theorisation of the new geomancy, HAARP – together with its symptomatic epistemological constraints – thus serves as a hyperbolic instance and a norming bellwether.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Karen Jacobs is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she specialises in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, visual culture studies, and critical theory. She is currently completing two monographs: Trace Atlas: American Spatial Itineraries ‘After’ Postmodern; and Afterimages: Nabokov • Sebald • Cole. Her work has appeared in such journals as Narrative, NOVEL, Twentieth-Century Literature, GLQ, and The Journal of Visual Culture.
Notes
* A short excerpt from this essay appears in “The New Geomancy,” Minding Nature, September 10.3, 2017.
1 See, for example, Baird (Citation2016).
2 For a representative (but not exhaustive) list of military, scientific, journalistic, and online sites and publications on HAARP, see for example, Baird Citation2011, Cole Citation2014, Fox Citationn.d., Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Citationn.d., Juventino Citationn.d., Kennedy et al. Citationn.d., Kennel Citation2013, Mosley Citation1996, Parry Citation2013, Rosen Citation2016, Rozell Citation2015, Shachtman Citation2009, Citation2013, Streep Citation2008, Weinberger Citation2008, and Wilson Citation2004. For sample conspiracy website, see GeoEngineering Watch: http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/want-to-know-about-haarp/; and for a sample conspiracy video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K52YbYzk36E.
3 The late 1980s – the decade just preceding HAARP’s construction – was a watershed decade in American public consciousness about climate change that included congressional hearings on global warming taking place from 1981 to 1982; the passage of the 1987 Global Climate Protection Act through an alliance of government and non-governmental agencies; and NASA climate modeler James Hansen’s well-publicised 1988 testimony before the House Energy Committee expressing his 99 per cent certainty that unusually warm global temperatures had come about through human impacts on greenhouse gases.
4 One way to quantify that resurgence in a broader Anglo-American context is through the publication of such texts as Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track, 1925 (reprinted 1933, 1945, 1948, 1970, 1974 and 1994); and The Ley-Hunter’s Manual, 1927 (reprinted 1983, 1989); Tony Wedd’s Skyways and Landmarks, 1961; John Michell, The Flying Saucer Vision, 1967, and The View Over Atlantis, 1969; The Earth Spirit, 1975; and The Old Stones of Land’s End, 1974; Tom Graves’ Needles of Stone, 1978; and Paul Devereux’s The Ley-Hunter’s Companion, 1979.
5 ‘Sacred geometry’ is employed synonymously with geomancy and sometimes in preference to it, as is suggested by the recurrence of the phrase in titles of recent books by such authors as Francene Hart, Miranda Lundy, Robert Lawlor, Stephen Skinner, Russell Symonds, and Mark Vidler and Catherine Young.
6 With the current number of displaced persons now exceeding 60 million, it’s clear that it’s not only the idea of home that’s been lost.
7 In peritectic reactions, liquid and solid phases of fixed proportions react at a fixed temperature to yield a single solid phase.
8 See Begich (Citation1995, Citation2000). The later text shifts away from a specific focus on HAARP to examine the spectrum of technological advances that may reshape Earth’s future.
9 Teilhard de Chardin’s cosmic theology was unfolded in 20 books published in the 1950s–1960s.
10 The term references that group of pre-Christian anti-materialist religions devoted to gnosis or spiritual mysteries, and collectively known as Gnosticism.
11 Antoine Faivre defines modern Western esotericism through five prominent ideas that include the idea of universal correspondences, such as those comparing planets and body; the idea of living in Nature, with Nature conceived as a living person connected to divine will; the complementary role of mediations and the imagination via rituals, symbols, etc.; the experience of transmutation as transformation or rebirth; and the belief in the concordance with and transmission of common characteristics or practices across different cultural traditions. While esotericism falls outside of religion, philosophy and science, it remains diversely indebted to each of them, as well as to the arts (Citation2010: 1–13).
12 In Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour critiques this romanticisation, arguing that the West is not detached from nature any more than the non-West is fused with it; nature plays no role in either, he contends, because the whole world is political (Partridge Citation2004: 43, 46).
13 Hanegraff notes that these esoteric beliefs, practices, and cultural forms have become a multi-million dollar market in the world economy (Citation2013: 131–42).
14 ‘By 1998’, Heelas and Woodhead report about England and the United States, ‘eighty-two percent of adults now feel the need to grow and mature spiritually’ while almost a third defined spirituality without reference to God or a higher authority (Citation2005: 74).
15 The two terms are used interchangeably to describe the belief in a usually imminent future that will usher in a 1000-year age of blessedness, beginning with or culminating in the Second Coming of Christ.
16 For Richard Landes, the key feature of millennialism is a change in temporality that imposes a sacralised narrative framework on the observable world: ‘For people who have entered apocalyptic time, everything quickens, everything enlivens, everything coheres … The smallest incident can have immense importance and opens the way to an entirely new vision of the world’ (Citation2006: 4).
17 As Charles Perrow noted in Citation1984, twentieth-century risks (and those that follow) are qualitatively more complex than those of the past; experts can’t predict the most dangerous types of failure because they’re caused by interactions that are, at least for a time, incomprehensible and invisible (144).
18 Mark Fenster has catalogued the proliferation of periodicals, pamphlets, books, broadcast media and shortwave radio, large national militias, cable TV, email lists and websites in the 1990s through which conspiracy and other prophetic (read here: paranoid) communities were formed (Citation1999: 183–5).
19 Think of the public censure following Hillary Clinton’s invocation of a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ in 1998.
20 The American Psychiatric Association included brainwashing under ‘dissociative disorders’ in the 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and it was often cited in subsequent years in lawsuits aiming to establish the influence of cults over impressionable minds (Melley Citation2013: 55–6).
21 See also Arquilla and Ronfeldt Citation2001 (who were employed by the influential Rand think tank in the early 1990s); and Alberts and Hayes Citation2003.
22 I concur with philosophers such as Nils J. Nilsson (Citation2014) that all knowledge is a variant of belief to the extent that it relies on a constructed model of reality (rather than the unmediated apprehension posited by correspondence theory). I therefore locate knowledge and belief on a continuum. What counts as knowledge in this account includes the greatest number of credible explanations and consequences that flow from causal reasoning, boasts the highest degree of consensus among experts, is the least falsifiable, and can be located in a related and reinforcing network that exceeds the lesser standard of probability. Belief is founded on the least number of these criteria.