Climate Absolution Devices, part 2
Alchemy and a Squamish Pilgrimage
Good Men and Bad, even Numberlesse,
(The latter, but without successe)
Desire the Art: But still (Alas!)
They are so given to Avarice,
That of a Million, hardly three
Were ere Ordaind for Alchimy.
- from Thomas Norton’s The Ordinal of Alchemy
Mystical analogies for carbon dioxide removal just keep on coming. CDR is the ‘new’, ‘black’ alchemy, but this time with base material pulled from the atmosphere rather than the subsurface.
Some have voiced discomfort with this skyward reorientation: “Carbon offsetting injects market logic into thin air,” begins an article from last year in e-flux. And, following layoffs by direct air capture pioneer Climeworks announced since I last wrote, one solemn LinkedIn commenter warns that DAC “represents a modern Tower of Babel, and likely not the last.”
As I argued in Part 1, our analogies reveal a lot. For one thing, they seem to confirm that many of us still swim in the same ‘socio-theological milieu.’1 Collective visions about the role of technology in society (and in the environment) are deeply, deeply informed by the past—even while those visions seem to keep shifting just as fast as the technologies themselves. We can’t resist the temptation to retell stories from the Reformation, and from long before, about the moral and spiritual danger of practices and objects which distract us from our true purpose. Speaking of telos, a vulgar version of Scholastic natural law is invoked, just for good measure, by our LinkedIn prophet: “In nature, nothing is stored without a purpose, especially not at scale,” and therefore trying to do so with DAC, by permanently shunting vast amounts of carbon dioxide underground, is folly.
Now, that this latter assertion is, er, bollocks should not stop us from taking these analogies seriously. ‘Symbolic arguments,’ as philosopher of technology Massimiliano Simons dubs them, are no less important—believe it or don’t—than any crash test, double-blind study, or risk assessment.
Elias Ashmole, in the prologue to his 1652 collection of alchemical texts, the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, argues the richness of collective memory that analogy, allegory, and symbol are able to draw on mean that poetry “has a Life, a Pulse, and such a secret Energy, as leaves in the Minde, a far deeper Impression, then what runs in the slow and evenlesse Numbers of Prose.” That’s probably why he put Thomas Norton’s work (quoted at the top) as the very first entry in the Theatrum, with its pretty couplets in Latin and English. It’s probably also why, when Ashmole died, his widow married a stonemason. Much more practical, those stonemasons, than poet-alchemists.
What Ashmole certainly got right, though, is that it’s hard to break analogical bonds once they have been cast—cosmos as machine, brain as computer, carbon removal as indulgence, and the idea that ordinary matter has within it the potential to be turned, at will, into gold.
“It is photosynthesis on steroids: Climeworks claims to do the job of 36,000 trees with the footprint of one. While Iceland is out of the way, the company’s pilot plant in an industrial zone in Hinwil outside Zürich is easily accessible; here visitors can inspect the rows of machines that look like oversized clothes dryers and, behind them, the thick balloons that hold pure, concentrated CO₂. Everyone from the Financial Times to Greta Thunberg has made the pilgrimage.”
- Andreas Malm & Wim Carton, ‘Seize the Means of Carbon Removal: The Political Economy of Direct Air Capture’
Despairing of DAC’s ‘ideology-laden metaphors,’—the kind Ashmole certainly would have coveted for his collection—here Malm & Carton, with characteristic verve, create one of their own. It’s true, many have gone to see this weird reverse oil well in the Swiss alps (the only other major attraction in town seems to be this pirate-themed biker disco, complete with galleon—der Hinwiler Black Rose). They may have done so without adequate criticality, or they might even have been enchanted—attracted maybe by an Ashmolean ‘secret Energy’ like many a pilgrim has been, travelling incorrigibly to places “where he has no particular business.”2
As with indulgences, Luther is wary: “To eradicate such false, seductive faith from the minds of simple Christian people, and to restore a right understanding of good works, all pilgrimages should be abolished.”3
Likewise some, probably Malm & Carton among them, would say that enchantment and suspension of good sense are two sides of the same coin. Pilgrimages are just asking for epistemological trouble. I had their passage in mind when I hiked alone in the pouring rain up the Stawamus Chief in January of 2023, to get a glimpse of a very peculiar shrine.
From the bare granite top of ‘the Chief’ looking west, you face on to the estuary where the Squamish and Stawamus rivers mix into the Howe Sound, the most northerly part of the Salish Sea. Vancouver lies about an hour south.
The town of Squamish sits astride the estuary. Two narrow, dredged industrial peninsulas jut out from it, the near one hosting, among much felled timber, the Carbon Engineering Innovation Centre.
Technology developed at the Innovation Centre is being deployed in what will soon be the world’s largest DAC project, built on top of the Permian Basin in Texas—STRATOS. Occidental (Oxy), the oil giant, bought Carbon Engineering later on in 2023, and is STRATOS’ developer.
Unlike, say, Hinwil, Squamish has other things going for it. Climbers, runners, MTBers, hydrologists, geologists, and ecologists prize its landscape. Spillover housing demand from Vancouver and Whistler has crippled its rental market. “Unified by the Land, Unified by Squamish” is how the contemporary redevelopment of the estuary peninsula markets itself.
Sacred experiences are not uncommon here, either. The Squamish Nation (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw) has designated land ‘behind’ the Chief as a Wild Spirit Place. The naked, shrooming Irishmen my friends encountered on the trail once, and the half a million (clothed) tourists who take the gondola up an adjacent peak every year, might be after a similar sort of thing—but they usually keep their gaze to the west rather than the east.
I had come for not much at all, really. Certainly not, at least, for a transformative ‘total process’—to use the anthropologist Victor Turner’s classic way of describing pilgrimage. I did not come to fail, like Thomas Norton’s ‘million,’ at alchemy, nor to see Carbon Engineering succeed. I was not seeking climate absolution.
The circulation of people and relics in pilgrimage can ‘make landscape fluid.’4 But this place seemed plenty fluid already—some of it was even dripping under my rain jacket collar and down the back of my neck. Fog obscured a large brown and gray shed and revealed it again. A lit-up ship docked at the bare edge of the far peninsula and pulled away. Logs lay haphazardly across its middle. Dredging, begun at least in the 60’s for a coal terminal, did not seem to be completed. I watched a backhoe, frantically digging up the near shore, nearly fall in several times.
All the while, contaminated money flows into the Innovation Centre, uncontaminated air flows out. It’s an odd site, I thought, blinking through the rain at that nondescript, rectangular structure far below, to produce a technology geared, in large part, towards permanence. “The Squamish Estuary is an incredible place that is forever changing right in front of your eyes.” I don’t really know what I saw. Uncertain relic without its jewelled case.
The next day, coming back along the Sea to Sky highway from Whistler with my friends, we stopped in Squamish for tacos and an IPA, as one does. I remember we talked about trees. Later, pulling out of town, I knew that it was still there, humming.
I still don’t know exactly what it means for technology to be enchanting, or what it means for us to enchant it. But I think it’s more than an analogy. I think it’s dangerous. I think it’s necessary.5
From Matthew Kearnes’ chapter in the collection Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred
From Eramus’ The Praise of Folly. The full passage from the Princeton Classics Edition: “One burns with zeal for revolutions; another is toiling upon his Grand Scheme. This man leaves wife and children at home and sets out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Rome, or the shrine of St. James, where he has no particular business. In sum, if you might look down from the moon, as Menippus did of old, upon the numberless agitations among mortal men, you would think you were seeing a swarm of flies or gnats, quarreling among themselves, waging wars, setting snares for each other, robbing, sporting, wantoning, being born, growing old, and dying”
From To the Christian Nobility in this edition
Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes by Ellen Arnold, page 176
Maybe I’ll come back and add more later. Maybe there will be a part 3. Couldn’t figure out a good place to cite them, but I wanted to mention two important Simon’s here who work on pilgrimage: Coleman and O’Sullivan.