Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

Maroon

42 From Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, comes aurora borealis and aurora australis, winds of the north and south that speak of beginnings . I have never felt more attracted to a subject I have never seen. From a scientific standpoint, my desire makes sense: auroras are places where light and magnetism meet. Their colors are restless waves of charged particles ; every flare catches something else and flickers anew. In a word, these are luminous storms that beacon. “Beacon” comes from the Old English béacn: a “sign” or “portent,” a fire set on high to serve as a warning, signal , or celebration. “Beckon” (bíecnan), “to summon” or “to gesture,” is a close relative.1 Perhaps the earliest English speakers, true boreals, experienced the beaconing powers of the aurora whenever they looked up into a clear night sky and fixated on celestial flames. But what kind of structure could I give to a signal that constantly signifies? For this chapter, I decided to embrace the aurora’s pull rather than uncurling its grasp. I traced the diverse stories it tells instead of defining its voice. I imagined dancing flames. And when the aurora beaconed, I tugged back at one of its energetic hues. Maroon is a color that beacons within the aurora: it invites us into incendiary intimacies of violence and pleasure; it signals stories of the past and lights potential futures to come; it sparks new relationships between humans and nonhumans that may ignite brighter ecological L O W E L L D U C K E R T Imagine dancing flames. As I write . . . I have before my eyes this crimson curtain that fluctuates, sends up great shoots, disappears, is fragmented, invades and illuminates space, only to die out, suddenly, in darkness. It is a complex and supple network, never in equilibrium—in other words, “existing”—striking and fluctuating swiftly in time, and having ill-defined edges. —Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time Maroon Maroon 43 communities for both. What follows is an Arcticology in and of maroon, an experiment in coexistence with a precarious world at the poles and everywhere in between. Now imagine, reader, drapes of deep reddish-brown unfurling before you: The sky is firing . . . Were you expecting the Robinson Crusoe of prismatic ecologies? I hope not. Look upon a desert isle for that sailor’s least favorite color, the shade of the “lost” or “abandoned.” Despite what it means to be “marooned,” the color maroon is never alone. Look up instead; gaze into “darkness . . . buzzing with unseen activity.”2 You might be surprised to find undulating bands of maroon dancing above you. Auroras are astronomical collaborations , our universe aflame. In simplest terms, an aurora is powered by the sun, shaped by the magnetosphere, and colored by gases.3 Charged particles from the sun (solar wind) collide with the earth’s magnetic field; this plasma is funneled toward the poles where it contacts atmospheric gas at approximately sixty to two hundred miles up. Electrical discharges emit different colors depending on what speed of electron excites what. Atomic oxygen(O)producesthemostcommoncolor—agreenish-whitishlight— but above 150 miles or so O produces a dark-red color known as the red line. And when electrons are extremely active, thereby able to penetrate farther into the solar atmosphere, nitrogen molecules (N2) create a maroonish glow at the bottom of the curtain.4 Even if it fringes the lower and upper borders of the aurora, however, maroon is a site of intense activity ratherthandiminishment.Maroonlivesuptoitsnamesake:alatesixteenthcentury word derived from the French marron (“chestnut”), maroon later meant “firework” because of the noise a chestnut makes when it bursts in the fire.5 Though somewhat predictable—auroras intensify during sunspot cycles about every eleven years, for instance—erratic phenomena like solar flares affect auroral illumination. Both recognizable and mysterious , “the forces that dance in the polar dark are awe-inspiring—alien, uncontrollable , and immensely vigorous.”6 Maroon is fire (at) work, an event akin to cooperative conflagration. The sky is firing . . . Samuel Hearne was the first European to travel overland across Canada to the Arctic Ocean, but he is perhaps remembered best as the inspiration for 44 Lowell Duckert Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Born in 1745, Hearne joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1766 and was stationed at the far-north outpost of Prince...