Walker - Worlds to Endure

Global Networks 13, 3 (2013) 391409. ISSN 14702266. 2013 The Author(s) Journal compilation 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd & Global Networks Partnership 391

Worlds to endure: weathering disorder

from Arnhem Land to Chicago

JEREMY WALKER

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW, Australia 2007

[email protected]

Abstract In this article I consider the cosmopolitical enfolding of Western and indigenous ontologies of order and disorder implicit in the production of a carbon offset by the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) project. The resumption in Arnhem Land of broad-scale land management by indigenous fire ecologists and its reframing as carbon farming is contextualized within an historical analysis of the distinctions made between magical thinking and rational notions of agency, causality and cosmic order. I move from the account of Australian totemism in classical anthropology, through cold war climatology, to the theories of rational expectations that support contemporary carbon trading. Examining the entangling of Aboriginal and late-modern pyrotechnical orders, I contrast ubietous (place-oriented) ontologies of land, law and cosmic order with their Western counterparts in sover-eignty, land law and finance theory. Arguing that the elder Australians possessed a philosophically coherent political economy grounded in detailed earth sciences and topological networks of economic practices, I reverse the anthropological mirror back upon the economic doctrines of the neoliberal era, which advocate the reimpo-sition of order on the wild climate by means of a comprehensive financialization.

Keywords ABORIGINAL ECONOMY, LAND LAW, FIRE ECOLOGY, EMISSIONS TRADING, MAGICAL THINKING, RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS, FINANCIALIZATION

Being boss of the fire was always the way. Not fire being the boss of us. That is the lesson from the old people.

(Fire ecologist, Dean Yibarbuk, in Mackenzie et al. 2009)

Since financial market prices can be constructed time period by time period, the natural assumption is that time will never end.

(Finance economist, Peter Friesen 1979)

The early researchers who recorded the few detailed ethnographies of Australian Aboriginal traditions in the decades following the violent passage of the frontier,

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392 2013 The Author(s)

deflected enquiry into Aboriginal economic thought and organization for generations when they characterized the linkage between the practice of law and the rhythms of biological regeneration posited by increased ceremonies as a vestigial form of magical thinking. Insofar as the apparent importance of Intichiuma ceremonies to the social organization of Aboriginal totemism (Spencer and Gillen 1899a: 167) served to indicate the pre-scientific nature of indigenous experiences of causality and human-environment interaction, it contributed to the definition of anthropology as the science of non-science (Vivieros de Castro 2003) and to the idea, which was long prevalent, that most native people live in a kind of idyllic pre-economic state (Thomson 1949: 1). The grundnorm of rationality from which this critique was elaborated was the scientific mind, of a piece with the calculative, utility maxim-izing individual of nineteenth-century liberal political economy. This latter figure is more or less preserved at the core of orthodox finance theory, the school of thought that justifies the commonplace that the only rational and efficient response to the intensification of climactic disorder is the erection of liquid financial markets trading in rights to continue polluting.

Pre-contact indigenous ontologies of time, place and being remain as inaccessible to us as the nourishing terrains (Rose 1996) they once served to reproduce. Yet we might assume that to the extent that the philosophical principles organizing indigenous thought have weathered the onslaughts of colonization, they would remain remote from the ontological complex of land, knowledge and law the West has since overcoded the Australian continent with, whether encountered in its different moments as state sovereignty extending the despotic dominion of property right in land to mining corporations, or as the evaluative machinery of orthodox finance theory which deduces from the law of the market the means by which we are to tame the future of disordered weather rolling ominously towards us.

This incommensurability is brought into productive tension in the resurrection of indigenous fire-based practices of long-term ecological management, reconfigured as carbon farming by the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project (WALFA). In Australias tropical savannahs, Bininj (people in local parlance) have lit low-intensity grass fires in the early part of the dry season to manage their country since time immemorial. The decline of the nomadic life and the prohibition of Bininj burns have resulted in dramatic changes in the fire regime, for fuel builds up and results in wild infernos in the late dry season in areas now rarely visited. Long left out of focus in studies of Australian indigenous culture, fire-stick farming to use the term Jones (1969) coined is only now being recognized as the most important technology of pan-Aboriginal social and economic organization and no longer as a form of patho-logically irresponsible collective pyromania. Grounded in detailed ecological and meteorological knowledge, Aboriginal firing of country fosters the abundance of a wide variety of potential food species. It generates a fine-grained mosaic of plant associations suited to mobile strategies of broad-spectrum hunting and foraging. It releases nitrogen and carbon back to the soil and, by reducing fuel loads and creating firebreaks, preserves rainforest gullies and the flowers and fruit of mature trees that would otherwise go up in smoke (Bliege Bird et al. 2008; Lewis 1989; Rose 1995;

Worlds to endure: weathering disorder from Arnhem Land to Chicago

2013 The Author(s) 393

Russell-Smith et al. 2009; Yibarbuk et al. 2001). Clearly aimed at the national imaginary, Bill Gammages (2011) The biggest estate on Earth, may yet profoundly change the way we perceive the contemporary Australian landscape. Gammage unearths a great midden of eyewitness accounts of the Australian landscape at the moment of Sovereignty. Marvelling at the park-like condition of game-rich grasslands, colonial diarists, sketchers and surveyors were also mystified by the abrupt proximity of beautiful forests to open, almost treeless pastures, with soil so soft and dark you could sink a hand into it with ease. They witnessed people working the land with fire in every locality from Van Diemans Land to Cooktown, yet rarely thought to connect the social endeavour of burning to the indigenous estates that had been made, seeing only the utopia of an undifferentiated nature devoid of social relations. The estates were violently annexed and the abundance fostered by a long-perfected ecological engineering destroyed.

In cooperation with scientists from the Tropical Savannahs Centre, Bushfires Northern Territory, and the Australian Greenhouse Office, five Western Arnhem Land clan groups the Jaywoyn, Djelk, Manwurrk, Mimal and Adjumarllal are re-humanizing the feral fire regime of West Arnhem Land, and in the process generating a measurable carbon abatement. In a 2006 deal brokered with the Northern Territory government and the Northern Land Council, the US energy giant ConocoPhillips agreed to fund the WALFA network to the tune of $1 million a year for 17 years. In exchange, ConocoPhillips purchased the right to offset some fraction of the emissions from its gas-fired electricity plant in Darwin. This time around, the setting of cultural fire across a vast swathe of Arnhem Land relies as much on traditional knowledge practices of weather prediction and phenology as it does on scientific techniques involving helicopters, satellites, GIS mapping and ICT networks, annually delivering well more than the 100,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent abatement specified in the contract. For rangers, the status of a proper wage enables them to escape from changing welfare regimes, of which the humiliating micro-management of the NT Emergency Intervention Act of 2007 is only the most recent. For senior custodians such as Wamud Namok, who was instrumental in establishing the WALFA network, it supports the transformative territorial politics of the outstations movement, allowing an escape from the dependent poverty of townships and a reconstitutive return to autonomous living on country. WALFA is not an incorporated company engaged in emissions trading, but an affiliation of landowners and scientists who see greenhouse gas abatement as a means of securing finances to address social, cultural and biodiversity agendas (Cooke 2012). ConocoPhillipss inventory registers WALFAs reduction in the intensity and scale of wildfires as a pollution offset purchased for around $10 per tonne. In other words, it is a hedge against a future carbon tax or emissions trading regime.1 Instantiating a moral equivalence in law, carbon offsets are financial assets predicated on the metrological commensuration of activities as disjunct as accelerating the rate of fossil energy combustion, destroying refrigerants produced for the purpose of profiting from their destruction or shooting unwanted camels (Drucker 2008; Mackenzie 2009; Rosenthal and Lehren 2012).

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Considering WALFA within the history of the anthropological distinction between magical and rational accounts of relations between human action and natural events, we begin by noting the earliest responses to the chaotic prospect of global warming in the depths of the cold war. We then trace the history of the category of magical thinking in classical anthropology and historicize the geoeconomic forces now shaping the tropical savannahs. The efforts of the historian of religion Tony Swain (1993) to recover the ground of a pan-Aboriginal philosophy of being are read against Bill Gammages (2011) retrieval from the colonial archive of the pyro-ecological techniques that once maintained a trans-continental network of park-like estates. Accepting (with obvious semantic caveats) that the Australians of 1788 pos-sessed a sophisticated political theology, and economic practices grounded in empirical sciences adequate to the real, reverses the anthropological mirror back upon neoliberal finance theory, which codifies contemporary liberalisms cosmologi-cal precepts insofar as it advocates the reimposition of order on the wild climate by means of a comprehensive financialization.

Climate control: global warming in the cold war

In 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson was presented with the earliest public study on the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and warned of its poten-tially devastating effects (Revelle et al. 1965). Since then, talk about the weather has lost its innocence. The denormalized weather is no longer a bare fact and evokes fiercely held moral and political ontologies. Ironically, this announcement of impend-ing biospheric destabilization came amid the zenith of a confidence in the imminent mastery of the climate, manifest in the numerous weather-engineering projects considered by cold war scientists. Anticipating a computational science of long-range weather prediction, the computer engineer, nuclear physicist and economist John von Neumann had considered the possible effects of atomic and thermonuclear explo-sions on the weather and declared in 1956 he had little doubt one could intervene on any desired scale, and ultimately achieve rather fantastic effects (Kwa 2001: 142). Storms would be summoned to bring crops to the deserts, or to overwhelm the communist enemy. In keeping with such optimism, the Presidents Science Advisory Committee never considered the restriction of fossil-fuel combustion, convinced that global heating could be fixed very cheaply through geoengineering. Littering vast areas of the worlds oceans with shoals of floating particles would make a kind of globally distributed Styrofoam mirror, lightening the colour of the sea, raising the Earths albedo and offsetting the effects of radiative forcing. In retrospect, this report inaugurated a new chapter in the history of magical thinking.

If digital computers fostered a dream of atmospheric discipline they also enabled the meteorological studies of Lorenz (1963), whose foundational work on determinis-tic chaos established the impossibility of long-range weather forecasting.2 The science of non-linear dynamics exposed the problems of verifying the effects of weather modification experiments: as all points in a weather system are highly sensitive, no causal model can demonstrate (with what quantum physics and tort law delightfully



calls counterfactual definiteness) what weather events would have occurred in the absence of the intervention. That long-range weather prediction is impossible does not, contra the sceptics, invalidate long-term projections of climate change. Weather, localized and immediate in its timing and intensities, can be distinguished from climate, which is conceptualized at much larger spatial and temporal scales. The future heat balance of the atmosphere can be estimated from basic physical laws and aggregations of measurements: the precise expression of this as weather cannot. Individual waves cannot be predicted, but the timing and height of tides can be published well in advance.

Although countless experiments in rainmaking and hurricane steering and suppression were made for civil purposes, the revelation that the skies of Vietnam were being weaponized in efforts to destroy the rice crop provoked worldwide outrage, leading to the 1978 UN Environmental Modification Convention, which ended official support for weather control. Importantly, this was not because people believed that weather engineering did not work, but that it might work too well, causing catastrophic flooding or the permanent loss of rainfall associated with seasonal storm patterns. Even though the power of computation was extremely limited by todays standards, the belief that weather engineering was working exemplifies a faith in the isomorphism between symbolic representation and the event being represented, whereby knowledge was thought to confer almost unlimited potential for control.

Magical thinking: the economic character of an anthropological disparagement

In 1912, Sir W. Baldwin Spencer visited the floodplains west of the remote colonial port recently renamed after Darwin. The federal government had appointed Spencer as the first chief protector of the Aborigines in the territory. The people whom Spencer dubbed the Kakadu (Gagadju was one of at least twelve languages then spoken in the area) were suffering rapid population declines after decades of frontier violence and introduced disease. Spencer was one of the few field ethnographers to record detailed post-contact observations of indigenous societies prior to the falling of the Great Silence (Stanner 1968), the erasure of Aborigines from public discourse and historiography as the frontier closed and colonists secured control over the extremities of the continent. Although working on the remotest peripheries to the metropolitan centres of theoretical innovation and prestige, the detailed ethnographic work of Spencer and Gillen (1899a) on the Arrernte people became central to the grand debate of fin-de-sicle anthropology regarding the relationship between magic and science, for James Frazer (1910) drew heavily on their field reports to write his Totemism and exogamy. According to Gardner (2008: 273, my emphasis):

Central to the debate was the anthropological term totemism which was defined as the origin of erroneous magical thinking and the mechanism by which the lowest races sought spiritual answers for material phenomena. From the base line of totemism, human evolution led to increasingly

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sophisticated religious thought and then finally to science. The implication was that, by this route, humanity was progressively freed from religious falsehood.

Struggling with the disorienting revelations of Darwinian deep time, Australian anthropologists folded biological evolution into social evolution with a familiar end of history scenario: at length we come to the civilised man with his personal rights and possessions and his gospel of political economy teaching him that self-seeking on the part of the individual must result in the greater good of the greater number. (Fison and Howitt 1880: 128).

Spencer and Gillens work on the corporeal performances of Arrernte ceremonies reported that among the most serious of the diverse rituals were those they called the Intichiuma, or increase ceremonies, enacted to persuade totemic beings to make rain or otherwise multiply the population of edible animals or plants. The primary function of a totemic group is that of ensuring by magic means a supply of the object which gives its name to the totemic group (Spencer and Gillen 1899b: 278). In 1913, Malinowski wrote of Spencer and Gillen that half the total production in anthropological theory has been based upon their work, and nine-tenths affected or modified by it (Kuklick 2006: 536). In describing the complex set of food restrictions associated with the Muraian ceremonies of the Kakadu peoples, Spencer (1914: 188) wrote that amongst the many ceremonies of this kind that I have seen performed by Australian aboriginals, none have impressed me more than these, as indicating that savage man believes that he is able to control his food supply by means of magic.

Arduous attempts were made to distinguish between magic, religion and science in the vast commentary generated by studies of Australian totemism, from Durkheim, Mauss, Malinowski, through to Levi-Strauss. Lvy-Bruhl (1910) set the tone in his sweeping Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures, which identified magical thinking as the foundational error of the primitive mind. Indigenous modes of thought were pre-logical, non-logical graspings toward an elusive causality: the rational laws of nature, isomomorphic with the order of the scientific mind. The category magical thinking indicated epistemological failure, an erroneous corre-lation of rituals, words and symbols with the causation of natural events, an obsessive attention to synchronicity signifying the most primitive of superstitions. In the convoluted debates that followed, indigenous modes of being tended to be backcast in a chronology wherein the uncovering of deterministic principles of natural law by modern science was the definitive event of human becoming. As Tambiah (1968: 203), for example, wrote:

As Levi-Strauss vacillates in a series of equivocations when he first argues on the lines of Mauss, that magic postulates an all-embracing determinism, an unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism, an act of faith in a science yet to be born, i.e. that magic is like science; then shifts his ground in the face of magics sometimes illusory results to say that to order is better than not to order and therefore taxonomy as represented in magical ideas has eminent aesthetic value, i.e. magic is like art; and finally says that the analogy



between magic and science is merely formal, and therefore instead of contrasting magic and science, it would be better to compare them as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.

If long absent from serious anthropology, confidence in a certain conception of rational order can be noted in that magical thinking survives as a categorization of the causal ontology of infants (Subbotsky 2004), a diagnostic proxy for psychosis (Thalbourne and French 1995), and an apologetics for financial traders momentarily bumping the economy out of full rational expectations equilibrium (Schiller 1999).

It is not my intention to deploy hindsight to cast anthropologists as mouthpieces of imperial ideology. Some strove mightily to overcome their philosophical and moral prejudices, to comprehend the elusive glimpses of an ancient order they sensed in the present, often hybrid and degenerate social relations of people existing under immense colonial pressures (Povinelli 2002: 36, 7189). Nor is it to re-present indigenous ontology as eminently Cartesian. Rather, my point is that even the most respectful Australianists tended to reify culture as a symbolic system of beliefs, myths and rites. The effect of this was to implicitly negate the possibility that empirically adequate life sciences and a lasting, organized system of political economy lay encoded in Law and enacted in material practices away from the spectacular performances of the ceremonial ground. As Austin-Broos (2010: 142) observes, long after the sustaining spatial order of the economy was swept out from underneath it, culture repositioned as an aesthetic practice in an altered social order remains the object of anthropological attention as an unchanging spiritual affiliation to land. Apparently just as unable as the land-appropriating squatters to conceive of stateless peoples as possessing the political organization or scientific knowledge necessary for the intentional labour of long-term land management, classical anthropology overlooked the pyrotechnical economic order. It thus did little to prevent nationalist mythology adopting Darwins image of harmless savages wandering about without knowing where they shall sleep at night (Gammage 2011).

The map of the savannahs was a dream

The tourist visiting Kakadu National Park is at once awed by the antiquity and con-tinuity of human habitation evidenced by the art galleries of Arnbangbang, where the western edge of the Arnhem Land escarpment looks out over the monsoonal flood-plains of the Wildman and Alligator rivers, abundant in turtles, lotus lilies, barra-mundi and magpie geese. While a human presence in northern Australia has a history of at least fifty thousand years, it is thought that the relatively dense populations and successions of peoples who have layered their distinctive paintings into these rock shelters date to the formation of the freshwater wetlands at the end of the last ice age some fifteen thousand years ago. Then, the land was drier, cooler, further from the sea and unable to support large communities.

The climate is changing again. More intense cyclones, storm surges and rising seas are slowly turning the freshwater wetlands saline, killing the paperbark groves as

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the bare, salted mudflats creep inland. One quickly grasps the extent to which this frontier region territorializes the exceptional messiness of post-colonial sovereignty, manifest in the selective transformations of its geography by the events that reverberate back and forth in the entangled spheres of global finance, the geopolitics of mining and energy, and the Anthropocene atmosphere itself.

Uranium is said to have been discovered here in 1892, but the deposits are in areas restricted in Jawoyn law as Sickness Country long before Becquerel or Curie were born. Considered potential allies of Japanese invaders, Aborigines were rounded up and removed to Native Control Camps during the Second World War. This act of settlement aided the initiation of mining operations, which began in earnest in 1952. The gazetting of Kakadu in the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act (1975), a response to the rising support for nature conservation among Australians, was also bound up with the advance of the land rights movement. The Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976) vested the ownership of the land in perpetuity to indigenous land trusts, in return for a permanent leasing of the land for a jointly managed national park. As a RAMSAR site and a World Heritage conservation area, Kakadu presumably enjoys the highest degree of protection available for its unique biodiversity and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, these landmark acts of legislation were from the start subordinated to modernitys insatiable hunger for exothermic energy release.

The imperative to excise the largest ore bodies from the park (and from the indigenous veto implied by native title) was built into both acts from the beginning. Opened in 1980, the Ranger mine now supplies 10 per cent of the worlds uranium. A major buyer is the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the stricken Fukushima reactors. Ranger routinely spills radiologically contaminated water into adjacent rivers and groundwater in breach of its no release operating licence (Ferguson and Mudd 2010). As I write, the wettest wet season ever recorded in Kakadu threatens to exceed the design limits of the tailings dam. Fukushima and Ranger, it might be said, are struggling with unanticipated events of excess liquidity.

Exceptional territory

The numerous exceptions that layer the territory are exemplified in the decisionism of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act (2007), rushed through the federal parliament when, in its eleventh year of government, the Howard LiberalNational coalition discovered the multiple social crises of certain impoverished remote indigenous communities. Responding to alcohol-fuelled violence, social breakdown and a cyclone of child abuse (Schubert and Murdoch 2007), in a domestication of the doctrine of the failed state the military was called to assist in the roll out of topdown welfare reform. After years of systemic neglect, the lack of ordinary government services demanded a response (Langton 2008). Yet, the seizure of tenure and control of townships on lands held communally and in perpetuity under native title embodied the conservative attribution of indigenous social suffering to



land rights legislation (Watson 2009). The government found it necessary to exempt its legislation from the Racial Discrimination Act (1975), rendering legal the intensive income management of all welfare recipients in scheduled communities, without right of review. Reflecting the commitment of neoliberals to the self-responsibilizing virtues of debt, people were to be instructed in financial literacy and offered mort-gages for private homes.

The scope for household financial accumulation is linked to the management of debt secured against property. The exclusive right in property that we are often told anchors the liberal rule of law is authorized by the interpretive legacy of case law decisions receding into a distant past. In its final regression, English common law is grounded in a primordial lex terrae: in every instance of court decision the authority of the law of the land speaks through. Given the Howard governments argument that the individualization and alienability of native title was absolutely necessary to economic advancement for indigenes, it is ironic that when the owners of Maningrida township sought just terms compensation for the forcible acquisition of property in the High Court, the Commonwealth denied this constitutional protection of property right applied in the territory. As it turns out, territorians do not enjoy a constitutional (as opposed to statutory) right to parliamentary representation, even though constitutional theory holds that it is no longer the decision of the Imperial Parliament of Britain to federate the separate colonies, but popular sovereignty that forms the grundnorm of Australian legal order (Brennan 2010). The authoritarian liberalism of the Northern Territory Emergency Response recalls the geopolitical ontology of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (2003: 48), who insisted that the authorizing violence of an immanent non-law is disclosed in every historical act of law:

the constitutive process of land-appropriation is found at the beginning of the history of every settled people, every commonwealth, every empire. This is true as well for the beginning of every historical epoch. Not only logically, but also historically, land-appropriation precedes the order that follows from it. It constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law. It is the reproductive root in the normative order of history. All further property relations are derived from this radical title. All subsequent law and everything promulgated and enacted thereafter as decrees and commands are nourished, to use Heraclitus word, by this source.

We should not be surprised at the strategic amnesia by which terra nullius is continually being declared, as if for the first time (Cooper and Mitropolous 2009: 367). The demand for the normalization of native title is in the interests of affluent Australians and their quarry economy. Pace Schmitt, the suspension of native rights through emergency legislation is ultimately a defence against the disorienting pos-sibility opened up by Mabo v Queensland No. 2 (1992) that, contra Schmitt, the ultimate foundation of title is the aboriginal laws of country (Rush 1995: 311).

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Radical title: retrieving the nomos of 1788

Indigenous Australians have been portrayed, often simultaneously, as timeless, lacking history, unchanged since the dawn of time, believers in a cyclical time, historically bound to original ancestors and a creationist Dreamtime. They are seen as possessed of a genealogical memory so shallow as to constitute cultural amnesia, to be ignorant of the origin of conception in sexual intercourse, forsaking to speak the names of the dead out of a terrified Oedipal denial of sex and of death, and irredeem-ably conservative in the face of change.

Tony Swain (1993) has attempted to gesture toward an ontology of pan-Aboriginal being from the surviving materials of the post-frontier, semantically contaminated as they are by the categorical assumptions of the ethnographers. Swain explains all the above-mentioned misconceptions through a critique of the white image of the Dreamtime as a cosmic origin myth, a one-period model in which the totality of being emerges out of non-being. He argues that the common misinterpre-tation of Aboriginal ontology as the result of simple epistemic, empirical or logical errors simply reflects the extent to which European writers were unable to see beyond their own cosmological horizon, which gives ontological priority to chrono-logical time.

Westerners derive cultural meaning from monotheistic eschatologies of First and Last days, later to be secularized into ideologies of historical progress. Coupled with the concrete processes by which land has been rendered fungible as a capital com-modity, this has led to the radical emptying of place, which is evacuated of all specific content in the Euclidean image of space as a grid of metric coordinates. In the popular Western view, Swain (1993: 19) writes, time still, so to speak, ticks on even if nothing occurs; its emancipation from events is ensured by its own sub-jugation of an ongoing numbered measure. But in Aboriginal thought there is nothing beyond events themselves. For Aborigines, there is nothing more fundamental than the statement: events occur.

Retranslating the mistranslation of the Dreamtime to Abiding Events, Swain shows that the rhythms of Australian religion (integrating ceremony, kinship and the nomadology of ecological and economic practices) may be characterized as nurturing a principled affirmation of ubiety (the ontological primacy of concrete places) over the body and time. Aboriginal ontology does not allow time or history philosophical determination because this is incompatible with an uncompromising insistence on the immutability of place. Abiding Events establish the shape of lands, but there is no world creation, or single unifying world principle (Swain 1993: 35). Places are fully conscious and intentional, pregnant with potential for emergence, sources of life to which all return upon death as undifferentiated being, there to await the abiding event of regeneration. Lives are momentary emanations, reaffirmations of ancestral jour-neys along the topological network of tracks linking the sacred places that manifest life and law across the entire continent. To attribute origin to sex or to name the dead was to abstract an individual body in time, to deny the abiding source of being in the living earth. To enthrone genealogy as a social principle brought the grave political



danger of a historical claim to territory, the suppression of which Swain proposes as one of the fundamental tasks of pan-Aboriginal politico-religious thought.

Temporality has an imperialist tendency that licenses historys systemic wars of territorial conquest and its erasure of prior occupants, something unthinkable to the people of 1788. What would be the point of killing an elder in law for her totemic place? The abiding presence in the site can only be activated by the rightful owners of the knowledge intrinsic to the being of that place. In a thesis reminiscent of Clastress (1989) political anthropology of Amerindia, Swain challenges us to rethink Aboriginal ontology as a consistent philosophical effort to ward off the corrosive effects of Utopian (= no place) historical consciousness, the better to create worlds to endure. While violence, sanctioned and illicit, was and remains present in Aboriginal society, as Strehlow and others observed of its loosely interdependent political organ-ization, the form of grouping or segmentation practised made possible not merely tribal but inter-tribal social co-operation. No tribe sought to dominate or terrorize its neighbours. There might be blood feuds [but] there have been, as far as we know, no instances of inter-tribal warfare in Australia (Strehlow 1956: 912).

This political ecology of places upheld a centreless system of continental exchange that was among the most extensive and complex in the Holocene world, linking a continuous series of estates. Totemism gave specific form to the funda-mental moral obligation to care for country: conferring responsibility for the custodial labour of Dreaming places and transmitting intricate local knowledge of (among other things) the ecology of fire. If the coherence of Aboriginal thought was simply inac-cessible to Western human sciences, this is in part because the nourishing terrains it served to maintain were literally invisible to the invaders. In an alien biota where 70 per cent of plants are adapted to regeneration in and through fire, Europeans were simply incapable of reading the rich abundance of the expropriated terrains as the achievement of indigenous science, political organization and the accumulated labour of millennia, or in crude terms, as the output of a process of production. To acknowledge the intentionality of Aboriginal ontology through its biogeography of Abiding Events hints at the affirming openness to world-changing events such thought may possess and yet still abide.

Phenology, synchronicity, order

We need not directly address the cross-cultural category of Aboriginal science to accept that indigenous peoples have knowledge of natural phenomena, and systems of logic or thinking about the natural world (Morphy 2002: 2). Beyond anthropology, the failure of philosophers of science from Leibniz through to Popper to detach science from its moorings in social practices, or to define a verificationist principle capable of demarcating scientific from non-scientific statements, is a familiar refrain (Agrawal 1995). If some might at this point invoke quarks, Heisenberg uncertainty, or Blackfoot physics, it is sufficient to note the empirical and taxonomical depth of the knowledge of, for example, the Inuit who collaborate with other scientists to monitor the altered ice worlds of Beringia (Krupnik and Jolly 2002). On their own account,

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Bininj have been directly witnessing climate-related disjunctions in their country for 30 years (Wunderlich 2010). These observations of unprecedented events are incor-porated into pre-existing ways of knowing that, while worlds apart in taxonomic ontology, they share the empirical domain of the biological sub-discipline phenology.

Phenologists study the synchronous periodicity of biological events, such as the arrival of migratory birds, the first fruiting and flowering of plants and their inter-actions with the lifecycles of pollinators. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has taken into account rural diarists recordings of events that preceded systematic temperature records (Whitfield 2001). Contemporary phenological studies play an important part in assessing the local manifestations of climate change (Memmott et al. 2007). Given meaning within coherent bodies of meteoro-logical, astronomical and ecological lore (Green et al. 2010), phenological events can be thought of as the empirical touchstone of indigenous orders of place, time and being.

The critique of totemism as magical thinking centred on an erroneous theory of causality, a mistaken investment in the power of symbols and performances to sustain the earth and increase production. We now redirect this criterion of scientific dis-qualification toward the orthodox finance theory of rational expectations and the ontology of the carbon offset.3

Taming the savage state: the celestial sphere of efficient finance

In the 1870s, Walras first objectified the economy by excising from it the categories of land and the political. Since then, standard economics has remained a micro-ontology of rational personhood in an ideal social setting the market where rational behaviour conflates with the mathematical solution of a constrained maxi-mization problem, an a priori psychology mapped on to incomplete vintages of energy physics (Mirowski 1989). The behaviour of the individuals comprising the economy is constrained by deterministic principles of general equilibrium and conflated with the timeless stability of natural law itself. Being prior to the elabor-ation of the second law of thermodynamics and indifferent to biological life, this metaphor presents all objects as completely substitutable and all processes as fully reversible, innocent of the resolutely historical dissipation of fossil energy and other natural resources into irrevocable waste by the entropic processes of industrial expansion (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). At its inception, economics sought to appropri-ate the scientific legitimacy of the physics of energy, which had arisen from the study of fossil-fuel combustion in the heat engines at the heart of the industrial economy. It is no small irony that the study of the material transformation of nature through human labour and the energy released by anthropogenic fire (industrial production) subsequently disappeared from economics proper, which came to be about the mar-ginal propensity to exchange of abstract economic actors in abstract markets.

According to the Chicago Schools efficient markets hypothesis (Fama 1970), a generalization of the theory of rational expectations (Lucas 1972) to macroeconomics,



market prices for financial assets always incorporate the totality of social knowledge about the fundamentals of the economy. They efficiently aggregate all information about possible futures into present prices and allocate all risks to those best able to bear them. Economic science here disposes of the possibility that manufactured ignorance, irrational speculation, or unrestrained desire might overwhelm the truth-arbitrating capacity of the market and disastrously disorganize the real economy. In orthodox finance theory, one can offset any contingent claim against another through the evolution of financial securities. A position can be taken against any, and all, savage states of nature (Chichilnisky 1999: 74). General equilibrium is preserved in the efforts of Graciela Chichilnisky to domesticate the uncertainties of the far-from-equilibrium climate. A designer of the Kyoto international emissions market, she has also authored novel instruments that securitize the exposure of insurers to unpredict-able climatological events in the form of catastrophe futures (Chichilnisky and Heal 1996). Candidly, she indicates what constitutes responsibility in the neoliberal dispen-sation: how to hedge against the risks that we ourselves cause? We introduce new markets, markets where the securities hedge against endogenous risks. This is precisely the role of derivative markets which hedge against the negative changes in crucial indices (Chichilnisky 1999: 12).

Uncertainty, along with moral liability for destructive pollution, can be commodi-fied, sliced, diced and laid off to the financial markets. This is the advantage that the finance industry offers humanity. The root assumption is that one can infinitely hedge all risks. So long as arbitrageurs are free to take a financial position against any event, the market ensures that the worst-case contingency will never precipitate.

The magic of the market: commensuration through financialization

The ontological stabilization of carbon finance is a demanding task. It requires a multitude of epistemic negotiations and metrological translations. Earth scientists compile swathes of data mapping the movements of the elements and input them to atmospheric general circulation model runs. Economists are commissioned to test proposed market-making legislation against emission-growth scenarios in their com-putable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The ever more precise unbundling and abstraction of legal property inspired by the Chicago School neo-liberal Ronald Coase plays out in the design of trading platforms and instruments. Meanwhile, the OTC derivative market continues to dwarf the value of the real economy by an order of magnitude. Even before we consider the WALFA network, we are dealing with knowledge paradigms likely incommensurable in the Kuhnian sense. Yet commensuration is the whole rationale of carbon trading.

On the basis that a tonne of carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gas equivalent) mitigated at marginal cost, no matter where or how the mitigation occurs, is a tonne mitigated, a host of contradictory objectives and unpredictable events can be brought into a single epistemological framework. The generation of a carbon offset as a unit of abatement, and its transmogrification into a licence to pollute involves account-ing the difference between as yet unrealized alternative future events, or a non-event

Jeremy Walker


measured in tonnes of CO2e. In this sense, carbon finance is derivative, insofar as no tangible property can be delivered in settlement of the contract. Under cap-and-trade theory, power stations project a business as usual scenario for future emissions and generate a tradable carbon credit if the actual emissions are less than the projection. Conversely, the test of additionality for clean development mechanism (CDM) funding requires the a posteriori assertion that an investment in abatement would not otherwise have been made. Normalizing the rapid rates of deforestation typical of debt-burdened exporting countries in the tropics, avoided deforestation in REDD offset schemes, generates bargain basement units of abatement out of promises not to raze as yet unrazed areas of forest, which it is asserted would inevitably be razed otherwise, and now will never be. This offsets the continuation of fossil fuel emis-sions elsewhere. At the macro-scale, carbon trading is supposed to commensurate the continuous expansion of industrial technomass with the radical reduction of the fossil fuel use that has always underwritten it.

Because derivatives trade in events represented in indices of price volatility and not in the exchange of the underlying assets and commodities, they enable the estab-lishment of relations between any combinations of asset, and between the present and future prices of those combinations. They thus connect markets previously insulated from one another even though no property has changed hands. As derivatives can be written against bad weather, political risk, tiger extinction, or anything that can be represented on an index, as Bryan and Rafferty (2007: 135) explain, the result is the increasing subjection of the cosmos to a:

huge market process in which all different forms and temporalities of capital are priced against (commensurated with) each other. By this process of com-mensuration, rates of return on different assets can be directly measured and, in a competitive capitalist environment, there follows a requirement of each asset, across space and time, to deliver a competitive return.

Obviously, the ability of money to convey information is not without its limits. Drawing attention to the computational architectures of trading platforms and their capacity to generate ever-more complex financial relationships, Mirowski argues that this evolution of automated algorithms for leveraged arbitrage across markets leads to a contagious state of computational intractability across all markets. As he (Mirowski 2010: 4334) contends:

Market forms start out isolated and operating at very low levels of complexity: market failures (in the current sense) are relatively unknown; innovation turns them into ever-more elaborate markomata. In the absence of severe macro-economic contractions, the pace of complexification accelerates. It is charac-teristic of the dynamic of economic development that human participants, from their individual parochial vantage points, attribute any observed failure to a particular localized market, whereas from an analytical point of view, it should more appropriately be attributed instead to the entire network architecture.



As financial derivatives have proliferated into an incredibly complex and increas-ingly fragile system of supra-national money traded by a small number of private banks, the turbulent events of environmental change and imperial debt finance have become inextricably connected as the cause or effect of one another (Cooper 2010). Just as the commodification of uncertainty in the endless drive for liquidity led (during the financial crisis of 2008) to the mass production of uncertainty and the drying up of liquidity (Lohmann 2010), so it also undermined attempts to fortify the caps on emissions that justify trading. As a result, emissions continue to rise and carbon prices continue to collapse in trading schemes from Europe to New Zealand. The doors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, whose voluntary contracts suffered a complete evaporation of value in the wake of the crisis, are now closed. In a figure-ground reversal, the faith that the magic of the market will reimpose order on the climate begins to look like an episode of ritual self-delusion, a nave increase ceremony betraying an inadequate conception of causality.

Conclusion

Whatever the inner understandings of WALFA scientists, indigenous or otherwise, these fire ecologists embody the cosmopolitical task of incorporating anomalous weather into the social order. WALFAs success has encouraged the export of traditional fire knowledge back to the south, where the full force of the invasion was borne, where each record heatwave brings its firestorms. We begin to imagine a strange, Hayekian cosmos in which traditional owners sell their pyro-cultural labours to financiers, who contribute to the intertemporal governance of the earth by taking profit on the trade of this post-national geomoney (Pryke 2007), integrating ancient networks of local responsibility for land into the open currents of finance.

Some will read WALFAs pyro-technics as another erosion of traditional society, or lament that indigenes have escaped from the micro-management of the NT Emergency Intervention into the arms of energy corporations, linking their fates to the volatilities of financial markets and the principal agents of global warming. Certainly, WALFAs gentle fires provide cheap moral cover to the Hadean conflagrations of ConocoPhillips, a corporation whose total energy stocks at the beginning of 2011, when sold to the world and burnt, would be equivalent to around 10 per cent of the record quantity of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere that year.4 While Aboriginal participation in carbon farming is commendably strategic, it is a secon-dary motivation given the gathering threats to life and land, an accommodation to the strangers whose recent arrival has been so destabilizing, a continuation of an abiding moral economy in and through the cataclysmic events of modernity.

At stake in the cooperative labour of indigenous rangers and Balanda scientists is what Gadamer (1989) termed a fusion of horizons, a dialectical process in which vantage points once incommensurable by reason of language, culture or historical consciousness may momentarily open to one another, allowing participants genuinely to inhabit the same lifeworld, as if for the first time. The emergency of capitalist time and its desynchronization of life, weather and law are forging a mutual rapprochement

Jeremy Walker


between the ancient and modern sciences of ecological management. This world-affirming ethos of responsibility is to be celebrated if the machine dream of an optimal nature, arising as if by magic from unrestricted self-interest, is ever to be exorcized from Western thought. Perhaps our efforts to confront the intensification of climatological disorder are best thought of as experiments in a missing moral geosophy: acts of faith in a science yet to be (re)born.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Weather Group_U artists collective for the opportunity to visit the Territory; Jon Marshall, James Goodman and anonymous reviewers; and in particular Gillian Cowlishaw, John von Sturmer and Deborah Bird Rose for learned and critical feedback. A UTS Early Career Researcher grant supported this research.

Notes

1. A consideration of Australias coal and gas export boom and the Gillard Labor govern-ments climate legislation (in effect since July 2012) is beyond the scope of this article.

2. I am indebted to Melinda Cooper for this reference. 3. One reviewer regretted that an opportunity was missed to develop a performative account

of finance in the manner of Michel Callons actor-network theory. We should approach this literature cautiously insofar as its exponents have admitted that social studies of finance [do] not set out to debunk conventional financial economics. Orthodox finance theory, for example, gives an account of markets that is in many respects perfectly successful (Buenza et al. 2006: 740).

4. According to their 2011 annual report, ConocoPhilips began the year with a net fossil-fuel stock of 8.3 billion BOE (barrels of oil equivalent). A barrel of oil weighs 0.137 metric tonnes. The US EPA reports that the carbon dioxide emissions that result from burning this quantity of oil are 0.430 tonnes. Burning all stocks would result in the addition of 3.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. According to the International Energy Agency, 30.6 billion tonnes of CO2 were added to the atmosphere in 2011, revealing the direst financial crisis in 80 years a mere speed bump in the business as usual emissions growth path.

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Walker - Worlds to Endure