Terrain Controls and Landscape-Scale Susceptibility Modelling of Active-Layer Detachments, Sabine Peninsula, Melville Island, Nunavut

Modelling the susceptibility of permafrost slopes to disturbance can identify areas at risk to future disturbance and result in safer infrastructure and resource development in the Arctic. In this study, we use terrain attributes derived from a digital elevation model, an inventory of permafrost slope disturbances known as active-layer detachments (ALDs) and generalised additive modelling to produce a map of permafrost slope disturbance susceptibility for an area on northern Melville Island, in the Canadian High Arctic. By examining terrain variables and their relative importance, we identified factors important for initiating slope disturbance. The model was calibrated and validated using 70 and 30 per cent of a data-set of 760 mapped ALDs, including disturbed and randomised undisturbed samples. The generalised additive model calibrated and validated very well, with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.89 and 0.81, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness at predicting disturbed and undisturbed samples. ALDs were most likely to occur below the marine limit on slope angles between 3 and 10° and in areas with low values of potential incoming solar radiation (north-facing slopes).

Modernist Ecology: Modernism and the Reimagination of Nature

Countering the trend in contemporary ecocriticism to advance realism as an environmentally responsible mode of representation, this essay argues that the anti-realist aesthetics of literary modernism were implicitly “ecological.” In order to make this argument I distinguish between contemporary and modernist ecological culture (both of which I differentiate in turn from ecological science); while the former is concerned primarily with the practical reform characteristic of what we now call “environmentalism,” the latter demanded an all-encompassing reimagination of the relationship between humanity and nature. “Modernist ecology,” as I call it, attempted to envision this change, which would be ontological or metaphysical rather than simply social, through thematically and formally experimental works of art. Its radical vision, suggestive in some ways of today’s “deep” ecology, repudiated modern accounts of nature as a congeries of inert objects to be manipulated by a sovereign subject, and instead foregrounded the chiasmic intertexture of the subject/object relationship. In aesthetic modernism we encounter not “objective” nature, but “nature-being” – a blank substratum beneath the solid contours of what philosopher Kate Soper calls “lay nature” – the revelation of which shatters historical constructions of nature and alone allows for radical alternatives. This essay looks specifically at modernist ecology as it appears in the works of W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Beckett, detailing their attempts to envision revolutionary new ecologies, but also their struggles with the limited capacity of esoteric modernist art to effect significant ecological change on a collective level.