Author: Delightful_Oryx

In my final blog post I will be using the secondary sources I used in my second and third blog posts, Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” and Bergthaller’s “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil” and building on the analysis I made in the third blog post regarding ‘luxury’  as repetitive descriptive word for artificial islands. I will be focusing mostly on a specific picture with a sunset and a beach that advertises Banana Island on its website, but I will still show two other pictures where ‘luxury’ is used to describe the artificial islands before analyzing the third picture. Those two pictures are ones I have not used yet in any of the blog posts, but will create a foundation for the idea that this descriptive word is repeated, so that this blog post will have one like the third blog post did. The final picture I argue visually characterizes what ‘luxury’ means for artificial islands, and shows that nature is not ‘sublime’ in Qatar’s artificial islands as Cronon explains it is. The ‘luxury’ that is advertised shows that artificial islands use nature as decoration, as something beautiful, not ‘sublime’, and find human-made amenities more important. Artificial islands in Qatar are an exception to what Cronon explains people feel when they see something ‘sublime’ because the ‘sublime’ is literally covered up by the human-made facilities, as it is not what artificial islands promote when they promote ‘luxury.’

The first image I would like to use to highlight that artificial islands are promoted with the word ‘luxury’ is with this picture of Costa Malaz from The Pearl website. I have circled the word luxury on the image, and the photograph of the place itself already embodies what I will be analyzing in the photograph of a place on Banana Island. The image shows buildings next to one another, which are human-made amenities that needed petrol and energy to make. These human-made amenities are next to natural components such as the palm trees, the sky, and the river. However, as one can see from the descriptive paragraph it is not the nature that is being promoted, it is a decorative aspect of the place that makes it “an oasis of calm and quiet luxury.” Especially with the final words of the first sentence, “an area of outstanding beauty”, the idea of nature as only ornamental and visual is highlighted by the advertisement.

That idea is also highlighted in this second picture of the Banana Island website. From the words that describe the island on this picture it is possible to see that the ‘natural’ components of the island are being described so that a person will be able to imagine what the island looks like and see that it is a visually beautiful place: “Banana Island Resort Doha by Anantara is a crescent of golden beach and over water villas just off the coast of downtown Doha.” But the beach is not what is being promoted to the people who are reading the website. The actual parts of the island that serve as the reason why people should want to visit Banana Island are the human-made amenities. The website expresses that someone can “surf, dive, golf or cinema” and “race across lagoon waters with a host of motorised water sports.” Thus, even the action of being in something ‘natural’ such as the water is sold to people by virtue of the human-made “motorised water sports” rather than the ocean by itself. 

The Banana Island website highlights gallery has different images on it, and one of them is the main photo I would like to analyze. It is not like the previous two I have spoken about in that there are some promotional words next to the image that I can analyze to explain how human-made aspects of the resort are more important than the ‘natural’. However, it is a poignant image which possesses a visual beauty to it that is very important to my argument because since it is part of the gallery, that means that it is an image the resort believes will attract people to the island even if there are no promotional words to create a sense of excitement about the place. Banana Island considers the beauty of this picture as a sufficient form of promotion. This is the photograph that I will be analyzing:

This image is of the “Q Lounge & Restaurant” in the gallery. This image has a boardwalk on it, with a well-lit area on the ocean with chairs and tables. There are also lights in the background and a structure on the right. Aside from this is a deep lilac hued ocean and a setting sky in the background. The main point of advertisement or attention on this image is the boardwalk in the middle, showing people that they can sit and eat while being next to this beautiful ocean. And even if this boardwalk was not there, one still has those lights on the ocean’s horizon and the buildings on the right as a distraction from the ‘natural’ aspects of the picture. If one were to take every single kind of distraction away, they would only see the ocean and the setting sky. This kind of image is what Cronon explains would be “those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s morality” (Cronon 4). Seeing only the sky and ocean and especially ones of these lovely colors at sunset would be able to make someone feel that they contrast to the sky and ocean because they are miniscule while the thing that they are looking at looks so expansive. But a person looking at this picture would not be able to feel that because all of the human-made things in the picture take the spotlight away from the ‘natural’ components. This shows that the idea that “For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth” (Cronon 1) is not how nature is used in artificial islands in Qatar. If Banana Island wanted to promote the ‘natural’ aspects of the resort that picture would only have the ocean and the sky in it, because Banana Island would want you to feel humbled by the ‘sublime’. But the images consider the boardwalk more important, that is why it is in the middle. Thus, one can see why many of the artificial islands describe themselves with the word ‘luxury’ as promotion. The image of the “Q Lounge & Restaurant” shows that the ‘luxury’ of artificial islands is the fact that they provide one with the “freedom and independence” (Bergthaller 429) that “became fully identified with individualized control over one’s private circumstances” (Bergthaller 429). Bergthaller wrote this line commenting on Huber talking about how energy usage being convenient became normal in “the “American Way of Life”” (Huber 17, quoted in Bergthaller 429). That people can do many different things on the island, amenities that are all human-made, while enjoying the sight of the ocean and the sky is what ‘luxury’ is in these artificial islands. That is why the human-made aspects are in the middle of that photograph in Banana Island’s gallery and also that picture of Costa Malaz in The Pearl. It is because they are more important, the feeling of freedom mentioned in Bergthaller’s book chapter that people feel having convenience with energy usage is more important. ‘Natural’ aspects are not ‘sublime’ in artificial islands in Qatar, they are the ornaments, the bonuses of the human-made aspects. The quote that Cronon used that was mentioned previously explains that nature was considered someplace void of human-made components for several Americans (Cronon 1). The way that Qatar’s artificial islands advertise themselves shows that this is not how they see nature, and that it is not ‘sublime’. 

In conclusion, ‘luxury’ in Qatar’s artificial islands highlights that Cronon’s ideas are not applied to them, but that Bergthaller’s ideas are. The promotional picture of the boardwalk on the beach in Banana Island takes the expansiveness of ‘nature’ from Cronon and merges it with the freedom from convenience of energy usage from Bergthaller. The way that it was done showed which was the true point of advertisement for the island. However, I would like to point out the same question I had in my last blog post at the end of this one. I am still interested to know what it means to feel that freedom when energy becomes convenient at home, versus a resort. The latter is a temporary place, and, if one were to assume that the ‘luxury’ it has is more than what one would have at home, then that should mean the energy convenience at the resort allows you to do more or do the same things in a more decadent place. This topic introduces questions on the psychology of energy addiction in a place of ‘luxury’ and a place that is not like that. 

Works Cited

Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature,  edited by William Cronon, New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1995, 1 – 24. 

Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2013. Print. Quoted in Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

A CNN Travel website wrote an article advertising Banana Island. The very first line of the article is very interesting because it explains that the article was most likely sponsored by Qatar – even though “CNN retains full editorial control over all of its reports.” The full capacity to which Banana Island would agree with everything that is said in this article is not completely known. However, this information is not important for the focus of this blog post. And indeed, considering the other primary source this blog post would like to mention, which is a photo I have taken myself of a billboard in Qatar, I can deduce that Banana Island likely does agree with the promotion presented from the outside party of CNN travel. 

The word that is used many times in this article to describe Banana Island is ‘luxury’. For instance: “the luxury resort can be reached via catamaran from Dhow Harbour (located near to the Museum of Islamic Arts) or by private yacht.” But ‘luxury’ is used to describe Qatar’s artificial islands by both an outside source and Qatar itself. Below is an image I have taken of a billboard in Qatar that advertises Gewan Island. ‘Luxury’ is the first word of description on this billboard.

The repetition of ‘luxury’ as the embodiment of Qatar’s artificial island makes it seem as though Qatar’s artificial islands must be luxurious. It seems as though it is an inherent trait of them – and the fact that both the billboard and the article are advertising these places, this means that luxury is something those writing and creating the primary sources believes is a great quality. Whether or not Qatar’s artificial islands need to be ‘luxurious’ is the question I would like to explore in this blog post, and I will use Hannes Bergthaller’s “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil” to answer it.

Hannes Bergthaller describes how petrol “fueled not only cars, ships and airplanes, but along with them, visions of the good life,” (424, citing Buell, Musiol, Sloterdijk). However, despite how vital petrol is to people, Bergthaller criticizes the idea of calling people addicted to it because the concept does not consider the complicated reasons that explain why we have become accustomed to petrol (425) and instead “invites a view of the dependency on oil as a sort of character flaw, something that could be shaken off if only we could muster the requisite moral stamina.” (425) 

However, the vitality of petrol comes from the fact that it made land no longer the only way someone could become affluent, which was the case when the globe was built under the system of farmland cultivation (Bergthaller, 428). Bergthaller explains that “it also allowed for the rapid growth of cities, and consequently for the emergence of modern mass politics” (428). What is especially relevant to these primary sources and the emphasis of the word ‘luxury’ as a quality of both of the artificial islands is that petrol, and how much of it a family would be able to use in their house became the gauge of a successful and free one (Bergthaller 428-429, citing Huber 163-164). But while petrol brings with it this feeling of being able to do what one would like, Bergthaller explains that we are shackled to petrol because we do not have anything we can use besides it (429). Bergthaller states: “from this perspective, life under petromodernity presents an oddly ambivalent, contradictory aspect” (429). 

The feeling of being able to do what one would like is captured by not only the CNN travel article but also the billboard. Both of them describe Qatar’s artificial islands as luxurious, as though those islands need to be. Looking at Bergthaller’s book chapter, the reason why luxury is emphasized in both primary sources is the same reason why petrol is important to people. Luxury comes from petrol, and this is clear from the CNN article when it describes Banana Island: “the 141 guest rooms, villas and bungalows here are decorated with Arabic designs and feature deluxe mosaic-adorned bathrooms, all of which are stocked up with automatically controlled curtains, flat-screen TVs, mini-bars and coffee machines.” Technology and petrol are used to make the resort’s rooms, and even arriving at the resort needs petrol, since getting there involves aquatic transport. The luxury room and the different items in it that one can use gives the feeling of being able to do as one would like, which is what petrol allows for. Luxury seems to be inherent in both artificial islands because in order for something to be ‘good’, let alone luxurious, it needs to have items in it that need petrol, and petrol as Bergthaller has argued, is something we are shackled to. These islands would not be luxurious if they did not have different traits in them, because then the person would not feel like they could do whatever they would like. 

Hence, the CNN travel article and the billboard advertising artificial islands in Qatar agree with Bergthaller’s explanations of how people are shackled to petrol. But there are openings in this subject, such as the question of what the ‘addiction’ to petrol truly means. Bergthaller opposes this word. However, the idea that one person can go from their home to a luxurious resort temporarily, and then go home, might suggest they might not completely be ‘addicted’ to petrol at all. Or, they are only addicted to what petrol has given them in their daily life and do not need ‘luxury’ petrol. I believe the extents to which someone can be ‘addicted’ to petrol, and in what cases, can be explored more, even if Bergthaller does not agree that this word should be utilized. 

Works cited: 

Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

Buell, Frederick. “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance.” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012): 273–293. Print. Quoted in Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

Huber, Matthew T. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2013. Print. Quoted in Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

Musiol, Hanna. “‘Liquid Modernity’: Sundown in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.” Oil Culture. Ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2014. 129–144. Print. Quoted in Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

Sloterdijk, Peter. “How Big is ‘Big’?” Collegium International, Feb. 2010. Web. 26 May 2015. Quoted in Bergthaller, Hannes. “Fossil Freedoms: The politics of emancipation and the end of oil.” The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Edited by John Christensen, Ursula K. Heise and Michelle Neimann, London: Routledge, 2017, 424-432.

In this blog post I want to explore Banana Island and how the different amenities it offers is described on its website. I want to see if the resort follows the theory of ‘wilderness’, and if the argument William Cronon provides regarding ‘wilderness’ concords with how the resort advertises itself to the world. 

Cronon in his “The Trouble with Wilderness” describes how “wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth” (1). But he says that, while it may appear as though the wilderness is so very different from the human world, it is actually very connected to it because we are the ones who characterized what it is, and then we simply interact with that fictitious characterization of ‘wilderness’ (1). One way that ‘wilderness’ is characterized is through the work of Romantics who connected wilderness to religion, and thus the idea of wilderness being ‘sublime’ came to be (Cronon 4). The wilderness being sublime means that anything that is the wilderness is like “those vast, powerful landscapes where one could not help feeling insignificant and being reminded of one’s mortality” (Cronon 4). They are places that can make someone feel that they are no longer in the realm of humans (Cronon 4) and have been “in the presence of the divine” (Cronon 5). 

The second way that people have characterized the ‘wilderness’ is as a place that people would want to go to as a way to resolve the consequences that modernity caused on the person, and this is the Primitivism theory (Cronon 7). However, Cronon argues against both Romantic and Primitivism theory because both of them push away the idea of human coexistence with nature (11). Cronon explains that, first, the concept of “nature, to be natural, must also be pristine — remote from humanity and untouched by our common past (13), is wrong because “everything we know about environmental history suggests that people have been manipulating the natural world on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing.” (13) Cronon explains that we cannot only consider something to be nature if it makes someone feel the way that Romantic theory describes wilderness to be like (17), because it places nature upon a pedestal and makes it seem as though we cannot have an “ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature” (11). 

Banana Island seems to apply some of Cronon’s theories but not others. On the one hand, Cronon does not want nature to be treated as though it is merely a place to go to as a vacation for people “enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral” (11) but that seems to oppose what Banana Island precisely is – and even what it describes itself as. On the Banana Island website, it is described as “your private luxury island getaway in Doha” and enunciates that one must arrive “by private catamaran” and that it is an “escape for family adventures”. These words, and also what Banana Island is, seems to follow what Cronon describes to be an incorrect way of conceiving of nature. It is in Qatar, but it is a place that advertises itself as a way for someone to move away from normal life in a place of nature, because it is an artificial island. But there is a contradiction in this statement. Banana Island might be something like nature because it possesses an ocean for instance, and with a beautiful view one might consider it to be the ‘sublime’ as Cronon described. But Banana Island also has a “VIP cinema, bowling alley”, which does not follow the idea of nature being non-human. Banana Island advertises itself as something that Cronon explains nature should not be like, but at the same time it is not exactly ‘nature’ as a thing which is not related to people. In essence, by being a resort, it is a place which invites people to itself. 

Banana Island is therefore a very interesting case study because it almost picks and chooses from the theories that Cronon discussed and is an amalgamation of theories of nature and non-nature in simultaneity. The questions that are raised from this application of Cronon’s theory to this case study are what ‘sublime’ would mean in a resort, in a place that might have beautiful views but that is still in the realm of humans. 

Works Cited

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature,  edited by William Cronon, New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1995, 1 – 24. 

In Lorraine Daston’s book Against Nature, she wants to look into the reason why nature is held so dearly by human beings: “why should nature be made to serve as a gigantic echo chamber for the moral orders that humans make?” (3) I would like to look into the ‘Specific Natures’ chapter in Datson’s book and describe her theory while comparing it to the descriptions of nature in Perlita Gardens in The Pearl from the website describing this island. Applying The Pearl website to Datson’s theory shows that people do find nature important, but that they still do not only want to live beside nature and want to live beside non-nature too. 

The theory of ‘Specific Natures’ defines ‘nature’ “as the essence of a thing, that which makes it what it is and not something else, its ontological identity card.” (7) Overall, as Datson explains, the reason that ‘nature’ is so important to people is because people associate nature with structure. (5-6) People tend to put things in the world into groups and those groups are made up of things with a known trajectory. (10) The groups “carry nestled within themselves the essence and the narrative of their being: not only what they are at the moment but also what they have been and will become.” (10) With Specific Natures, we are able to dictate that a thing is part of ‘nature’ if the thing is able to birth a thing concordant with itself, and if it cannot, the thing would not be a part of what makes nature according to Specific Natures structured and is not nature. (11) Thus, nature is held dearly by people because “we can barely imagine a world without specific natures, in which everything would constantly be morphing into everything else and what a thing is would be no guide to what it was and will be.” (14)

Datson’s theory has explained what something that is conceived as part of ‘nature’ is, and also why people find nature to be important. I will apply this theory onto a description of one of the locations in The Pearl, Perlita Gardens, on The Pearl website. This part of the website advertises Perlita Gardens as: “characterized by lush landscaping, it gives the impression of living in the heart of nature.” This sentence makes it seem as though it is intuitive or obvious that living beside nature is a good thing. It does not explicitly praise nature but considers nature to be the appealing characteristic of the place. I can argue that this sentence shows that The Pearl follows the theory of Specific Natures because it advertises nature in a way that suggests people should already be aware of why they would want to be beside nature. Specific Natures explains that people find nature to be important because of the structure and information it provides as to the trajectory of things as well as what they will birth, if they are part of nature. A sentence that advertises being beside nature as an obviously appealing aspect of Perlita Gardens shows that The Pearl’s website believes people should be beside nature, and the “lush landscaping” part of the sentence points to what is ‘nature’.

Yet, if The Pearl was trying to say that people should be beside nature then the sentence: “while seclusion is the defining feature of Perlita Gardens precinct, the lovely shopping outlets of Medina Centrale precinct are never far away.” makes no sense. After all, shopping districts are not part of nature because as Specific Natures states, it is not a thing which can birth something from itself. The shopping district is still part of the advertisement though, which means both the ‘nature’ of Perlita Gardens and the non-nature are considered things people should want. The Pearl’s website’s descriptions of the artificial island show that it does not fully apply Datson’s theory. It seems that even though nature is very important to people, it is not too big a problem if people did not have structure by living beside things that are not nature. 

The advertisement of The Pearl which praises both nature and non-nature shows that people might not only need structure in their life. Indeed, the sentence about the non-nature not being too far from the houses that are beside nature shows that people might enjoy nature but that people do not want to be missing the non-nature amenities. Connecting Datson’s article to The Pearl shows that people might enjoy nature and structure to the extent that it is not the only part of their life. The sentence that reminds the reader that the non-nature is close to the residents as well feels like it is trying to reassure the reader, almost like being beside only nature is a bad thing. This blog post raises questions in the future about why living beside nature only is a negative thing, which is something I might look into in future posts.

Bibliography:

Datson, Lorraine. Against Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.