March 28, 2021

Planthroposcene

Brian Michael Murphy shared this article by Natasha Myers, How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene, and I’ve been thinking about how to work with it in unexpected ways (expected ways might include the usual, impossible-to-achieve and privileged individual or atomized family going off grid, a jaunt with ayahuasca hosted by a Daniel Pinchbeck accolade or if you’re really flush an eco-trip trip to Peru to do it on location).
I’m thinking small: helicopter parenting your seedlings, which is a long term relationship many times a day; talking to the trees in your neighborhood; trying to get the aggressive species to play nice in your yard (not ripping them out as that is hopeless anyway without destroying everybody else’s day); not being so pro-forma with your houseplants – that is, it’s not just your weekly obligation but an attention to their needs, which can be tweaked: you are their legs after all, and so on.

In an enlarged space of sociality,
– developing a dis-econocentric set of values and practices is always good.
– fiddling with or overhauling your relationship to time, by slowing down, canceling things, being idle, napping, listening for longer than you think possible, doing less, fading back, leaning back, looking around (not forward or back).

Related links:

https://emergencemagazine.org/podcast/on-time-and-water/
https://read.dukeupress.edu/differences/article-abstract/23/3/74/97715/Involutionary-Momentum-Affective-Ecologies-and-the
https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28848
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-economization-of-life
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cosmopolitics-i
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