ANIMALS, PEOPLE AND THOSE IN BETWEEN
One of my UrbanNature Interventionist students suggested this film – it’s at once shmaltzy, beautifully shot, and umwelt-shifting!
Here’s chapter one, but you can watch the full 50 minute doc at Nature/PBS. It premiered in Nov 2011.
Watch My Life as a Turkey on PBS. See more from Nature.
Whoah! Molly Dilworth sent me this super duper essay on new conceptions of Pre-Colombian new world:
1492, by Charles C Mann, Atlantic Monthly 2002
For instance:
Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long…this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago.
(A) cohort of scholars has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. (T)his picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.
More important are the implications of the new theories for today’s ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, “the pristine myth”—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, “untrammeled by man,” in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the nation’s first and most important environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?
You really have to marvel at the English – they thought God provided, making room for the Europeans, by the passive killing of all those natives (the English were a vector for a disease that wiped many out, same story in the northwest etc etc). You really have to marvel at bacteria and viruses. What did they get from the wipe-out?
The article goes on to cite some landscape in S America considered “the greatest works of art,” they are so manipulated. And diversely farmed. And facts about terra preta soil that is considered a superorganism of micronutrients and organisms who constantly replenish the soil bank – if you leave some of it in tact.
Also, remarkably, indigenous humans are referred to later in the article as “keystone” species – a term normally reserved for wolves and other influential animals who are not dependent on great numbers to affect beneficial results:
A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a species “that affects the survival and abundance of many other species.” Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, “results in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the [ecological] community.”
Knowing more of what I am starting to know, a lone wolf is not a romantic beast. His or her status is a walkabout, but when you walk a territory mainly devoid of potential companion alliances, what is your world like? My heart hurts; I’m not even sure what my own loneliness feels like.
Gray Wolf (Canis lupus)
At this time, there is only one documented gray wolf living in the wild in California.
On Dec. 28, 2011 a 2 ½-year-old, male gray wolf entered California after traveling from northeast Oregon. Designated OR7, his behavior, called dispersal, is not atypical of a wolf his age.
Historically, wolves inhabited California, but were extirpated. Before OR7, the last confirmed wolf in California was here in 1924 and since then, investigated “sightings” have turned out to be coyotes, dogs, wolf-dog hybrids, etc. DFG wildlife managers anticipated that wolves would eventually enter California, and have been preparing for it.
- The State of California is not intentionally reintroducing wolves.
- Gray wolves pose little direct risk to humans.
- Any wolf that enters California is protected as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.
DFG provides these maps to show the route that Wolf OR 7 has traveled since his entry into California. The maps will be updated periodically as additional data becomes available. However, there will be an intentional delay in posting new map information to protect the current location of this wolf. This wolf’s movement pattern, in terms of timing, direction and distance has so far been unpredictable. Therefore the maps will provide useful information on where he has been recently, but not where he is now.
- Map of OR7’s path in California (PDF)
This map contains data through July 10, 2012Since July 10, OR7 has remained in the same general areas of Tehama, Plumas and Butte counties. When OR7 makes a significant move to other locations, DFG will update the map.- Updates on Gray Wolf OR7
This is a photo of OR10. Another grey wolf from the Northwest, When this link breaks you will know there is shifted interest or possibly no more interest from California Fish and Wildlife (info source). I decided not to download the picture in order to upload it in a state of frozen preservation but leave it where it lies.
Having just come back from the nonhuman conference hosted by SLSA, which was presided over by the OOOze, of which I am rather fond, I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of OOO- the lines (which may be subjectively drawn) around which OOO matters? As I am not into knob twiddling, I very much appreciate this post by Levi Bryant, What Differences Make a Difference?– Relations Again. Being NO expert reader, this post is ore of a note for me, about continuing to, hmm, make sure that theory inspires action for me.
The idea that a relation can make a difference only makes sense where we begin from the premise that substances, entities, machines, or objects possess some minimal autonomy from whatever relations they currently possess to other entities. “Minimal autonomy” means that entities can be separated from some relations and enter into new relations. Tasha’s being consists, in part, of an essential frailty where she can be separated from relations to other things like the food she needs to sustain herself, the temperature range in which her body can function, the oxygen she needs to sustain herself, the barometric pressure she needs to sustain herself, etc. Likewise, part of her being consists in the capacity to undergo new encounters or relations. She can encounter microbes that significantly transform her body’s ability to function. She can be taken to the Andes and encounter altitudes with different barometric pressures and concentrations of air that change how she functions. She can encounter various foods that either give her a luxurious coat and lots of energy or that leave her depleted and waxen. She can encounter people that treat her well or poorly. These are all relations that significantly change her qualities and powers of acting. Yet these changes, either through subtraction or addition, are only possible if Tasha has some minimal being independent of whatever relations she happens to entertain.
Thinkers like Whitehead are sometimes celebrated because it is alleged that by virtue of their relationism, holism, and internalism they enable us to think “ecologically”. Yet as I argued in a prior post building on some remarks made by Harman, what a text says its trying to do and what it actually does can be quite at odds with one another. Far from enabling us to think the difference that a relation makes, forms of thought such as we encounter in Whitehead actually inhibit our ability to think the difference that relations contribute. This is because such orientations of thought treat relation as always already there. If you want to think the difference relations make, you need to turn to OOO (or in my case, machine-oriented ontology), where the ontology in question is acutely aware that relations can always be subtracted or added, thereby opening way to an investigation of what difference the subtraction and addition of relations makes. Paradoxically, it is the defense of autonomous substances that allows us to think the importance of relations. And here, in a closely related vein, we should look less at how ecologiststheorize being, and more at their actual practice. At the level of their theories of being they tend to argue that everything is internally related. But at the level of their practice we see them proceeding as good object-oriented ontologists, presupposing that entities can break with their relations and enter into new relations, and attending to what differences these additions and subtractions make. What happens, they wonder, when portions of the ocean encounter large algae blooms as a result of fertilizers running into the water? This is a question about what happens when a new relation takes place.
It was these sorts of considerations that motivated my thesis that objects or machines are divided between their virtual proper being and their local manifestations. I’ll concede this much to Whitehead: we need to get beyond subject/predicate thinking that treats entities as a bundle of qualities (predicates) inhering in a substance. Instead, I propose that we treat entities as a collection of powers or capacities rather than qualities. Entities are what they’re capable of doing, not whatever qualities they happen to embody at a particular point in time. A quality is not something an entity has, but is the way in which an entity actualizes a power under particular conditions (in a particular set of relations). The ball is not red, but does red in response to particular wavelengths of light. The scope of what an entity can do (its powers) is always broader than whatever qualities it happens to actualize at a particular point in time. Such a framework, I hope, encourages us to attend to the relations an entity enters into and how these relations affect its doings or the actualization of its powers.
“Weather surgeons draw silk through needles, close the eye of the storm.”
– Karen An-hwei Lee, from the poem Dream of Inflation
I came across a particularly virulent strain of enviro-bashing in the work of Telegraph.co.uk pundit James Delingpole, who has authored, among other things:
Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors
(find out what global warming ‘climate change’ is really all about)
We all bash, but I know my position is the right path – I can adopt a middle path in terms of understanding the other side, but why wouldn’t we err towards stewardship instead of exploitation? Why busy one’s self with conspiracy theories? Is everything about ripping off the freedom of the little guy who may maybe maybe maybe, one far away day, get rich off the same things with which his overlords rule? I know, this is naïve and sincere, but there you go.
There are other economies than the ones most of us engage in, that foster more care about one’s larger community.
See:
The Money Fix, Alan Rosenblith
(one of the great questions Rosenblith asks is whether the KIND of item chosen to stand in as money affects the behavior of the people inside that economy?)
WATCH FILM
Money is at the intersection of nearly every aspect of modern life. Most of us take the monetary system for granted, but it has a profound and largely misunderstood influence on our lives. THE MONEY FIX is a feature-length documentary exploring our society’s relationship with the almighty dollar.
THE MONEY FIX examines economic patterning in both the human and the natural worlds, and through this lens we learn how we can empower ourselves by redesigning the lifeblood of the economy at the community level. The film documents three types of alternative money systems, all of which help solve economic problems for the communities in which they operate.
This via Genevieve Hoffman, who snapped the pic at Printed Matter artist’s bookstore in NYC:
And this from my recent hike in Tent Rocks, New Mexico:
