I have been struggling (again) with ways to succinctly describe what I am up to in Portland. I\u2019ve had over 40 meetings since June 1, engaged with (taken the time of) a host of generous\u00a0people, and what I\u2019ve come away with is that the project is perceived alternately as:<\/p>\n
Really exciting | How can I participate? | Too science-y | Too arty | Too esoteric | Too pro-industry | How can you help me?<\/em><\/p>\n So I\u2019m trying to work it out in a semi-public way on this blog, and therefore trying to be responsible for my language, and to provide some context for these thoughts.<\/p>\n Comments always welcome.<\/p>\n Back to definitions.<\/p>\n Environmental awareness is, finally, a sense of irony, because it is through irony that we realize that we might be wrong, that identity might not be as solid as we\u00a0think, that our own gaze might be the evil that we see.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Timothy Morton, Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul (2010) http:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/pub_collapse6.php<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I asked Tim Morton for a succinct definition of \u201cdark ecology.\u201d While not brief, it\u2019s full of guideposts:<\/p>\n There are parts of dark ecology that I\u2019ll need to tease out here before I give you the telegraphic definition.<\/p>\n 1. Depressing. Melancholy. Ecological awareness is depressing (suffering etc.) and also ontologically depressing, because I\u2019m literally pressed from all sides\u00a0(including the inside) by other beings<\/p>\n 2. Mysterious. When you start to look, ecological awareness requires that distinctions become blurred but not dissolved: life-nonlife, sentient-nonsentient,\u00a0intelligent-nonintelligent, conscious-nonconscious, existing-nonexistent. etc etc To be a thing is to be a mystery.<\/p>\n 3. Uncanny. (a) Ecological awareness takes a noir form. You realize you are implicated. The tools you use to realize this (global technological devices) are also\u00a0implicated in the very thing you are realizing. (b) It\u2019s like knowing something unconscious about yourself, which is impossible\u2013kind of glimpsing it sidelong. You\u00a0don\u2019t mean to harm earth when you turn your ignition key. And you\u2019re not\u2013it\u2019s statistically meaningless. But at Earth magnitude (billions of key turnings) this is\u00a0exactly what happens. The difference between me (Tim, little me) and this member of homo sapiens (species me). The latter is a hyperobject, not just an abstract\u00a0concept.<\/p>\n When you put these together you get this nifty sentence: Ecological awareness has a loop form, because ecological beings have a loop form, because things in general have a loop form.<\/p>\n Through ecological awareness you realize that things just are what they are, but are ever so slightly different from what they are, all the time. The reaction to this takes many forms. There is a hierarchy of them, which you can imagine as moving from the outer brittle layers of a chocolate to its inner,\u00a0sweet layer:<\/p>\n Guilt At first, dark ecology seems like a tragedy. Our attempt to escape the web of fate IS the web of fate. But in the end (in some ecological future to come), dark\u00a0ecology is funny, in a sweet, nonviolent and outrageous way.<\/p>\n \u2013 Timothy Morton (personal correspondence)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I am struck by guilt and shame as a space that can really inform both the draw to the abject \u201cpost-Amercian (Rebecca Solnit) landscapes, and a way to unpack this anti-aesthetic. In the end, I\u2019m going to conclude that while we can\u2019t live without the rules of aesthetics (which are malleable, and bumpy in time), we need to be very awake to how they operate as instruments of power (see the hatred\/ perceived danger of neo-environmentalists like Peter Kareiva or Emma Marris and the Breakthrough Institute, for instance, as undoing a lot of environmental work that\u2019s been done in the last three decades). I think guilt and shame need some proper psychiatric treatment, in public, in groups. Superfund site exploration as group therapy.<\/p>\n So I tried to rewrite this project description anew:<\/p>\n FSDE is an art\/science lab for hands-on creative inquiry into the Dark Ecologies of urban Nature. ArtScience Resident Experts and Amateurs\u00a0(AREA heads) design and guide participatory field trips, workshops and discussions that mix\u00a0citizen science, civic engagement, and artistic output in experimental, open-ended ways, in order to intimately experience problematic landscapes and their agents. Often this means\u00a0coming close to the discomforts and realities of urban spaces that have industrial legacies. While the\u00a0Superfund megasites\u00a0of North Portland may provide a spectacular example of this\u00a0sort of landscape, your own backyard may be a miniature brown field, and this is precisely the point: to connect, awaken and charge citizens with a thirst for knowledge and the tools and connections to\u00a0do something.<\/p>\n FSDE is also interested in a shift of the imagination (a “nudge,” thank you, Una Chaudhuri<\/a>). This is work we began in Dear Climate<\/a>, which asks: what is inner climate, and what would that change look like? As we face more uncertainty, can we move to a generosity rather than a scarcity model that extends to species beyond the human? And can we appreciate the porosity \u2013 the blur \u2013 between self and other? Can we move beyond empathy, and cultivate compassion that is not based on similarity Can we embrace the \u201cstrange stranger?\u201d<\/p>\n And finally, FSDE aims to allow grief and hope and conflict to exist simultaneously within the bounds of the project.<\/p>\n FSDE wants you to draw your own conclusions, question the given aesthetics and terms that constitute nature\/culture, good\/bad, ugly\/beautiful), and partake in the transformations\u00a0possible in the landscapes that surround your city. FSDE believes artists, designers, permaculturists, naturalists, and creative citizens of all sorts should not only be invested in\/entitled to\u00a0their surroundings, but could cultivate a robust biophilia, and have a place at policy tables to determine how aesthetics, values, morals and the desires of human AND non human\u00a0agents can play out in determining urban futures.<\/p>\n Dark ecology\u2019s aims are not to celebrate the dark, or to depress participants. In fact, quite the opposite can occur: there is hope in taking the reins and opening ones eyes. There are\u00a0small, large and enormous leverage points to be had, with will and organization. And there is beauty and ugliness at work. The point is to\u00a0not\u00a0do that online UX quick-swipe \u201chot or not\u201d move\u00a0to get rid of the ugly as fast as one can, but to realize that you are not only soaking in it, but without doubt, implicated in its manifestations (which are only artifacts).<\/p>\n The project aims to use art as a tool for social change: nudging our capacity to encounter<\/em> is the first step toward stewardship. Sometimes this stewardship does not look as clean and pure as the \u201ctypical environmentalist\u201d would like (that would require editing out huge swaths of competing realities).<\/p>\n FSDE\u2019s goal is to make a space in which one can be awake. And therefore connected. This is not a logical connectedness, but one of many points, overlaps and conflicts. There needs\u00a0to be a safe place (in Winnicott\u2019s terms, to be held) where one can explore grief, hope, science, longing, and most importantly, the imagination.<\/p>\n Morton\u2019s second book, The Ecological Thought was discussed by philosopher Levi Bryant thusly:<\/p>\n \u201cEcology shows us that all beings are connected.\u00a0The ecological thought\u00a0 is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about\u00a0ecology, but it\u2019s also a thinking that is ecological\u2026 It\u2019s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings\u2013\u00a0animal, vegetable, or mineral.\u201d \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Levi Bryant,\u00a0The Ecological Thought: A Reply to a Critic<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And this is what FSDE aims for: to\u00a0perform<\/em> ecology<\/strong>, not just learn about it or support it whilst omitting (at convenience and ad nauseum) one\u2019s complicity in its jaw-dropping,\u00a0anthropogenic scope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been struggling (again) with ways to succinctly describe what I am up to in Portland. I\u2019ve had over 40 meetings since June 1, engaged with (taken the time of) a host of generous\u00a0people, and what I\u2019ve come away with is that the project is perceived alternately as: Really exciting | How can I … <\/p>\n
\nShame
\nHorror
\nRidicule
\nMelancholia
\nSadness
\nLonging
\nJoy<\/p>\n