Morning comrades.
I have an essay question. Nothing to do with any of the readings this week, but harkening back to Jason Moore's paper from a few weeks ago. Here it is:
What contribution can Moore's attention to primitive accumulation make to our understanding of the politics of animals today?
The one and only Wadiwell for a taste of what kind of thing I'm going for.
On y va!
Week 7, after reading week
Is it Colonial Dèja-Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice by Kyle Powys Whyte (in Humanities for the Environment)
The multifaceted way that settler colonialism has and continues to cause harm, especially for Indigenous people
Thinking about climate injustice against Indigenous peoples is less about envisioning a new future and more like the experience of deja vu. This is because climate injustice is part of a cyclical history situated within the larger struggle of anthropogenic environmental change catalysed by colonialism, industrialism and capitalism - not three unfortunately converging courses of history. Today’s climate injustice ordeal reminds us of historic climate injustices that began well before the last 250 years of industrial development.
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Resistance is Fertile! (Ch4 in Rock | Water | Life: Ecology & Humanities for a Decolonial South Africa by Lesley Green
Calling out eco-fascism (the unbearable whiteness of green) and (some of) the history of colonialism in South Africa
Green whiteness cannot contemplate the contradiction of protecting its “real Africa” from Africans.
and ways of resistance, through soil
While it is not possible to recover a precolonial past ...an ethic of care for the relationships through which humans connect to one another—the living and the dead, humans and soil, seed, water, plants, fish, cattle, wild animals, and birds. This set of ideas connects world and person, nature and humanity, in ways that are very different to the concept of nature-apart-from-society that dominates contemporary conservation biology. If it is, for the moment, impossible to imagine all nature reserves integrated into human society, is it possible to explore the possibilities for African conceptualisations of human kinship with soil and its multispecies partners, in a time when the soils of the Anthropocene are so damaged?
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The second text by Green got me thinking again, always on growing and food. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at examples, which you can see over on my Arena. After the session, a fellow stuent shared this excellent article on seed sharing by Ruby Tandoh. Wait for the twist at the end 😭
In the seminar, our provocation was to look at a social justice movement that may not have a clear environmental or ecological link. We discussed trans rights.
After the discussion, our lecturer shared this article:
Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption by Malin Ah-King & Eva Hayward
It is unbelievably interesting AND not paywalled. Clickity click.
We—human and nonhuman—are living in a time of intensified exposure to toxicity where life requires reinvention (if it can) or risks extinction and disease. Things can get worse, and probably will, but life is already dire for many. We are entwined through our descent (and, possibly, our extinction), but also through our coexistence in shared environments. Nonhumans and humans are vulnerable, but also exuberant, adaptable, resilient and constantly changing in interaction with environments. We are living in environmental catastrophe, certainly some organisms will survive; perhaps only humans will not.
... Embodiment, which includes sex, is a process of becoming with these altered environments. Whatever futures await us, we are the future organisms that we are becoming.
🔥🔥🔥
A nice segue into week 8, where the theme was toxicity. No lecture because it's strike season.
Transmutation of Powers (Ch1 in Radiation and Revolution by Sabu Kohso)
A really interesting chapter on the nuclear disaster in Fukoshima, during and after
... we are living in an age when planetary interconnectivity can no longer be dealt with by the reductionist and divisive politics of capitalist nation-states (the World). In this sense, one of the most radical lessons of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is that, should we change the course of the World away from its processual annihilation, it would be necessary to decompose capitalist nation-states and to create different existential territories, which would establish transnational associations from neighborhood to neighborhood, community to community, bypassing nation-state to nation-state negotiations while constituting singular relationships with the planetary body—environment, terrain, and resources.
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A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World by Stacey Ann Langwick
And then, close to my heart, a story of gardens
In these gardens, therapeutic plants are never only resources to be harnessed for human need (corporeal, aesthetic, or economic); they are also collaborators in the making of nourishing and nourished spaces.
Plant collaborators <3
Trees. Study | Fyodor Vasilyev
Also...
On Mistaking Whales by Bathsheba Demuth which is beautiful and sad, as expected from Demuth's work. This is a good critique.
Comrades in Arms with the Web of Life: A Conversation with Jason W. Moore to help me formulate the essay question, but is also just quite good.
Summer by Ali Smith The final in the quartet, brings them the storylines together in that tidy way that fiction can. I still don't know what to think about this series! What did you think?