Good morning,
The work begins in earnest. Processing 2 weeks of lectures in one sitting is a lot. Useful, for me. To remember, to review my notes, and to put it in writing. I hope there is also something interesting for you.
I haven't linked to paywalled academic papers, but if you are interested in reading any of them, just respond to this email and I'm happy to share it.
I send this fortnightly on Sunday and I don’t collect any data.
Three Miles from the Sea | Nyani Quarmyne
The first week of lectures was introductory, setting us up for what we'll cover in the following 11 weeks as well as starting to define what we mean by ecology, how we characterise the problems, how we respond to them.
Throughout, we discussed the various terms used to characterise the multifarious problems often called climate change, or climate crisis, breakdown, etc. Each comes with its own consequences.
The two texts were relatively gentle, to start us off. In 'Ideas of Nature' (Ch 3 of Problems in Materialism and Culture by Raymond Williams), Williams discusses the "history and complexity of meanings" of nature and the separation of man and nature
usually, when we say nature, do we mean to include ourselves?
He closes with a call for a different imaginary.
Even the idea of the balance of nature has its social implications. If we talk only of singular Man and singular Nature we can compose a general history, but at the cost of excluding the real and altering social relations. [...] If we alienate the living processes of which we are a part, we end, though unequally, by alienating ourselves.
We need different ideas because we need different relationships. ... We need and are perhaps beginning to find different ideas, different feelings, if we are to know nature as varied and variable nature, as the changing conditions of a human world.
The very readable text by Stephanie Wakefield, 'The Back Loop' (Ch 1 in Anthropocene Back Loop) uses the back loop concept (or adaptive cycle) developed by C. S. Holling as a way of understanding the current ecological moment.
She suggests that we are currently in the beginning phase of the back loop (release) and the challenge is how do we reorganise?
Apparently, she's not the only one to use this concept but is unique in focusing on the 'x'
Resilience ecologists also point out that all back loops are different. Just as possible as the rise of new structures, is the possibility that no new structures may arise.
Cheery stuff.
Three Miles from the Sea | Nyani Quarmyne
Week 2 was situating us in the humanities, covering representative thinkers in the humanities who have accepted the narrative of the Anthropocene. We're still sitting with how the problems are posed for the posing of the problem influences the stakes. Thinking of problems as constellations of connections, the question is then how to make those connections?
The Anthropocene, though still not officially recognised as a geological era, has definitely shaped public and political imaginations. What are the consequences?
We read 'How not to (de)animate nature' (in Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour). I just cannot get on with him. I find his texts so difficult to read but simultaneously uninspiring. I do not feel that everything must or can be explained simply, sometimes it is hard work. But that hard work should be worth it.
(Speaking thus about a living, celebrity-status thinker is foolishness. But you, my gentle readers, will hopefully not tell anyone.)
This part was interesting
Have you noticed that we are now attributing to natural history the terms of human history – tipping points, acceleration, crisis, revolution – and that to speak of human history we are using the words inertia, hysteresis, path dependency, as if humans had taken on the aspect of a passive and immutable nature in order to explain why they are doing nothing against the thread? ... it is as though we had indeed ceased to be modern, and, this time, collectively.
The second text was The Climate of History by Dipesh Chakrabarty. A surprising turn from his earlier work that I've read. He appeals to an argument of species as a response to the crisis of climate change.
Climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of catastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of global identity...
I can see why it's compelling but, when you dig deeper, I just don't think it works.
Three Miles from the Sea | Nyani Quarmyne
The Leavers by Lisa Ko
A beautiful story, set in China and New York, of a mother and her son and what borders can do to a family, to a person. Another audiobook experience (I’m tearing through them), which gives the whole book a sort of hazy, affective memory.
Abolish borders.
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The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
It will be very unsurprising to anyone who knows me that I'm obsessed with this book. The title, for one... pure poetry. Le Guin is transcendent as always. In the preface, Le Guin talks about how she drew her characters along more simplistic lines of good/evil than usual – and described why, against the backdrop of the Vietnam war.
Despite that, there is so much beauty (and terror). The descriptions of forests, her imagination of a different way of living, the ending.
You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.
Devastating.