#critical ecology

[queering-ecology]

Chap 12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (part 3, final)

Queer Ecologies

‘what it might mean to inhabit the natural world having been transformed by the experience of its loss’?

‘[the queer artist's] natures are not saved wildernesses; they are wrecks, barrens, cutovers, nuclear power plants: unlikely refuges and impossible gardens. But they are also sites for extraordinary reflection on life, beauty, and community’ (344)

AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts

The artist (Jan Zita Grover’s North Enough) writes about moving from San Francisco, where she has worked as a personal caregiver to many individuals who were dying, and died of, AIDS, eventually to the woods of Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota hoping for ‘a geographic cure’ to her burnout and grief. (344)

‘in their persistence [grief, mourning], generate a form of imagination—an awareness of the persistence of loss—that allows her to conceive of the natural world around her in ways that challenge the logic of commodity substitution characterizing contemporary relations of nature consumption” (344)

“The north woods did not provide me with a geographic cure. But they did something much finer. Instead of ready-made solutions, they offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality and then beyond those to their strengths—their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.  AIDS, I believe, prepared me to perform these imaginative feats. In learning to know and love the north woods, not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them” (344)

Rather than the landscape of her dreams, the land looks more like a candidate for reclamation. Through Grover’s research we learn that the region is one that been ‘systematically abused: logged several times, drained, subjected to failed attempts at agriculture, depleted, abandoned, eroded, invaded, neglected.”

Jack pines are predominant in the region; tenacious, ‘the first conifers to reestablish themselves after a fire” (16), in their own way remarkable even as they are useless for lumber, short lived, and not at all the sorts of trees about which adjectives like ‘breathtaking’ circulate” (345) they are a loud testament to the violence that has generated them.

“the diminishment of this landscape mortified and disciplined me. Its scars will outlast me, bearing witness for decades beyond my death to the damage done here” (20) But still: the love emerges, painfully, gradually, intimately. (345)

She experiences the landscape in terms of loss and change, rather than idyll and replacement. It is all personal; it is all about developing a way of making meaning that recognizes the singularities of the past and takes responsibility for the future in the midst of intimate devastation. (345)

‘Environmental hubris’—fly fishing, the introduction of non-native fish to the river, changing temperatures of rivers caused by logging and diversion; specific policies, politics, and technologies that have had effects on the rivers, the fish, and the other species throughout the river and the north woods (356)

A refusal to demonize the ‘invasive’ species; Grover herself is ‘invasive’ both culturally and personally (white settlers and big city imports) thus her ethical claim is not for purity but for an active and thoughtful remembering of historical violences in the midst of ongoing necessity of movement and change (346)

Seek relationships with Clear-cuts and landfills in order to bring to the foreground the massive weight of human devastation of the natural world; “a discerning eye can see how unstewarded most of this land has been. The charm lies in finding ways to love with such loss and pull from it what beauties remain” (81) (347)

“she does not romanticize the dying even as she might mourn their loss to the world; instead [through Grover] we witness each loss as particular, irrevocable, and concrete: she is their witness” (347)

Can we learn to see these landscapes as creation as well as destruction?

Rather than mourn the loss of the pristine, she carefully cultivates an attitude of appreciation of what lies before her, beyond the aesthetic wilderness to the intricate details of human interactions with the species and landscapes of the region. In this manner she comes to be able to find the beauty in, for example, landfills and clearcuts; far from naivete or technophilia, this ability is grounded in a commitment to recognizing the simultaneity of death and life in these landscapes, the glut of aspen-loving birds in the clear-cut, the swallows, turkey vultures, and bald eagles near the landfill.

--

It is necessary to face our fear and pain; we have to make room in our relationships with the natural world, queer and otherwise, for the recognition that that is what we might be feeling in the first place (355)

[altrbody]

The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto

"We did not originate in the cosmos.

The connection between Middle Passage and space travel is tenuous at best.

Out of five hundred thirty-four space travelers, fourteen have been black. An all-black crew is unlikely.

Magic interstellar travel and/or the wondrous communication grid can lead to an illusion of outer space and cyberspace as egalitarian.

This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured upon a "master/slave" relationship."

[essektheylyss]

Because I'm going to be thinking about this forever, I do want to talk about how Caleb speaks, because I think there's something to be said for how his protectiveness (in general) actually presents itself.

Caleb uses epithets and allusions a lot. He refers to Nott as "my goblin friend," to Jester as "my blue friend," to Yasha as "my barbarian friend." Yussa is at one point "our wizard friend," and Essek is "my Kryn friend," in the two-shot.

He is also, notably, paranoid about being surveiled. He wears the amulet of nondetection for most of the campaign, and it's not unwarranted, given that Trent locates him and nearly burns down the Blooming Grove the moment he's able to get a lock on them. Trent in fact has been shown to use any and all information he can get ahold of about or from Caleb against him, to a truly extreme level. His seemingly single-minded goal is expressed to be to ensure that not a single aspect of Caleb's life and loved ones is safe at any moment, to perpetuate the threat of harm from any direction in order to essentially control and monopolize Caleb's every thought.

In Echoes of the Solstice, Caleb does suggest that he is not concerned with Trent being able to surveil him any longer, but Trent is not the only threat, and, timey-wimey plot nonsense aside, the Hells' inability to scry on him since then suggests that he is likely wearing an amulet at least by that point in the timeline.

The extent of Trent's focus on him and his ensuing paranoia is extreme, and even beyond when he may no longer feel that Trent is a threat to him, he seems unwilling to allow him to pose a threat to others, and people he cares about in particular.

Within that context, it's not difficult to read his use of epithets, particularly in referring to people who are not currently present (rather than using their name aloud), as a form of protection. Some of his manner of speaking implicitly or explicitly presumes that he is being surveiled, even outside of the context of protectiveness; after Vess Derogna's death, he frequently refers to Lucian only by epithets, most often, "our old friend," and at one point establishes "Lady D," (to Jester's glee) as a code name for Vess Derogna for the specific purposes of countersurveilance.

This method of protection, I would imagine, goes double for Essek; not only does Caleb have the habit of worrying over those who would use his loved ones against him, which is of course borne out in Echoes of the Solstice, but he also must consider that Essek has his own enemies, and a stray mention of his name in the wrong company or setting could get his partner killed. It seems even in that gifset, when Caleb says, "I am worried for Essek," after the encounter with Trent at Vergessen, that he first considers obfuscating, stumbling over allusory phrasing before acknowledging that Trent already has the information he needs, and at that point Trent is their only real concern about who might care, given Lucien is far too focused on reaching the Astral Sea to worry about hostages.

When Caleb answers Jester's, "And he's going to hurt Essek," with a silence and an oblique reply, it feels most to me like a further measure of protection, knowing that knowledge is power that can be used against him and his loved ones, and silence is the weapon he has against it.

[carbonated-fenwater]

Mostly screaming into the void with this one but I'm almost to the end of earning my Bachelor's and I've got something to say.

It is not edgy or subversive to redirect your hatred onto animals that you deem morally impure or to try and yassify misunderstood creatures.

"Sea otters assault their females to death and drown their pups" they are still a cornerstone species worth protecting and whole ecosystems are suffering for the loss of them.

"Sharks are just ocean puppies and big sweeties." No they're not, they are apex predators and you have to treat them with respect. Saying they're not capable of aggression or completely misunderstood is still spreading misinformation, you cannot generalize a group of animals like this.

"Dolphins are super smart and actually capable of understanding that some of their behaviors are evil" I am actually going to break into your house and steal your shoes if you say this to me.

"Charismatic megafauna are useless and overrated and taking away from underappreciated species that Really need our help" wrong again dipshit. Animals like pandas, elephants, whales, and others that I'm sure you're tired of seeing plastered everywhere are important to get the general public involved. It's called PR (and while I wish it wasn't necessary and that people would care regardless I digress) and what conservation work IS done based around them is advantageous to other threatened species that share their habitat.

As someone going into the field of ecological conservation and marine biology, I have met one too many people who think it's okay to say a certain animal doesn't deserve to be protected because it makes them feel yucky or just because they think it doesn't deserve it. I shouldn't have to tell you why that is SO not okay. The underappreciated and overrated can both exist, you don't need to proselytize people into hating dolphins just so sharks can get their dues.

You're also allowed to just dislike an animal! But if you sensationalize their behaviors that are morally incorrect by human standards, then I am begging you to reevaluate yourself, get more educated on the subject, and talk to a real ecologist.

No creature on this planet deserves to be eradicated just because you are personally offended by their natural behaviors or deem them unfit to take up space.

[fatehbaz]

"The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe". British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend's seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. "Towards infinity!"

---

In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called [...] the Congo Free State. [...] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. [...] This was [...] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium [...] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.

Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with funds for a series of monumental building projects [...]. Indeed, Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” [...]. The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing [...]. [H]istorical research [...] recovers Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them [...]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation [...]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, [...] Leopold - now the Roi Batisseur ("Builder King") he long aimed to be - planned renovations explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV's Versailles. Enormous greenhouses contained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. [...]

---

The Tervuren Congo palace [...]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. [...] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots [...] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue [...]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies [...]. As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from British businessman “Colonel” John Thomas North [...].

Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold [...] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 [...]. Ostend encompassed a boomtown not of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but of beachfront and leisure [...] [developed] as a "British-style" seaside resort. [...] Leopold [...] [w]as said to spend "as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels," [...]. Ostend underwent a dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. [...] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. [...] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit [...], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle [...]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and “the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.” Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.

---

Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].

First, it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regime and set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening [...] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property [...]. Leopold [...] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions [...] to extract and export wild rubber.

Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic [...] had made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions [...]. Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). [...]

---

One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront, the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” [...]

King Leopold met American mining magnate Thomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise: Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of [...] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North [...].

At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point [...]. Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) [...].

---

Text above by: Debora Silverman. "Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium". e-flux Architecture (Appropriations series). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, y'all, it's rant time again. Buckle up.

A new report just came out from Public Citizen highlighting the dangers of using apps and AI foraging guides for identifying mushrooms, particularly when mushroom foraging. It's the latest in a string of warnings that are fighting against a tide of purported convenience ("just take a picture and get your answer instantly!")

I've ranted about this since last August, and I also wrote up a detailed post on how to identify an AI-generated foraging guide. I'm also including info on the limitations of apps and AI in The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go. I'm not just saying this to toot my own horn--it's because nature identification, and teaching it to others, is literally what I do for a living. So this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

I teach a very, very specific sort of identification class; whether we're focusing on animals, plants, fungi, or all of the above, I walk people through a detailed process of how to observe a given organism, make note of its various physical traits and habitat, and use that information to try to determine what it is. I emphasize the need to use as many sources as possible--field guides, websites, online and in-person groups, journal articles, etc.--to make absolutely sure that your identification is solid.

And every year, I get people (thankfully, a very small minority of my students) who complain because my two-hour basic mushroom hunting class wasn't just five minutes of introduction and one hundred and fifteen minutes of me showing slide after slide of edible mushrooms. There are so many people out there who just want a quick, easy answer so they can frolic in the woods and blithely pick mushrooms like some idealized image of a cottagecore herbalist with a cabin full of dried plants and smiling frogs or something.

While I do incorporate a bit of information on getting started with the app iNaturalist in my classes, it is as only ONE of MANY tools I encourage people to use. Sure, it's more solid than most apps because, in addition to the algorithmic I.D. suggestions it initially gives you, other iNaturalist users can go onto your observations later and either agree with your I.D.s or suggest something different and even explain why.

And yet--even as great as iNat is, it and its users can still be wrong. So can every other I.D. app out there. And I think that is one thing that the hyper-romanticized approaches to foraging--and nature identification in general--miss. In order to be a good forager, you HAVE to also be good at nature identification.

And nature identification is an entire process that requires you to have solid observational and critical thinking skills, to be able to independently research using many different types of tools, and be willing to invest the time, patience, and focus to properly arrive at a solid identification--if not to species level, then as far down the taxonomic ladder as you can realistically manage. (There's a reason even the experts complain about Little Brown Mushrooms and Damned Yellow Composites!)

People mistake one single tool--apps--for the entire toolkit. They assume any book they find on Amazon is going to be as good as any other, and don't take the time to look up the author to determine any credentials or experience, or even whether they actually exist or not. It doesn't help that the creators of these products often advertise them as "the only [book/app/etc.] you need to easily identify [organism of choice]!"

I mean, sure, the world isn't going to end if you never question the birdsong results on the Merlin app, or if you go through life thinking a deer fern is just a baby western sword fern. But when we get into people actually eating things they find in the wild, there's often no room for error. There are plants and mushrooms that can kill you even if you only eat a tiny amount. And even if they don't kill you, they may make you wish you were dead for a few days while you suffer through a whole host of gastrointestinal nastiness and other symptoms.

There aren't any shortcuts if you want to be safe in your foraging. You HAVE to be willing to do the work. And any teacher, author, or product that says otherwise isn't being ethical. I'm glad to see more people speaking out against the "fast foodization" of foraging in regards to overreliance on apps and the existence of AI foraging books; I just hope it's enough to prevent more people from getting sick or dying.

[flat-neines]

No one:

Me: hey wouldn't it be fucked up if the fae in acotar, especially the high fae have almost zero biological redundancies? And that's why they're so "perfect"? Because the daglan essentially cultivated them as livestock with what would be the most desirable traits to consume from fae?And now all the fae post invasion are now so far removed from the original indigenous fae population that they are basically husks of what they were?

@goldenspringmornings @achaotichuman @a-court-of-moonlight-and-ire

[backintheblackparade]

Ultimately, my take on the CR gods debate comes down to the same core as my gripe with the really hardcore vegetarians/vegans. Plants are alive, too. What makes them dying for our sustenance less morally wrong than animals? We are heterotrophs. No matter what, we must consume the bodies of living things to survive. The gods? Also living things. They are organisms who exist on a different level of the food web as mortals, sure, but still basic beings who have (admittedly different from humanoid) needs to live, and life themselves. Who are the mortals to decide they do not deserve to live? What gives them the right to cast judgement and scorn on their fellow beings? Those with wants, goals, and homeostatic needs of their own? They don’t have one. And they also don’t have the right to be party or complicit to what would essentially be an extermination/genocide. The gods are fully sentient and sapient beings, and people are weighing the total destruction of their population to the last.

Even as an introduced species, the gods have filled an ecological niche once occupied by beings now “extinct”/unable to fill their former role (titans, Luxon, etc.). Removing them would lead to a total collapse of the ‘ecosystem’ of Exandria. Utter foolishness of the highest order. And leaving Ludinus with a dangerous amount of precedent and power to utterly eliminate those he sees as “wrong”.

(Also, having species evolved to live on the Red moon introduced back into the former habitat they are no longer adapted to by the DOZENS surely won’t go wrong, if it occurs in the unregulated invasive way the denizens of Ruidus seem to be planning. Good grief!!!)

[wildlifetracker]

Panamanian Golden Frog, Atelopus zeteki

Endemic to Panama. Extinct in the wild.

[c0mpoundeyes]

Calling anyone in Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Texas: USGS is asking the public to send in dead butterflies and moths for research to understand their decline !

An article with more info:

https://www.kosu.org/energy-environment/2023-07-25/oklahomans-are-asked-to-mail-in-dead-butterflies-moths-in-the-name-of-science

(image: a Sinai baton blue I painted a few years back)

[dailyanarchistposts]

Anarchists and Neo-anarchists: Horizontalism and Autonomous Spaces

It is not uncommon, particularly in North America, to see anarchism defined as an ideology rooted in ‘direct democracy’, consensus decision making, and the maintenance of ‘horizontal’ (i.e., ‘non-hierarchical’) social relations, particularly in autonomous zones or public spaces.

This idea of anarchism is unusual in that it places at the centre of its definition an adherence to very specific forms of procedure and interpersonal behaviour while downplaying the political ends a ‘horizontal’ movement should be trying to establish. From this perspective, reclaiming public space as an opportunity to hold non-hierarchical public assemblies, where we can hammer out decisions by consensus, is, in itself, ‘anarchist’ – whatever the result of such processes.

This has little to do with the classical, mass-anarchist tradition and its politics of revolutionary socialism. It is, instead, an approach which is better described as falling under the banner of ‘neo-anarchism’ (or ‘small-a anarchism’). Neo-anarchism is a modern conception of anarchism largely informed by the feminist and peace movements of the 70s, the environmental movement of the 80s, the alter-globalisation movement of the 90s, and the Argentinian uprising of 2001; which coined the term horizontalidad (‘horizontalism’) to describe the movement’s rejection of representative democracy, the use of general assemblies to coordinate activity, and converting abandoned or bankrupt factories into cooperative businesses.

Take, for instance, the insistence by neo-anarchists on the use of consensus decision making. Though consensus (or ‘unanimity’, as it was typically called) was sometimes a feature of anarchist political organisations, and often seen as an ideal to work towards through comradely discussion, it was never a fundamental component of the anarchist movement. Anarchists have generally agreed that the appropriate form of decision making depends on the circumstances concerned, and frequently endorsed variations of majoritarian voting; particularly in mass organisations based on commonalities other than close-ideological affinity, such as unions. The focus for anarchists has generally not been the form of decision-making, but instead the principles of free association and solidarity. Furthermore, though anarchists have always stressed the right ofthe minority to be free of the majority’s coercion, it is even more important that the great majority be free of minoritarian rule or sabotage. As Malatesta wrote in his pamphlet Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy:

everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator, respecting the inviolability of the principles of equality and justice which the society is based on.

In response to the concern over minoritarian sabotage, he continues by asserting that such a situation would

[make it] necessary to take forcible action, because if it is unjust that the majority oppress the minority, it’s no more just that the contrary should happen. And just as the minority have the right of insurrection, so do the majority have the right of defense, or if the word doesn’t offend you, repression.[3]

As for ‘autonomous zones’ and the tactic of reclaiming public spaces (as seen in the Occupy movement) – here we have no connection to anarchism as a revolutionary tradition, and an example of a tactic which has repeatedly shown its inability to extract significant reforms, let alone revolutionise production and destroy the State.

The fundamental limitations of the ‘public occupation’ or ‘autonomous zone’ , and the defeats which have followed from these limitations, have led some former advocates of the strategy to make a notable transition from neo-anarchism to parliamentary politics. Though inexplicable to some outside observers, the change is easily understood when we consider neo-anarchism’s peculiar view of ‘direct democracy’, or ‘horizontally organised spaces’, as the defining characteristic of anarchism, and not a theory of libertarian revolution against the State and capital.

If we accept the idea of anarchism as proposed by the neo-anarchists, there is no fundamental contradiction between anarchism and involvement in parliamentary politics. If the political party is a directly democratic one, composed of social movements, and committed to horizontal interpersonal relations, what difference does it make if the decision made (ideally by consensus) is to campaign for political candidates, or even administer the State?

We have seen this with the so-called ‘Movements of the Squares’ in Europe. Activists who took part in the 15M (or ‘Indignados’) movement in Spain abandoned their dismissal of all politicians (“¡Que no nos representan!” – “They don’t represent us!”) with the formation of Podemos and various other ‘municipalist’ parties.[4]

A similar trajectory was followed by the anthropologist David Graeber towards the end of his life. Graeber – a figurehead of Occupy Wall Street and, prior to that, a participant in the alter-globalisation movement – apparently saw no contradiction between his professed (neo-)anarchism and his efforts to join the British Labour Party in support of Jeremy Corbyn. In particular, Graeber was enthusiastic about the Labour-affiliated organisation Momentum; an outgrowth of the Corbyn leadership campaign, which he argued constituted a unique attempt to fuse a radical social movement with a traditional parliamentary party.[5]

More recently we have witnessed the absurdity of a self-proclaimed ‘libertarian socialist’, Gabriel Boric (who touts his association with Chile’s radical student movement), ascending to the presidency in the aftermath of a militant popular uprising.

The damage caused by these supposedly ‘unique’ attempts to translate the ‘horizontalism’ of neo-anarchism into the party-form – which, in reality, hardly differs from the historic approach offered by Marxists as an alternative to anarchism – has been outlined well elsewhere, and there is no need to go over the details here.[6] It suffices to say that in each case there was bureaucratisation, accomodation with the necessities of administering the capitalist state (or even just campaigning to administer it), and zero empowerment of workers against the bosses.

The reality is that there is no way to fully ‘prefigure’ anarchy and communism through ‘directly democratic’ spaces of ‘autonomy’. Anarchism requires a specific anarchist movement and anarchist practice. Though we must certainly organise ourselves from the bottom up, with a consistent federalist structure, we can not simply bring about our ideal by ‘living anarchisticly’ or relating to one another as ‘horizontally’ as possible. Similarly, the content of anarchism can not be limited to the structure of our movement – its content of revolutionary class struggle must be maintained. To quote Luigi Fabbri:

If anarchism were simply an individual ethic, to be cultivated within oneself, and at the same time adapted in material life to acts and movements in contradiction with it, we could call ourselves anarchists and belong to the most diverse parties; and so many could be called anarchists who, although they are spiritually and intellectually emancipated, are and remain, on practical grounds, our enemies.But anarchism is something else… proletarian and revolutionary, an active participation in the movement for human emancipation, with principles and goals that are egalitarian and libertarian at the same time. The most important part of its program does not consist solely in the dream, which we want to come true, of a society without bosses and without governments, but above all in the libertarian conception of revolution, of revolution against the state and not through the state… [7]

[altrbody]

"The 3ecologies project is an autonomous organization dedicated to participatory experimentation in research-creation. It operates at the intersection of artistic practice, philosophy, and community engagement, building on the nearly two decades of experience of its former parent organization, SenseLab. Its aim is to catalyze the emergence of new forms of creative collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, and to disseminate the resulting “techniques of relation” for adoption by artists and social actors, for adaptation to their needs. It seeks to operate as a “process seed bank” disseminating seeds of creative practice that can impart self-organizing momentum to outside artists, collectives, and organizations.

The 3e project operates as an extra-university research and learning environment, according to the principles of a processual gift economy. It is dedicated to an ethos of radical openness. A nonprofit organization registered in Quebec, all of its activities are open to all and free of charge. 3e places special emphasis on creating a welcoming environment for neurodiversity, not only supportive of but positively learning from the normally undervalued experiential and perceptual worlds of pathologized and racialized communities. The perspective is ecological, in an expanded sense adopted from philosopher/activist Felix Guattari. The “three ecologies” are the social, the environmental, and the conceptual, as they enmesh in every event. 3e poses the question of sustainability in that expanded framework.

3e operates as a node in the international network developed by the SenseLab, which includes over 800 participants worldwide, with active local groups in Montreal, Australia, Brazil, and several locations in Europe, and formal partnerships with more than two dozen university and art-organization partners. Distance collaboration tools are used to cross-pollinate ideas and approaches between network members. Activities cycle between online collaboration and live participatory research-creation events of experimental format. The development of new digital tools for cycling between locally embodied and networked online interactions as part of an integrated “creative process engine” is a long-term goal of 3e."

[cantsayidont]

I am generally fond of the Peter Jackson LORD OF THE RINGS movies (much more so than THE HOBBIT trilogy, which is an unmitigated disaster from start to finish), but I still feel that it was a tremendous error to remove "The Scouring of the Shire" from the ending of RETURN OF THE KING. I think I understand the rationale for omitting it — it further complicates what's already a protracted finale, and it is kind of a downer — but I suspect it's one of the changes to which Tolkien himself would have most objected.

First, it's an essential element in the arc of Frodo. Frodo has already been wounded in a way that even Elrond and Gandalf can't entirely fix, even after they remove the notch of the Morgul-knife. After enduring an impossible ordeal, he returns to the Shire to find that the war has come home in a way that, at least for him, can't be fully set right even after Saruman is dead and much of the immediate damage repaired. Frodo's original conflicts have been seemingly resolved: At the beginning of the book, he's seen in Hobbiton as an irresponsible youth of dubious background who grows into another suspicious eccentric like Bilbo, but by the end, they want to make him the mayor (to which Frodo only very reluctantly and temporarily agrees), and even his feud with the Sackville-Bagginses is ended. Even so, Frodo is left far more alienated than he ever was to start with, which is why he finally chooses to go over Sea rather than live out his life in the Shire.

Second, while it is superficially rather grim, I think Tolkien might have argued that it's actually his most hopeful chapter. Tolkien says in the introduction to the second edition that "The Scouring of the Shire" had its roots in his own childhood:

The country in which I lived in childhood [in Warwickshire] was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important.

Thus, it seems significant that the shabby destruction of the Shire at the hands of Saruman and his men is actually set right remarkably quickly. As soon as Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return, they're able to rouse the other hobbits to action and drive out the ruffians within a matter of days, and Sam is even able to use Galadriel's gift to replace most of the trees that have been carelessly destroyed, with a magnificent mallorn-tree in place of the beloved Party Tree. The Shire hasn't wholly escaped the scars of industrialization, but the hobbits have come to their senses and turned back before it was too late.

That is really the most optimistic element of the story's finale. Aragorn's coronation means a restoration of order to the West, but magic and wonder are fading away or departing over Sea. Arwen has made the choice of Luthien and is doomed to eventually fade and leave the world; in the Appendices, after Aragorn's death, she returns to Lórien, now deserted, and essentially lies down and dies. Tolkien did not feel the Ents would ever find the Ent-wives, so they too will probably never flourish again. However, the Shire endures, in a way that the country where Tolkien grew up did not — not by remaining completely aloof from the world, but by rejecting the new mill and the smokestacks, and by "thousands of willing hands of all ages" deliberately tearing down everything built by Saruman and using the bricks "to repair many an old hole, to make it snugger and drier."

[hoarding-stories]

Good to know that the all minds burn fungus isn't just an uncontrolled growth planted on the moon

[fatehbaz]

Didn't wanna clog up your post, and these sources are more about relationships of time with space/place, but here's some stuff that I've encountered:

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“Temporal sovereignty”. Contemporary US/Australian claims over time-keeping. Reclaiming agency by operating on Indigenous/alternative time schedules. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology and deep past, precipitating nineteenth-century conquest of time. Mid-twentieth century understanding of “deep time” and its co-option by the Australian state. "Deep time dreaming".

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

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How "time is a form of enclosure". Checkpoints, "baroque processes to apply for permits to travel", fences, incapacity to change residences, and other "debilitating infrastructures" work to "turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies" by "stretching time". This is a "slow death" and a simultaneous "slowing down of life" because "it takes so long to get anywhere" and "movement is suffocated". Thus "time itself is held hostage". This "suspended state" of anxiety and endless wait-times "wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc". "Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time. Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work [...]. Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities" through a "constant state of uncertainty". "The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall 'lack of jurisdiction over the functions of one's own senses' [...] endemic to the operation of colonial rule". This "extraction of time" produces a "depleted" and tired person "beholden to the logistics" of administrative apparatuses, community suffers and "communing is thrawted".

Jabir K. Puar. "Spatial debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism [...]." South Atlantic Quarterly 120. April 2021.

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The "apocalyptic temporality" that presumes extinction. Indigenous Polynesian/Pacific perceptions and ways of being "destabilize the colonial present" and also "transfigure the past" by "contesting linear and teleological Western time". Indigenous "ontologies of cyclical temporality or inhabitation of heterogenous time". How United States and Europe colonized Oceania for weapons testing and conquest of tropical Edens while rendering local Indigenous people "ungrievable" and "without future". "Pacific time is a layering of oral and somatic memory". Instead of accepting an apocalyptic future or doomsday or nightmare, assert the possibility of a livable future, in spite of "Western temporal closures".

Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.

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Colonial "space-time homogenization". The experience of "homogenous, empty time". Orientalist "time lag" and the naturalization of a supposed East-West hemispheric divide. Late Victorian imperial conceptions of temporality. The British establishment of the Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. The influence of British imperial seafaring and cartography on the establishment of time and on European/US feelings towards the Pacific Ocean. How the origin of English science fiction literature, space travel aspirations, and time travel narratives coincided with the Yellow Peril and xenophobia targeting East Asia.

Timothy J. Yamamura. "Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell". Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representation of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017.

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Imprisonment as time-control. Here “the question of the past the present and the future indeed time itself looms” especially around the prisoner. “The law renders punishment in units of time”, taking away a the right to a future. There are alternative worlds, many of them, which have been practiced and brought into being, which colonization tried to obscure. There is “a whole anthropology of people without future embedded in the assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management”. "The prison’s logic exterminates time as we know it”. In prison, bodies have been alienated from time and history ... the punishment seems endless ... to “achieve a measure of agency and possibility it is necessary to redeem time”, to refuse the doom, fated to a life of abandonment.

Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands. 2011.

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Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010) explores how the advent of European sciences like geology, preceding the "time revolution" when Europeans experienced revelations about the scale of "deep time", happened alongside and after the Haitian Revolution and other abolitionist movements. French, German, and British naturalists translated the explosion of "new" scientific knowledge from the colonies, so that the metropolitan European audience became a market for historical and scientific "narratives" about how "nature" and time functioned.

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Prartik Chakrabarti's writing on time, temporality, and "the deep past" as British imperial concepts built in conversation with colonial encounters with South Asia. (British Empire reaching such heights in the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time that the newly professionalized sciences of geology were providing revelations about the previously unknown vast scale of "deep time". New colonial anthropology/ethnology also presumed to connect this "primitive" past with "primitive" people.)

See Chakrabarti's "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past". Past & Present. 2019.

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We must witness and consider "multiple space-times" to understand how "unfree labour" of plantations was "foundational" to contemporary work, movement, subjugation, health, etc. We must "trace the geneaology of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation" [workplaces, imperial/colonial nations, factories, mines, etc.] back in time to plantations. How "the [plantation] estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation" times and places, with the plantation "being a major blueprint of socialization into [contemporary] work". The plantation was "a laboratory for [...] migration regulation in subsequent epochs" that practiced methods of racializing and criminalizing.

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

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“Slow life” and the relationship between “settler colonialism, carceral capitalism, and the modulation of ... registers of time,” including “historical time, the stealing of time through the expansion of labor time, ... and the cordoning off of space through time”. For example, as in occupied zones or at border checkpoints, “the cordoning off of space through time” includes physical architecture like fences and customs, obstacles that impede movement and rhythm, so that “nothing ever happens on time” and there is “a stretching of time”. All the wasted time spent in line, showing papers, waiting for confirmation, etc. “is not a by-product of surveillance, it is the point of surveillance”. Such that “uncertainty becomes a primary affective orientation ... flesh as felt” with a racializing effect“. "This is a biopolitics conditioned through pure capacitation and its metrics”:

Jasbir Puar. In: “Mass Debilitation and Algorithmic Governance” by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman and Jasbir Puar. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021.

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"Starfish time". Indigenous Australian/Aboriginal perceptions of time and "attending to more-than-human agencies of time". Acknowledging the timescales of entire ecosystems, as part of multispecies relationships, a "transcorporeal collaboration". Cyclical time vs linear time. Contrasting timescales experienced by insects that only live a few days and creatures that live for decades. "Starfish may seem to be still" but they slowly move; "larval time" and "the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch"'. The "immensity of the alterity is literally incomprehensible"; "we can't know what these beings know" but we "should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled".

Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S.  Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.

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The use of calendars, dates, clocks, and industrial/corporate temporality as fundamental to the rise of plantations and financialization in United States/Europe, with a case study of the modern Colombian/Latin American state. Observance of certain dates and strict adherence to specific calendars support "mythologized deeds and heroic retellings" of colonization and industrialization. “The evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time” were intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England and later during the global ascendancy of work and industrialized plantation monoculture, but the persistence of alternative time should “serve as a reminder that futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar”.

Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.

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Indigenous people of Alaska and the US control over time management. For the past 50 years, Yupiak people have been subject to US government’s “investment in a certain way of being in time” which “standardized the clock” and disrupted human relationships with salmon. This US management model “anonymized care” and made “a way of attending to the life and death of others that strips life of the social and ecological bonds that imbue it” with resilience and meaning, which “ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible”. This disregards “the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds ... life is doubly negated” ... “futures depend on an orientation to salmon in the present”.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.

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"Idling" and "being idle" as a form of reclaiming agency and life. Case studies of fugitive Blackness in Caribbean plantation societies. “Disruptive waiting”. “The maroon’s relationship to time challenges [both] the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the [...] narratives to negotiate struggle in the [...] present" in "antagonistic relationship with colonial power". Defying the “European narrative of modernity”. Refusing to be productive.

Amanda Lagji. “Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. March 2018.

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Indigenous futures. "It is important to remember that some futures never went anywhere" and "yet they survive. These are futures suppressed and cancelled by colonial power." These are "parallel futures". "Colonial power must control the past so as to deny the emergence of" an alternative future; "colonial power creates a future in advance so that no others will take its place". Poor, racialized, Black, Indigenous people manifest alternative futures.

Pedro Neves Marques. "Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?" e-flux. April 2019.

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The "legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree shape and are part of the environment we inhabit". The "idea of the plantation is migratory" and it lives on "as the persistent blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles", so we must seek out "secretive histories" that no longer "rehearse lifelessness".

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

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“The temporal dispossession” of Congolese people. There is an “impossibility” of “predictable time” because temporal dispossession “disrupts the possibility of building a future”. Livelihoods/income is driven by market and price fluctuations in United States and Europe tech industries, so “there is an inescapable day-to-day sense of uncertainty”. As Mbembe says, “in Africa, the spread of terror ... blows apart temporal frames”.

James H. Smith. ‘Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.’ American Ethnologist Volume 38 Issue 1. February 2011.

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“Slow death”. Chronic illness not just as a byproduct of colonialism/dispossession, but also as part of its aim, a weapon that debilitates people, who become exhausted. Dooming poor and racialized people to lives “without future” through debility, “a condition of being worn out”. Relationship of illness, lack of healthcare, and debt as functionally incapacitating, a form of death sentence. A “zone of temporality” unfolding unlike abrupt/sudden traumatic events and becoming an inescapable condition.

Jasbir K. Puar. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017.

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The extension of poverty, landlessness, homeless, and imprisonment. "To be unable to transcend the horror of such a world order is what hell means", and "without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we are living in hell". The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity” but can be claimed and built and lived here, now. There is "no guarantee" of “coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms”, no guarantee that “the time is right” one day if we wait just long enough. Instead: "can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?" The "utopian margins", an alternate world crossing time and place, an "imaginative space and temporality to trace the remains of what "was almost or not quite, of the future yet to come", living as if it were the present. Colonialism tried to crush the many headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic, those who challenged the making of the modern world system.

Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and  Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. And: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.

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The US/European "city is the site of regulatory regimes" that try to impose a definitive narrative about history, progress, and possible futures. But it cannot achieve "a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm" because the land "continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, the repressed". The "commodification" of landscapes "circulates an imaginary geography" mediated through advertisements, labels, soap operas, television, etc. which celebrate "sanctioned narratives and institutionalized rhetoric". A "wild zone" of informal spaces, debris. "Ruins are places where the things, people, and "other memories can be articulated". There is "a spectral residue" that "haunts dominant ways of seeing and being". "Alternative stories might be assembled", so that we can respect the people banished to abandonment, the periphery, and reclaim agency.

Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 23. 2005.

Also, how "master narratives of history as progress decompose" when faced with "a continuously remembered past" when "the ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin" to expose "the debris of unprecedented material destruction" of colonialism/empire-building. These "hauntings rupture linear temporality" and recall those people beaten down as "the trash of history". It is "essential to see the things and the people [...] banished to the periphery [...]."

Tim Edensor. "Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality". Space and Culture Issue 11. 2002.

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"Many kinds of time" of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and "Western colonialism meet on the gravestones". Some creatures, like lichen, are very long-lived and "these temporal feats alert us that modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters". The "long duree evolutionary rapprochements to the quick boom and bust of investment capital" where "minor forms of space and time merge with great ones". Extinction is "a breakdown of coordinations with reverberating effects". Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present, a time of rupture. "Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress". "Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship".

Elaine  Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.

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Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History. (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy. 2023.)

Chapters include: "Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology" (Sarah Yu et al.); "Songs and the Deep Present" (Linda Barwick); "Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa (James Bednall); "Across 'Koori Time' and Space (John Maynard)

[coldcanyon]

i don't even remember putting a hold on this Karen Barad book but it just came in so I have to read that next and then I think it'll be Camera Lucida ..........& ummmm maybe struggle through more Ettinger.