Category Archives: Environmental politics

Arts Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe

September 22, 2024 – 5:48 pm

p. 28 Rufinus’s translations of Origen’s works (from Green to Latin) “also changing the voice of Origen to the voice of Rufinus-as-Origen and at the same time to the voice of Origen-as-Rufinus, in order to transform their readers. In the preface, Rufinus writes ‘The interpretation of the 36th, 27th and 28th Psalm contains everything that is the moral life. They provide us with teachings for the correction of our lives, showing us both the path to conversion and repentance and the path to cleansing and perfection… The book, Rufinus promises his friends, this bundle of plant bodies platted and painted by human hands, can help you change… In manifold ways, the words and languages and hands and bodies touch and change each other.”

p. 29 “The force that Origen, in Rufinus’s Latin, calls ‘the power of words” illuminates and sanctifies the speaker’s soul. This is a bodily change, not just persuasion. In his late treatise Against Celsus, Origen says of majical spells that ‘it is not the significance of the things which the word describe that has a certain power to do this or that, but it is the qualities and characteristics of the sounds.”

p. 36 “Papyrus can wait a long time in the dark. Pliny writes that ‘Cassus Hemina, a historian of many years ago states, in his Annals IV, that Gnaeus Terentius, a clerk, when digging his land on the Janiculum, unearthed a chest that held the body of Numa, king of Rome, and some books of his. This happened 535 years after Numa’s reign. Hemina further writes that the books were made of paper (papyrus) which is all the more remarkable because they remained intact. The books, in this story, are later destroyed, some deliberately and some by accident. Pliny’s story is about how old papyrus can be, but it ius also a story about trust, about the mutual confidence of plants and humans resting together in bodies, and about remembering… papyrus is the caretaker of the human body and it becomes the body; undone and woven back together in plant form. The plant cares for the human that touched it, although its care is inhumane. It cares for the human in this way because it is inhumane, for no human could provide the same long afterlife for another.”

p. 51 Unlike plants and humans, stones and earthy matter exist at the obscure limits of aliveness. Sometimes they are alive and sometimes they are records of past aliveness or signs of aliveness in the future. Sometimes they exist on the barest possibility of aliveness. They are a logical problem. In his translation of Origen’s On First Principles, Rufinus, in Origen’s voice, simultaneously denies that stones will be reunited with God at the end of the world, and concedes that one might think that scripture implies they could be… In Origen’s Homily 4 on Ezekiel, Origen, this time in the words of Jerome, admits: 2If I look over the whole broad ‘forest’ of Scripture, I am constrained to suppose that this visible earth is a living creature…. The whole creation groans and suffers pangs.” ] Rom 8:22] If the whole creation groans and suffers pangs, but the earth and heaven and aether are a part of the creation … then who knows whether the earth also is subject to some sort of sin according to its own nature, and held liable?”

p. 72 “The limestone, brick and marble of Aquileia also changed over the course of the 5th century. The city fell to Attila the Hun in 452, and afterwards the forum, the walls and other public spaces were reconfigured or abandoned… But humans are not the only rebuilders of limestone: wind, weather, salt deposits, changes in water flow, or seismic action are equally involved in the movement and reshaping of stone matter. The tendencies and reactions of stone to its chemical or atmospheric surroundings are some of what Origen might call the characteristics of the stone’s parts.”

“Plotinus believed that the earth, in its nonhuman, seeing, sensing form, was good. Origen believed that the earth, graning in labour pains, desired to become good… Theophrastus says that the most wonderful of all are the stones that give birth to young.”

p. 76 “Rufinus was an intellectual, but he was also a traveller. In the world in which he lived, thinking and moving were the same. Thinking and knowing and hoping and trusting and believing happened in inbetween space…. Learning was often pictured as a path or journey, and the stories of migrations – the wanderings of Odysseus, the wanderings of Abraham or Moses – were stories of intellectual motion. Knowledge was not an accumulation of facts but a navigation, a directional skill that one could practice well or badly… In a universe made up of divine thinking, to go out from the land of Egypt, to cross the sea, to move in our tiny human way through the landscape, is to exist inside knowledge. To find, and be found by, the nonhuman things that lie between  us and the horizon is to live inside the mind and body of the world.”

p. 80 Vitruvius, from whom we learn much of what we know about Roman architectural theory, insists that the Roman builder of houses ‘should have learned the art of medicine, because of the influences of the different zones of the world… and of different types of air and location – some of them healthy and others conducive to illness – and because of the importance of different waters. Without all these considerations, no place to live can be healthy. In siting a farm, according to the agricultural writer Palladius, “a wholesome air is indicated by a location well away from valley bottoms and night mists, and by appraisal of the inhabitants’ physique. The forms our bodies take are manifestations of the air and water around us; we are products of their tendencies and constraints.”

p. 134 “The movement and touch of hands is ephemeral, but it is also a way of creating knowledge that is different from the knowledge that we find elsewhere. Knowledge from hands is from and with a body, so it is hard to put into words, though words too can be part of a hand’s work… Zeno of Citium, we are told, said that knowing something is like grasping it firmly in your hands.”

p. 135 “This physical conversation between maker and matter is a way of knowing, as Tim Ingold puts it, from the inside; it is a responsive practice of inquiry…” the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the material with which we work. Knowlewdge construction, when it is literal construction, is both experiential and multidirectional, in the sense that knowledge is neither simply imposed on a material object of knowing nor purely extracted from it. The nonhuman interlocutor and its human partner are together greating and inhabiting a period of time in which knowledge occurs as the coming together of their bodily actions and tendencies. In this way, making is a process of creating events and times that are full of knowledge… is a turn away from a model of knowledge that locates knowing exclusively or primarily in the mind, and that defaults to the propositional as the primary form of knowledge.”

p. 150 “Intimacy is not an individual experience but happens between beings. Theorists of intimacy focus primarily on the intimate relationships between beings who are alive at the same time, at the same time scale. What does it mean to have or to make, an intimate relationship with the past? In such a relationship, to the degree that we can reach out and touch the past, that is, to a very small degree, the strangeness and decentering is mutual. We are destabilized when we touch the past, but the past is also destabilized by us and by our touch.

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from Bruno Latour Politics and Nature

February 13, 2024 – 6:18 pm

p. 232 No culture except that of the West has used nature to organise its political life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologist, to anthropology, we can understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collective instituted to paralyse democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collective with two houses: nature and society.?

Once nature has been set aside, another question arises – how to bring the collective together – that is heir to the old nature and the old society. We cannot simply bring objects and subjects together… we have to consider that the collective is made up of humans and nonhumans capable of being seated as citizens, provided that we proceed to the apportionment of capabilities… leaving to be sceptical of all spokesperson – those who represent humans as well as those who represent non-humans. The second apportionment consists in redistributing the capacity to act as a social actor, while considering only associations of humans and non-humans. It is on these associations and not on nature that ecology must focus . This does not means that citizens of the collective belong to language or the social realm since, by the third apportionment, the sectors are also defined by reality and recalcitrance. The three sets of apportionments allows us to define the collective as composed of propositions. P. 233 To convene the collective, we shall thus no longer be interested in nature and society, but only in knowing whether the propositions that compose it are more or less well articulated. The collective as finally convened allows a return to civil peace, by defefining politics as the progressive composition of a good common world.

… It is impossible of course to go back to the old separation between facts and values, for that separation has only disadvantages, even though it seems indispensable to public order. … We restore order to these assemblies if we distinguish two other powers: the power to take into account and the power to put in order. The first power is going to retain from facts the requirement of perplexity and from values the requirements of consultation. The second is going to recuperate from values the requirement of hierarchy and from facts the requirement of institution. In place of the impossible distinction between facts and values we are thus going to have two powers of representations of the collective that are at once distinct and complementary.

p. 235 There are in fact not one but two arrows of time; the first one, modernist, goes towards ever-increasing separation between objectivity and subjectivity; and the other, non-modern, goes towards ever more intricate attachments. Only the second makes it possible to define the collective by its learning curve – provided that we add to the two preceding powers a third power, the power to follow up, which brings up anew the question of the State. The State of political ecology remains to be invented, since it is no longer based on any transcendence but on the qaulity of the follow-up of collective experimentation. It is on this quality, the art of governing without mastery, that civilization capable of putting an end to the state of war depends.”

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Books Environmental politics Feminism History Science Women's history

Notes from Meeting with Moths

November 29, 2023 – 8:00 pm

p. 34-6 “The Six-spot Burnet is Britain’s most widespread burnet moth … Their bodies are packed with poisons that deter even the hungriest of predators. These poisons are accumulated by the caterpillars… munch on leaves of trefoils, they not only get the essential nutrients for growing, they also swallow the chemicals, in this case cyanides, which the plant produces to protect itself. The caterpillars themselves have evolved ways to deal with the plant’s poisons… cunningly store the dangerous chemicals in small pounches just under the skin. This prevents the toxins from interfering with their own body functioning and also allows them to be exuded through the skin as foul-tasting droplets for any predator follish enough to investigate too closely… As adults, females use cyanides as part of their alluring perfume to help attract males, and mating males transfer varying amounts to the female in little packages with their sperm. A toxic male is the most attractive and desirable.”

p. 54 “In 29021, Butterfly Conservation estimated that the work undertaken by volunteers to protect both butterflies and moths, would cost £18 million if valued commercially.”

p. 76 Family of micromoths known as Tineidae. … most feed on organic waste… recycling nutrients back into the environment. Some… specialise in digesting the protein found in animal hair, skin, feathers, claws and horns. As they nibble, they slowly do their bit to break the tough material down … Two species have become rather well know… The Webbing Clothes Moth and the Case-making Clothes Moth are problem pests worldwide… in the dark corners of warm houses they will happily breed all year round…. each female will lay about 50 tiny eggs on suitable substrates, which in turn hatch into the fabric-destroying caterpillers.”

p. 86 Herald (Scoliopteryn libatrix) emerging … “a race against time for the moth, for if the wings are not given the space they need, they might dry in a stunted or twisted position and effective flight is never realised”

p. 88 Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfut in 1647 to a family of artists and printmakers … in 1679 she published her first book on caterpillars… showing the real-life relationship between insects and plants was groundbreaking. The concept of ecology, the interactions between animals, plants and the environment now so fundamental to our understanding of the natural world, was barely considered at the time.”

p. 90 “the book for which she would later receive most acclaium. Metamorphosis Insectorum was publsihed in 1705 with 60 large copper-plate engravings illustrating the stages of development of many different insects arranged around the plants she had found them on…. Her work was circulated, discussed and admired by the scientific elite of the Royal Society of London. Tsar Peter the Great acquired a large collection of her work. Later George III bought a first edition of her Surinam book for the Royal Collection. Carl Linnaeus used her illustrations to help him describe species of plants and animals. At least nine animals now bear her name. Sadly, after her death some of her findings were disputed. Inaccurate copies of her books had been made and when these errors were spotted her work became widely criticised. Genuine observations such as a large spider capturing a bird were dismissed as fanciful female imagination. Only 150 years later, when the explorer Henry Bates proved her bird-eating spider was accurate, was the record finally set straight; but her books and their legacy were soon forgotten.”

p. 101 In most moth species it is the female that releases a sex pheronome, a behaviour referred to as ‘calling’, when she is ready to mate… Males are usually better endowed than females in the antennal department… a greater surface area and therefore more space for special scent receptors.”

p. 102 “There are reports of some species attracting a suitor from over 10 km away”

p. 113 “The very first moths, flying around 200 million years ago, had chewing moutparts and probably fed on fern spores and pollen from primitive conifers in their prehistoric swampland homes. To keep hydrated they might have sipped on dew .. and it is thought this gradiually led to the development of more specialised sucking moutnparts to better deal with these food sources. Once flowering plants made an appearance… things started to change more rapidly… There are still tiny moths that eat fern spores and pollen grains, using a special cavity in the mouth to process these granular foostuffs, But most others have moved on, with the evolution of a long tubular moutnpart called the proboscis”

p. 135 “Moths with ears were flying around their prehistoric worlds at least 28 million years before echolocating bats were on the scene … must once have been used for something other than bat avoidance, probably to hear other approaching predators but perhaps also for communicating with each other”.

p. 144 “Parasitoids… are a crucial part of ecosystems and have an important role in regulating the size of moth populations without eliminating them… reghular fluctuation of moth numbers over the course of years, tracked by a fluctuation in abundance of its parasitoids.”

p. 170 “migrating moths are naive; they’ve never done the journey before and will never do it again… they rely entirely on instinct to know when and where to go. Environmental cues of temperature, other weather patterns and day length interact with the moths’ genetics to make this work.”

p. 185 The most extreme cold conditions, as low as minus 70C, are endured by the Arctic Wolly Bear moth… most northerly breeding species of moth, eking out a remarkable life in the icy realms of Canada and Greenland… termperatures only become warm enough for activity on sunny afternoons in midsummer, so it takes on average seven years, a severely punctuated seven years, for the caterpillar to complete its development.”

p. 199 Alice Blanche Balfour (1850-1936) grew up with a love of natural history… her most significant finds happened during her 60s and 70s… bequathed her impressive collection of pinned specimens, notebooks and equipment to the National Museum of Scotland.”

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from Bruno Latour’s Down To Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

October 21, 2023 – 4:06 pm

Written after the election of Trump

p. 36 For the first time, a large-scale movement no longer claims to address geopolitical realities seriously, but purports to put itself explicitly outside of all worldly constraints, literally offshore, like a tax haven.What counts above all for the elites behind this movement is no longer having to share with the others a world that they know will never again be a common world. They do all this while maintaining the American ideal of the Frontier … It is quite remarkable, morever, that his invention comes from a real estate developer who has been constantinly in debt, racing from failed deal to failed deal, and who became famous by way of reality television, another form of unreality and escapism”

p. 37 It is quite useless to become outraged on the pretext that Trump voters “don’t believe in facts”. They are not stupid. It is because the overall geopolitical situation between advance and retreat had to be taken into account … defines the first government totally orienttated towards the ecological question, but negatives, through rejection! … Accountants are quite familiar with entrepeneurs who defraud investors: the innovation of Trumpism is to have the greatest nation in the world take that step: Trump as the country’s Madoff?”

p. 70 “If the planet has ended up moving away from the Terrestrial, it is because everything has happened as though nature seen from the universe had begun to replace, bit by bit – to cover, over, to chase away – nature seen from the Earth, the nature that grasped, that could have grasped, that should have continued to include, all the phenomena of genesis.

The grandiose Galilean invention has come to take up all the space by making people forget that seeing the earth from Sirius is only a tiny part – even if the infinite universe is involved – of what we have the right to know positively.”..

If we recall all the bizarre things that earthbound beings, over the last three or four centuries, have imagined they discerned on the red planet before noticing their errors, we shall not be surprised by all the errors committed, over the last three or four centuries, regarding the fate of the terrestrial civilisations as seen from Sirius!

“The ideals of rationality, like the accusations of irrationality brought against the Earth and the earthbound. So many pipe dreams, so many moons made of green cheese, so many canals on Mars…

p. 71 “It is on this point that the two meanings, positive and negative, of the word “Global” turn out to divurge entirely.

The subjective side begins to be associated with the archaic and the outdated; the objective side with the modern and the progressive. Seeing things from the inside comes to have no value other than being traditional, intimate, archaic. Seeing things from the outside, on the contrary, becomes the only way to grasp the reality that counts, and, above all, the only way to orient oneself towards the future.

It is this brutal division that was to give consistency, as it were, to the illusion of the Global as the horizon of modernity. From this point on it was necessary, even if one stayed in place, to shift one’s position virtually, bag and baggage, away from the subjective and sensitive positions towards exclusively objective positions, finally freed of all sensitivity – or rather of sentimentality.

This is where, by contrast with the Global, the necessarily reactive, reflexive, nostalgic figure of the Local comes in

Losing one’s sensitivity to nature as process – according to the old sense of the term “nature” – was becoming the only way to gain access to nature as an infinite universe – according to the new definition. To progress in modernity was to tear oneself away from the primordial soil and set out for the Great Outside, to become, if not natural, at least naturalist.

p. 72 Through a strange perversion of metaphors of giving birth, no longer depending on those old forms of genesis was what would allow us to “be born at last to modernity”.

As feminists have shown by analyzing witchcraft trails, hatred of a large number of values traditionally associated with women would come from this tragic metamophosis, rendering grotesque all forms of attachment to the old soils. The effort to resist the attraction of any form of grounding was a way of saying – as the hypocrite priest Tartuffe said to his host’s daughter “Cover that bosom, girl.” From then on, objectivity became gendered.

This great displacement – the only real ‘Great Replacement’ – will then be imposed on the entire world, which becomes the landscape of globaization-minus as the last vestiges of adherence to the old nature-as-process are durably eradicated.

This is the meaing of the expression that is now out of fashion, but whose echoes are still heard whenever anyone speaks of progress, development and the future: “We are going to modernize the planet, which is in the process of unification.”

p. 73 No progress will be made towards a “politics of nature” as long as the same term is used to designate, for example, research into terrestrial magnetism…. the role of earthworms in soil aeration, the reaction of shepherds in the Pyrenees to the reintroduction of bears, or the reaction of bacteria in our intestines to our latest gastronomic overindulgence. That nature is a real catch-all.

There is no point in looking any further for the slow pace of mobilizations in favour of nature-as-universe. It is completely incapable of churning anything political… Trying to mobilize that nature in class conflicts is like getting ready to go out on a protest march by stepping into concrete.”

p. 74 “To be knowledgeable in scientific terms, it does not help to be beamed up to Sirius. It is not necessary, either, to shun rationality in order to add feelings to cold knowledge. It is essential to acquire as much cold-blooded knowledge as possible about the heated activity of an Earth finally grasped from up close.

… as early as the 17th century, when economists began to take “nature” into account, they took it as a mere “factor of production”, a resource that was precisely external, indifferent to our actions, grasped from afar, as if by foreigners pursuing goals that were indifferent to the Earth.

In what we call systems of production, it was known how to identify human agents – workers, capitalists – as well as artificial infrastructure – machines, factories, cities, agrobusiness – but it was impossible to take the beings that had in the meantime become “natural” (seen from Sirius) as agents, actors, animated, acting entities of the same caliber…

p. 75 One could of course go rummaging in the archives of other peoples to discover attitudes, myths and rituals that were absolutely untouched by any notion of “resource” or “production” but these findings were taken, at the time, as mere vestiges of old forms of subjectivity, of archaic cultures irreversibly outstripped by the modernization front. The testimony was mobing, to be sure, but appropriate for ethnographic museums.

It is only today that all these practices have become previous models for learning how to survive in the future.

p. 76 The simplification introduced by Lovelock is the comprehension of terrestrial phenomena is not that he added “life” to the Earth, or that he made the Earth a “living organism”, but, quite to the contrary, that he stopped denying that living beings were active participants in biochemical and geochemical phenomena. His reductionist argument is the exact opposite of vitalism. He refuses to de-animate the planet by removing most of the actors that intervene all along a causal chain.”

p. 77 The conflict can be summarized simply: there are those who continue to look at things from the vantage point of Sirius and simply do not see that the earth system reacts to human action, or do not believe it possible… they do not believe that there is life on Earth capable of suffering and reacting. And there are those who seek, while keeping a firm grip on the science, to understand what is meant by distributing action, animation, the power to act, all along the causal chains in which they find themselves entangled. The former are climate skeptics (through a taste for distance if not through active corruption); the latter consent to face up to an enigma concerning the number and nature of the agents at work.

P. 86 It is perhaps time… to stop speaking about humans and to refer instead to terrestrials (the Earthbound), thus insisting on humus and, yes, the compost included in the etymology of the word “human”. (“Terrestrial” has the advantage of not specifying species.)

Saying “We are earthbound, we are terrestrials amid terrestrials”, does not lead to the same politics as saying “We are humans in nature.” The two are not made of the same cloth – or rather the same mud.”

p. 87 Terrestrials in fact have the very delicate problem of discovering how many other beings they need in order to subsist. It is ny making this list that they sketch out their dwelling places (the expression allows us to shift away from the word “territory”, a word too often limited to the simple administrative grid of a state.”

In a system of engendering, all the agents, all the animated beings, raise questions about descendants and forebears; in short, the question of how to recognize and inset oneself into lineages that will manage to last.”

p. 95 To definte a dwelling place, for a terrestrial, is to list what it needs for its subsistence, and, consequently, what it is ready to defend, with its own life if need be. This holds as true for a wolf as a bacterium, for a business enterprise as for a forest, for a divinity as for a family. What must be documented are the property of a terrestrial – in all senses of the word property – by which it is possessed and on which it depends, to the extent that if it were deprived of them, it would disappear.”

p. 96 “One episode of Frenh history… might give a sense of the undertaking: the constructuion of a ledger of complaints, from January to May 1789, becfore the revolutionary term … before all the descriptions were aggregated to produce the classic conception of Politics as a totalizing question. This same view of Politics faces us again today, in the immense and paralyzing question of how to replace capitalism by some other regime.

In a few short months, at the request of a king with his back to the wall, in a situation of financial disaster and climatic tension, all the villages of France, all the cities, all the corporations, not to mention the three estates, managed to describe fairly precisely their living environments, rgulation after regulation, plot of ground after plot of ground, privilege after privilege, tax after tax… This episode offers a template for trying to start again, from the bottom up… is it possible that politics has never done another accounting of its material stakes, at this level of detail, since … Could we be less capable than out predecessors of defining our interests, our demands, our grievances?”

p. 103 “If the first united Europe was created to give a common home to millions of ‘displaced persons’, as was said at the end of the last war, then the second will also be made by and for the displaced persons of today … Europe’s wiseacres are indignant: How can so many people think they can cross Europe’s border, settle impudently “in our space” and “make themselves at home”? The anti-immigrationists ought to have thought about his ahead of time, before the “great discoveries”, before colonization, before decolonization. Any group that is afraid of the Great Replacement shouldn’t have begun by going off to replace ‘virgin lands’ with its own way of life… There is no way out of this. Europe has invaded all peoples; all peoples are coming to Europe in their turn. .. Europe has made a pact with the other terrestrials, who are also setting out to invade its borders, the water of the seas, dried-up or overflowing rivers, forests obliged to migrate as fast as possible so as not to be overtaken by climate change, microbes and parasites, all these, too, aspire to a great replacement. We came to you uninvited; you are now coming to us uninvited. We have benefited from every resource; now these resources have become actors in their own right, have set out, like the Birnam Wood, to recover what belongs to them.”

p. 106 There is nothing like an Old Continent for taking up on a new basis what is common, while observing, with anguish, that the universal condition today entails living in the ruins of modernization, groping for a dwelling place… when those who constituted the old “West” have abandoned the very idea of building a world order – isn’t this actually a much more positive version of its age-old history. The Earth that Europe had wanted to grasp as a Globe is offering itself anew as the Terrestrial, offering Europe a second chance that it in no way deserved. This is quite fitting for the region of the world that has the greatest responsibility in the history of the ecological upheaval.”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Wolf: Culture, Nature, Heritage

October 4, 2023 – 5:42 pm

France p. 23 “The survey indicates there are two plausible modes of wild wolf attacks on humans (a) those that are rabies related and (b) more difficult to explain predatory attacks by apparently ‘healthy’ wolves… rabid wolves attacked exclusively as a lone wold in an ‘indiscriminate’ fashion, exhibiting furious behavior as an extreme manifestation of hydrophohic canine rabies. Although rarely directly fatal to adults, violent and lunging rabid wolf attacks often resulted in serious multiple mauling injuries, often to the limbs, neck and face… evenly distributed among a broad age group and gender of human victims.”

Determined predatory attacks by one or more non-diseased wolves were identified on the basis of a swift attack and disappearance, possibly later attacking elsewhere … predominately against women and children, often resulting in serious injury and death.”

p. 26 Mariceau’s 6599 recorded wolf attacks in France span five centuries, from as early as 1421 until the last documented attack by a supposed healthy wolf in 1918. A total of 3,360 human deaths are attributable to rabid wolf attacks and 3239 can be linked to non-rabid predatory wolves, around 13 victims a year, a comparatively low figure when compared with other historic causes of human mortality such as disease, poverty and conflict … wolf-dog hybrids and perhaps feral dogs similar in appearance to wolves were involved… still possible to see big feral dogs who look like wolves (and are perhaps highly interbred with wolves) around settlements in southern and eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

p. 42 Wolves seem to have become extinct in England in the 14th century… it seems likely that the specioes became extinct in Wales around the same time…the wolf survived longest in Scotland… Sutherland, where there are records from ostensibly reliable local naturalists from the first half of the 17th century. They did not survive much longer…. Thomas Pennant (1726098)… suggested that the last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1680.”

p. 50 “Wolves occasionally and accidentally strating the streets of Rome were merely driven out of the city and largely left unharmed. Similar merciful treatment and approaches to the wolf are known from Greece. It seems that throughout Indo-European territories, from India to Ireland and from Scandinavia to Italy to Greece, the wold had attained a certain degree of untouchability that barred active persecution… The most plausible reason for this is that, during pre-Christian times, the wold was of social, perhaos even religious significance, and served as a role model of highly patriarchally organised Indo-European societies.. the koryos, the adolescents… youths aged from about 8-12 to 18-19, who for a number of years (this varies considerably in space and time) lived part or all of the year outside the protection of the teuta, having only each other to help survive the wilderness. The youngsters had no or very few possessions, perhaps only light weaponry, and had to keep alive by taking what the land had to offer, even if that had to be obtained by robbery or theft from their own kin. To do this, they had to cooperate and rely on each other above all else. For this, the koryos members might have taken example from wolves and even identified with them… In terms of social behaviour, wolves are closest to humans of all wild animals…. a sort of totem for the koryos, on both an individual and a collective level, which could explain the frequent wolf-based names of early medieval elites.”

p. 106 In March 2021, The Telegraph reported that the UK government … had been instructued by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to create a rewilding ‘task force’ to gauge appetite for returning lynx and wolf to England. Although DEFRA soon published a refutation of this claim, the response of the chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, George Dunn, was decisiveL “reckless in the extreme… midguided idea about returning Britain to a sort of medieval wasteland.”

p. 109 Although the conception of the early medieval period as a wolf-infested ‘Dark Age’ is not based in historical fact, contemporary cultural products that engage with this notion are indeed rooted in the past, with the perception that life during this era as a ‘waking nightmare’ enforced and ‘reinforced by selective recreations of the Middle Ages … through the lens of gothic romance’ of the 18th to 20th centuries. The wolf is ‘an instantly recognisable companion to the crumbling castles, ruined churches and dark woods of neo-medieval goth horror’ … of the animal as a creature of ‘originary wilderness’ whose presence evokes ‘a sense of the primal’ and creates an ‘atmosphere of the long-distant and the far away.”

p. 112 “the majority of the population of early medieval England lived in far closer proximity to and intimacy with the natural world than most people do today, as is evidenced by the numerous zoocentric Old English riddles recoreded in the 10th-century Exeter Book manuscript whose author(s) contemplated non-human modes of being and ways of experiencing the world by adopting the perspective of the animal… bestial speakers … often challenge their exploitation by hjumans (for exmaple, in one riddle an animals laments its death and the transformation of its skin into the pages of a book) … known today as Wild and Eadwacer, this poem is written from the point of view of an unnamed female speaker about her lover, Wuld… an amibiguous being who can be taken as both a human and an animal… he is a sympathetic character persecuted by a group of weras (men) who in fact act more ‘wolfishly’ than he.”

p. 113 “The landscape of modern-day Britain is far more justificably described as a ‘wasteland’ than that of our medieval predecessors. These people lived alongside more than 130 species which subsequently disappeared after the turn of the 16th century”

p. 124 archaezoologists and molecular geneticists suggest that the domestication of the wolf probably occurred somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, somewhere on the Eurasian continent, perhaps in more than one location. Two predominant origin stories seek to explain how the domestication of the wold took place. The commensual scavenger hypothesis suggests that wolves essential domesticated themse,llves by invading human settlements in seach of animal remains and other waste food discarded by hunter-gatherers. Over time, tolerance of these animals by humans gave a selective advantage to bolder, less fearful wolves… the alternative account … pet keeping or corss-species adoption… provides a different narrative. This draws heavily onf anthropoological observations of pet keeping among recent hunter-gatherers, and postulates that Palaeolitic people could have been similarly inclined to capture, adopt and rear infant mammals… provided the basis for the evolution of a cooperative social system involving both species.”

p. 152 “the wolf was chased and killed by the Japanese because it, and in particular the northern variant, the Hokkaido wolf, was allegedly a threat to newly imported developments in pasture utilisation from America (horse breeding). The Japanese wolf was one of the first victims of the orientation towards the West and the modernisation of Japan.”

p. 161 “The dingo is a naturalised Australian species. The oldest archaeological dingo remains have been carbon-dated between 3000 and 3509000 years ago … genetically disctint from both dogs and wolves for at least 8,000-11,000 years… several genomic studies have identified t he New Guinea singing dog as the dingo’s closest relative, and both dingoes and NGSDs are distinct from the free-ranging dogs found in Asia.

p. 163 “dingos strongly suppress herbivores weighing 7-100kg and introduced mesopredators in some locations … and can have beneficial effects on populations of small mammals and ground-nesting birds due to release from predation by mesopredators and vegetation suppression by herbivores… whilst hybridisation between dingos and dogs does occur, it is rare and most wild dingos carry more than 75% dingo ancestry”.

p. 179 A wild male wolf lived for eight years alone on a small cluster of islands off the south end of Vancouver Island and came to be known as Takaya … one of a unique population of wolves called coastal or sea wolves that live in the coastal habitats of British Columbia and the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska… at one time the sea wolf population extended from Alaska to California.”

p. 230 The Thylacine or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the sole surviving member of the Thylacinidae lineage and the largest marsupial carnivor to have existed into modern tims… 19th century … considered slow, stupid, morose and cowardly, all of which could not be further from the truth.. notable feature … was its enormous gape, at 80 degrees the largest of any mammal… undoubtedly an advantage in securing fast moving prey, such as wallabies, but it was also used as a cautionary warning if threatened. The Thylacine’s tail also set it aside from the canids, as it was not abruptly separated from the body, but gradually tapered, like that of a kangaroo.”

p, 261 Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, Minnesota Wold predation on beavers in the GVE fluctuates in predictable ways during the ice-free season (approximately April to October). As ice cover disappears in April, beavers begin foraging on land to replenish body fat lost during winter. Wolves respond to this and kill vulnerable beavers who venture on land. Predation peaks in May when young dispersing beavers, travelling in shallow waterways and across land, are readily killed when discovered by wolves. During May, beavers constitute approximately 53% of wolf pack diets in the GVE, although this varies considerably among packs, with beaver constituting up to 88% of some packs’ diets in May. Wolf predation on beavers decreases dramatically in June and July as wolves switch to hunting vulnerable deer fawns that are born at the end of May … increases again in late summer and autumn, when beavers forage more frequently on land too stockpile food for the upcoming winter … on average 24% of Sept-Oct wolf diest… substantial pack-level difference in predation … 53% of one packs, only 6% of another pack’s diet. Interestingly beaver density was c. 50% higher in the territory of the latter pack. By late autumn, lakes, ponds and rivers are frozen over and beavers remain largely locked below the ice.”

p. 264 “Wolves choose ambush locations to counter and capitalise on the sensory abilities of beavers. Beavers, like wolves, have well-developed olfactory acilities, which is their primary mode of detecting predators. On the other hand, beavers have extremely poor eyesight and visual acuity, and are therefore incapable of detecting motionless predators when on land… wolves almost always take into account wind direction when chosing ambush locations … often wolves wait in areas with little to no visual cover, suggesting wolves understand beavers cannot visually detect motionless predators. Beavers, can, however, visually detect pursuing predators. Thus wolves generally choose ambush locations very close (<5m) to where they expect beavers to be on land”

p. 291 There are countless examples in the world of people and communities managing to coexist with wild animals, in many cases animals that are much more dangerous and much more difficult to coexist with than our world… the village of Charotar, in central Gujarat in India, where people have learned to live alongside one of nature’s most danerous predators, the crocodile. Villagers have built islands for crocodiles where they can lie in the sun. Perhaps because they know that people help them from time to time, and because they do not expect anything to be done to them, crocodiles tolerate human encroachment, and even accept it when fishermen pick up and drag the animals. The day before setting their nets, fishermen moor their boats in the lake as a warning to the predatorws. They then usually retreat to neighbouring wetlands, or densely vegetated parts of the lake, giving the fishermen space.”

p. 292 “famous example of from the Australian whaling village of Eden, where for centuries local whalers in Twofold Bay cooperated with the resident orcas when hunting baleen whales”

p. 374 Lakes district, the Helsfell Wolf, lived between 1139 and 1197.. in a timeline when wolves coexisted with humans in our landscape … the density of place name distribution reveals the ‘shadowy presence’ of wolves across the North West

p. 377 The history of Britain is of an ever-downward spiral of destruction of wild nature from the elimination of predators inconvenient to land users. This led to the judgement by the Addison Committee, the first Parliamentary Committee on National Parks, in 1931, that there was no need of the types of National Park seen in North America that gave free, unfettered space to wild nature because Britain was a “country where the fauna is practically limited to birds, insects and the smaller mammals”… in whcat would be a well-rehearsed objection since then to reinstatement of large carbivors, the Committee went on to say: “Great Britain is small, densely populated and highly developed and has relatively little land which is not already put to some economic or productive use.” In effect, the report repudiated the notion that the depauperate state of Britain’s wild nature could be reversed.”

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Books Environmental politics Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

August 25, 2023 – 11:52 am

Nancy Fraser p. 38 “the ecological dimension has to be front and centre. It is not reducible to, but it is deeply intertwined, with the dynamics of the economic, financialisation and social reproduction crises. It was when I took this objective of a crisis critique that I found I could not any longer keep the ecological dimension in the margins”

p. 48 Akwugo Emejulu “If you see something that needs to change, you have to do it yourself. The idea that someone else either understands the issue better than you or has beeter ideas than you seems anti-egalitarian. This does not mean you are making someone else take responsibility for their own liberation… Rather , it’s to say: “If you want change to happen then you actually have to grab a broom and gather with others to make that happen.”

p. 53 In the UK you are one of 24 Black female professors out of 19,000 professors nationwide, 14,000 of whom are male.

p. 68 Sheila Rowbotham “After abolition the memory of the extraordinarily far-sighted and creative things that had been done just got completely pushed aside. The GLC’s radical scope was much wider than previous left councils in the past. Ken Livingstone had been influenced by Harvey Milk in San Francisco and was aware of the liberation and feminist politics in a way that was unusual among Labour Party politicians. I worked in Industry and Employment, the area for which Mike Ward was respobsible. Mike had been inspired by the visionary measures adopted by the Communist council in Bologna, but he also knew in detail about the history of local government in Brighton. Robin Murray, the chief economic adviser, had experience as a development economist and in community politics in Brighton where he lived. My immediate boss was Hilary Wainwright, then in her early 30s. … She contrived to link the creation of forms of democratic planning with economic policies that served human needs, transplanting the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Alternative Plan into Local government.

JL So what did you do at the GLC?

“I initiated policies on childcare, deomstic labour and contract cleaning for the London Industrial Strategy. … creating jobs by funding women’s workplace co-ops and nurseries. We also funded a launderette run by older women under the Westway. About 20% of people in London at that time didn’t have their own washing machine. Many were pensioners. There had been municipal washing places that were being closed. The women who used one had campaigned for a replacement, a community laundrette. Westway was funded by Industry and Employment and the nursery by the Women’s Committee, headed by Val Wise. So the women who used the launderette had contact with the little children, and they also used to do the washing of all the nappies for the nursery.”

Veronica Gago Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires p. 85 “I think in Latin America the vocabulary of environmentalism has more to do with anti-extractive struggles than with ‘environmentalism’. The vocabulary is changing fast with younger generations. Whilst comrades in other areas talk about ecofeminism, I think that here, in Latin America, the struggles, the vocabulary, the imagery, have to do more with strategies of anti-extractivism and indigenous movements… extractivism for us is the main issue in rethinking the exploitation of land, the exploitations of corporations and the distribution of common resources… the agro-business model is now exploding in terms of environmental problems, both with the basic issues of food and water, and with the dispossession of indigenous people through the expropriation of plants. There is also a very long discussion about the colonial frame of developmentalism in ‘the Third World’, and the dilemmas ralted to the international division of labour for our countries.”

p. 92 Wendy Brown, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berleley. “One of the things I paid too little attention to in Undoing the Demos (2015) was the disintregration of the social… In erican case that disintregration has had two important effects. First, this process literally takes apart social bonds and social welfare – not simply by promoting a libertarian notion of freedom and dismantling the welfare state, but also by reducing legitimate political claims only to those advanced by and for families and individuals, not social groups generated by social powers. Second, something I didn’t emphasise adequately in 2015 … is the extent to which neoliberalism could generate a political formation that combined libertarianism with a very strong statism that works to secure, essentially, the deregulated public sphere that neoliberalism itself generated.”

p. 97 “We live in such nihilist times. By which I mean, drawing from Nietzsche, not that there are no values circulating, but that our values are commercialised, trivilaised, fungible; they’re traded, trafficked in, used for branding and profit.”

p. 107 Lynne Segal – “The mantra promoting notions of the autonomous, individualised self is indeed so strong today, although it has little connection to what it is to be human. This is especially pernicious when we enter the world of care, one where public support is crucial for so many. For instance, spaces for mothers with young children are being demolished before our eyes. According to the Sutton Trust, there was a 50 per cent cut in early years day care provision between 2010 and 2017, and at the very same time there was almost the exact same rise in referrals for children in crisis, creating an explosion in demand for child protection services; it is all so short sighted.”

p. 114 Lynne Segal “Biology and culture, biology and environment are never in any way separable. Donna Haraway has so much to say about how complicated this relationship is, seeing biology as an “endless resource” of “multiple possibilities”. Similarly, the neuroscientists Steven Rose points out how even the environment of chromosomes is unstable, making patterns of genetic transmission entirely unpredictable. Genetic outcomes not only depend upon endless external physical, social and cultural factors, but also on unstable internal cellular features. So, when we are trying to explain something as complex as how we become women, or men – if indeed we do identify with these gender positions we’re seen as born into – the complexity is quite phenomenal! The idea that we could separate out the intricacies of the biological from the convolutions of culture is foolish. And yet we have evolutionary speculators, such as Richard Dworkin, providing “biological” reasons why women wear high heels and tight dresses. However laughable, the media present these biological musings as gold standard science. Thus, popularisers of scientific folk tales come to be seen as leading scientists.”

Hilary Wainwright p. 130 After 2019 general election”one of the reasons why we lost, say, in the North East, and, to some degree, Wakefield, some of the north-western towns, and certainly in Stoke, is because in fact people’s political alienation, their experience of having no control over the decisions shaping their daily lives, was not actually a result of their experience of Europe, but rather their daily life experience, especially of Labour Councils that took their voters completely for granted, treating them more or less with contempt. Even on the interviews on the election night, you heard working-class people who voted Tory explain their decision by saying “Labour’s done nothing for us round here” as much as they talked about Brexit.”

p. 185 Angela McRobbie, Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London “Most of the time I’ve been working in Germany in the last three years has been dedicated to an AHRC three-city study of fashion micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan…. The argument has emerged that it is the existence of a social wage which permits small creative enterprises to function where there is support and subsidy for rent of studio space and equipment, and a huge number of courses for upskilling and further training. Germany is the land of free at-the-point-of-delivery vocational training. The social democratic heritage, even as it is being transformed, remains pretty intact. And since Fashion is a female-led field, these provision benefit the context of women’s employment.

Gargi Bhattacharyya Professor fo Sociology at the University of East London

p. 197 “from Thatcher onwards – and escalating when we come to 2008, and the formal new institutionalisation fo the new austerity – part of how any public consensus around welfare or any social support operates is by increasingly making all of us guilty until proven innocent. Nearly all state functions become modelled as punitive, so instead of via the cuddly daddy who will tell you off, who will give you all a sweetie if you’ll just come and line up. Instead, we’ve got the state patriarch sating “Well I’m not sure any of you are my kids anyway. Can you prove it?” And so then we’re all endlessly having to prove how we are deserving of t he smallest indulgence, even the indulgence of being allowed to live our lives. That really shifts expectations. … it’s always “How can I avoid punishment?” even if the punishment is only taking away some of the small supports … everyone gets trained to look over their shoulder and to not ask for help because sometimes the threat of punishment is greater than the small social good that might be gained… The machinery enacting our rights is becoming increasingly punitive.”

Sylvie Walby p. 214 JL You describe feminism as a project, rather than an identity. Why?

“The concept of a ‘project’ contains the implications of change, of movement, of fluidity, of possibility. The concept of ‘identity’ is very fixed. I’m not comfortable with the concept of identity because of its tendency to essentialise, albeit on the level of culture rather than biology; hence I find it a relatively unproductive term … the concept of ‘project’ is better than ‘movement’ because it contains notions of practices, as well as ideas.”

p. 218 “There is a possibility of a cascade of changes, something which appears to be quite small can have very large effects … The concept of a cascade is really important. It’s an analysis of society as being made up of multiple systems. .. of two main kinds: regimes of inequality and institutional domains. The notion of the crisis ‘cascading’ is that it cascades through these interconnected systems. It’s not that the whole society will move at once, but that steo by step, one system could change another. But there’s no inevitability; and any specific system could absorb it. I used the example of the financial crisis, for example … there was no inevitability that there should be austerity. You might say the same with Covid there’s no inevitability that the closing down of the economy had to mean austerity. The government can simply print money” And if we compare the two crises, the government in this instance has simply printed money, whereas it didn’t in the previous one.”

Sophia Siddiqui, Institute of Race Relations

p. 250 “The reproductive labour of migrant women is essential to maintaining the capitalist system, as the care work needed to sustain families is increasingly outsourced onto their shoulders. But in every conceivable way, migrant women remain cordoned off from the body politic through immigration regimes that exclude them and push them out to the edges of society. And these immigration regimes often prevent them from being with and caring for their own families, who they have to leave behind in their countries of origin, to care for the families of more affluent others. We can’t look at these issues in silos; we need to see them together, particularly in the context of the multiple crises of care and of capitalism. That was how the term ‘reproductive racism’ emerged”

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