Category Archives: Environmental politics

Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Book of Eels by Tom Fort

December 23, 2020 – 5:12 pm

p 20 Talking to a fisherman near Hinckley Point

“He told me one day before the war, his father had caught a sturgeon in the nets weighing nearly a hundred pounds. “Seven foot long it were. Amazing. No. I’ve never seen another one.”

p. 24 An American anthropologist, Albert Herre, who worked in the Philippines in the 1920s, found a ‘well-developed’ eel cult among the Lepanti Igorots who lived near Mount Mougoa. They kept sacred eels in pols, which were fed daily on rice and sweet potatoes by devotees who sang songs of praise as they went about their work.”

p. 35 A Roman of Praeneste, Claudius Aelianus, who in the second century AD, complied a collection of contemporary curiosities entitled De Natura Animalium. .. his book also contains reference to fly fishing for trout, as practiced by the Macedonians, which subsequent investigation has shown to be – almost certainly – authentic and reliable.”

p. 40 “The first great English antiquary, John Leland, referred to Lanport market in Segdemoor being full of “peckles, as they call them, because they take them in those waters by pecking an eel speare in them when they lie in their beds”… Eel spears were still being made in the small Danish town of Skyum until 30 years ago, and Dr Christopher Moriarty records how commercial eel spearing contniued on the mudflats at Rosslare, in south-east Ireland, until the 1960s, when tidal changes refulted in the eel grounds being buried in sand.”

p. 56 “the eel is an ancient creature and a primitve one. But its primitiveness does not mean that it is simply made, only that it was perfectly made in the earliest times. In fact its sensory equipment is so complex as to defy analysis, even now. Scientists who have spent lifetimes dissecting eels and studying their habits sill do not have any clear idea how – for example – they find their way across the vast expanses of the ocean to their breeding grounds. The Irish pote, Seamus Heaney, was stirred by the mystery. In “The Return”, he wrote

Who knows if she knows

her depth and direction;

She’s passed Malin and

Tory, silent, wakeless,

A wisp, a wick, that is

Its own taper and light

Through the weltering dark.”

p. 111 “The quiet life they have pursued this past 10 or 15 years is coming to an end. THey are preparing for a journey, to fulfil their destiny. Their backs and flanks darken from greenish to near black, while their bellies turn from yellow to silver. They become firmer to the touch, as fat is stored in their body muscle. Their nostrils dilate and their eyes expand. They cease to eat, and their digestive tracts degenerate. The salt content in the blood diminishes. The sex organs, which run like ribbons through the bodies of males and females, swell.” The order to move is generally sensed at night, and the external circumstances that stimulate have been known for thousands of years and exploited to mankind’s dietary advantage. The night is dark and stormy, and the barometric pressure is low. The moon is in its last squarter, small and growing smaller. The river is high, swollen by rain, and the current is strong. The wind blows from the lake into the mouth of the river leading to the sea, the stronger the better. Although there will be a trickle of migrating eels at any time, in any conditions, between August and the end of the year, it is this concert of effects which triggers the sudden and overwhelming collective impulse to depart, the mass exodus…. The records of the Comacchio fishery relate that on the night of 4 October 1697, the fishermen took 322,520kg of eel – around 300 tons, perhaps three quarters of a million fish, in one night’s work… these mighty harvests belong to the distant past.”

p. 114 Its skin is able, when moist, to absorb up to 90% of its oxygen requirement. The skin also plays a vital part in permitting the fish to pass without distress from freshwater to saltwater. … the thickness of the skin and the mucus with which it is so lavishly coated make it unusually resistant to the process known as osmosis”.

p. 127 “On the Thames the elver run was known as the eel fare. It usually began towards the end of April and was the occasion for Londoners to arm themselves with sieves and nets, take off their shoes, roll up their trousers, and help themselves. In 1832 Dr William Roots of Kingston upon Thames kept watch on a column close to the bank. It proceeded continuuously for five days, and he calculated that up to 1800 elvers were passing each minute.”

p. 132 “there is no evidence to support the charge – endlessly repeated by ignorant proprietors of trout and salmon fisheries, their keepers and some anglers – that they are destructive predators of salmon and trout eggs. These fish generally spawn during the winter and early spring, when eels are buried in mud, motionless and fasting, their metabolism merely yicking over… eels eat when they need to, and they are frequently caught with entirely empty stomachs, which – considering it takes them up to three days to digest a meal – suggests an abstemious attitude to the pleasures of the table.”

p. 157 In 1908 a delegation of fishmongers and fishery owners from Hamburg arrived in Gloucester. They had heard of the extraordinary scale of the Severn elver run, and wished to obtain supplies with which to supplement the stocks in German rivers and lakes which were insufficient to meet demand for eel. They were given permission to establish a depot at Epney, behind the Anchor Inn, from where the babies were shipped live back to Hamburg. It was an unusual trading link, but evidently a profitable one, for the depot was still flourishing in 1939, when the Ministry of Agriculture took possession of it and sent the Germans back home”

p. 170 a splendid print datying back from around 1800, called Eel Bobbing at Battersea. An old woman is sitting in a boat held in position a yard or two from the bank of the Thames by a pole driven into the mud. Beyond her, on the far side, standing out againsy a pale coral sky, rise the spire of a church and a windmill. She has a pipe jammed into her mouth, a round hat on her head, a blanket over her knees, a barrel in the sterm. She is grasping a sturdy piece of tumber in her honry hands, from the end of which, descending into the calm, oily water is a line. Somewhere beneath is the ball of worsted and worms, and once she feels teeth in it, up it will come, and there will be pie for supper, or perhaps eel in jelly”

p. 175 “the supply of live eels to the one great central fish market – at Billingsgate in London – was already largely controlled by the Dutch well before 1412, when the Lord Mayor decreed they should be sold by weight only. The vessels used for transporting and storing them were known as schuyts. Bulging with their perforated eel prisons, they became a familiar sight in London, as the companies owning them had been granted the right to anchor off Billingsgate for ease of access. In the late 17th century the official concession to supply eels to the market was bestowed by royal decree, partly in acknowledgement of the part played by the masters and crew of the schuyts in fighting the Great Fire of 1666 and providing food and shelter for the homeless victims. The main condition of the concession was that there should be at least one shop filled with eels in position at all times”

p. 268 “almost all the figures point to steep and continuing reductions in stock levels, and the eel watchers are of pretty much one mind. Some judge the decline to be critical, others prefer ‘significant’ or #dramatic#…no one knows what impact eel fishing is having, because no one knows how many eele there are and how many are being caught. Anyway, the effect of fishing is but one of the factors determining population dynamics. Others include the creeping advance on both sides of the Atlantic of the parasitic nematode Anguillicola crassus, which destroys the fish’s swimbladder, the spread of a herpes virus which attacks blood-forming tiss,e contaminations by PCBs and other pollutants, and the loss of habitat due to the draining of wetlands and the construction of dams… the Sargossa Sea itself has been given a generally clean bill of health .. but there is deep concern about a transport system that delivers the baby eels to the shores of Europe and North America, and the deepending suspicioun that the great alliance between the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current may be faltering… the warming of the Arctic Ocean might be eroding the vigour”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from A Shadow Above: The Fall and Rise of the Raven

April 11, 2020 – 12:07 pm


P. 149 Ravens, as with other corvids, are notorious for hiding things. Because the birds lack a sense of smell, instead they memorise the exact locations of where they have buried their food in order to return to it later. Ravens are also master thieves, able to map out the patches of rival birds and dig up their caches. A 2003 experiment in the US by Bernd Heinrich discovered that when surrounded by competitors, ravens will wait until the attention of their rivals is distracted, before planting their own caches.

“It is not only food that ravens steal and secrete… the writer Truman Capote was making pioneering observations of his own pet raven, Lola. In his 1964 essay of the same name, Capote describes how he tricked Lola into showing him where she kept her treasures – after his bird stole the false teeth of an elderly guest staying in his Sicilian mountainside home. … When the teeth vanished, Capote placed his gold ring – which he had watched the raven greedily covt – on the kitchen table after lunch one afternoon and hid behind the door. The moment Lola presumed she wasn’t being watched she stopped snaffling up crumbs from the table, snatched the ring and waddled out of the dining room and down a hall into the library. From there she hopped up on a chair and on to the bookshelves, disappearing into a gap obscured by The Complete Jane Austen. Capote lists the items tretrieved from the raven’s cache: “the long-lost keys to my car, a mass of paper money, old letters, my best cufflinks, rubber bands, yards of string, the first page of a short story, an American penny, a dry rose, a crystal button..” and, of course, the purloined dentures of his house guest.”

P. 155 the raven roost at Newborough Forest on the Welsh island of Anglesey … furst started their nightly gatherings here in the 1990s and soon began to arrive in such numbers that Newborough was, at one point, considered the largest roost in the world. On some evenings, it exceeded 2,000 birds. That mantle has since passed to a roost in Idahoon steel pylons supporting 711km of power cable along the Snake River… during the cold months, vast numbers arriv ehere from all over North Wales, England, Scotland, and perhaps even across the Irish Sea – an epic journey that calls into question their supposed reluctance to cross large bodies of waer. They come to Anglesey as juveniles and lone adults attracted by all the same possibilities that prompt humans to leave their homes and travel to foreign lands: love, security and survival.”

P. 157 The trees were planted here between 1947 and 1965, covering a desert landscape of loose-blown sand dunes. Some 700 years ago a particularly fierce storm carried the sand so far inland that farmers were buried inside their cottages.”

P. 167

“Watson is particularly interested in the way humans process the sound of the raven. He calls this the notion of temporal resolution, the speed at which information is assimilated by our brains. The raven, like other birds, processes sound roughly twice as fast as humans are capable of. “We have to slow it down before we can even begin to understand the complexity of it,” Watson says.

P. 186

In a 1962 study of the breeding densities of ravens and peregrines, the ecologist Derek Ratcliffe noted a “proximity tolerance” limit between adjacent nesting pairs. Famously, this tolerance is often pushed to the point of downright hostility.”

P. 189

Ravens in Yorkshire “they protect their clutches against such cold weather by lining their nests with sheep’s wool and laying the eggs deep within them. The female normally incubates the eggs for about 21 days before they hatch. Ravens can lay four or six eggs – quite large cluches relative to most birds – and fledge about three young. The family then stays together until early summer, the young ravens learning to fly off the quarry edges, before they disperse to join flocks of other juvenile ravens. When the young have left, the adult pair will begin securing their territory before the next breeding season.”

P. 204 Charles Waterton “travelled widely as a young man in the jungles of Guyana, making his name in 19th-century British society as a gentleman explorer and conservationist. He managed to cheat death countless times during his travels and returned – wracked with dengue fever and malaria – to his inherited 300 acres, where he established Britain’s first protected nature reserve. While the Industrial Revolution boomed in coal country all around him, poisoning rivers, digging mines and felling woodland in the name of commerce. Waterton erected a vast three-mile long and 4metre high wall around his estate… completed in 1826. Everything inside of it he devoted to the preservation of animals.”

P. 208

The progress of man is measured out in the species we have laid waste to. When the ice sheets melted across BRitain around 10,000 years ago, Mesolithic hunter gatherers set out across these virgin lands with spear, bow and arrow in hand. They killed auroch, wolf, lynx, brown bear, wild boar, beaver and eld, which were all once prolific across the great forests and wildwoods. The UK’s bison, elk and brown bear were wiped out by 500AD, and the last wild wolf in Britain was supposedly killed by a Highland chief called Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, in 1685. Our appetite for destruction kept the ravens close. They knew that human footsteps would always lead to blood. Yet in the centuries that followed, our attention turned to ravens themselves.

The Preservation of Grain Act passed in 1532 by Henry VIII and strengthened by Elizabeth I in 1566, made it compulsory for every man, woman and child to kill as many creatures as possible that appeared on an official list of ‘vermin’, in order to protect crops and liverstock. Bounties for the bodies of vermin were administered by churchwardens. One could expect to be paid 4 pence for bringing the head of a raven, kite or jay. Kingfishers were valued at one pence a head; so to a clutch of six young crows. “

P. 209

By the end of the 17th century, the raven had already been driven from the lowlands of England and Wales. The methods used by trappers included lime sticks (placed around the corpse of an animal which meant the ravens became stuck.” and smearing corpses with nux vomica, the tosic seed of an East Indian tree from which strychnine is derived.”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics Women's history

Notes from Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day

February 17, 2019 – 9:47 pm

Fascinating, broad-ranging study

p. 67 “Aristotle … the crucial contrast between ancient and modern here is one of approach, not invention, as the Politics expounds an essentially ‘open’ form of population thinking, which emerged from a world comprising a multiplicity of autonomous city-states of varying size and constitution, unlike the ‘closed’ model of the 19th-century European nation-state. Fertility and mortality, the two cornerstones of modern demography, play a minor role in Aristotle’s considerations because, for him, mobility and shifting patterns of membership were the main shapers of any community.”

p. 71 “Plato decreed that his ideal polis should contain 5,040 citizen farmers, male heads of landed households….Aristotle’s Politics … took exception to the size of Magneia’s population. The territory required to sustain such a multitude of people is impossibly vast, he alleged. But Aristotle’s objections .. were not just practical. A key point of his programme is that in measuring the greatness of a polis, biggest is not best. Greatness is about happiness and prosperity, which is produced by effectiveness, not numbers.”

Exhibit 3

“one of the most influential and enduring ideas in the history of generation and reproduction: that one’s birth circumstances can shape the course of one’s life. This powerful and alluring concept developed in Babylonia and eventually spread far across Eurasia thanks to influential proponents such as Ptolemy in the Roman Empire, al-Biruni in the medieval Islamic world and Sacrobosco in the Latin West .. Babylonian scholars began reading the gods’ intentions in the night sky in the third millennium BC. For around 2,000 years after that, celestial divination was exclusively a method for ruulers to check that their actions and intentions met with divine favour; the gods did not concern themselves with the fate of individuals. However, in 484BC, the Persian king Darius severed royal ties with the Babylonian intelligentsia after a political revolt, and scholars had to find new clients, new sources of income and prestige. Over the next few decades, a radical reconceptualization of the night sky took place that enabled individual destinies to be foretold. The two earliest extant horoscopes both date to 410BC, and by 400BC, give or take five years, the constellations on the eclipse – the path of the moon – had become 12 zodiacal signs of exactly equal sizes. They bear essentially the same names today as they did then.”

p. 253 In the era before the 19th-century rise of national statistics, we find a conception of population that was more attentive to the heterogeneity of sub-populations and its importance. Early modern population thinking did not standardize populations, nor pretend to treat them equally. Distinctive histories and political, cultural and religious differences were recognized to shape what numerical information should be collected, on which groups, and its interpretation. From the 16th or the early 19th century, balancing the heterogeneity of memberships making up the population of a state was a fundamental ground of the form and legitimacy of government, and of arguments for democracy…it reminds us of a fruitful way of thinking about aggregate properties of societies and states, different from the one we now take for granted. Its open, bottom-up reasoning about human numbers focused on how sub-populations are formed, sustained and compromised in relation to others and to wider forces.”

p. 321 “forceps, according to Aveling, prompted a sudden increase in man-midwifery, including lecture courses on obstetrics for male practitioners, lying-in hospitals staffed by men; and men attending route births. The boom was swiftly met by criticism, often centred on the threat to women’s modesty… upon closer examination cannot bear the full weight of the shift from female to male birth attendants. Sarah Stone, practicising in Bristol in the 1720s, complained about all the anatomically trained man-midwives in business. “For dissecting the Dead, and being just and tender to the Living, are vastly different.” The Chamberlens had no disciples in the city in this period, so forceps were not the reason that Bristol matrons started routinely hiring man-midives. Second, man-midwives did not always advocate the new technology.. Third .. the Camberlen family mobilized not one new technology, but three: the Vectis, the filley and the forceps… Wilson suggests that the most fundamental shift was not technological but mental: the idea that a surgeon had a role in the delivery of a living baby.”

p. 332 – suggests part of a shift of a number of professions from female to male, e.g. alewives, as economic opportunities developed and also “a somewhat peculiar version of a bigger project: the Enlightenment attempt to improve the life chances of mothers and babies.”

p. 345 “During the 18th-century debates about population, doctors, clergymen, mathematicians, government bureaucrats and others developed methods which drew on a wide range of public and private records to quantify features of populations. These numerical techniques were part of a general effort to ameliorate suffering and death, and they stimulated comparisons, which in turn contributed to the new statistical idea of population and the role of reproduction in determining its size. At the beginning of the 19th-century, in the wake of the French Revolution and Malthus’s Essay, governments began to institute civil registration of births, deaths and marriages, as well as regular census, thus providing more uniform and inclusive accounts of the national population.”

p. 633 “Often misread as a technological determinist who overstated the role of biological sex difference in her call for ‘control of human fertility’, Firestone is more accurately understood as a theorist of consciousness. Among the first to articulate the principle that reproduction is neither outside history nor inside the body, Ifrestone argued that the social organisation of reproduction, rather than biological destiny, determined not only female but human potential.”

p. 635 Far from becoming free individuals within a new economy of contractual labour, modern science and medicine reinforced women’s subjugation to a sexual division of labour allegedly based in natural fact. Activities which have never been inherently debilitating – pregnancy is not a disease, childcare can be shared and maternity if not incompatible with paid employment – were redefined for many (not all) modern women in terms of biological destin6y, thus justifying their sequestration as wives and mothers within the timeless sphere of domesticity.”

p. 637 “from a feminist point of view, the possibility of theorizing identity, status, classificatory systems, kinship, ritual, language and group organisation as social technologies offered the important possibility of accounting for reproductive causality by means other than physiology… social organisation not only plays a causal role in the determination of reproductive outcomes, but must be seen as constitutive of reproductivity itself.”

p. 350 “The story of the ‘nuptiality valve’ in western Europe before 1850 is now familiar, with a sizeable component of women’s reproductive capacity under-exploited or unexploited because of the relatively late age of marriage, and a significant number of women never marrying. It has frequently been asserted that this nuptiality pattern acted as a safety vale in the creation of demographic homeostasis… if mortality is assumed to have been unstable… nuptiality must e the principle ‘driver’ of fertility. France in the period c. 1650-1800 exemplifies such n interrelationship. A demographic equilibrium continually re-established itself, despite disturbances large initiated by epidemics… for much of the late 17th and 18th centuries, the number of hearths in the Paris basin barely changed at all… demographers use the concept of an agricultural holding or craft workshop as fulfilling a function analogous to that of a territory in a bird population in which a new breeding pair I allowed to establish itself only once a next is vacated”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from Landskipping by Anna Pavord

February 2, 2019 – 10:36 pm

p. 109 William Cobbett’s “reports of his Rural Rides started to appear in 1821, in the pages of his journal, the Political register… rode with the eyes of a yeoman farmer, constantly appraising the capabilities of the land he was passing through. He appreciated well-grown crops, well-tended orchards, properly managed flocks. He was fantastically energetic, endlessly curious, splenetic, endearing in his lack of self-doubt… If only farmers would do things his way, sow more swedes, and sow that seed in drills rather than broadcast, then agriculture in Britain might yet be saved. ‘Cobbett’s Quackeries’, his enemies called these obsessions – for American corn (the maize that is now widely grown by farmers for cattle doffer), for robina as a fast-growing fuel, for straw plaiting as a way of providing an income for countrywomen. Why should Leghorn bonnets make Italy rich, when plaiting straw for the bonnets could equally well be done here in England?”

p. 111 “It was because of this sympathy with the labourer (the Political Register had a circulation of c. 60,000, mostly among working men) that Cobbett always felt happiest in relatively sheltered, well-wooded country. He felt no connection with the high, open landscape of the Cotswolds.. going towards Cirencester in October 1821, he noted fields ‘fenced with stone, laid together in walls without mortar or earth … There is very little wood here. The labourers seem miserably poor….in the high chalk lands round Salisbury, where fuel had to be bought, he remembered the miserable sight of the poor taking turns to make a fire so that four or five kettles could be boiled on the one flame. ‘What a winter life must those lead, whose turn it is not to make the fire.’”

p. 112 “The kind of landscape he responds to manifests itself in Mr Sloper’s farm at West Woody in Hampshire: ‘large tracts of turnips; clean land; stubbles ploughed up early; ploughing with oxen; and a very large and singularly fine flock of sheep. Everything that you see, land, stock, implements, fences, buildings; all do credit to the owner; bespeak his sound judgement, his industry, and care.” Cobbett likes a landscape to be productive, shipshape. “

p. 117 “Riding back to London from Dover on 3 September 1823, he notes the wretched condition of the labourers in the district: “Invariably have I observed, that the richer the soil, and the more destitute the woods; that is to say, the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers.. In this beautiful island, every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees surround the great farm-house. All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood, and has no place for a pig or cow to graze, or even to lie down upon. The rabbit countries are the countries for labouring men. There the ground is not so valuable.”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America

July 25, 2018 – 8:37 pm

p. 66 Many historians consider a smallbook of recipes published by Amelia Simmons in 1796 to be the first American cooker book because it contains American ingredients married to British culinary practices. Simmon’s recipes call for maize (still called Indian meal), pumpkins and cranberries among others. Thomas Hariot, John Smith and William Bradford among the earliest Englishmen in America would have readily taken to these dishes, but other early colonists did so only out of necessity. All spoke of the abundance of native American foods and how well people could fare upon them. Hariot declared that “Indian corn yields 100 London bushels while in England wheat yields 40 … Plus one man can in 24 hours of labor produce enough to last 12 months. .. once maize reached Europe it was destined to be food for poor backcountry folks and food animals.”

p. 67 “Nor was the corn produced in the same way as that used at least y Native peoples of New England. No patches were cut out of nutrient-rich forests, then left to fallow. Instead, corn came to be grown as a commoditized crop in larger cleared fields, sent to powered gristmills and then sold cheaply. Thus was a pattern set for America’s food and the way that it was and is produced.”

p. 239 The overwhelming majority of the millions who streamed into the United States between 1880 and 1920 came from eastern, southern, north and central Europe. Italians, mostly from south of Rome and Sicily, numbered more than 5 million. One-third returned after making enough money to purchase a farm or business back home; some of these food companies then shipped products such as olive oil to America. Two million Jews who fled pogroms and conscription in Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Messarabia found their way to America… some 1.5 million Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes fled poverty and political difficulties to settle in the rural and urban upper Midwest. Greeks, mainly from the poorest upland regions of the Peloponnese, numbered about 400,000 in the same period… some traditional foodways remained within communities. Germans had the most powerful effect on American food from the mid-19th century, as in lager beer, sausage culture, bread, sauerkraut. But if it comes to numbers of dining places, then one might argue for Chinese. in the 21st century there are roughly 41,000 Chinese restaurants in America, a number far outstripping hamburger and mid-level restaurant chains. .. famous for two Americanized dishes, chop suey and chow mien… Around 1890 New Yorkers, especially the ‘Bohemian’ crowd seeking new taste sensations, began going to Chinatown for these bargain dishes. The same happened in other cities such as Chicago, where cheap Chinese eateries opened in the red light district for louche clientele.”

 

p. 300 Hamburger chains abound., not so with hot dogs. … perhaps it is that from their beginning as street food in the late 19th century, hot dogs have ramified into many regional and local styles, their differences celebrated by local communities and widely noted in the press… the food chain from animals to factory may be in the hands of a relatively few restaurant and processing companies, but absolute hegemony, not the cultural kind at least, does not work.”

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Books Environmental politics

Notes from Being Ecological by Timothy Morton

May 11, 2018 – 1:31 pm

p. 44 “something about the vagueness of kinda sorta finding yourself in the Anthropocene, which is the reason why the Sixth Mass Extinction event on planet Earth is now ongoing, something about that vagueness is in fact essential and intrinsic to the fact of being in such an age. This is like saying that jet lag tells you something rue about how things are…. Heidigger’s word … is vorhanden, which means present-at-hand. Normally things kind of disappear as you concentrate on your tasks. The light switch is just part of your daily routine… Things kind of disappear – they are merely there; they don’t stick out … less weird, less oppressively obvious versions of themselves. [jetlag] when you wake up, everything is back to normal, and that’s how things actually are; they are, as Heidegger says, zuhanden, ready-to-hand or handy. You have a grip on them.”

p. 66 agriculture “the inner logic of the smoothly functioning system – right up until the moment at which it wasn’t smoothly functioning, aka now – consists of logical axioms that have to do with survival no matter what. Existence no matter what. Existing overriding any quality of existing – human existing that is, and to hell with the lifeforms that aren’t our cattle (a term from which we get chattels, as in women in many forms of patriarchy, and the root of the word capital.) Existence above and beyond qualities. This supremacy of existing is a default ontology and a default utilitarianism, and before any of it was philosophically formalized, was built into social space, which now means pretty much the entire surface of the Earth. You can see it in the gigantic fields where automated farm equipment spins in its lonely efficient way. You can feel it in the field analogs such as huge meanihngless lawns, massive parking lots, supersized meals. You can sense it in the general feeling of numbness of shock that greets the fact of mass extinction. Quite a while ago humans severed their social, philosophical and psychic ties with nonhumans. We confront a blank-seeming wall in every dimension of our experience – social space, psychic space, philosophy space. Uncannily we begin to realise that we are somewhere. Not nowhere.. this feeling of openness, this uncanny sensation of finding ourselves somewhere and not recognising it, is exactly a glimpse of living less definitively, in a world comprised almost entirely not of ourselves.”

p. 96 “what’s wrong with most human-built space in what is called ‘civilisat8ion’, that it doesn’t accommodate the beings who are already here, walking around as strays or bursting through the cracks in the concrete. These nonhumans are like uninvited guests. With human uninvited guests, we follow rules of hospitality… but with nonhumans, what is the etiquette? Well, we are perhaps reaching the point where we might want to revisit our customs, our rules, and modify them to include at least some nonhumans.”

p. 98 “The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the whole is less than the sum of its parts … a much easier way of thinking. And it’s a much nicer way of thinking – nicer to the parts, which in our case, the ecological one, means nicer to polar bears and coral. .. we have simply been passing on the normal form of holism without thinking too much .. we can .. concentrate on just the super-being, the network that the things create, we can ignore extinction.”

p. 154 “Death is comfy, as Freud observed: the tension between a ting and the beings that veer around it is lowered to zero. A cell wall is ruptured and the cell’s inside’s spill out into its surroundings. A glass shatters and the difference between itself and the space around it collapses. It’s life that is disturbing and uncanny, all those energies flowing around, exchanges happening between the inside and the outside of an organism, exchanges between organisms, in every possible physical and metaphorical (and metaphysical) sense.”

p/ 155 “Bitter is a taste that infants have, without cultural training – they can all make the wincing face of tasting bitterness from birth. Bitter is a sign of poison … but if you avoid them altogether, you also get sick. Perhaps you choose to eat burgers because you don’t like that bitter taste. So you die more quickly of a heart attack or a stroke. Life is a balance between completely avoiding stuff and dosing yourself with stuff over and over again. … washing our hands with soap all the time, and nowadays with antibacterial soap – is precisely what brings on death in various ecological forms (such as upgraded superbugs).”

p. 186 “Plastic care, stripped down and efficient, is highly toxic, especially when you scale it up to Earth magnitude and operate like that for 12,500 years. What is required instead is playful care. This doesn’t mean care that is cynical … we need … a playful seriousness. This mode would have a slight smile on its face, knowing that all solutions are flawed in some way. Expanded care, care with the care/less halo, is more likely to include more lifeforms under its umbrella, because it is less focused on sheer survival.”

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