Anna Tsing & Donna Haraway: "Tunneling in the Chthulucene" transcript

in her brilliant 2005 book friction and ethnography of Global Connection anat Singh delves into the tangled webs of global universalities and particularities Global Connections are everywhere she writes capitalism science and politics all depend on them each spreads through aspirations to fulfill Universal dreams and schemes yet this is a particular kind of universality it can only be charged and enacted in the sticky materiality of practical encounters taking us to the Indonesian rainforest as a site of these awkward encounters these frictions sing deafly crochets weaving seems far too simple a metaphor an extraordinary ethnography that includes everything from International speculators to National politicians to daak villagers to Giant dipterocarp trees to fruit orchards rattans and other human tended plants in both its insistence on the inextricable frictions between and among globals and locals and in its careful inclusion of the more than human worlds in uh included in these entanglements friction was and is an outstanding example of the emerging field of multispecies ethnography Anna is a professor of anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz and Neils bore professor in the department of culture and Society at arhus University in Denmark in addition to friction she is the author of in the realm of the diamond Queen marginality in an out ofthe way Place 1994 co-editor of such important collections as nature in the global South 2003 communities and conservation 2005 and words in motion toward a global lexicon 2009 which follows specific words as they travel through time around the world most recently Anna is collaborating with other ethnographers in the absolutely awesome matake worlds research group to study Global scientific ecological and Commercial connections involving matake mushrooms in which telling stories about complex connections between people and mushrooms neither begins from nor returns us to Harmony with the fungal other but forces us to explore what emerges precisely from disturbance this work can be found on the matake world's website and also in the forthcoming book The Mushroom at the end of the world on the POS on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins I first encountered the work of Donna haray in 1990 when a friend gave me a copy of a modest little book called primate Visions as then a young grad student trying to piece together a feminist ecology that was also deeply committed to history as I read the book changed everything I think it's not hyperbole to suggest that excuse me I think it's not hyperbole to suggest that this is most people's experience of reading Donna's work and indeed that she has changed the course of the whole conversation in such Fields as feminist science studies epistemology cultural studies and political Theory drawing on her training as a biologist as well as an historian of science cultural critic and socialist feminist from an earlier generation of materialisms her work from her 1976 crystals fabrics and Fields metaphors of organicism in 20th century developmental biology onward have not only challenged but also completely reconfigured persistent divisions between nature and culture science and the humanity ontology and politics Donna is distinguished professor amerita at the University of California Santa Cruz she is the author of seven books on top of the earlier crystals fabrics and Fields and primate Visions these include Simeon cyborgs and women the reinvention of nature 1991 modest witness at second Millennium female do man meets enom Mouse 1997 how like a leaf conversations with Donna harway 1999 the companion species Manifesto 20 2003 and when species meet 2008 from this extraordinarily Rich ovra two essays in particular have become required reading for anyone seriously interested in late capitalist politics of science technology bodies and relationships the 1985 cyborg Manifesto which introduced her methodologically Innovative practice of using particular figures to illustrate complex biot technopolitical relations and the 1988 situated knowledges the science question feminism and the privilege of partial perspective which demanded and I quote politics and epistemologies of location positioning and situating where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims that that this is for so many of us in the environmental Humanities pretty much self-evident tells you a lot about the influence of her work of course Donna's work did not end in 1998 and companion species and nature cultures have entered our common lexicon alongside Cyborg godrick and teddy bear patriarchy it is this determination to explore our complex entanglements with other beings that has driven so much of her recent work including the forthcoming book staying with the trouble making making kin in the thuline in the midst of planetary transformation we can't forget nor ever imagine that we are that we are or that we are or ever were the sole agents in that multispecies that web of multispecies relations I just muffed that sentence um we can never imagine that we are the sole agents in that web of multispecies relations that not not only sustains us but fundamentally is us I am delighted to welcome anet Singh and Donna haray to asley [Applause] go for it you don't need to do anything without there managing it I can I can speak okay it's a real H pleasure and honor to get to address you here today um and also to uh conduct a dialogue with Donna harway who's been a long-term guide and companion in my explorations of multipe species world making uh I I want to apologize first to the sign language interpreters uh we are not uh working from a prepared script I would like it if you would look up and kind of glare at me if I start going too fast thank you our challenge today is to offer stories and Reflections on storytelling for Resurgence on a damaged planet on the one hand uh a a challenge to not sweep the bad news under the bed even under the sign of Hope and on the other hand to try and explore some paths through to Arts of living on a damaged Planet our opening Loop which was generously assembled by rest and hogness uh shows two stories that help us think about human and non-human Resurgence uh one is never alone a world game uh made in collaboration with the Cook Inlet Tri Council of of the in in inate people as well as hi miyazaki's anime film NAA of the spirit of of the Valley of the wind um great thanks I I was particularly tickled to have the chance to uh come talk to a conference where thinking From The Underground was our chall all uh for a number of years I've been working on um fungi in particular a kind of fungi that lives in the ground with tree roots and it's helped me see the underground as a space of life I think too often we think maybe because of burial Customs as underground as death a space of death but working with fungi has allowed me see the very Lively uh worlds there and that are also worlds for making uh space for making livability for many species including us um miyazaki's naasa film is one of the few films I've ever seen that has fungi as one of its protagonist and it's not just one mushroom it's a whole multispecies landscape with different kinds of of mushrooms as you see in the slide um and it helps me think about the problems of livability um despite environmental destruction NASA is also a story that might help us think about the anthrop seen that proposed geological epic in which humans have moved more Earth and changed the climate more than glaciers as a term anthropos is a wakeup call asking us to pay attention to environmental destruction it also of course has many problems things that it carries and I start by modifying it right off uh by calling by calling attention to the patchy anthropocene that is one that's made up of multiple nature culture patches but we flank it too with other terms Donna's wonderful trully scine a term for the tentacular interconnections that make up our worlds of becoming with and also another another um donat term uh the plantation oene that I'll talk about today that gives us a sense of part of what's wrong um miyazaki's film also describe is is helpful for thinking about the anthropos scene uh because he describes a postapocalyptic future of living in the ruins of the destructions of human projects uh in his film the Earth was destroyed by giant Warriors and in this slide you see the cities crumbling at their feet it's helped me to think of anthropos scine as Earth stalked by man and by man I mean that capital M guy uh who gave us capital P progress he's not Humanity but the one who tried to convince us that giving Technologies and wealth to the lead at the top would somehow uh create a tide that brought All Ships uh into a greater well-being that was a very seductive idea in the 20th century the nation state seemed a possible entry way for all kinds of citizens to get involved in this promised new Prosperity but by the end of the century the sheen of progress began to fall away and I think the comeback of indigenous uh Pride was really important to that because the one group that ideologically rejected from capital P progress uh are indigenous people and uh to take the indigenous seriously makes us question what that whole project was about and it's also the comeback of the environment as a force capable of making history so together those have challenged us to rethink what our futures are all about and that's a time that we need stories we need new kinds of stories uh that help us think about livability without uh the without the capital P progress charting our way so NASA is a postapocalyptic multi-species world in the story uh the fungi are toxic they give off fumes and naasa is always seen with a face mask so that uh she doesn't have to breede the toxic fumes uh they turn out in the end to be sequestering contamination and also reprocessing it turning it into water uh so uh it's it's an optimistic Vision although in terms the temporality is a long one there uh but it does alert us to the fact that uh humans might not be Masters of the Universe and that we might have to think of ourselves in relation to multispecies Resurgence uh this is the kind of story that helps us think about collaborative survival uh and how multispecies Landscapes are part of our lives uh let me turn um the microphone over to Donna Anna and I have done a kind of call and response with each other in a number of formats over the years in particular we taught three graduate seminars together uh that put our research and our students and our our L our needs our desires our our lures toward each other under the rubric of Geo feminisms and this is the first time we've uh done a kind of call of response in this format but I think both of us like to think of it as an ongoing kind of string figuring a kind of SF practice a kind of speculative feminism string figures science fiction uh speculative fabulation and that in making string figures one hand is still while the other moves patterning requires many digits not necessarily of this kind uh and that the the patterns are relayed and passed on both through the generations as well as through the actual materiality of string figuring and I think and Anna and I have thought together that speculative speculative fabulation and speculative feminism are a kind of genre a kind of worlding a kind of story making with deep materialities that work through relays and noddings and dropping threads and somebody else picking a thread and a mutation in a pattern happening that you didn't intend that perhaps ruins the pattern but perhaps also suggests something interesting and fun and better maybe like coyotes opening two doors a Navajo uh NLO string figure pattern that's a very mobile and uh very suggestive of of coyotes either coming together or running away I think of speculative feminism and speculative fabulation as that kind of practice that has been the privilege of our colleagu ship for more than 25 years so the anthropos was sort of dropping on us uh by geologists for serious reasons and much as I have been a resistor to the terminology and the particular kind of uh apparatus and size and power of the story I have come around to feeling that the anthropos scine has a place in our storym apparatuses of a rather important kind but it's not mainly what we're going to be talking about today rather I want to suggest something that my colleague Scott gilbertt um uh gave us in the same gathering in which the plantation oene erupted Among Us namely that the anthropos scine is not so much an epic as a boundary event from a geological point of view it's very much like the Cretaceous paleogene boundary and not to be thought of that way so I have for you here a slide um of the Cretaceous paleogene boundary this bright stripe here and there's a before and an after but what comes next was not what came came before this is the great Extinction event of about 66 million years ago and this is tabletop mountain in Colorado and I think that perhaps our task is to make the anthropos scine as thin as possible um there is no question that we will have to deal with the sediments of the anthropos and its Stigmata in airs Waters and places for ages to come the extinction event in the midst of which we are living if that's going to turn into a sentence uh maybe may be later there will be a period much later it is onrushing it is it uh it is we are in a a kind of a Time Tunnel of onrushing and irreversible Extinction that's simply a fact but need not be as bad as it might be it can still matter as Tom van Doran says to hold open space for each other and for another it still matters okay so I turned to an artist this really uh cool guy named Ryan dwey who did a a project for the geographers meeting in 2015 that he called core logging anthropos and real time in which he made whoops in which he made um core sediments of the anthropos scine out of the shelves of big box real ta retail stores and he called these commoditized sediments and I think this is really a fabulous image of the particular kind of core sampling of that story enough of that story by the way there's a whole wonderful background uh of the materiality of how he does this but I think you can just sit with commoditized sediments and be happy campers uh to go to the fulu scene to simonic the Earthly ones the ones of the earth who Sim who Sim who do Sim poetically making with worlding in epics past present and yet to come now watch the irony of my invoking an image from this very interesting game it was a good paper given yesterday on this game Eline media um uh upper One games the ANC the Cook Inlet Tribal Council uh the uh the um Eline media opened up a studio in Seattle a very interesting collaborations between uh Elders of the cook ey Tribal Council between game players game designers between kids between adults a game that has been um seen uh you know hit more than a million times was on 50 of the best of 14 uh computer game uh winners of just a year ago um a game that is called A World game of which there is at this moment only one instance of this genre those of you in literature world games are uh computer games made from indigenous points to view in Alliance for worlding for casting out propositions and languages and ways of making worlds for first of all the Youth of the nupc but also a worlding a kind of proposition a kind of invitation now there's an irony for NE me to name this with a Greek rootlet thonic okay uh it's not lost on me that I am putting World Games and syonic together uh neither is an ANC word although the ANC use World game to my best of my knowledge they haven't yet had the chance to decide whether they're going to use the thuline or syonic but my guess is they will find that unhelpful uh who knows I'm not I maybe who knows I I don't know the point of it is though that um the thulu scene is first of all the tentacular multi-temporal multi-spatial uh past presents and yet and yet to come it's not about the old past of the thonic Greeks or something like that the autous fantasy of the Greeks it is a temporality that is undecided in the way that a critical theorist might understand that term okay uh and yet to come as well as what is inherited it's tentacular and grasping and the Greeks thought of squid and octopus uh as the operah of Critters they squ they squirt dark knight uh they entangle in tentacular Nets they are Masters of Disguise their skin can be anything uh the operi of the Greeks were the were the Cuttlefish and the squid and the and the octopus I think that's a good figure to think with um many temporalities many um many names in no one's back pocket this is not either in anyone's control uh nor is it um some kind of uh uniquely human generated world but human beings are in this world um I'm going to start a little storytelling uh riff about uh Resurgence and I first need to apologize that obviously I wrote this slide when I was a little tired refug here when the ice seeds doesn't make any sense so I try refugia for when the ice reeds what uh can you hear me now am I okay ah sounds maybe better what does it take for humans to survive I I I think uh we've been arguing in that Sim uh way that it's going to take more than humans imagined autonomously but entangled in multispecies uh worlds but the Landscapes that we're a part of are not just backgrounds or aesthetic objects we need the other players with us uh in making these worlds to be active and creative and to be uh part of um making the same kinds of projects that that we will also respond to and we we need them to respond to Opportunities including human trouble I'm going to use the word disturbance and I hope it doesn't upset you too much a disturbance just means relatively quick ecological change it's not necessarily bad it's not necessarily human uh fires and floods or disturbances and so too is human farming when other living beings come back in the face of disturbance I'll call that Resurgence cut down a forest and it grows back again that's Resurgence drain a wet land and don't maintain the drains it becomes a wet land again that's resurgence my main argument in this section is that we need Resurgence we can't survive without it we're in trouble to the extent that we block Resurgence and there's a particular kind of resurgence too that might be a guide and I'm going to call it holine Resurgence after the geological epic following the last ice age when the earth's climate warmed and stabilized this is also the time of the spread of human farming now the Holocene was not the world in natural Harmony humans already had extinguished many of the big animals the ones we now call megaphon but compared to the present we had an array of other life forms that our species managed to live with in the midst of farming and we might want to appreciate that now that we're doing much uh less well so what this slide shows is the last glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago the world was full of ice and deserts when the ice retreated and the world got warmer and wetter plants and animals moved into new places taking advantage of opportunities and I think we don't appreciate the ability of plants in particular to move around very much and we should because that's what that's the basis of what I'm calling researching and our livelihoods including farming of both plants and animals depend on researching we can't do without it researches is always a multispecies affair it doesn't work for each organism to just take off by itself consider forests and fungi micro risal fungi are fungi that form joint organs with the roots of trees the fungi and the trees make each other spread possible in places where not many nutrients are easily available for trees they trees depend particularly heavily on fungi to forage the nutrients for them and in turn the fungi depend on the trees for their carbohydrate meals forests spread through the interactions of plants and fungi fungi might trees more successful and thus able to build forests in turn the combination of trees and forests makes habitats for all kinds of other life Forest Resurgence creates livable landscapes for many animals as well as plants fungi and bacteria when glaciers covered the land or dried Landscapes into deserts forests retreated when the ice melted and the rains returned forests extended themselves that's holine resurgence Farmers depend on Forest Resurgence I learned this first in my research in Indonesia where I worked with shifting cultivators in the rainforest Fields were left to grow into forest forest made it possible to clear new Fields but this has been equally true for temperate Farmers with permanent Fields until industrialization Farmers with animals use the forest to feed their animals Farmers without animals use green manure gathered from the forest to keep their fields fertile so this slide shows a satoyama landscape in Japan a landscape of rice patties and surrounding Village forests forests made possible farming here far Farmers gathered Forest stuff to fertilize their fields they also gained life Necessities from the village forest from firewood and charcoal to vegetables nuts and mushrooms funi and trees work together to come back as as Forest CLE as Farmers cleared forests Resurgence was a necessary feature of farming indeed the very species that had established the most had had exhibited the most post Ice Age Mobility such as Pines and Oaks were those two that farmers could depend on to revitalize Village forests since the M since the mid 1950s Japan has experienced a fuel Revolution firewood and charcoal have been been replaced by fossil fuels for cooking and heating Forest glean fertilizers have been replaced with fossil fuel guzzling chemicals Village forests have been abandoned farming has been separated from forest Resurgence this separation in which we forget entirely our dependence on Resurgence is the problem we face today and it's in the center of why it makes sense to me to join the discussion called anthropos one group of scientists in a recent issue of Nature has argued for a beginning of the anthropos scene that corresponds to the European decimation of the new world's human population which changed the uh carbon dioxide levels so much in the earth atmosphere just by killing off uh so many people it at that same time we see the spread of a new technology of ecological simplification in which exotic crops and enslaved people are brought together in disciplined cleaned out spaces with no local relations I'm going to call these simplified ecologies for longdistance asset making plantations and there's a good argument for putting such ecological simplification at the center of our complaints about the anthropos scene my argument is that plantations block Resurgence and this is a threat to livability plantations are an eruption of man again that capital M guy who's caused us so many problems plantations are discreet and yet traveling they help me think about patchy anthropos scene not evenly spread but also on the move plantations can directly displace indigenous ecologies and peoples but they also create the conditions for ecologies that block Resurgence by making new kinds of ecologies possible I'm calling these feral biologies that is ecological processes that emerge from anthropos processes outside human control and because I had such a good time working with micro risal fi I started thinking about this in terms of what you might call killer funai that is plantation pests on FOH killer funi helped me think about patchy anthropos because they show emergent patches of landscape livability and unli negotiating and responding to eruptions of man as the plantation one one more time okay uh two kinds of mechanisms are prominent in making killer fungi the first is longdistance industrial travel which offers a speed and scale of transfer of organisms unmatched since the continents were struck were stuck together the biggest threat to plant species today is the industrial Nursery trade which spreads plant pathogens so quickly and thoroughly that plant ecologies cannot recover the second issue is the ecological simplification of the plantation which allows new processes of growth and reproduction of pests and diseases this is a picture of a rubber Plantation in Brazil which offers a good place to start when rubber is put into plant ation in its native Brazil the fungi that in the forest are ordinary parts of its ecological assemblage go into hyperdrive repr repurposing the forms of reproduction that won't work in the forest where a rubber tree is surrounded by all kinds of other trees but one kind of tree rubbing up next to another that's exactly like it and fungal reproduction goes nuts destroying all the trees feral blights challenge the Resurgence on which we Depend and this is a story that needs to be told not just by natural scientists but by humanists we're the ones who know how to work with patchiness and travel we pay attention to history we watch Poetics and cosmopolitics we are needed to tell this story so we're in a section of our talk that Anna and I committed to the importance of Sciences and stories together so I want to back up a little bit and also speak about resurgent biology Oles and I want to do it through a revolution which is taking place in the biological sciences um that emphasizes symbiosis the living together of Critters who need each other for getting through the day or perhaps by one killing the other symbiosis is not a name for nice uh and symbiogenesis which is to say that changes in organizational order in the biological world happen not merely through mutation and and selection and perhaps maybe not primarily through mut mutation and selection but quite possibly major organizational changes in the structure of the Living World are the result of indigestion which is to say Critter A and B eat each other partially assimilate each other partially fail to assimilate each other and have to hang out for a few million years together afterwards as something we may as call a one a two a one who how many uh Lyn margalus is of course Lyn margalus who uh you know died way too early a couple of years ago now is uh the the scientist who was gutsy enough and strong enough and equipped enough including with the Technologies of uh all of the biological revolutions from the 1970s on visualizing Technologies imuno assays sequencing Technologies genomics apparatuses giant database managements as well as the observation of the Teeny tinies uh with a very physical work process uh Linn margalus of course proposes the notion and indeed provides the evidence for the notion that the origin of the modern cell the sorts of cells that make up about 10% of the cells of our bodies uh but the biggest ones the one that sort of make us look like us the origin of the modern eukaryotic cell was the result of sim biogenesis that is to say ARA and bacteria um joining each other through um acts of eating each other and getting indigestion uh Nicole King at the University of California Berkeley has developed a model system that involves uh a particular kind of bacteria and a particular sort of Free Living coagulate those sort of single cells Critters with long flagelli that sort of swim through the world and stick onto their prey and bring it into their little collar sacks um infected with the proper bacteria they Clump and start acting like animals so Nicole King is interested in the Infectious or of multicellularity in the animal kingdom similar kinds of work go on in the plant kingdom another biologist Margaret McFall NY this only an accident that all these folks are girls another scientist Margaret McFall NY and her collaborator who's a boy whose name I'm actually forgetting that's very bad Jesus uh anyway I'll remember it later uh have proposed have have developed a model system that involves the Hawaiian body tail squid and a particular a kind of bacteria that must infect the little baby new hatch squid at the right place at the right time where the squid can't build the ventral pouch on itself to house bacteria who are going to lumines on dark night so that the hunting squid looks like a Starry Sky from the point of view of the prey below uh there are many kinds of things that go on in this symbiogenetic U and then symbiotic Lifestyle the point I'm making is that the fundamental organ ganizational events of the biological world origin of the modern cell multicellularity being able to to uh perform a developmental pattern from youth through the whole life cycle that these things um are more and more looking like ecological evolutionary developmental Eco evoo events and in that sense we have never been one we have never been individuals Scott Gilbert's slogan okay we are all lyans we are all Coral or in my view we've never been posthuman we are compost okay and remember that the word human goes as easily to humus as it does to homo indeed uh more easily it's the same route why did we go to homo so um like Anna indeed like Anna because she taught me to do this okay I am interested in the Way Forest function as refugia for reestablishing uh partially healed partially flourishing uh renewed worlds okay and I put before you two slides together one The Forest of the sea the coral reef and another a forest of the land a tropical forest in this case on the island of Madagascar now there's an irony in saying we are all compost in two ecosystems which don't make compost but you're going to have to forgive me for that okay the uh picture of the coral reef occurs on the website for the it's a picture of the Great Barrier Reef from the Great Barrier Reef and it's being used for the rights of nature tribunal being held as we speak in the far north of Queensland collecting statements from Aboriginal witnesses to present at the international Tribunal for the rights of nature at the climate change Summit this fall in this December in Paris the second is a poster developed from a story making project by two allies both lemur biologist a malagi woman and an American woman that I'll say more about in a minute but um the point of the refugia of the forest is that if you're going to grow rice in Madagascar which is the principal food of the rural people if the forests are all cut down those rice patties will depend entirely on fossil fuel based external inputs and the life of the people will be blasted so that the maintenance of the of the complex life ways among peoples and forests and critters and rice growing practices and and shifting cultivating practices and stable wet rice patties the maintenance of that patterning is a very big is a very big deal okay so I go to two art projects that simply emphasize what I've already said one is the co crochet coral reef project initiated by Margaret and Christine verim at The Institute for figuring in Los Angeles where they have Play tanks rather than work tanks okay the notion that Anna's work needs to be talked about in terms of crocheting the frilly and crenelated and ruffled and looping the excess space the kinds of shapes in the world that are just excess space the hyperbolic geometries really screwed up screwed up geometries that turn out to be everywhere in in the living world and for which the first workable models are developed by a mathematician Dina T Tamina from Cornell University where she crochets a math mathematical model of the hyperbolic plane it's then picked up by a mathematician and a and a literary scholar and a poet Christine and Margaret faim born in Brisbane near the Great Barrier Reef who develop a collaborative art project that has so far involved 8,000 people in 27 countries to to crochet coral reefs out of all sorts of everything from uh you know real toore abandoned tape San wrap New York Times blue plastic wrappers uh all sorts of plastic trash for the toxic Reef uh for the uh Coral nightmare fantasy Reef also CR crocheting from wool and silk and cotton doing certain kinds of applique 8,000 contributors to the multiple coral reefs that have been exhibited since 2007 was the first exhibit through to the ongoing ex exhibitions of the coral reef many of them are are crocheting of the the toxic and polluted reefs it's a it's a mode of bringing together mathematics women's Fiber Arts community art activism a kind of solidarity with the reefs a kind of coming to awareness of the crisis that we are in um not through needing to go on an ecotourist diving Expedition and touch a reef but through a kind of Jake meda's term intimacy without proximity a kind of coming to care through crocheting with each other and you see the white Coral Garden the other side of it is a story book made by Allison Jolly Jolly and hun Rossa minana um both biologists ra uh uh H rasa minana was educated in the Soviet era socialist uh president of Madagascar she was educated in veterinary science in the Soviet Union further education of various kinds Allison Jolly an American lemur biologist colleagues in conservation work with all its complexities in a place like the malagi Republic and colleagues in doing story books with a book artist and a poster artist to work around the failed school system and get story books out to kids in Mal agazi so they've done six bilingual Mal agazi English story books the one you see is is seaka the white white uh bounce the white suaka and you see a page in malagi in this section of our talk we're going to talk about our own art science activisms uh and uh in in these storytelling really is our practice not just ours but probably uh all Scholars are engaged in in arts of Storytelling and to the extent that we want to intervene we are Reen narrating the world uh my own uh project that I'm thinking through is a collaborative project a kind of gang of storytellers if you would uh that we're calling Aus University research on the anthropos scene and it's particularly an attempt to develop new stories across the Arts and Sciences uh with um anthropology being considered in the Arts in that particular University system uh now we have challenges on both sides certainly there are lots of natural scientists who don't think that anything coming from the Arts is important but we also have our colleagues on the art sides of things arguing against the politics of working ever with natural scientists because of the possibility of being corrupted by positivism and other things like that uh I'm trying to argue that this there's an opening here that the kinds of environmental dilemmas we have right now are a time for something new that's not arts and not sciences and that uh well our work is an attempt to try uh to do a new kind of Storytelling a radical storytelling in that underground sense of that it challenges us at the roots uh the project that I began to tell you a little bit about uh a minute ago uh feral biologies was conceived this spring within that uh storytelling gang it's a project that emerges from both the Arts and scientists it takes ecological concerns about Extinction seriously while also paying attention to the kind of global heterogeneity uh knowledge practices uh that make up what I'm calling patchy anthropocene it's a story of the eruptions of capital M man and the living in Ruins that it's engendered the idea is a web project in which various kinds of research from arts or Sciences or creative work uh can be put forward in short essays or other genres in which about kinds of ecologies gone out of control and it might be a chance to look at the kind of political economies and ecologies that give rise to these it's open-ended we want art poetry and ceremony as well as scholarly essays and there's a signup sheet going around right now uh uh for those who'd like to get involved uh my plan when I wrote this talk was to tell you about frogs because uh there's a killer fungi on the loose among frogs it's something new new that developed that did not exist before as I read uh the literature it's coming from the intersection of two industrial commodity chains in frogs one involving uh uh no well don't do that yet okay but thank you though uh stop that uh one one one involves uh uh xenopus uh African Claud frogs and the other American Bullfrogs and when they came together a new fungus developed and th those frogs went pharoh uh and spread this around the world not on not to to themselves but to frogs everywhere else far from the plantation um I then I took a walk yesterday morning and when I got to the state line there was a sign about the involvement of this area in a white pine blister rust uh another very important fungal plague and I thought I'm going to tell you that story instead I've left the Frog slides in so there's a kind of call and response intended between the real problem we're having with the extinction of frogs and the story I'm going to tell you about white pine blister rest um so both of them have the same kind of moral of the story which is when we start regarding the world as a plantation the kinds of ecologies that plantations create that are completely outside of our control go feral they're going to spread everywhere um so uh under under the picture oh I did want that yeah under the picture of a frog then I'm going to tell you the story of a tree uh White Pine is indigenous to North America it's one of the heroes of post Ice Age Resurgence it comes back and because of that too it's a companion to Farmers uh it's the first thing that grows in abandoned Fields helping to remake forests with its micro isal Partners uh it's also a valued Elder according to the sign at the state line uh NES P say that white pine was the original guardian of fire that great destroyer and revitalizer of multispecies Landscapes but it also fell in with the eruption of man it was white pine was the first tree of the US logging industry in the US Northeast when they had finished uh felling all the trees there they went to the Midwest and when they finished filling all the trees there they came to the Inland Empire of the west where we are now uh when they logged it out of course White Pines grew back they're very resilient but loggers wanted more and they introduced plantations uh worse yet uh they confused plantations and the forest treating the world as a plantation but where would they get their seedlings well us nurseries at that moment were more interested in ornamentals which were fetching higher price they found it possible to Outsource to Central Europe where uh they were willing to grow White Pine seedlings White Pine is not uh a local plant in Europe uh so these um nurseries were bringing in introduced White Pine along with pines from all over the world including Asia and a a Asian fungus which was a kind of sleepy parochial companion species to Pines in Asia uh infected the white pine seedlings from North America and millions of infected White Pine seedlings were sent as a plantation crop to uh North America from Maine to British Columbia millions of seedlings and um Pines uh died in droves um this is this is the fungus killing frogs uh Congress um uh responded in 1912 with a quarantine the first quarantine uh against uh shipping White Pines but it was a great example of closing the Barn Door after the horses left uh White Pines were already dying across North America uh this is what I've been calling an eruption of man uh in the sense that uh it was a bringing a particular model of how to grow a forest one that had only one species in it white pines and it inspired people to apply Plantation techniques to cure Plantation blights so the the response was to eradicate uh and this seemed possible because White Pine blister R Us has a complex life cycle that involves not just White Pines but another species uh Gooseberry and current bushes of the uh genus ryes uh and uh in Europe ryes are mainly like black currents in gardens and they thought they could just take out a few black currents from Gardens um and get rid of this but in the United States there are dozens of kinds of ryes in all kinds of habitats and eradicating Ry bees was a major problem and there's all kinds of really great stories that I wish I had time to tell you but I won't but it would help me with patchy anthropos scene if I did have time uh I'm going to go straight to the Northwest Inland Empire where most ryes and most forests were how did they eradicate it uh under the the picture of American bullfrog uh the the first way they tried was uh after the invention of the bulldozzer uh which they just went through stream bed and they eradicated everything all plants and they threw in Hay seed after that transforming what they called unproductive multispecies spaces into productive hay Fields uh but the second thing was The Depression which allowed a work crew that through Federal programs like uh the CCC and the WPA they brought in uh uh many many workers to go out into the forest and just eradicate ribes it was a perpetual motion machine because it turns out that the plantation and logging are really good for ribes that every time you save a crop of White Pine and you cut it down it's the perfect place for Ries to grow up uh but then came World War II the labor disappeared they tried to make do with other kinds of available labor like the brasero labor program or Prisoners the cheapest labor of all uh but the whole program um just dwindled out again patchy anthropos scine it it it's just disappeared except for a few small places like the pine Plantation that you can go look at at the state line where they're trying to develop uh blister uh rust resistant White Pines but the big story the big story about oh um the big story about white uh White Pine blister rust is not the industrial White Pines that are out there on the plantation at state line it's the other white pines the ones that weren't part of the industry that conf using the plantation in the forest allowed uh that uh things like Sugar Pine uh white bark Pine we've lost so many white pines that had nothing to do with the timber industry at all because uh these kinds of plagues once you confuse the plantation in the world um uh spread 113 okay uh um this is just a slide saying if you'd like to get involved in this project this is not just about killer funshai the question is what blocks Resurgence on which we all depend uh all kinds of of living and non-living kinds of feral uh ecologies are fair game please sign up if you'd like to be part of this project um and my email address is wrong once again it's it's aing at ucsc.edu and I'm hoping that uh in the the discussion which we really will be having uh that Anna will say more about the fal biologies web project because this is the kind of making alliances that we're both hoping to do and I'm thinking in order to make time for the conclusion I will let my part of making alliances namely the Camille stories function also as our conclusion okay okay change your plan so it so happened to years ago that I was at a conference in a writing Workshop in speculative fabulation why are we surprised when we were broken down into groups of two or three people and I happen to be with a Belgian filmmaker Fabricio teranova and ven despre a friend and colleague who's both a philosopher and an ethologist and a really remarkable thinker about multispecies making and unmaking and we were told that we had a baby I had kept all mine carefully hloy up until that time and now they're just cooked but there we were with a baby um and we were told to get that kid through five human Generations somehow that there had to be five generations of babies somehow that was our writing problem we didn't want to name our kid male or female we were in France we hit on Camille uh turned out we didn't like gender very much so we worked various ways to figure out how Camille could get through life without having to do it many things happened but what happened to us is that all of a sudden Camille dropped into our lives we actually had this squiggling kid to cope with uh and I've been writing and so have my colleagues Camille Stories the children of compost stories of the communities of compost for the last couple of years and I'm going to give you a little bit from three of the camiles three of the generations first of all it happened that beginning around 2015 for reasons historians still don't understand but across the world from many different kinds of peoples and places a kind of infectious coming together to inhabit and repair and try to make resurgent ruined and damaged lands and Waters uh infectiously spread across the Earth so that communities of two or 300 people uh both from existing communities and migrant communities settled specifically on ruined land now it happened that Camille 1's community of about 300 people settled in a place at the Confluence of the the goly river and the Red River in West Virginia near where Mountaintop coal mining removal had occurred uh Mountain had been removed uh I knew about this place in particular because Beth Stevens and Annie Sprinkle artist friends of mine go around marrying the Earth in these really kind of seriously wonderful FM porn uh ecosexual sorry not porn ecosexual couplings uh all over everywhere and Beth Stevens happened to have been born near there and they did a film goodbye to golly Mountain there were certain simple principles in the communities of compost in particular they felt themselves part of uh trying to hold open space space for Critters who would not make it five human Generations which is a quite short time frankly um and they also felt it absolutely essential to practice ecojustice environmental justice climate Justice um through helping to move the planet with more not less well being from the approximately 11 billion people it is likely to be by the end of the 21st century we're already well over 7 billion in my lifetime it's gone from 2 and a half billion to 7.5 billion and I am no longer happy with the combination of AG gender power analysis PR Fran Francis Mor Lee and F food first we have to rethink and react at an extraordinary level the communities of compost felt that they were going to be part of moving the human population over about 400 years which is about what it take took to get here think anthropos uh back to about two billion from uh hoping they could hold it at 10 billion instead of 11 billion a little breathing space maybe a billion fewer than it would have been without the communities of compost just maybe if we're really lucky and if birth rates stay low many places in the world most places in the world at or below replacement rate now only if that holds okay okay so three parents for every kid that's principle number one they don't have to be lovers they certainly don't have to be married they are committed one every you can do a cap and trade if you want um three for one every kid born three parents committed for Life kin making is the major practice of these communities friendship is one of its major mechanisms uh multigenerational multi-child household are really really great they didn't have any babies for the first 5 years where they were sort of working this out first generation of kids they they birthed five kids in 20 in uh in 2025 each of those kids reproductive freedom is really important to folks in this community it just doesn't take the form of being able to decide all on your own if you're going to have a baby or not that happens to be a collective decision of great weight but reproductive freedom of the for the pregnant one is really important and it takes the form of deciding for the one you are pregnant with who their animal symbient is going to be that is to say you were to exciting for another an incredible life-changing event as you do when you have a kid anyway uh so it turned out that Camille was bonded with monarch butterflies who are in trouble in that area of West Virginia and indeed in trouble across the swath of their migration from the Great Eastern migration with the overwintering trees in meakan and Mexico State um the they're overwintering among the mazahua and the peoples of the trans volcanic belt in Mexico with their Lea frogging sexually reproductive Generations on into Southern Canada passing through a wide swath of Eastern Eastern North America means east of the Rocky Mountains I always thought the East Coast belonged to you know started in Kansas but uh and then the western migration which moves uh across the the western slope of the Rockies uh through Washington State and Oregon and down into California there're two large swaths of migrants you must know that monarch butterflies may not make it that the migrations are terribly endangered the job of the Symbian the the reason for being of the Symbian is to form the socialities and the biologies and the alliances and the makings and the unmaking to get their Critter through okay so that these are commun the communities of compost are Cosmopolitan they really are worldly in their Outlook they're not an enclosed intentional Community rather their socialities are constructed out of the pathways of their symbiance and the kids are bonded to crit that move um and then the whole world that that Critter needs in order to have a possibility of a future becomes the special responsibility of the Sim kids Camille 1 understands and works Sim biogenesis Cil to spends most of P's life bar borrowing from Marge Percy for a gender neutral word by the way kids could decide to have genders and there were four working genders in the time that Nali was established ciswoman man trans man and transom but everybody regarded those as highly provisional and really a bad list um so gender is constantly getting reformatted through this you know every all the time everywhere it always has been um but you don't have to do gender some kids choose to some don't but what Camille 2 does Camille 2 was born when Camille 1 is about 15 years from dying Camille 1 helps educate Camille 2 Camille 2 spends most of P's life in mitak Khan and happens to arrive there uh in November when the when the butterflies tend to come back on El de muos The Day of the Dead and learns that the the masaha of the the village that was hosting Camille 2 uh regard the returning butterflies as The Souls of the Dead they don't represent the souls of the Dead they are The Souls of the Dead in Sim anima Genesis comes to be worked and developed and inhabited by the camiles uh both with and against Sim biogenesis Sim anagenesis and Sim biogenesis both come into the practice of Sims well it happens that even though monarchs were looking pretty good and lots of really good things were happening even though about 50% of the kinds of Critters alive in 2020 when the community was founded are gone 300 years later that was fewer than would have been gone otherwise okay the great Extinction is irreversible but it can be moderated okay uh it it happened that in the fourth generation of camiles the monarchs who looked like they were doing pretty pretty well a a fungus infected their whole sub family across the planet and wiped them out very quickly of course many Sim kids already had simbian that had gone extinct and the task of a kid a Sim person about there about a billion Sim people alive by the end of the third Camille Generation by the way which is sort of interesting Humanity Humanity came to a crisis figuring out how the Sim parts of humanity and the non-sim part of humanity were going to think of themselves as humans what did it mean um for a third there were about three billion people alive then a third of them are are sims uh with with other Critters and you know various genetic modifications never of the animals but of the people you know Camille to got a beard implant of butterfly antenna to be able to taste the nectar and the pheromones better and Scott Gilbert gave me some biologically plausible mechanisms for implanting uh so it's all biologically cool anyway like Camille 4 the butter the monarchs are gone and the job of Camille 4 is to teach Camille 5 to be a Speaker for the Dead the the practice of being a Speaker for the Dead wres straight out of Orson Scott card and write straight out of a kid trained to be a military gameplaying exterminator of the hive species who as an adult takes on the role of the Speaker for the Dead traveling to places where people cannot come to terms with their dead cannot come come to terms with going on until somehow the dead are made present in such a way as to give heart to the living so that the job of the Speaker for the Dead in our times of extinctions our times of urgencies uh is the job of making of a kind of it's a kind of a job of resurgence that in a way the Speaker for the Dead understand the dead as refugia for giving heart to the ongoing work of making live we're done [Applause] what good are old stories if their wisdom is not shared uh you C by the way people own stories you can't just take somebody's story but stories are also proposed uh for joining in and Anna and I are proposing stories and projects to join in now it's your turn thank you both for all the work you've done and for what you shared today I have an observation and then a question I'm looking at this last image and a lot of what you said and I the story of Christmas Carol came to mind which is of course Redemption individual action and one that has a great deal of power in North America I think we're just the us but I'm wondering about the possibilities of that being an old story that gets rehashed but my question is for me in the last two weeks there were three major news stories the Pope's amazing Proclamation um the extinction being larger faster than scientists have thought and then polar bears are supposedly surviving by changing their diet which to me is a dangerous story because it can be interpet reted as oh nothing we do will really do long-term harm things will adapt so my question is more what do you see in terms of public intellectuals and also um Stories the events of the last three weeks or two weeks in terms of the Pope Etc adding to the conversation and how we could use it along with your ideas I'll take the Pope I grew up Catholic I feel like I like the pope owes [Laughter] me uh I think it matters immensely that someone with that kind of power in a hierarchical masculinist uh major bureaucratic organization that influences about 1.1 billion people on this planet such that people are the priests are supposed to give sermons The Sunday after the encyclical is published mind you the Americans did not give such sermons which is very interesting uh limitation of the authority even of the of the uh Papa uh I I find the the encyclical um heartening for many reasons most importantly that it takes a strong version of the Vatican 2 and Liberation theology doctrine of the preference for the poor developed principally by Latin Americans many of whom opposed and were opposed by this very same Pope when he was the bishop in in Buenos Ares he will never go to the class struggle end uh of The Liberation theology but he has gone a long way to point out on whom the burden of this destruction most rest and to whom action is most owed and from whom and every and action is needed from everyone he also of course took the occasion to point out that too many people are not the problem and abortion is bad uh the uh UT I believe that's a sin I believe that in the future it will the church even as it has recognized that the that the living world that the environment that the rights of nature exist which is quite new that the um uh the burdening of this Earth so that all of it is turned into resources for Humanity will be regarded as a sin in the history of theology she prays you want to take another part of that sure I I'll say a word about the polar bears I agree completely about the danger of it and I was thinking um maybe some of you know the yes Mana artist Collective and one of their uh polar bear things say something like polar bears are the longdistance athletes of the ocean we make them swim farther and then it's got shell oils sign on it so wow thank you um very much for your fabulous pler I I think I've got a um another little hope for story to contribute um and actually funnily enough it also pertains to religion there's a really cool um program that developed um I think it developed in Chicago and that's where my story is based anyway um is an effort to bring um uh ecological uh understanding sensibility and practice importantly um into uh sort of poor communities in Chicago who haven't um sort of historically been particularly engaged with reading ecotheology um which has been around for several centuries I mean several no but it has a sense it has a that's completely true for several decades good to see that Pope's been reading it finally but anyway um the story is this it's it's a really lovely little project um that was um developed specifically for um poor African-American and Hispanic communities in chic Chicago area to engage them with ecological questions and the way was through migration and um it was an invitation to people to come together to share stories of migration um and to link these human stories of migration and questions about what do migrants need to thrive to the plight of migratory species and specifically monarchs monarch butterflies um and will you put this on the website we're making from who were doing it tough who doing it tough and through to through reflecting upon their own migratory history these people have been um invited to engage empathetically with non-human migratory species and to um develop Gardens that are designed to provide um habitat for migratory species and so the first step was this um sort of local action actually Urban sort of urban um uh kind of habitat regeneration um but the people some of the people who've got involved in that have got kind of so kind of converted to the Earth in a sense that they're also now demanding kind of excursions out of the city and going to kind of places that are kind of less um kind of um humanized in a kind of um uh destructive way so I just thought that was one really nice little example um of a kind of um engagement of through faith communities um of practices yeah thank you we live in a world full of refugees without refugees right across species yeah thank you hi I think the question is mine um I came up here to ask about the Ries but I actually want to um go two questions back and um I want to say that I found it really upsetting to hear um with love I want to say I found it really upsetting um to hear you know talked about the three most amazing stories in the last two weeks without mention of the white supremacist Massacre and I really don't want to be in a community where we're only looking at one pole of environment and I think what you said totally speaks to that inant in terms of the plantation is scene right enslaving peoples along with exotic past uh plants but I think we too easily divide those things and I just really want to encourage us to connect [Applause] them hello can you hear me um there were so many phrases in that wonderful presentation so many phrases I wanted to write down because I know I'd find them reverberating for ages um one that forms the basis of this question I suppose is when you said symbiosis is not another word for nice and it seems to me that a lot of recent thought in ecocriticism and new materialism and sort of associated schools of thought has been a celebration of semiotic Exchange um of flux and free movement and that of course could stand in contrast to what you describe as treating the world as a plantation the creation of monocultures you seem to be saying is exceptionally dangerous and it was interesting although you didn't go on to use this example it was interesting that you put up the um picture about the development of the BD or kyrid infection in Fr frogs because in Europe the usual explanation that's given for this is that the fungal infection has spread because of the pet trade because of the importing of amphibians uh of exotic species uh for the pet trade in Europe um and that way uh the native populations have been infected so it seems to me in a way there's a kind of counter example A sense in which the breaking down of boundaries and the free globalizing semiotic exchange has been the problem and so it seems to me that in looking at these things we can't think very easily in terms of one cat category good another category bad one has to find a different kind of pragmatism which I think you are beginning to advance but a kind of pragmatism that is peculiarly lacking in broad guidelines broad categories that that that that enable us to distinguish the good from the bad so really I'm asking you to say a little bit more about what our first principles if any can be thank you for that I I I am struggling with just some of those issues indeed um my new interest in killer fungi reacts in part to the fact that I just wrote this book about mic Riz fungi and how helpful they are in helping us continue to live and it was in some sense precisely that move that I'm sure many around the room are familiar with where we're looking at these symbiotic connections as somehow hopeful and helpful and I thought I think maybe I have gone too far perhaps in celebrating those kinds of things because just as you're saying uh not all life processes are as as helpful to General livability as I mean they're not exactly the same as each other and we need to be May paying more attention to some of the unli ability problems that we're living with that might indeed include pet trades and uh the kind of very uh intimate connections that we all want to have when we want to pet a frog and um I the best I can do right now is to arue for the the to really pay attention to the concrete emergencies of particular phenomena and actually the whole reason for the feral biologies project is I want people to tell stories of lots of these and then to take a look you know what have we got here that I've put out as a place to start the plantation but maybe some of them are going to turn out different and it's precisely in my kind of empirical curiosity that I want to have hundreds of examp examples to play with to see what we've got in our hands and also as the last speaker very carefully usefully said to make sure that questions about um human inequalities are also part of the same kinds of stories that we're telling about frogs I think I would just second what Anna said and perhaps add one that situated knowledges has been a kind of slogan for me and I think situated complexities of with their with their consequences and who lives and who dies and how in which inside which complexities and what uh what are the rates of change and who Bears them uh the where what who when why how and it really matters to know more at the end of the day than one did in the morning that there is really a whole lot of of finding out about things to be done and that our ideologies often serve us badly uh in particular for people like me my ideologies of the love of complexity sometimes serve me badly a kind of um follow-up terminology question um to the last I I've heard you use the word plantations um several times but I don't believe I've heard you use the word monocultures and I just wondered why why why the choice I I guess that's probably to me and I want to uh invoke that history of slavery and uh kind of termination that uh the term Plantation for me carries with it that I I want the monoc culture part which I think is completely right and in the the production of these Ferro biologies I'm talking about it's that monoculture stuff that you're seeing in sugarcane slide that makes it a paradise for certain kinds of fungal Evolution but uh it's the coupling of it with this history of enslavement and uh dispossession of indigenous this people that I want to hold on to so it's not just the monoculture it's this complex of the discipline of humans and plants together and and then animals also because I'm going to use the term Plantation of scene for industrial uh livestock uh management and things like that too so just to hold on to that Legacy I just wonder if Monsanto is going to hear you the same way I mean I I I hope that they would I I hope that the that that the word Plantation would get back to the powers that be that that might be creating massive monocultures I I just wonder if the if the discourse is is operating in the reverse as well hopefully you mean you think that monocultures might be a stronger word to use sometimes well Ju Just in sort of everyday parlons I I feel like that's the word that's being used and so if we could Infuse monoculture with the plantation history instead of using Plantation but yeah no that's very helpful thank you actually my question Builds on the same kind of line of thinking from the past two questions too or past three questions and um and thank you both too this is like a dream come true it was really awesome just totally delicious um so um indigestion [Laughter] follows but my question my question is about uh the plantation of scene which I think is really really um really thought Prov but I'm thinking of Tim Morton's work on AGR Logistics about how the agricultural act in instantiated an aesthetic view of the land and with it patriarchy private property and so forth so I'm wondering if you could talk about um the agricultural act I mean without AGR Logistics we wouldn't have a plantation first of all and then also I wanted to talk or wanted to ask you more about Resurgence and whether whether Resurgence and Resurgence farming can overcome the violence of the Agricultural act in Tim Morton's view of it thanks I I'm in trouble I don't know the agricultural act uh so he was saying in the holos scene the when people started using the Earth to grow food instantiated yeah okay yes I I I see uh yes well the it is true the plantation as I was using the term has its roots in certain kind kind of grain Agriculture and part of what goes into Plantation is treating all living things that are going to be crops or livestock as if they were grain uh so it's true that there's older roots to it but I would not want to implicate all farming that partly because of my own research with shifting cultivators who grew in the same small uh plot no bigger than this Auditorium that grew a hundred different cultivars that even when they were growing rice a typical grain crop they grew 50 varieties of rice in a very small area and they interplanted it with cucumbers sugar cane banana trees uh all kinds eggplants uh the many many crops were being grown in the same place requiring a situated attention of the farmers with each of the temporalities the many temporalities of the crops and some of those crops indeed were Resurgence crops and Things That Grew uh because they were coming up from the forest that had been there things that had been in the soil a long time waiting for the light to hit them like wild cucumbers that people really savored so that that there's another kind of farming that's possible that involves many species and a quite different way of handling uh it it uh the kinds of pests and uh challenges to Farmers and it was a very rich farming too a farming that went in and out of foraging in the forest and was very appreciative knew that only the Resurgence of the forest might make more farming possible in the future so this is a tie-in but I first have to plant my poetic haunting moment of this trip which is driving through Eastern Washington the monocrop plantations of Eastern Washington and the Department of Transportation made this Valiant effort to educate the zooming public about these monocrops by putting little like do signs on the crop wall right so the crops that we saw my daughter's Sixth and she could read sweet corn she had a hard time with alala but she figured that out she could read potatoes and then there was this weird crop called Timothy which I didn't even know about but it was normally grown in humid places right it's like supposed to be wet to grow Timothy but this is Eastern Washington insanely dry environment and so I'm going around like how the hell do they get off growing Timothy in a time of drought and you guys are from Selenas California so I feel like one of the interventions I think Ed edua edua Abby would be wanting us to create either major monkey wrenches in the irrigation industry and or drought resistant killer fungi that could attack the monocrops but I we're not that radical right you guys are pretty radical I'm impressed it's my first time at asley but my question would be coming from California where we're reducing water use via the governor yet not getting going against industrial agriculture is there any way the pending drought we can get on that is there any successful news about in 20 seconds uh Santa Cruz not Selenas although Selenas is definitely part of our responsibility uh another one of the big stories of the last week of course is the uh GPS and other Technologies World planetary survey of the aquafers and the 27 known aquafers of planet Earth which of them uh have been have already passed a Tipping Point such that they will never recharge which of them haven't reached such a Tipping Point yet which of them are merely sort of overcharged and which of them are really doing well uh and it's an extremely distressing story uh I also know from my Australian colleagues that when El Nino was going on here it makes it wet here meaning California and there meaning my friends in Australia makes it really dry and over that incredible 10 12 year drought that Australians went through uh into the early 2000s a huge amount of radical water politics and radical water uh redoing of things occurred not enough mind you when it rained too soon um such that some of the really radical legislation didn't get passed and enforced but there I think that there's a way in which Extinction focuses the mind uh and I think the wetlands of the Central Valley might become part of the possible the imaginary of the possible the possible again uh so enough you you know what I think we should do is just ask the remaining people to ask their questions without trying to answer and then we can hear each other's so at least we can hear and then we'll see if there's any time left all right thank you thank you for such a rich presentation for letting us into your play tank population figured prominently in the Camille stories and I'm wondering and unfortunately now um you just said you won't answer the questions but I'm wondering wondering about ways of talking about population in environmentally just ways um in this moment and it seems that in the Camille stories that you told there were fairly um non-mobile humans with mobile Sims in terms of um the story and what that might mean for this sort of idea of an intentional population practice and yet at this moment we're very much um experiencing um a refugee crisis right um incredible numbers of migration and refugees in a time when human rights discourse is receding and there's a lot of rhetoric especially in Europe about letting people drown um and I've been reading Allison bashford's history of global population um in the early 20th century in this emphasis on migration um as a key way of thinking through the question of population and so I'm just want the Camille stories in that sense this sort of um immobile Humans mobile Sims doesn't um seem to get at some of the real um Justice tensions of talking about population now didn't mean to imply that the humans were immobile only that the Sims Pathways of of responsibility were particularly important to the worldliness of the communities uh I've tried to avoid the word population and talk about situated human numbering and what it what it does and means and and I uh it is certainly clear that either a born or adopted uh North American is you there ought to be a kind of a 10 to1 cap and trade uh there ought to be a sliding scale for cap and trade on making babies um and we need babies babies are incredibly precious care for the born ones as a slogan of the communities of compost uh somehow there's got to be ways to share babies um and the huge the the the um continuing uh making of babies in the rich regions and countries and Rich families is of course a giant problem but not the only problem uh and the um anyway enough does this work hi I'll be very quick first of all thank you for your talk and secondly uh if I were just Loosely using the term anthropos I wouldn't be confused but my definition is fairly rigid it is a time period and only a time period you like idea it is not the same thing as what takes place within a time period uh for example 19th century or the last hour it's a time period so patchy is a spatial term not a time period and so I get confused when I hear the word Pache anthropos scine in the same way that I would get concerned hearing the word patchy 20th century so thank you and our very last comment thank you very much um as a biologist and an artist and an educator I struggle with ways to give hope and I was struck by your use of the term Resurgence instead of ecological succession and I hadn't ever thought very deeply about the fraught nature of the term sucession other than in a theoretical level of how it had traditionally been derived in The Sciences as a a linear directional you know Apex was the climax Forest um denying the regularity and importance of disturbance I also valued that the language um that you used in terms of uh choices like uh um uh well I can't remember the term but uh use of the of terminology without judging the the value of the ecological process so yeah particular ular things aren't nice or not nice uh and related to that I'm curious about the degree to which in the ecocritical work which I am fairly new to uh the term symbiosis to what degree has the uh parasitism side of that been uh used because so much of the common vernacular symbiosis is equated with mutualism M whereas uh as an ecologist I don't see it that way parasitism is a form of symbiosis appreciate bringing in the um the the invasive uh diseases as an aspect of that but I'm curious about to what degree that's dispersed um and the and the last sort of thought I have and interest is and sorry that I'm being long but is that uh I in seeking to give hope I also find a tension in that to me there is hope in even though we are going through a massive Extinction those periods when uh refugia were present on the earth during the last glaciation uh those were the separations between those patches were what set the seeds for the next great flowering of speciation and so for me one of my pieces of hope that I give to students is even should this horrible mass extinction which hurts me very deeply and hurts each of us deeply that won't be the end of the process of speciation uh although it may or may not include us and the tension I feel is then for those uh people who twist that into saying well then we shouldn't do anything about it and you know what's the big deal uh so I'm I don't know if this is a comment or what but I'm just interested in conversations about how people negotiate giving hope and yet acknowledging and engaging with the problems thanks yeah that I think that's a very good place to draw to a close so thank you very much thank you all very much thank you to Donna and Anna for an absolutely extraordinary plenary and thank you oh boy thank you to the ASL interpreters today [Applause]