downthefallfullpassagain

NB: contains reference to art depicting suicide and body mutilation. We are not only human. Some of know that fact consciously, perhaps surprised by some tidbit science news that suggests how much of our biomass is microbes – ten-to-one, nonhuman to human, last I heard. Rarely if ever does the NONhuman scream in capital letters and strike my subconscious or, to use a less violent metaphor, lodge into my core and make itself known. That I (a human) am not fully human. A strange feat of knowing: to believe that what you believe is not altogether true. My self-referential thoughts are never quite up to the task – language breaks – what to do?  A recent art encounter shocked me into keeping company with the nonhuman. Begin narration: you walk into a dark space and see a dappled hide on the concrete floor. Edging around piles of dead plant matter, the form sharpens and you see a human torso with a horse's body. The centaur is dead as if asleep, and her limp expression is noble. Her face...

0.  I can't tell you anything new about the river– you can't tell a river to itself. There's lots of chatter in the Environmental Humanities network about "rights of nature" – the idea that legal institutions may extend the legal concept of personhood to a natural (nonhuman) object for more powerful laws against its exploitation, extraction, or destruction. The most famous example is the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (aka New Zealand), which gained personhood status in 2017, shortly after nearby Te Urewera National Park was recognized as a living being in 2014. With no hesitation, I cheer on the strides in legal reform that have been pushed by activists from Indigenous and non-indigenous groups across the world, from the debates on wild rice in Minnesota to the campaign for Pacific Ocean personhood . The opening citation from Natalie Diaz ("Exhibits from The American Water Museum "), along with Sherri Mitchell's writing, compels me to think deeper ab...

I'm working on a project that leverages Dante studies to compute the magnitude of environmental collapse in the Anthropocene. The book that has helped me focus my thinking and writing is Tim Morton's Dark Ecology , which I've referenced before in this blog. There's a passage within it that quite casually asks us to think about a temporality of unfolding and nested catastrophes. I think it's brilliant. Here's why, plus a fun graphic to help us visualize time differently. I'm in a masters program in Environmental Humanities these days. A point that was raised a couple days ago is 'any representation of time affects the way we live time.' This is phenomenology: reality is how we think it. And coming from geology and earth sciences, I've seen the GSA timeline over and over again. For a summer I had it tacked onto my wall so that I could quickly find when the Ediacaran Period happened (600 million years ago), for instance. It's incredibly useful ...