downthefallfullpassagain

He gets waved through customs, steps into his country, sees the haze. Yellow sun and jaundiced sky. It could be interpreted again as an angelic gold. His small stream of social media sirens goes straight to seeing the smoke as sign and signal. Apocalypse mixed with the warm hues of a blade runner sky. He drives two hours home. The next morning he sends a picture to friends back at university. You can see the smoke from Canada (that's how everyone was calling it, just "from Canada") and it's kinda beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful. They respond, oh God... Hannah Arendt's past and future – two titans locked in collision at the present – are the two vectors of his reaction; he is caught between imagining what preceded the smoke and what comes after. Terror is a foolish spark. Beauty is held in action, if you and your country are not burned by the match or the aftermath. A few weeks before his flight, he had heard of the floods in the south of his adopted country. ...

Any time I mention Indigenous communities, either those near where I lived in Maine or others across the continent, to my (white) Italian friends, they'll be curious. But how many recognized groups are there? But they still exist in the United States? Meanwhile, often we're talking in my environmental anthropology classes about Indigenous realities, mostly from the Amazon region. Starting from the "ontological turn" of Vivieros de Castros and others in the 1990s, a more radical branch of academia admits to equally valid forms of living, being, and knowing as practiced among people with longstanding working relationships to everything around them. But I note two things: first, that these are still mediated relationships, for the most part. The anthropologist has learned how to be fairly non-extractive (at least in my classroom) and dedicated to collaboration, healing, and trust. This is, however, far from 'self-translation,' where Indigenous folks choose when a...

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...

I have been delighted to get to know people campaigning for a more livable future after only just a few months in Venice. Indeed, "livable" is the theme behind every single activism effort I've witnessed so far. Students are clamoring for affordable housing and devoted study spaces. Residents are divided over whether entry-tickets to Venice will actually help ease mass tourism (between my friends, we think it won't). And climate action – the big one – demands that we work now to avoid present and future suffering. I wholeheartedly join my voice with others through nonviolent action. First, a comparative look. Italy has a long history of student activism, and most universities have at least one "collettivo" devoted to open discussion among student members. The burden of leadership seems to be shared: one person may organize more than others, but it is generally assumed that any long-time member can step into a driving role. I am instantly struck by how this m...

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 ...

While traveling I listened to many episodes of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text , a podcast series. Along with excellent content, the two hosts have done something remarkable with the podcast's approach: active re-treatment of a text. Since JK Rowling's reputation for trans-phobia emerged, the Harry Potter series has fallen in status among my generation. My friend Emily tipped me off that this podcast is disaggregating the words from their author, much as studies of the great religious texts can regard them as stand-alone objects regardless of their authorship. In such analysis, the critical reader assumes purpose within every detail and encourages reflection on small things. After all, it is small things that make the whole. (These religious studies / literature practices, moreover, are in accord with neighboring academic "turns," such as how in object-oriented philosophy all things [including texts] are assumed to have irreducible qualities shimmering within and aro...