Tag: nature writing

Papercuts: greeting the old and the new

Posted on by Alissa

black-and-white spooky forest
This edition of Papercuts, the occasional series where I talk about cool stuff I read recently, is haunted by the ever-growing number of unread items in my Pocket account (now 1,943 and rising) and the grim knowledge that the ability to read at all is a transient gift. I was tempted to declare Pocket bankruptcy (akin to email bankruptcy) and start again, but I knew I would regret deleting things I had long forgotten.

Most of these reads are not corona-related. I figure everyone is well aware of the coronapocalypse by now, so why not read something else?

I forget what led me to a radical New Orleans-based webzine (unusually, I don’t think it was Twitter) but I greatly enjoyed Jules Bentley’s piece on ‘Reviving Indigenous Histories with “Bulbancha is Still a Place”‘ (Antigravity Magazine, September 2018), about a collaborative zine on the Native American history of New Orleans. I paired it with another of Bentley’s excellent articles in the same mag, ‘Blanc Like Me: Cajuns vs. Whiteness’ (July 2019) about the history of the Cajuns of Louisiana, an ethnic group I admit I knew little about, and their complicated relationship with whiteness. People of similar ethnic heritage in Canada, from whence the Cajuns originated, would be considered Métis—that is, not white1—but in the United States consider themselves, and are considered in turn, sometimes white and sometimes not. My personal status as an extremely white lady will likely never be questioned, so I admit to being mildly fascinated (and somewhat repulsed) by the way whiteness grows and shrinks according to socio-political whims.

On Saturday I attended a webinar on ‘New Nature’, co-presented by the State Library of New South Wales and the Sydney Review of Books. A silver lining to everyone staying home for two months is the proliferation of online events that would previously have been held in-person, enabling the geographically dispersed and the ordinarily housebound to participate far more fully in cultural life. I’ve become a voracious reader of so-called new nature writing over the past couple of years and greatly enjoyed the webinar. One of the panellists was Koori poet and academic Evelyn Araluen, who I could listen to all day. She spoke to her SRB piece ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum’ (Sydney Review of Books, February 2019), a beautiful and intricate essay on pastoralism, Aboriginality and the landscape as expressed in Australian children’s literature, which had lain dormant in my Pocket account for far too long. I immediately wished I’d read it sooner. It’s the sort of piece that demands recurrent readings.

Between the webinar and reading Araluen’s piece, though, I stumbled upon Paul Kingsnorth declaring that ‘The Earth Does Not Speak in Prose’ (paulkingsnorth.net, November 2019), a transcript of a conversation with Charlotte Du Cann, also published in issue 16 of the Dark Mountain Project. Kingsnorth is a complex, esoteric and somewhat divisive figure in new nature writing, a self-described ‘recovering environmentalist’ who co-founded Dark Mountain in 2009 before growing disillusioned with it all. He fled to Ireland with his family to put down roots and ground himself, but it doesn’t appear to have pacified him. His latest book Savage Gods has him desperately wondering whether words are the enemy of belonging (LA Review of Books, September 2019), whether language is the ultimate abstractor standing between us and the living earth, and whether he should give up writing completely.

Ever since reading ‘A Storm Blown From Paradise’ in the first issue of Emergence Magazine (February 2018) I’ve followed Kingsnorth’s work from a distance, not always agreeing with everything he says yet finding it deeply fascinating. His detractors accuse him of being an ethnonationalist, an impression not helped by the fact he voted Leave. I am inclined to read this particular interview more charitably, seeing a man cast adrift by his ancestors, reviling the culture that spawned him yet feeling he has no other to return to, a man desperate to anchor himself somewhere in deep time. I was intrigued by his thinking here; some parts, like the below passage, cut very close to the bone:

Paul: We’re people with no tradition, because that’s what modernity has done. It’s made us all into little individuals. So the story we tell, we have to come up with ourselves. And then we’re endlessly in pain, because we’re always driven to try and work everything out. Because we’re not supported by ancestry, we’re not supported by a culture. The bargain of modernity is we have no tradition to hold us back, but we also have no tradition to support us. So all the storytellers have to come up with their own vision which is why writers end up shooting themselves, or drinking themselves to death…
Charlotte: Or rediscovering old myths, old texts…
Paul: Yes. And what Dark Mountain ended up doing quite a lot of: talking about myths, folk tales and religious stories. Almost unconsciously, Dark Mountain ended up as a place where you could start looking for old stories. One of the things we got wrong in the manifesto was this notion that we need a new story, when we needed to rediscover the old ones. Martin Shaw was one of the people who really made me focus on that, because he said, ‘Look, the stories are already here, it’s just that we don’t know them anymore.’

Evelyn Araluen touched on this in the New Nature webinar, the fact that Aboriginal ways of knowing and being are not new, though they may very well feel new to those learning about them for the first time, and that it wasn’t a matter of finding new ways to live in the Anthropocene, but more a matter of centring the voices and experiences of Aboriginal people, whose ways were already working perfectly fine. I look forward to revisiting the webinar recording when it’s released, as well as delving into the new Guardian Australia series Old Knowledge for the New Normal (May 2020), which deals with similar themes.

Sadly, happily, fortunately, unfortuately, there’s been a lot of well-wishing going on lately. So it was with some interest that I came across the Get Well Soon! project, by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain (March 2020). It collates thousands of well-wishes left on GoFundMe pages for medical fundraisers, a sad indictment of the American health system (or what’s left of it) as well as the radical energy of supporters and community. Lavigne and Brain are completely right that such an archive should not exist, but in the interests of transparency and political analysis, I’m glad it does.

The accompanying essay by Johanna Hedva is outstanding, comparing the now of illness with the now of revolution, the need for care with the need for change. It does so in a coronavirus context, because that was the only context going in late March, but I read it at the time through my own prism of severe anxiety, bedridden and unable to function, and it gave me hope in a way little else managed during that time:

Those of us for whom sickness is an everyday reality have long known about its revolutionary potential. We’ve known that a revolution can look like a horizontal body in a bed, unable to go to work. We’ve known that it might look like hundreds of thousands of bodies in bed, organizing a rent strike, separating life’s value from capitalist productivity. We’ve known that a revolution can look like the labor of a single nurse, keeping the patients in her ward alive, or the labor of a single friend, helping you buy groceries. We’ve known that it can look like the labor of nursing and care expanded exponentially, all of us reaching out to everyone we know, everyone we know reaching out to theirs. We’ve known that a revolution can look like a community pitching in $5 per person for someone’s medical treatment—we’ve wondered when that community would notice just how revolutionary the act of communal care is.

We’re told everything is impossible. Until, suddenly, it isn’t. One of the recent cardiMail newsletters highlighted this incomplete, evolving collection of The New Possible, a list of recent public policy decisions around coronavirus that would have seemed unthinkable just a few months ago. My personal favourite is the French government’s decree barring flag carrier Air France from carrying passengers between cities less than 2 1/2 hours’ flying distance where a rail line exists instead. Hooray for a rail-focused national transportation policy! For a chaser, I recommend the incendiary ‘America Is a Sham’ by Dan Kois (Slate, 14 March 2020), or for something more sedate, this interesting exploration of ‘Why Airports Die’ (Citylab, May 2020).

There’s something dangerously enticing about the idea of a ‘designer asylum’: even more so, the idea that ‘The lunatics are taking over the means of production’ (Asylum Magazine, 27(1), March 2020). I think about the hospital I recently spent time in, the kinds of questions they didn’t ask on the feedback survey, and how much nicer that environment might have been were it in a forest, and full of beanbags. I think about what scares me the most about going back. I think about why I’m scared of a place that’s meant to help me get better. It’s tempting to think about what my ideal psychiatric care environment might look like, but I know deep down it will never formally exist. Whoever heard of ‘a positive place to experience mental distress’?

I desperately want someone to visit the new Heide healing garden (Foreground, May 2020) for me when it opens later this year. I don’t dare hope that I might be able to visit in person. I can’t see myself getting to Melbourne anytime soon. Again I reflect on how my future has disintegrated.

For the moment, I will content myself with the National Museum of Australia’s online ethnobotanical exhibition Knowing Plants, which came to me via Ellen Coates’ daily delightful #CovidGLAMR explorations. The exhibition highlights three sites of First Contact on the east coast of the continent, and features plants both collected and ignored by Captain Cook’s men, with local Indigenous names and knowledge featured alongside the explorers’ botanical drawings. The backdrop of the splash page reminded me of the beautiful Parnatti exhibit at Adelaide’s MOD museum, guiding the visitor through Kaurna Yerta’s windy season.

A friend read ‘Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours’ (The Guardian, January 2020) and dropped it in my inbox, having kindly thought of me. This piece is everything I tried desperately to explain about my time in Tasmania last January; spending an entire day at Cataract Gorge doing nothing but reading Rebecca Solnit in a stone beanbag; my inexplicable outrage at TMAG over the settlers’ blithe destruction of a sacred, sustainable lifeworld, and in particular at their mechanisation of time; the brief moment at Cradle Mountain where I stood in that lakeside forest, and felt the divine. I returned from lutruwita a very different person. This piece resonated deeply with me, a sorely needed reminder that those times and places still exist; that I still exist; that today will not persist forever; that I might one day return. The yearning for such Peace is what’s keeping me going.

A different yearning to Paul Kingsnorth’s, I think, but perhaps a related one.

  1. The Métis are one of Canada’s three constitutionally recognised indigenous groups, alongside the Inuit and First Nations Indians; Canada is the only country to recognise mixed-race people in its constitution in this way. ↩

On the nature of information: the best of #emptythepocket, issue 4

Posted on by Alissa
Reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit at Cataract Gorge, Launceston, January 2019. Photograph by the author

I got a lot out of a month’s holiday in Tasmania and in Melbourne, but perhaps the greatest gift was being able to read again. I don’t mean that I was previously illiterate, but rather that I no longer had the energy or interest in reading anything for longer than five minutes. I was (and still am) surrounded by books I longed to read, but knew I lacked the brainspace to absorb and make sense of them, and so I didn’t try.

Time away from work and the internet, and within nature, restored me to something like my former self. I realised I wanted to read again. I had forgotten what this felt like. My body had forgotten how to want to read books all day, and to be able to read books all day, and not have this gnawing pit of sad exhausted panic undercutting every paragraph. I hadn’t realised how profound a loss this was until I got it back.

I had packed four books for the trip:

  • one I immediately lent to a friend (Track Changes by Matthew Kirschenbaum)
  • one I didn’t get around to reading because I was too busy enjoying myself (Terra, volume 14 of the Dark Mountain Project)
  • one I read to contextualise that enjoyment (Into the Heart of Tasmania by Rebe Taylor)
  • and one I made a point of reading only in picturesque places (A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit). It’s an incredible book. I read it at Lake Wendouree, Ballarat; at Buckley Falls, Geelong; at Cataract Gorge, Launceston; at the blowhole in Bicheno. As it happened I read the last one and a half chapters of Field Guide on foot and on a tram, reaching the final line as I reached my final destination, bursting into the most hipster cafe in Fitzroy high as a kite on philosophy and the possible. Brunch was good that day.

Thankfully this spark has remained as I settle back into work and the internet. I still have loads of physical books to read, but I’m also finally making headway on my overstuffed Pocket account. Realising that it’s far easier to choose what to read when your selection is limited, my friend and comrade Hugh recently built an accidental serendipity machine called pocket-snack. It’s an experimental Python script for one’s pocket that presents you with a few randomly selected links per day, out of the several hundred you probably have saved (I had well over a thousand before we got the script to work). It’s helped me clear out stuff that it turns out I wasn’t actually interested in or that was no longer relevant to me, which freed up some brainspace for more worthwhile items. Emptying the pocket has truly never been so enjoyable.

Below are a few gems from the last little while, subconsciously themed around ‘the nature of information’:

Animism, Tree-consciousness, and the Religion of Life: Reflections on Richard Powers’ The Overstory / Bron Taylor, Humans and Nature
Full disclosure: I haven’t yet read The Overstory, the Booker-nominated 2018 novel whose central premise is that ‘entities in nature, and life itself, have agency, purpose, and personhood—and we have ethical obligations to all such persons.’ I’d had it in the back of my head to read at some point, noting that I seldom read fiction of any kind, and already have a to-read list as tall as I am. This review, however, propelled The Overstory to the top of my list.

I have a half-finished zine entitled ‘Five Epiphanies in Tasmania’. I’ve had a hard time pinning down the third, an experience in Ballroom Forest that I’ve likened to a moment of religious ecstasy. Reconciling this with my lifelong atheism has been somewhat challenging—whoever heard of an irreligious mystic? It seems my answer lies not in formal religious traditions, but in a kind of nature spirituality that recognises the consciousness of plants, natural features, and ultimately nature itself. Crucially, it also incorporates the responsibility of humankind to care for nature, while not situating ourselves above it. Review author Bron Taylor has dubbed this spirituality ‘dark green religion’, and his definition thereof is worth quoting at length:

It was within this complicated milieu that, over time, I began to notice patterns. These I eventually developed into the notion of dark green religion. This notion refers to diverse social phenomena in which people have animistic perceptions, emphasize ecological interdependence and mutual dependence, develop deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature, and understand the biosphere as a sacred, Gaia-like superorganism. These sorts of nature-based spiritualities generally cohere with and draw on evolutionary and ecological understandings and therefore stress continuity and kinship among all organisms. Uniting these Gaian and animistic perceptions is generally a deep sense of humility about the human place in the universe and suspicions of anthropocentric conceits, wherein human beings consider themselves to be superior to other living things and the only ones whose interests are morally significant.

To learn that this worldview not only had a name, but was a Thing that others felt and lived and wrote novels about, was overwhelming. I was slightly late to work from reading this article. I regret nothing.

If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost / Mita Williams, Librarian of Things
This sounds like a geography article but it’s not—Mita Williams, a scholarly communication librarian based in Canada, writes on how social graphs and scholcomm ecosystems are beginning to shape, rather than merely guide access to, academic output. The big 3 companies (Clarivate, Elsevier and Springer-Nature) are integrating their component services more and more tightly, which has the effect of widely automating—and locking humans, especially librarians, out of—the scholarly publishing process. Mita also discusses a higher education funding mechanism in Ontario that sounds a bit like the UK’s REF (Research Excellence Framework), in that it determines how much money is allocated to various institutions on the basis of some highly exclusionary and frustrating metrics.

Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls.

I won’t pretend to be anything near an expert on scholcomm but this all sounds fairly… rubbish. No wonder people want to dump Elsevier.

Computational Landscape Architecture / Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
I love trees. I also love wifi. But the two are strange bedfellows. This article explores the impact different species of tree might have on phone and internet reception, leading to ‘the possibility that we might someday begin landscaping […] according to which species of vegetation are less likely to block WiFi’ and the potential use of pot plants in electronic subterfuge. I mean, Geoff also links to an article from Popular Science suggesting wifi is responsible for mass radiation poisoning in Dutch street trees, so I’m not entirely convinced wifiscaping is a good idea, but it’s yet another reminder that computing, like the rest of human ingenuity, exists within nature and not above it.

PROSPEKT. Organising information is never innocent / Regine, We Make Money Not Art
I initially read this before going on holidays, but VR performance artist Geraldine Juárez has some incisive comments for the GLAM sector that I thought deserve a wider audience. The bulk of this article discusses PROSPEKT, her 2018 performance situated within the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, Sweden. The first paragraph, however, is a neat summary of her 2017 essay ‘Intercolonial Technogalactic’ [large PDF, begins page 152]. In it, Juárez critiques the activities of the Google Cultural Institute, which has digitised and published online thousands of museum-held cultural artefacts from around the world, but which curiously offers very little information about its own origins. (It was intended as part of a PR move against French publishers who were suing Google in 2011 over Google Books and breaches of copyright.)

She notes that Google views libraries, museums and other cultural institutions not as true collaborative partners but as ‘gatekeepers of world cultures’: repositories of content to be mined and paywalled. Google reproduces the power structures and cultural biases that gave rise to it, prizing European high culture above all else, and viewing publicly-funded institutions as beacons of ‘inefficiency’ that need ‘disrupting’ by private enterprise. All information is organised for a purpose. It is never innocent. It is never neutral.

The colonial gaze was determined to scan the surface looking for specimens for study, fixing them as objects out of time and out of place, in the same way that digital documents offer imagings of the world at a distance via screens. This is a prospecting gaze – a wandering ogle that examines, sorts and determines meaning and value.

While re-reading this article I was violently reminded of a series of uncomfortable experiences at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. I’ve never been wild about taxidermy, but TMAG’s hall of lovingly stuffed creatures, with mammals, birds and insects wrenched from their natural homes and drowned in formaldehyde, made me deeply uncomfortable. These poor animals deserve to return to the earth, not spend the next three eternities in suspended animation for the amusement of humans.

Natural Processes: information doesn’t grow on trees / Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Real Life
This piece has had such an impact on how I think about cataloguing that I’m including it again. It reminded me that the very notion of cataloguing and classification has deeply imperialist foundations that bode ill for our efforts at more inclusive collection description. It also reminded me of how my dear mother, a keen gardener, was able to identify every plant photo I texted to her during my trip. Sometimes it’s far better to ask mum than ask Google. Or an app reliant on crowdsourcing and machine learning.

The “herborizer,” a 17th-century nature enthusiast “armed with nothing more than a collector’s bag, a notebook, and some specimen bottles, desiring nothing more than a few peaceful hours alone with the bugs and flowers,” was the passive cousin of the conquistador or the diplomat […] His harmless assertion of taxonomical hegemony over Europe and her colonies actually produced commercially exploitable knowledge for the empire’s gain. He was a researcher, classifying, collecting, qualifying and quantifying imperial loot.

By cataloguing nature in ways that privileged only select facets of a living thing (those that could be seen, felt, or observed in isolation from its natural habitat), the burgeoning fields of taxonomy and scientific classification enabled Enlightenment-era Europeans to distance themselves from the natural world they ravaged. It continues to enable users of the aforementioned plant-identifying app, which propagates this classificatory, imperialist method of coming to know the earth. Taxonomy, with its discrete categories and precise hierarchies, primes us to see nature as a resource, as something to be mined, prospected and extracted for humanity’s benefit (such as improving our wifi). ‘It teaches us to see other life as proximate to us, rather than knowing ourselves as an extension of it.’

The antithesis of Bron Taylor’s dark green religion. The very anthropocentrism to which Richard Powers’ The Overstory stands opposed.

I titled this blog Cataloguing the Universe because it reflected a childhood impulse to never stop learning about the world, about space and time, about my place on this planet. Library catalogues have always been, for me, a path to knowledge: first as I browsed them, now as I contribute to their upkeep. It’s only within the last couple of years that I’ve learned how taxonomies and classification systems reflect the views, biases and priorities of those who create them. It’s only within the last hour that I’ve realised the binary character of natural history classification is echoed within my work as a cataloguer. I can assign a book only one call number. I can either include or not include a subject heading—no parts, shades or relevance rankings, no way to indicate just how well a work relates to the subjects I decide it’s about. It’s not a good system. How can I smash it?

This notion of cataloguing as a means of collecting and producing knowledge, like everything else about the culture I was raised in, is inherently Eurocentric and deeply flawed. I couldn’t quite articulate this in late January, but I can now. This is why I wanted to learn differently this year. To overcome my ecological illiteracy borne from spending 28 years inside on someone else’s land. To learn different ways of seeing the world, so that I might address the harm my settler presence has caused.

The article’s conclusion suggests the first step is ‘to take off our lenses and reckon with the humbling, bewildering condition of unknowing, to [quell] the appetite for legibility of the world that leaves us at a comfortable distance from what we cannot understand.’ I don’t think I’m comfortable enough yet with my own ignorance. I have so much to unlearn.

The serial place collector

Posted on by Alissa
This is not even half of it honestly you should see my book pile

For this month’s GLAM Blog Club theme of ‘collect’, I glanced over at my tottering ‘to-read pile that was sitting on a table but is now a table itself’. It’s perhaps an unusual pile. For one thing, I seldom read novels. Instead I’m drawn to narrative non-fiction, short stories and poetry. Stories about natural history, eco-friendly travel, walking, ecology, place, psychogeography, re-knowing our planet and watching helplessly as it changes. Stories that feel real.

Interestingly, that to-read pile has quite a number of print serials on place and nature writing. (Developing a magazine habit is a bit of a family tradition.) Currently I’m absorbed in volume 4 of Elementum, which arrived last week (don’t ask me how much the postage was!), as well as back issues of Elsewhere, which I hope to write for one day.

I did a brief analysis of my print serial collection in Libraries Australia and found only one title held in any Australian library: the Melbourne-based Lindsay, who have fulfilled their legal deposit obligations with the NLA. Considering the vast majority of these journals are published abroad I’m not terribly surprised. Perhaps when I die, some nature-inclined library here will take an interest in the rest of my collection. Perhaps not.

Then again, it’s not like online nature and place journals are well-represented in libraries either. There are lots of excellent blogs, often written and maintained by one person, as well as lush online magazines that make the most of the browser and create an immersive reading experience. Yet the long-term survival of many is largely dependent on the Internet Archive, which doesn’t quite feel like enough. My current personal favourite online journal is Emergence Magazine, ‘a journal of ecology, culture and spirituality’ with some seriously impressive writing, visuals and web design.

You know you want to read it, like, right now.

I’ve also been enjoying Plumwood Mountain, ‘an Australian journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics’. Australian publications of this type seem to be harder to find. I hope that doesn’t mean they’re thin on the ground; perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong places.

Naturally, I’d like to collect Plumwood Mountain, or hope that a library could do so for me. I have a few options: I can manually save every page to the Internet Archive (highly time-consuming); I can manually save every page locally using Webrecorder (also highly time-consuming); or I can submit the site to Pandora and hope the author acquiesces. If she doesn’t, well, I tried. (Did you know anyone can suggest sites to Pandora for collection? Be aware that if you put someone’s email address in the form, it’ll send them an email.)

How can libraries collect emailed serials? In my past life as a local history librarian we dealt with this mostly by printing them out, which is obviously not ideal. To the best of my knowledge, newsletters hosted on platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact aren’t harvestable by web archiving crawlers. Collection of these emails by libraries would therefore depend on either the publisher depositing a clean HTML or PDF version, or preserving the email files as part of an archive of someone’s inbox (which is very difficult, highly labour-intensive and not ideal for everyday access). We can’t rely on online platforms being available forever. We need to figure out a way to collect and preserve this content from the browser.

I desperately want someone to archive the full run of In Wild Air, a weekly emailed serial from 2016 to 2018 by Blue Mountains-based creative Heath Killen, each week featuring six things that made a guest tick. I loved this newsletter. Every Monday I took a leisurely walk through someone’s psyche. It was brilliant. I love basically everything Heath does. But if I were to ask Pandora to crawl that website, all it would collect is the index of names. The content itself is hosted on MailChimp—beyond the crawler’s reach.

I wonder if this proliferation of Anglophone ecoliterature is decidedly English in origin—the place, as well as the language. Settlers in Australia brought English concepts of geography with them (as explored in J.M. Arthur’s 2003 book The default country) and tried, unsuccessfully, to apply them to the Australian landscape. How else could you justify calling Weereewa / Lake George a ‘lake’ or Lhere Mparntwe / Todd River a ‘river’?

A collection selection

These are a few of my favourite journals. Please be aware that this list, though reasonably culturally competent, is white as hell. I’d really like to address that. A lot of these are based in Britain, where the nature writing crowd is overwhelmingly white, but I’m very keen to expand my collection to include more Indigenous perspectives. I’d also like to highlight the upcoming Willowherb Review, an online journal for nature writers of colour, which promises to be very good.

Print journals

Online journals and blogs