Salad

Well,1 um, There are few more important questions it would seem to me than than what we decide is alive, what we decide is dead. What power, state power, um, financial power, corporate power decides is alive, decides is dead. Really, so many consequences flow from where that that that border between life and not-life between animacy and matter: something like this is drawn It’s a constant shifting boundary, it’s a highly political, and, in many ways, a highly policed boundary. As First, How might natural scientists, humanists, and artists use field-based curiosities to work together across disciplinary divides to study the Anthropocene? Second, Can we find to tell terrible stories about the environment, yet stories that energize listeners rather making them feel overwhelmed and paralyzed? Third, Might digital media help us offer stories of emergent and open-ended political ecologies at varied incompatible scales? What we decide is life at various incompatible scales (divide between) animacy and matter (evidence of life) constant shifting boundaries2 the divide between animacy and matter terrible stories (energized) shifting boundaries (power) (paralyzed) highly policed (terrible stories) constant shifting boundaries. Well, um, There are few more important questions it would seem to me than than what we decide is alive, what we decide is dead. What power, state power, um, financial power, corporate power decides is alive, decides is dead. Really, so many consequences flow from where that that that border between life and not-life between animacy and matter: something like this is drawn It’s a constant shifting boundary, it’s a highly political, and, in many ways, a highly policed boundary. As First, How might natural scientists, humanists, and artists use field-based curiosities to work together across disciplinary divides to study the Anthropocene? Second, Can we find to tell terrible stories about the environment, yet stories that energize listeners rather making them feel overwhelmed and paralyzed? Third, Might digital media help us offer stories of emergent and open-ended political ecologies at varied incompatible scales? Political ecologies at various incompatible scales terrible stories3 (digital media) to study the anthropocene (field-based curiosity) political ecologies at various incompatible (incompatible) scales (power) (power) shifting boundaries between animacy and matter (digital media) what is alive and what is dead. that (that) (that) border few more important questions it would seem to me (first) digital media (shift) (shift) shifting boundaries, political ecologies, curiosities, to study the anthropocene political ecologies at various incompatible scale4 What is alive? What is dead?5 What is animacy? What is matter?

1

These are two of my favorite writers extending their lens of understanding to include non-human beings. Robert Macfarlane walks, climbs, dives, and swims through landscapes, while conversing with their many meanings. Anna Tsing expands ethnographic inquiry by engaging with non-human actors that shape interpersonal, cross-cultural, and interspecies relationships across time and space. I was fascinated by the questions these two writers posed in the above texts. I explored audio-visual materials of them engaging with their ideas, threading the needle of fair use by weaving the distilled essence of their inquiries into aliveness and intersubjective dialogue between human and non-human actors.

2

What I love about the relationship between these two texts is how one serves as a sort of answer to the other. Macfarlane’s wide-ranging journeys across the world in search of rivers acquiring political agency, radically transforming the human-mediated landscapes through determination to flow past the violence of human control and spiritual blindness, seem to suggest ways we can tell stories that catalyze the ability to cooperate with entities both human and non-human to preserve and bolster aliveness in the world. The shifting boundaries invite us to consider how static entities like legal doctrine have distinct limitations in animating our understanding of rivers.

3

How to tell terrible stories is, for me, the remaining question that lingers still in the air after the music decays into the background frequency of our daily lives. The drive to either flatten the difficulties of restoring our animate relationships with the world into simple platitudes or portray the damage we’ve done to our planet as irretrievably fucked powerfully shapes our vision and imagination. I don’t know how to answer this question, but I hope this can foster creative reframings that spark our collective dreaming.

4

In intersecting lines of the quotations, this last phrase, “Shifting boundaries, political ecologies, curiousities, to study the Anthropocene. Political ecologies at various incompatible scale” is my attempt to propose a method for figuring new senses of aliveness and relationality into being. When we cross disciplinary and geographic boundaries, think ecologically about politics growing out of its relationship to broader, seemingly incompatible scales, and any collection of meanings becomes fertile soil for possibilities. These possibilities depend on the medium in which they are growing. Even if we want living futures that break with the unsustainable meanings of the past, the growth medium out of which these stem is still these meanings, despite their limitations and pitfalls. This is what I find interesting about how collections of people who care for and depend upon rivers, and the non-human world more generally, use legal personhood as a springboard for creating new ways of understanding relationality.

5

One of the most compelling questions Macfarlane poses is “Can an entity murder a river?” If so, what does that mean for questions of legal culpability, for accountability overall? There are so many traditions for deliberating how to reshape relations after the rupture. How do these relate to legal frameworks? In Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America. I’ve encountered, in Nicole Eustace’s exhaustive analysis of colonial legal records, incredible ways in which justice and reparation are imagined and grounded in traditions of Indigenous American diplomacy among different social groups. They warrant more attention than a passing footnote can provide, but I hope they serve as invitations to examine these ideas in their broader contexts. Are there ways we can bridge the gap between differences? What are ways in your world where boundary blurring and scale shifting can incite your curiosity and imagination? Can they ground themselves in ways that create possibilities for relating?

References

Macfarlane, R., & Pandey, S. (2025, May 17). Rivers are living beings with rights.

Tsing, A. L. (n.d.). Anthropocene Lecture - Feral Atlas. IV. Anthropocene Formations.

i‘m wilted summertime, Ohio.

Wring dry knotted sunshine sometimes

I think about lilting melodies on

ranch wind.

  She skitters simmering, wind chimes.

Small cry slotted sing side I find

my small child supple riddling

mouth feel.

  He has thankfully, soft ears.

Swing slide spotted appetite sometimes

I think about wounded recipes for

Slink towards the edge of the ledge,

wink at your comrade,

Statistical modeling the shape of my bones

break. Violent history of the brain’s collision

Alone

among malignant thoughts

of friends lost,

bodies left wanting,

lies a wooden box

with silver lining.

  Enough

to want reverberant

return soft,

simple touch yawning,

pries source material

Winds of influence wring out silver 

the basketball slipping slowing

winter the source material render

ribs in the spaces between ribs

my heart speed rows of wrinkled 

sisters in their place east facing

walls let the light inside I am