FOP: Beyond Rocks

Great post by Friends Of the Pleistoscene. Read it in full here.

In the wake of Seth’s presentation, we couldn’t help wondering:  Is the speed of change in the material realities of life on the planet outpacing our ways of knowing?  Everything we humans think we know about living on Earth, and everything we thought was useful for life here, was invented by ancestors who lived during times when the hockey stick graphs were relatively “flat.”  But, as Seth put it, we’re now living at right angles with that (former) world.  We’re now living on a qualitatively different planet.  While that doesn’t necessarily mean that human knowledge needs to start over, it does mean we need to rethink, reconfigure, and reinvent “what we know” from an entirely different angle (the vertical, accelerating rise).  And we need to do that quickly.

“Weather Shield” Book

Weather Shield For a Migrant Dwelling | Make Your Own Book

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Shelters

Reading (& Watching) List

Urban outfitters: The Nature Conservancy goes to the city by Greg Hanscom for Grist.

“There are more species in New York City than in Yellowstone,” [Bill Ulfelder] says. “New York City has humpback whales and sharks, peregrine falcon, and sturgeon. There’s stuff worth conserving here.”

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Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature by Rachel Armstrong for Next Nature.

Ecologist Fern Wickson argues that humans are intertwined in a complex web of biological systems and cannot be included within a definition of nature where “an atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill” and wonders whether there is a better definition of nature.

Garbage explains how we can be connected to nature – but not in an unlimited way. We subjectively distinguish ourselves from the natural world by ‘editing’ our networks through the process of making garbage. We choose what is important to us by applying cultural, rather than material criteria, which does not lend itself to empirical measurement.

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Growth Assembly – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Sascha Pohflepp from Sascha Pohflepp on Vimeo.

Fishing with Marcel

via Hyperallergic

The Allamanda

Love Poems From China

Six years ago I was teaching English in China. My colleague Vlady had her students write love poems. Here are a few favorites:

(RMB is China’s currency.)

Shelters

There is no such thing as a natural disaster.

“There is no such thing as a natural disaster. In earthquakes the architecture fails. If you’re out in a grassy meadow, it doesn’t matter how big the earthquake is: it might knock you down, but if nothing falls on top of you and nothing catches fire from broken gas mains or power lines, then you’re probably okay. Architecture is the first casualty of earthquakes, and human beings under the architecture are the casualties of the architecture. Even with a wholly natural disaster, whatever that might be—a tsunami, maybe—who gets help, who has resources to rebuild, who is treated as a threat or a malingerer—those are not natural but social phenomena. With Katrina you need to talk about the role of climate change in making the hurricane; of the crappy levees built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and not adequately maintained; of the lack of evacuation resources for the poor; of the demonization of those left behind; of the transformation of New Orleans into a prison-city preventing evacuation … nothing could be less natural. The natural disaster was the least of what happened to the people of New Orleans, if not the rest of the Gulf, that week.”

– Rebecca Solnit, interview with Astra Taylor, BOMB Magazine

Lover 9th Ward, from the New Orleans Suite, 2006. Photo by Lewis Watts.

Today

Improvised some miniature shelters in a vacant lot across from my apartment building. Sort of shrine-like, sort of post-apocalyptic. Not exactly sure what’s going on here yet.