Livable Futures

Q & A

What makes more livable futures for you?   

Multispecies flourishings. And being a part of creative, supportive communities that recognize the agency of all members, including humans, insects, trees, water, diatoms, racoons, fungi, and phragmites. The Global Justice Movement, as described by Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark: the Untold History of People Power is big enough to include non-human people. This, knowledge, combined with learning about the ways indigenous people maintain mutually-beneficial relationships with their local ecosystems, gives me hope for the ongoing co-creation of more socially-just, less-exploitive futures. Livability is solidarity with people in my species who are grappling with our messy, beautiful interdependence with the rest of the world, embracing this fact and finding joy in it. Together, we might be able to learn from a beetle or a plant about resilience and about how to co-create livable futures.. 

What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?    

How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell. She is a new media artist whose work I have loved over the years and I feel sure that she wrote this book just for me. I’m also reading The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, and am enjoying learning this history of this early science explorer who was inspired by nature, poetry, and art and who was the first to conceive of the world as an integrated system. I do most of my reading when I can’t sleep at night and next to my bed is The Animal Internet, which is an encouraging look into how technological eyes can bring endangered animals into our everyday attention and care. Another one there is Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. I can’t watch the news, but I have been listening to NPR and Democracy Now, and when I get too sad, I turn on a podcast from Emergence Magazine or Radio Lab. My TV soft spot is nature documentaries; I never get tired of watching the bears catching the salmon in the waterfalls.

What practices are sustaining you?  

Feeding worms, harvesting their compost, feeding it to the garden plants, watching them grow, eating tomatoes, weeding, petting rabbits, harvesting their waste, feeding worms, repeat. I’ve also been playing with technologies, plants, and people. And trying to figure out ways to co-create with them. While sometimes frustrating, technology is providing perspectives I can’t get otherwise and offering interfaces that help me play with others, learn about them and attempt to enter their worlds. I’ve been experimenting with augmented reality as an embodied storytelling tool for inhabiting non-human perspectives. My summer obsession is participating in the citizen science project and phone appiNaturalist, which uses computer vision in association with a human community to identify species of plants, animals, insects, or fungi based on photos uploaded into the app. Now that I can identify Tiger Bee Fly and Pale Jewelweed I have become more curious about their worlds and trying to imagine the threads that connect them to mine.