April 5, 2018

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Multispecies 🐝 | Permanently Moved 🔊

There is a rescue mission and a salvage mission. In this one I have thoughts on my Land As Platform project and Kenneth Olwig’s concept of ‘Landship’. Also please feedback on the overall audio levels, theres a few jump cuts between takes – are they ok? I AM only recording and editing this whole thing in an hour.

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Landship

Well, well, well—episode three. Last week went by quickly. Easter happened, and looking out the window, so has spring. That’s a nice setup because what I wanted to talk to you about this week is the concept of Landship.

As you may or may not know, for about the last six months, I’ve been thinking about the idea of land as a platform—kind of a subset of thinking about spatial strategy. It’s perhaps an overly ambitious idea, covering everything from soil biology to warring AIs betting on prediction markets to best complete their climate change models. It touches on keyline design, farm layout, and land management.

It’s quite a big thing, and I think it’s going to have to be a book at some point.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about solarpunk. I’ve been thinking about rewilding. I’ve been thinking about keyline design and what it looks like when actually applied to the landscape. I’ve been thinking about rice paddies in Bali, terracing in the Mediterranean. And in the last couple of days, a whole bunch of things have come together.

I wanted to read you a quote from the call for papers for a conference called Landscape Citizens: A Symposium, which will take place at Conway Hall in November. I’m thinking about submitting to it—if I can navigate the academic language.

So here we go:

“Everywhere, people are courted by sophisticated media engines—political, corporate, marketing—which seek to tie their identities to brands, nations, races, sports, monarchs, deities, shared animosities. Alternatively, environmental belletrist Gary Snyder (1995), in advancing the idea of watershed or bioregional citizenships, seeks to tie belonging to substantive landscapes. Kenneth Olwig (2005), for example, also frames similar ideas grounded in a discourse of landscape justice and landscape democracy. Olwig makes an electrifying parallel between the suffixes ‘-scape’ and ‘-ship,’ the latter meaning something showing, exhibiting, or embodying a quality or state of being—as is tangible in friendship, comradeship, or fellowship. Olwig thus asks that people might conceive of themselves embedded in a landship, the dimensions of which might lead to a more fulfilling, engaged, meaningful, and emplaced belonging. Citizenship, conceived as landship, also asks that the criteria for belonging issue not from birthright or blood and soil, but from affinity, experience, and applied landscape knowledge.”

Wow—what a term. And I’m sorry for such a long quote in the middle of the show, but I thought it was important.

Landship—as in spaceship.
Landship—as in friendship.

I love the term. It works so, so well. I mean, I can conceive of my relationship with Eve as a ship that we bind ourselves to, lashing ourselves to the mast to weather the difficulties of life and the trials it brings. But we are also in relationship with one another. So what, then, does it mean to be in spaceship with an environment?

I think the books of Ann Leckie—the Ancillary Justice trilogy—and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora speak to what it means to be in spaceship with an environment, just as we would be in Landship with the world around us.

Landship as spaceship.

We have the ability to change the environment around us. It’s one of the defining features of being human. The environment around us could be a desert, and we can change that. Rewilding is just a small part of it. Better land management, better land use, and a different approach to how we think about land itself. But thinking of it as a ship feels like a much more localized version of Bucky Fuller’s Spaceship Earth. And I think that’s a really interesting proposition to work with.

Landship. Friendship. Relationship. We’re going to need all three if we’re going to survive the rescue mission.

Because with a rescue mission comes a salvage mission. And we need more than cathedral-scale permaculture to save the world. We need landship. We need friendship. And we must face the future the way humanity always has—through dreams, stories, and song.

And that feels very much like the opening of a discussion rather than the ending of one.

Speaking of endings—my time is up.

I’ve been @thejaymo on the socials, and you’ve been listening to episode 1803 of Permanently Moved—a podcast in 301 seconds.