June 22, 2019

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Multispecies 🐝 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Solarpunk 🌅

S2E12

Catching up the last two weeks. I cover some of what I said at Bordersessions festival in The Hague.

 

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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The Anthropogreen

Well, I’m back — thanks for listening if you are still around. I’ve missed two weeks, I’m not that bothered about it but it is always nice to get a streak going. I missed the first week because I was terribly sick as for like 3 days friday morning all through the weekend. It was brutal. I didn’t have a cold or anything but it was a full body thing with a temperature and my body just demanded that I sleep. It was annoying and a bit stressful as i was trying to finish up my talk for border sessions festival in the hague. 

Which incidental where I was last week. My talk was called “Solarpunk And The Great Unfolding: Building Keystones Of Continuity” I talked a little about the history of Solarpunk, and stepped the audience though some of the key posts and events like the publication of the book in brazil in 2012, adam flynns notes towards a manifesto, miss olivia louise’s post cohering the aesthetic of solarpunk, andrew dana hudsons on the political dimensions of solarpunk, solarpunk anarchists dot com and the rest. It’s getting to the point where it is difficult to fit all the anthology books that have been published on one slide – which is a very good situation to be in.

I talked about unfolding, short term thinking and indeterminacy.

How our quote unquote “modern” management techniques shrink time and don’t let us grasp the enormity of the task ahead of regreening the world. If it takes 100-120 years to get an oak tree from seed to full canopy height then that is the short term. And anything beyond 2150 is the medium term. 

This whole section can be summed up in the slide “We have 10 years to save the world but its going to take us 100 years to do it. “ 

I am tired of the Anthropocene

I talked about how I am already tired of the Anthropocene. The art and humanities worlds have flogged that horse to death leaving very little utility left in the term as it represents what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk criticised as the “kinetic nihilism” of modernity. Oh the Anthropocene I hear, Yes we know i always think , what exactly are we supposed to do about it?

So I brought up the Anthropogreen for the first time. – thank you Gordon White – As a counterpoint to Anthropocene.

The Anthropogreen

The Anthropogreen – A new geological epoch defined by the outcome of a different sort of human intervention upon the earth. 

A global planned but locally integrated landscape, shaped by a civilisation with gardeners hands. A patchwork areas of mixed stewardship and land use with some left to play out nature’s brutal but beautiful realities.

I talked about the surprising fact that if you plant billions of trees they then grow – pulling in the previous talk on oak trees and short term thinking. The closing part of the talk pulled in some of the work I’ve been doing inside Land As Platform: 

That In the face of the momentum of the climate and the world that will begin to flower around us. We need to consider modular elements that can be reconfigured & redeployed to prospect new potential lines of development. We can’t over plan the future down the finest detail, but we can flesh out high level consensus that makes sense within the context of the local land and topology.

Showing folks pictures of things like keyline design, Sprawl Repair by Galina Tachieva and the work of DPZ, the eden project, the loess plateau etc.  Anyway. I do have a recording of the talk but it’s pretty terrible quality. I’m not sure if I’m going to post it or not – i’ll see. The talk went well tho and people in the audience seemed to enjoy it.

I also got to attend a workshop at the new institute in rotterdam on the zo-op an outgrowth of the multispecies workshops I attended last year as part of the terra fiction series. Both in rotterdam but also at the waarg in amsterdam. It’s a very very exciting project.

I’ve said it a few times in various places but the level at which the conversation is at around radical regenerative and re-greening projects in the netherlands are so much further ahead than in the UK. In fact many of the building blocks or foundation views and assumptions that one needs to make to participate in the conversation are not really hurdles. Everyone just nods and moves on. In the uk however there’d be instant pushback and a back and forth around something or another. Perhaps in another 5 years or so the London folks will be where the netherlands creative worlds are. Sitting round a table where everyone is familiar with the need for context in the holistic management framework is so so refreshing. 

Big thanks to the team at border sessions, the rotterdam folks at the zoop and a big thanks to ian and thurn for dinner when i was at a loose end on my final night.

UPDATE

5 years later I expanded the idea of The Anthropogreen at my 2024 talk at Human Entities Conference in Lisbon on Wednesday 5th June 2024 – organised by CADA, in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Trienniale and the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon.