Really happy to share that a paper I contributed to (with many other co-authors) Multispecies Sustainability has just been published. In the open access Global Sustainability Journal from Cambridge University Press.

The paper was developed by the ‘Multispecies Cities’ team. We have been brought together by the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan

Non-technical summary:

The sustainability concept seeks to balance how present and future generations of humans meet their needs. But because nature is viewed only as a resource, sustainability fails to recognize that humans and other living beings depend on each other for their well-being. We therefore argue that true sustainability can only be achieved if the interdependent needs of all species of current and future generations are met, and propose calling this ‘multispecies sustainability’. We explore the concept through visualizations and scenarios, then consider how it might be applied through case studies involving bees and healthy green spaces.

The paper even has its own press release. Heres an extract below:

An interdisciplinary team led by Senior Researcher Dr. Christoph Rupprecht (FEAST Project, RIHN) has revealed a new definition of sustainability that expands the concept to non-human species and their needs. With this new definition, published in the journal Global Sustainability, the researchers addressed a critical flaw in the original concept of sustainability that was hindering global transformation efforts. Examples from landscape planning and the Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative (HUMI) suggest the new multispecies sustainability concept will have wide-ranging applications.

The team of nineteen researchers identified a contradiction at the core of sustainability: its resource management approach ignores that the well-being and needs of all living beings is interdependent in ecologically complex ways. To overcome this critical flaw, they combined recent advances in multispecies ethnography with research by Indigenous scholars and insights from cybernetics. Based on this work, the team formulated a set of six principles and a new concept of multispecies sustainability, defined as meeting the interdependent needs of all species while enhancing the ability of future generations of all species to meet their own needs. The researchers then showcased potential applications that help enable human-wildlife coexistence and radically rethink urban greenspace design based on recent microbiome and public health insights.

Future scenarios

You may remember my writing on compass memes and the Multispecies Imaginaries Compass that I made last year.

My compass was also made with this paper’s lead author: Dr. Christoph Rupprecht. This Multispecies Sustainability Paper includes this diagram:

Which is about as far as you can push things in an academic context vs our one. lol/

Anyhoo’s really happy that this paper is now out in the world.
The paper is open access, you can read it here.

The post Multispecies Sustainability appeared first on thejaymo.net.

On Monday I attended the Solarpunk Larp “Now London London Is A City Farm” the second of four workshops from Algorithmic Food Justice .

The workshop series is exploring and prototyping new systems to serve the needs of humans and non-humans (such as seeds, soil and water). The project is from UCL in partnership with Spitalfields City Farm, Furtherfield, and Gaia Foundation.

The workshop itself was a 3 hour Solarpunk LARP/Roleplay with the following conceit:

“It’s 2035, fifteen years after The Great Food Emergency. Londoners discuss their roles in recreating the great metropolis as a city farm.”

During the workshop we each adopted a human character and a companion species that we had to speak for/with during the workshop. I choose sensors in the city wide sensor grid as mine.

We were split randomly into two groups:

1. The Greater London City Farm Authority GLCFA – responsible for London-wide decisions
2. E1 City Farm Assembly (E1CFA) – the community that is organising locally, around the old Spitalfield City Farm

And then we began. Later we came together to cross pollinate the groups and did a mapping exercise. 

I don’t want to give too much away around the LARP construction and the events of the day excetera as I attended the prototype. However: The best part of the day hands down was the committee meeting. 

I took on the role of coordinator for the E1CFA. I took loads of notes during the meeting, and had to contribute several times.

I also live tweeted some of the best bits of the discussion. Replicating them here below:

“We’ve been getting complaints from the soil bacteria”
“The bees have gone on strike and the hand pollinators are feeling undervalued”
“My electric solar powered milk and water van”
What exactly is the structure of our multispecies assemblies?
“We now use genomic smart sequencing to ascertain crop lineage right at the farm bed.”
“there’s 250k people marching down from Birmingham, the Army went rogue and the M25 is a DMZ with Tanks! Tanks”
“Perhaps we could have a travelling West End Bee musical”
“Can we Re-use Old/Closed Heathrow’s body scanners to prevent pumpkin smuggling?”
“King Charles’ Green Park Permaculture Demonstration Site”
“The bee keepers think they have a higher status just because the insects now have all the wealth”
“We have responsibility for Community Care AND Calibration”

It was interesting being part of a Solarpunk LARP with people who had never participated in one before. There was a lot of nervousness in the beginning, but more experienced people (like me) jumped right in and set the tone and the mood of the meeting. The familiar setting of a committee meeting also really helped to ease people into the roleplay. 

I think once it has gone round a few more rounds of play testing, this workshop will be a great tool for helping policy makers etc get their heads around and inside multispecies cities and thinking. Looking forward to the next workshop which is on sensors and blockchain.

Attending this was a good sync actually, as I have just stared ploughing though the 720 page “Playing At The World” by Jon Peterson (associated blog).
It was recommended to me by Benedict Singleton when I saw him the other week at Holly’s show at the Barbican. As he said to me “Its as much a work of philosophy as it is history”. I’m only 50 pages in and that is already apparent.

Todays blog has got pretty long but I’d like to recommend this radio show on English Folk Horror that was just on BBC Radio 4. Huw Lemmey sent it over.

‘Fear in the furrows’

Documentary maker Simon Hollis explores the darker underside of the pastoral idyll and the traditions of Folk Horror being revived by a new generation of writers, musicians and filmmakers.

Permanently Moved

Saints & Souls

S2E31

All Saints Day and All Souls Day. 
Humanising invisible companions
Necromantic Bone Cults
Staying with the trouble
Ancestors as a complicated story

This podcast was nearly 1m 10s over length after the first edit. I cut A LOT out. Hope it still makes sense.

But Lesson learnt: 2 essays in 301 seconds is … hard.
 —
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

This actually took me over 90mins to make. 🙁 I made the whole episode in the usual time, but after the first edit it was 1m 10secs over my time budget. This is the most I’ve ever been (usually its 10 seconds) which can easily be found in the second pass audio edit.

I basically attempted too much in one episode. Two short/dense chapters each with a three act structure plus two audio samples is HARD. I basically bit off more than I could chew. But, it was a really useful learning experience. If I do a christianity based start select reset I’ll put the full transcript in that.

As I said a few weeks ago, I’m trying to push myself and make more interesting and ambitions work with the show. I feel like the inclusion of my brother in the last episode and this one are steps towards that. I had quite a few people sharing it straight away, including people I didn’t know were listening along!

Onward!

Dipping the Stacks

Inside Hot Ones, the wildly popular and violently spicy YouTube show – The Verge

How We Misremember the Internet’s Origins

What happened when a professor was accused of sharing his own work on his website

Unraveling the Secret Supply Chain Behind an AmazonBasics Battery

The Ministry

I start a big project on Monday (henceforth names as PROJECT NOVA).

I’m doing it for free, but I will write it up and add it to the website once its over. PROJECT NOVA is probably the most important project I’ve worked on in my life – ever this point. I’ll be super busy with that until Mid-December at the earliest. I sent a 9 page pitch earlier in the week and they said “yup”. 

I’ll obviously speak in shadows about this for a little while.

Because NOVA is kicking off, I did a lot of prep for Nanowrimo. I’m not writing a novel this year. But i do have a clear plan about what i want to get written and get finished before the end of November. 

Reading

I read Dante this week. It’s the prequel(?) novel to the Devastation of Baal. Dante is one of the most famous characters in the lore and has been around as a model since I was a kid. This novel contextualised some of the personal moments in the second book. It was also interesting to learn more about the Blood Angels homeworlds and what life as a human is like on these worlds. The book follows Dante’s journey as a kid from a salt trading clan, his trek across the rad wastes of the long devastated moon and documents his trials to become a space marine. It’s not a book for people new to the universe but I enjoyed it.

I also started what some people consider to be the best 40k war novel – Helsreach by Adam Dembski Bowden. Set during the third war for Armageddon a global gaming event that happened in real life when I was a teenager. 

The story is full of characters with real depth to them facing impossible odds. The battle for Helsreach is basically a grimdark siege of Leningrad senario. If someone wanted to get into the world of warhammer 40k, and space marine novels this is not a bad place to start.

As previously mentioned I’m also reading Playing At The World.

Music

I’ve been listening to a load of Italo this week because i’ve been working. Mainly Modern Talking. Most of their songs kinda sound the same: kick, snare, kick, snare.
Here’s Brother Louie, if you haven’t heard it you probably should. If you go anywhere in Southern Europe they will definitely play this in the club at some point in the night.

Remember kids:

The post The bees have gone on strike… appeared first on thejaymo.net.

October 11, 2019

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Event 🎫 | Multispecies 🐝 | Permanently Moved 🔊

just got back from Unsound Festival in Poland yesterday. I talk about the panel and talk I did, and some of the artists I saw live. Also being inspired by hanging out with inspiring people.

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

Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

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Back From Krakow

Since we last spoke I’ve flown to and from Poland, and boy are my arms tired.

As mentioned last week I was there to moderate a panel discussion on interspecies solidarity between cultural geographer and filmmaker, Amy Cutler and the writer Luke Turner. It was a really good discussion. We couldn’t just jump into the conversation on solidarity as the topic is ultimately to many people’s ears in the current landscape of 2019 a ‘weird idea’ to say the least. 

So instead we felt our way there. Via Tim Ingold’s comments on the difference between moving through space and being on landscape from Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge. Though Kenith Olwigs reframing of our relationship to the land from a landscape to Landship. The discussion then felt its way through Anna Tsing’s mushroom at the end of the world and Donna Harrayway’s concept of making Kin by encouraging others to foster and recognise a sense of quote unquote Entanglement with the more than human world. We used the words Multispecies entanglement a great deal. 

For my part it was great to have a conversation with other people in a public setting where you could roll through the material on this space with others that know well. From Eduardo Kohn to Monica Gagliarno without needing to pause and explain a concept from scratch. Or mentioning things like landscapes are haunted by the past in very real and impactful ways. I got the sense from conversations in the audience that this was a good move, as they grasped the concepts at some intuitive level due to the nature of the conversation, but not necessarily understanding them fully. 

Amy brought up that there is emergence in emergency and there must also be solidarity in the world’s extinction. I thought later that the adage “an injury to one is an injury to all” is of even more importance when talking about multispecies entanglement than when it’s just applied to humans. 

A key notion that came up around how the human is ultimately a human construction and therefore subject to all our fallacies and foibles seemed to resonate with the audience too. 

Luke spoke about coppicing and pollarding of the forest. How the forest is not necessarily the wild space of one’s imagination. That a forest like Epping is a collaborative space between humans doing human things in the landscape that humans do and the trees themselves. After all a coppiced tree will live far far longer than one that was left to grow and die on its own natural timeline.

An audience member said that it was the best discussion they’d seen in the 4 years they’d been coming to the festival, which was cool. Hopefully the talk will be published to the festival archive sometime soon and I’ll let you all know when that happens.

My Solarpunk talk was at midday the next day, a tricky time for the talk audience wise considering that it was Unsound karaoke the night before. Big thanks to those that showed up on 3 hours sleep to hear me talk about cultural fracking of futures in mainstream media, Solarpunk, unfolding and polyphony. It went well and folks thought it was interesting. Obviously I’ll link to that too if/when it gets posted.

The whole festival was great, I got in early in the week so it was more of the experimental artists. Lingua Ignota performed basically the whole of Caligula from start to finish on my first night. It was an incredible performance, there was a moment when she sang the Kyrie, and it was awesome to see that for the first time in a nominally catholic country. The atmosphere from the audience turned the room inside out and you could have felt a pin drop let alone heard one. Came away really impressed by the one person live set too. I was also really pleased to have seen Dreamcrusher, it was HEAVY and I loved every second of it.

Of course as ever, it was a real privilege to be at Unsound, I’m always amazed when anyone invites me to anything to be honest i really do appreciate it.

I wanted to talk a little bit about my experiences at events like unsound or sonar as a speaker. Of course being a speaker is different from being an artist at the music venue, but you wear the same wristband and get to go to the same places not always afforded to the attendees. 

I’ve been incredibly lucky that people have always been generous with their time and attention at events like this. Either I’ve known other people either performing or speaking at the festival, or known friends of friends who I have been able to hang out with. This year I need to give a big shout out to Lisa, Lyra, Jacob, Luke, and Debi. 

Because the reality is, when folks you know go do something without you or with others you are in a foreign country, in a foreign city. And you are completely on your own. It happened to me in the Hague this year and it’s a bit bleak. So the atmosphere to combat this is very much. Dinner at 7.30 bring anyone you want. And that’s really nice. 

These festivals for me are periods of intense inspiration. Being around other creative people, executing on the thing that they love. Whether it’s writing, music, journalism etc. Speaking to people about the things that they love doing and are getting to do is obviously inspiring. It naturally makes you fired up and want to explore your own creative life and want to lean into it harder. It’s mainly because the conversation isn’t one big back slapping session either. But also there’s moments that can cut really deep into dealing with ones self doubt, creative struggles with their practice and the like. Which of course I’ve been talking about on here myself. 

Everytime I’m exposed to an environment like this, i’m inspired to do more, create more. Be more me.  

The post Back From Krakow | 1928 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

After writing on the Accelerationist political compasses last week I thought I’d make my own. The above is a kaleidoscopic compass of speculative multispecies imaginaries.

I made it with Dr Christoph Rupprecht from Doshisha & Kyoto University. Consider it an output from the “multi species cities” research stream his department have. (although he informs me ‘Meme’ is not a check box available to him in his system)

Of course it being made by the two of us, everything is footnoted in a document. Literally every square has two or more references to ideas, concepts, writers or thinkers in this space. I also threw in some Gordon White and M1k3y too obviously.

We’ve been thinking about maybe writing a whole essay together but I’m not sure.

Also Huw Lemmey had some nice words to say about Permanently Moved in his subscriber newsletter Utopian Drivel this week :

I would like to write more informally for this newsletter. I’m also thinking about doing a regular five minute podcast recorded outside, on location, which I might well release on this platform. If you have any thoughts about that, let me know — the idea comes partially from @thejaymo’s compelling podcast ‘301 – Permanently Moved’, a personal podcast 301 seconds in length. He writes, records and edits it every week in one hour, and following its development has been so interesting for me, its bitesize format allowing for short and punchy snippets of information.

I’m sure he won’t mind me saying that not every episode is for everyone, but they’re short enough that you listen anyway, following the ebb and flow of his intellectual life on a weekly basis. Having that constant this year has helped ground my own writing, but also I have noticed that I’m becoming a bit of a shut-in here in Barcelona (always a bad habit and function of my mental health), so perhaps a regular short podcast on life outside would, at the very least, be good for me. Stay tuned, and, in the meantime, do subscribe to Jay’s podcast. Three highlights for me have been:

[Media property name] isn’t your friend
Stella Maris
Remembrance

I had coffee with the artist Penny Goring in Kingston today. It was super good to meet her IRL finally despite living round the corner from her and knowing her online for nearly a decade.

Permanently Moved

Pretty pleased with this weeks show. A few folks have said that they were nodding along with the argument about the end of history and how purveyor of mass media culture can only continue to do so by fracking content from a time that it still existed.

Though I did make a whole podcast just because I thought of the word Webxit during the week. Also disappointed in the comic books media for not using it as a headline

Dipping the Stacks

Profile: Bob Kramer of Kramer Knives Is Just Getting Started • Gear Patrol

Dropping Out: Why and How? | Meta-Nomad

I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan – The Atlantic

NYU professor Scott Galloway calls WeWork ‘WeWTF,’ slams bankers

The Ministry

TBA

Reading

Atomic habits was a little better than first impressions. Had some good ideas that I’m going to take with me.

Spear of the Emperor is hands down one of the best 40k novels. Not for beginners but if you know the universe the lore etc its fantastic.

I’ve finally started reading Dark Emu

I’m finally reading Dark Emu. And its fantastic.

Music

Club music are great.

Also been listening to a lot of this new track by Fire-Toolz. It’s all over the place and extremely my shit.

Remember kids:

The post Salvage/Rescue appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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.

 

 —

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

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.

The post The Anthropogreen | 1912 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Note I’m writing this blogpost in the new wordpress visual editor thing. It’s crap and laggy as hell. Missing a bunch of features. Just Awful. 

It’s been a busy week for me (in comparison to other weeks recently). 

Monday Eve passed her driving test in the morning so we were all very pleased about that. We all had a celebration obviously.  

Tuesday was extremely domestic with appointments in the morning and later on in the day in kingston and back in Surbiton in the evening.

Wednesday I battled South Western Railway’s consistently piss poor service to arrive *on time* for lunchtime/early afternoon at Furtherfield. To discuss both the previously mentioned citizen scifi project and also a futurescapes project. Graham from spiralseed was there – whilst we have met before, it was the first time we have interacted in any great length.

Also, Mr James Taylor (AKA @LondonPrmcultr) was also at the same meeting, we’ve been tracking each other online for years at this point i think and it was good to ‘meat’ him IRL as it were. The discussion about the projects was fruitful but the best bit was being in the 12 pins at 3pm with them both. It’s one of the first times i’ve been able to nerd out about permaculture with people who are so deep in the discipline they teach PDC’s etc.

Following those drinks relocated to meet Mr Goth: Proprietor and president of https://xenogothic.com in soho. I arrived half cut, but you always start as you mean to go on when you’re meeting people off the internet i suppose. We had fantastic conversation about the state of the L/U/R/ACC milieu including the tech world. We ended up in the phoenix just behind the old BHS building and had a nice chat with a property man

Thursday morning was spent moving quite slowly after the evening before. But then went into town for the evening to eat dinner at Lima in Fitzrovia. Im not going to say who I had dinner with but it was absolutely fucking fantastic. I wouldn’t go back to that place if given the choice.

Friday was the landscape citizenships symposium at Conway hall, initiated in part by the good Tim Waterman – another internet acquaintance I’ve met via Furtherfield. You may remember I spoke about Kennith Olwig and his concept of landscape in episode 3 of permanently moved way back in April. He closed out the symposium and went off on one hard about the philosophy of euclidean geometry and how it relates to maps in reference to every thing he’d heard during the day.

A real highlight for me to be honest!

It was also a pleasure to sit next to the previously mentioned Good Mr LondonPrmcultr at the venue and have him as conference buddy for the day. We had many good chats reacting to what was going on with the academic talks. After that we went for beers with Andy Goldring the Boss of the UK Permaculture Association. That whole conversation smoking outside in the misty streets of london was fantastic. Realy realy facianting.

Saturday I went to St Albans to see the extended fams. I ate a delicious mushroom burger.

But now it’s sunder and I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather since I got in last night.

Permanently Moved

I didn’t record a permanently moved this week. But I may record two next week. I have a few things to respond to having been at the landscape citizenships conference

Dipping the stacks

Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia 

That “ethics in hamburger journalism” article but I forgot to bookmark it Im sure you know the article im talking about.

Understanding Platforms through Value Chain Maps

For Sale: Neopaganism “As Is”

Visions of Ether: How major narratives of Ethereum and $ETH have evolved over time.

The Ministry

It’s all going quite well actually.

Reading

I haven’t been reading much this week, I used quite a bit of time traveling on the train to catch up on podcasts.

This interview with Eza Kline is really interesting: Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media. So is the interview between rogan and the swimmer guy

Music

Been a good week for music tbh. The news of the year has to be that there is a new mineral track – their first new song in 20 years.

I also finally got round to listening to Art Pop champion Kimbra’s new Album Primal Heart. It’s a mixed bag but there’s a bunch of amazing stand out tracks.

Remember kids: 

The post Citizenships and Community appeared first on thejaymo.net.

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.

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