Now comes author, deep ecologist and philosopher Eileen Crist with excerpts from a recent blog post, affiliated with her excellent journal, The Ecological Citizen.
Images are relayed from the website of artist Peter Hill, “a visual artist, a musician, a builder, a permaculture gardener, father of five fantastic children and captain of the local bush fire brigade.”
CONVERSATION BETWEEN A HOUSE AND A TREE
HEAD STACK
BOUND TOGETHER
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We stay with The Ecological Citizen this week, with a plea from editor Eileen Crist to stop tying ourselves up in identity knots and stand solidly on the hard reality (and responsibility) of shared common ground. Image added by DP.
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In an editorial opening the recent “animals” issue of The Ecological Citizen, Eileen Crist underscores the heavy price we pay when we obscure our animal selves, and abuse our animal kin. We cannot address climate emergency without confronting the dominant ethos of human supremacism, and its dense understory of “petty mind-games.” Excerpts below, with images added by DP.
One of the key tidal observations throughout our DP voyages has been, simply put, that we cannot change what we do not truthfully understand.
For example: reconciliation regarding the historical experience of American slavery is impossible without coming to grips with how that history lives on in the present through densely interwoven manifestations of white supremacy, with the carceral state at its center.
Now comes the ever-lucid Eileen Crist, with thoughts on a different though related variant of subjugation, not within a single species but rather between one particularly invasive species (homo sapiens) and the rest of life on Mother Earth.
Excerpts from a recent interview below, with images relayed from the website of Joseph Wheelwright.
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Note: The entire excellent interview from within the pages of The Sun Magazine (not the tabloid, mind!) is worthy of close consideration. The magazine has generously dropped its pay wall during Covidzeit, yet relies entirely on reader support. We highly recommend trial perusal, and then subscription.
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We are grateful to our colleagues at Rewilding Earth for publishing an excellent, detailed report on the threat of extensive deep-sea mining, written by Abundant Earth author Eileen Crist. The article includes an extensive bibliography, as well as the outlines of a non-extractive alternative way of connecting with seaborne earthlings and their magnificent habitat.
Brief excerpts below, together with a few images of hungry ghost maw-machines relayed from the website of a “pioneering” sea-mining corporation. They communicate the dark, indiscriminate and savage sort of supremacist violence that has become the signature of an extractive capitalism gone berserk, through an “always encroaching’ (see below) greed for plunder and profit.
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We are grateful to a longtime DP reader for steering us to a lucid interview with Eileen Crist, following the publication of her book Abundant Earth. A few excerpts below, interwoven with revolting images of clearcutting in four California counties, relayed from stopclearcuttingca.org.
She closes with a cautionary critique of reliance upon “hope”:
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In the category of revulsion in search of revolution, let us close with the below transcript from a recent press conference where the American style of environmentally catastrophic human supremacism was brazenly promoted to the rest of the planet.
MR. MULVANEY:
The focus of the event will be global growth and challenges to the global economy, specifically dealing with things like rejuvenating incentives for growth and prosperity; rolling back prosperity-killing regulations; ending trade barriers; and re-opening energy markets. So, taking a lot of what we have been doing here domestically with such success and trying to encourage the rest of the world to get onboard as we sit here and our economy does so well. You look all across the world right now, and the rest of the world is either at or near recession. And we really do think that we have hit on a formula that works not only here but that would work overseas, where we take the G7 as the opportunity to try and convince other nations that they can have the same successes by following the same model.
Then during the Q & A, that mostly centered on how holding the G7 at a Trump-branded resort was not a naked conflict of interest:
MR. MULVANEY: Okay. Anybody else on G7?
Q I got one more. Is there any precedent in your studying of the G7 of a G7 Summit being held at a property owned by the President or a President?
And my second question is: As you’re looking at the content of what you want to do next year, it’s probably going to be hot in Florida in June. Will climate change be one of the issues that you discuss?
MR. MULVANEY: The first question is, no. I don’t know if another President has ever done it. I don’t know if another President has owned a property that was even considered for G7. So, no, we haven’t — I don’t know the answer to that question.
Climate change will not be on the agenda.
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Message to Mr. Mulvaney and the Circle of Death for which he is a mouthpiece:
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It seems logical that reversing the vast environmental damage caused by the Great Acceleration will require an equally as forceful Great Deceleration. Yet at exactly the time when humans need to do less via dramatic contraction, both economic and biological, we prefer to sustain the delusion that we can fix the broken world with yet another spasm of frantic human activity.
This week, we relay brief excerpts from a December 2018 article by Eileen Crist that provides a concise delineation of the human supremacist self-understanding we must overcome if we are to avert the worst consequences of the deepening ecological emergency.
Images are from recent mass civil disobedience protests against the perpetuation of lignite coal mining in Germany.
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As the earth’s biosphere continues to be sacrificed to the short-term requirements of human economies, we turn to an essay written jointly by Eileen Crist and Tom Butler in 2014, marking the centennial of John Muir’s death.
First published in Resilience, the last paragraphs of the essay are excerpted below, with images from Mark Adlington’s Painting the Ice Bear project.
Note to those who place their faith in de-extinction and other arrogant expressions of hubris: technology will not save us! We are “inverted utopians”, unable to imagine the implications of our inventions and interventions.
We are indebted to a faithful DP correspondent for steering us to an excellent 2014 lecture presented by Eileen Crist, in which she articulates a concise overview of what she calls the Human Supremacy Complex, or toxic anthropocentrism.
Professor Crist begins with a reference to an October, 2013 article published in The Economist reporting on a clot of jellyfish inside cooling pipes at a Swedish nuclear reactor, a report that swiftly mutates into an infomercial for a new technology named with the perverse acronym JEROS: Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm. According to its creator, JEROS will chew through even the most exhuberant clot of jellies, and thus keep our nuclear reactors humming.
The entire lecture is linked below, followed by a montage of her slides that convey a useful summary of core questions and arguments. The final image is taken from The Herd, an installation project by Tasha Lewis, whose studio we shall revisit in future posts.
THE HERD
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If we refuse to learn how to live responsibly within this “community of unique and exquisite beings”, clinging to the delusion that no matter what ruinous consequence we inflict upon the natural world, our clever technologies will always save us: we shall be obliterated.
Though JEROS robochops jellyfish into mush, it will take more than robot swarms to chew through the lethal clot of our own hubris and arrogance, such that we might embrace the “abundant and ravishing” planet, “inhabited with respect.”
Now comes Eileen Crist, with excerpts from her brilliant essay, I Walk in the World to Love It; images are from the Aviary of Sara Angelucci.
The quotation from Mary Oliver descends from her essay, Waste Land: An Elegy. Here are the lines that follow:
Desperado Philosophy 