> [!summary] Progressive Summary > This is a beautifully written collection of essays that weaves together the history of settler colonialism in the US, ecology, and philosophical musings about the options for action available to us in an overwhelmingly oppressive world. # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Mossback ### Like a Mountain ### The Watershed and the Grid ### After Apocalypse > Apocalypse is an exercise of what anthropologist David Graeber calls “imaginative counterpower,” which is to say, it helps the oppressed name the powers that seem to control their lives, as well as to imagine an end to these powers. - Graeber, David. _Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology_. 2nd print. Paradigm 14. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006. > In her marvelous book As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes about Nishnaabeg internationalism. Anishinaabe, or Nishnaabeg, refers to the culturally related indigenous groups that inhabited the Great Lakes region, including Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi. To my surprise and delight, she describes internationalism not only as how the Ojibwe relate to Canada and surrounding First Nations but also as how they relate to other species. This is grounded in a traditional story of learning good relations with the deer tribe after a period of overhunting. Seeing different species as nations—deer nation, maple nation—with whom the Anishinaabe are in relationship transforms the landscape into one thrumming with possibility or danger. This is a different sort of international relations. As Simpson says, “Our shared diplomacy has created a relationship that enables our two nations to coexist among many other nations in a single region. From within Nishnaabeg thought, our political relationship with the deer nation isn’t fundamentally different from our political relationship with the Kanien’kehá:ka [commonly known as the Mohawk nation].” > > Settler colonialism is largely the opposite of this stance. When an empire has learned to see the world as full of resources to be extracted rather than as populated by many nations—people nations, plant nations, and animal nations—to be in relationship with, it becomes easy to assert superiority over any nation. > Apocalypse makes imagination a battleground. Colonization has physical and lasting effects, but it starts with the ability to imagine that indigenous people and their ecologies are less important than settler ecologies. > > So I think we must first be able to imagine an end to settler colonialism in order to change it. Just as the displacement of indigenous people took sustained effort and attention by those who would benefit from it, so finding a future that upholds the sovereignty of indigenous people and species requires enough people willing to imagine it. That imagination must be formed, I think, in relationships. ### An Ancestor, a Cabin, and a Legacy ### Finding Our Way Home This essay is about not drawing a line between our bodies and our external environment. According to the scientific theory of niche construction, organisms transform their habitats into places that are more conducive to their thriving. The wilderness is a settler colonial concept, used to empty a landscape of its native inhabitants so that it can be occupied. Because the earthworm has a hydrostatic skeleton, a shape that is maintained by pressure from within, it requires an environment that is moist and filled with oxygen. It creates this by eating soil, combining it with bacteria from its gut, and expelling this as pellets. The soil becomes its external kidney. By taking soil enriched by earthworks, we are "organ thieves"! Earthworms secret mucus as they form their tunnels, making the tunnels quite stable. They also pull in organic matter to plug up the tunnels and to store food, thus helping to keep moisture in. (Charles Darwin wrote a book about earthworms a year before he died - The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms.) Our mitochondria produce heat. Clothing acts as a second skin to slow down the loss of heat. Shelter is another layer of skin that serves this purpose. Fire adds heat externally. Through cooking, it also serves as an external stomach. --- Quotes from the chapter: > If I was to truly critique contemporary life, I had better strive for independence from it. > In 1972, biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced the term autopoiesis. The word, constructed from Greek, puts together “self” and “creation,” to give language to the metabolic magic that all living organisms constantly conjure. By this definition, life is the organization of molecules into a bounded system that maintains itself against entropy or decay. Living means there is a border between the atoms of “me” and “not me.” Staying alive requires constant vigilance at that edge: keep the decay outside; sustain the order of the inside. > But the nature of entropy—that movement of energy from order to disorder, from lumpiness to evenness—means that things fall apart. Constantly. Free radical molecules disrupt the genes of a bacterial cell. Heat loss threatens the thermal requirements for the mouse. Desire for continued existence moves the organism to work against decay and entropy by developing ways to produce the energy needed to repair itself, or to seek sources of energy outside itself. Meaning becomes quite clear for the organism. The oak finds that rich soil is good—that is, helping the tree stay alive—and that shade is bad—that is, limiting the tree’s ability to fight entropy by channeling energy. > We are matter making meaning. > Fire-making. Water-finding. Shelter-building. Food-gathering. Like the earthworm modifying its environment to make it more inhabitable, basic skills allowed me to survive in a place that seemed otherwise dangerous. What I learned in the desert is that there is no wilderness—there are only people without the cultural knowledge and personal skills to live in certain places. > The earth thrums with aliveness. Soil rises slowly with the steady work of the worm, then erupts suddenly with anthills. Waterways slow and spread outward with the activity of beavers. Gophers incise the earth, leaving tunnels in their wake. Long after the gopher is gone, these arteries will allow water to soak into the ground and will provide habitat for insects and small animals. For these creatures, extending their bodies entangles them in a matrix of a multitude of lives. It is a tangled web, certainly, and not benign. After all, there are spiders in the web of life, as well as snakes, parasites, and a host of creatures whose own lives depend on cutting short the lives of others. But for most creatures the pursuit of life adds richness to the landscape’s texture rather than depleting it. > While the phrase “leave no trace” was well intentioned, a better understanding of our relationship to the world would be to “leave good trace.” > The truth is, I need community to stay alive. My two-footed standing in life is bookended by a toddler’s crawl and, if I live long enough, a weak-kneed old man’s frailty. My very digestion depends on the metabolic activity of the microbiome in my gut. Throughout our lives, we rely on others to care for us. And beyond the human community, we cannot live without other creatures. > > How might we survive the many unfolding catastrophes of this age? Not as individuals surviving wilderness but, rather, by communities learning to live again in the contours of landscape and relationship ingrained in the world. It might be possible for humans to find our way home, to reclaim earth as habitat, becoming, as Robin Wall Kimmerer put it, naturalized, living “as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit.” > Now those cold desert nights are a distant dream. I only occasionally practice fire-making. But I still think often about the lessons of meeting my basic needs. In the cool spring morning, I remember that my coat is a second skin, helping to hold in the heat from the fires of my mitochondria. I leave my house, host to other beings, like the spider whose web drapes the upper corner of the window, and enter into the larger house of my watershed, home to so many other beings. We make this home together, each extending our lives in the ways that suit us. Gopher’s house makes tunnels underground that become host to others. Raccoon prowls the backyard at night, occasionally foraging in the same compost heap where earthworms make the soil their kidney. Western gray squirrels make the ground a larder, inadvertently leaving some nuts and acorns to grow into trees, which then become home to other arboreal creatures. > > Perhaps if humans, too, found our way home again, we would stop visiting violence upon the external world in our search for internal harmony, replaying that old imperial story. But this is not an individual endeavor. It is not enough to merely stand on our own two feet, but perhaps we can learn, with our human neighbors and the community of creatures in our local bioregion, to stand with our feet, roots, and paws planted in a place we are making together. Naturalized species don’t live forever, and neither do survivalists. But the species that have found ways to live among others—those that have entwined their tendrils with other plants, or seduced mycelium into relationship with their roots—do have a home to live and die in. And perhaps that is the answer. ### A Catechism of Kinship ### Hungering Bodies ### Into the Brine ### The Tree, the Ax, and the Struggle for Life ### Wisdom Dwells in Dark Places ### Refuge Speech by Boudicca (British insurgent queen) before going into battle with the Romans: > "They require shade and covering, they require kneaded bread and wine and oil, and if any of these things fails them, they perish; for us, on the other hand, any grass or root serves as bread, the juice of any plant as oil, any water as wine, any tree as a house. Furthermore, this region is familiar to us and is our ally, but to them it is unknown and hostile. As for the rivers, we swim them naked, whereas they do not cross them easily even with boats. Let us, therefore, go against them trusting boldly to good fortune. Let us show them that they are hares and foxes trying to rule over dogs and wolves." > This speech represents the contrasting visions of life that met on the battlefield that day. Her words show the fundamental difference between the watershed and the grid—the former is a site of relationship and the economic ecology of mutual aid, whereas the latter is the site of conflict and extraction. # Quotes > We can no longer rely on being supported by structures that may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force. You cannot rely on structures. The time for relying on structures has disappeared. They are good and they should help us, and we should do the best we can with them. But they may be taken away, and if everything is taken away, what do you do next? > – Thomas Merton, Asian Journal > “Life makes a lump of matter deeply invested in preserving its particular form and its own freedom to act.” > – Andreas Weber, [[The Biology of Wonder]] # References [Cronon undefined - The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature](zotero://select/items/1_RPV36WBR) Matrix of Man - https://archive.org/details/matrixofmanillus0000moho/page/270/mode/2up