in the last few weeks you've read a lot about what we might think of as all the horrors of the
Contemporary world. Wildfires, radiation, toxicity, simplification of landscapes, disasters, epidemics
We1ve talked about all the injustices and the equal distribution of harm that underlies all of
these things as well and just last week we touched on you know how the anthropocene is now even
Within us within our
blood stream and but many of those that you read also find some sources of hope and from our
readings we can sort of make two categories of hopefulness I think and one is to see hope in the
possibility of thinking differently, and the other is hope in the way the world works itself.
The first hope and thinking differently can come in different versions we might se hope in
subversion for instance in working against universalising logics as Davidson and Todd says or
in working against modernity's progressive understanding of time as in Dawdy's article and we
might find hope in the turning point of the crisis in a sense hope
in ruptures that allow us to think otherwise and in events that kind of yank us out of our
ingrained patterns of thought and here we can think of Chen about exposure to toxins and about
toxins creativity how toxins have this possibility or this power to allow us to think
differently
about our own bodies or thinking about Peytrina who says that the wildfires or
disasters more generally can make us think differently about certainty and knowledge itself. So
this version of hope the version of hope as thinking differently is also something that comes
through in the article by Deborah Bird Rose that you're reading
so for Rose there's hope in the possibility of what she calls more inclusive cosmopolitics it's possible
to practice other less destructive ways of being together with other species the question is and it
seems kind of banal when you put it this way back then but this sort of the question is how can we
live together with other humans in better ways and in less murderous ways as Rose
Says but this is you know this is the real challenge as we all know and Rose tries to indicate
something about how humans may rise to the challenge of living together in
less murderous ways
so how may we create this kind of more inclusive cosmopolitics for one thing it lies in a different
way of thinking about difference and sameness and specifically to what extent we see ourselves as
humans to be different from other species to see sameness or to see differences is a matter of
perspectives says Rose we can look at one thing and from one's perspective we see difference but from
Another we see sameness
so if we shift our perspective in such a way as such way as to look at animals from a point of view
of sameness we can avoid assuming that animals are sort of essentially other and as Heidegger
famously put it poor in the world and and so this is a classic assumption that I think probably a
lot of people in our society share the notion that different species different creatures all
have access to an experienced different sliver of reality so different range of colors different
wavelengths of sound and different things we were able to feel and sense and so on but that
essentially humans have richer access to the world than other species and that is the sort of the
the common assumption I think in our society at least and what often goes along with that
is the thinking which animals are assumed to be something like automatons like kind of machine
that simply act out their natural instils where humans are conscious subjects in a different way.
We shouldn't have that as our starting point I think Rose would say
we shouldn't think of ourselves as different in essence from other species we
Should start instead she indicates with sameness and by assuming that their world are also rich not
poor they are also rich worlds just in different ways
so she writes about flying foxes which I'm gonna put up a picture here on the slide slide and there are
species of bat as you can see and one of the things she emphasises is that flying foxes have
pleasurable sex and they enjoy things they play with each other they have social lives they're
surely not poor in the world then we should avoid measuring other creatures against humans and perhaps
especially we should avoid
using the human hand to measure others against. For Heidegger the hand was especially
important and if we measure other species using the hand as the measured yardstick then
inevitably they will turn out to be poor in the world to not have the same capabilities as we do we
might say that in Western thought we have taken the hand as the default interface between
ourselves and world or the hand and the eye perhaps also a bit Heidegger emphasizes the hand and
so the hand and the eye that's how we thought about our encounter with the world and thinking with
the hand that's sort of the default interface between ourselves and reality and it's something
that allows us to sort of in our minds keep the world as a distance
if we think through the hand as the interface with the world and then the world or the
environment or nature become something we in grasp it's something out there that we can reach out
and grasp and we also imagine that the hand is universal that they're in there's nothing that
cannot be grasped by the hand
flying foxes in contrast meet the world through wings and tongues and thinking through the relation
between the creature and the environment with the interface of the tongue is a very different thing
than the hand it highlights an attachment to the world that is characterized by a simultaneous giving
and taking according to Rose and she has this example with a kiss you know it involves the tongue and
and
with the kiss it's hard to say which part is giving in which part is taking in this distinction
between the giver and taker is sort of not always relevant or meaningful when it comes to exchanges
through the tongue right and also another thing that characterises the meeting between a
creature and their tongue and the world is
Specific adaptation rather than the universal hand and the tongue isn't Universal like we imagined the hand to be
the tongue is made for another Rose writes the exact shape of a flying fox tongue is adapted species
by species to the food in which each particular species depends she says
so if the hand points to dominance and distance the tongue points to symbiotic mutualism and
intimate involvement and we humans have these kinds of attachments to the world also but they have
just been overshadowed by an imagination based on the hand
and there's a nice quote on page 109
that highlights this Mutual relation between flying foxes and Eucalyptus tree and I'm going to quote
it at some length here so she writes treets put out their delectable and beckoning flowers and flying
foxes leave their home camp and come racing to the blossoming trees their responses include their
long tongues that are well adapted to sucking up nectar and their body further picks up thousands of
grains of pollen
distributes over 70 percent intact every night
flying foxes carry eucalyptus Futures on their furry little bodies and across the patchy and
increasingly fragmented landscape of contemporary Australia the renewal of woodland and forest life
hinges on this mutualism. Forest futures are born on fur and tongue and on the wings that beat through
the night flying fox futures are born in the showing and appealing blossoms.
so notice especially this point that I put on this slide here flying foxes embody the future of
other species and vice versa the future of the species it's being lies in the relation that they
have to other species and so the point here is that encounters like these shows that others enable
Our lives
and this realisation can and should translate into an ethics and that is a way of acting and once
we've seen the world from the flying foxes point of view or point of tongue you might say and through
their social lives through their playfulness through their interactions with other species through
their way of being once we've seen that these are creatures who have rich lives with complex
Entanglements
then Australian people's treatment of them seems quite horrid. Australian settlers have had both the
very direct and and the more sort of indirect structural animosity towards these creatures almost
like a war and Rolls then asks how can we create peace and the answer I believe is with an ethics
that starts with sameness and flows from appreciating how others enable our lives
Not starting with ourselves and how we can live but starting with how we enable others and how others
enables our lives, it is an ethics that starts from asking what life do I enable and what others
Enable my life
the other source of hope that I mentioned in the beginning is hope in how the world works and I've
illustrated that here with some grass that grows in pavement cracks and the idea is that you know no
matter how much we try and cage in and pave over nature it will still stubbornly grow in the cracks
and ends no matter how we think and no matter how destructively we act the
grass is still going to
grow
and for this point I am going to focus on the article by Kristina Lyon decomposition as life
politics so Lyon begins her article with the vignette that shows how she experiences several
different kinds of decomposition and decay so she writes about the scent of rotting
fruit the sound of larvae chewing on leaves the feel of her boots
As they crunch down on layers of decaying stalks
and the point is that there's hope to be found in this processes of decomposition and decay so she
writes about the kind of life that farmers are able to make flourish in between wars and the
criminalised and poison ecology of coca plantations and their indication in the Colombian Amazon
it's a situation where widespread fumigation with chemicals
and the increase in extractive Industries like plantations and Mining has seemed to lead to a
strangling of life from the inside out it's not just killing but that the conditions of life are taken
away
and one of the farmers Lyons talks to uses the term agriculture of death to refer to these
large-scale market-oriented monoculture Plantation based practices
but even here even with all these destructive things the life potential of these
local amazonians ecologists lies in two things and they are first that
they lie in the local practices that strive to learn from their local landscape and
nurture those landscapes for the future and the second is that they lie in decay and
decomposition
itself
so the farmers promote local farming practices they're learning from the local landscape
and for one of the farming families Lyons describes them having a partnership with the
soil she says that what they are doing is creating conditions rather than imposing conditions and in
industrial plantations would be the perfect example of imposing conditions right
and so these local farmers create conditions and they do so among other things by composting and by
nurturing the soil and also by planting plants that are good for other plants such as plants that
give cover to others and plants and bring with them microbes that nurture the roots so this is kind of
farming that has as its aim to produce conditions for further farming to be possible
you know producing food is important sure but what might be even more important in this kind of
farming is that you're able to produce the conditions for further farming to be possible There's
Hope in decomposition and because this is a part of what creates these conditions what enables
future farming to it was for but this is also hopeful because there's life potential inherent
and in decaying leaves and the decomposition itself
and for these farmes there's hope in the way that the Amazonian soils themselves work so Amazonian
soils cannot be taken over by intensive agricultural practices they argue they can only be
destroyed and abandoned Amazonian soils cannot sustain intensive agriculture for long because they
become depleted it's after intensive use the soil themselves
refuse to continue working and just become dead in a way
but they're only apparently dead they're only seemingly dead and there is always the
possibility according to the Amazonian Farmers that one can revitalise such destroyed soils if you
if you practice right kind of slow decomposing and decomposition composting and
decomposition practices
the more generally with if we think through decay and decomposition then life and death are not
oppositional says Lyons decomposition is a kind of regenerative dying and so we might say that
there are two kinds of death here in Lyons case one is the kind of death that plantations and
fumigation bring this is a death that strangles the conditions for life this is anthropocene death
the other is the death of decomposition it is the way that the decaying old leaves die death that
decomposes into new forms of life that that is part of creating conditions but composting and
decomposition may also be an alternative to the classic western story of death and new Life as I've
Touched on in the previous videos with decomposition
composting we get in the sense the opposite of putting the past behind us and starting in a new right
instead of putting the old behind us recycle the old back in the old is what creates the new the old
creates the conditions for something to continue without the old being cycled in there is no new
life