#critical ecology

[vampirechatroom]

becoming extremely obsessed w/ the work of suzanne pierre, phd, pioneer in the field of critical ecology and absolute badass (also super fucking hilarious)...she’s so cool and the work she’s doing is just incredible and so important. a new academic/life goal is to meet & work with her. 

#dr. suzanne pierre #critical ecology #social ecology

[perfectlyripeclementine]

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

#nonbinary love #nblnb yearning #nb4nb #nblnb #wholesomeposting #yearning hours #ive been thinking about how some languages dont have a possessive tense #so you dont say “i have a thing” but rather “a thing is by me” #and like im not usually one for psycho linguistics and like critical thoughts etc etc etc #but i really like the framework of responsibility/commitment rather than ownership #i think about this mostly in terms of ecology #and relation to land #but i also love it as it applies to language shared between lovers #like i LOVE calling them mine or for them to call me theirs #but i'm also nonmonog and that was kinda weird to square for a while #and it clicked one time when i was talking about my neighborhood and i was like well #when i say my neighborhood or my city it's understood i'm not taking it away from anybody else #its understood i just mean the city where i live #so why cant we apply the same to lovers? #mine in the way i want to show up for you again and again #ok #done now

[leafygreenresearcher]

Just listened to this episode of Ologies discussing the field of Critical Ecology with its founder Dr. Suzanne Pierre

https://www.alieward.com/ologies/criticalecology

One cool point mentioned was the difference between Environmental Justice and Critical Ecology.

According to Dr. Pierre EJ is more focused on solving and addressing currently occurring issues of injustice, typically on a smaller scale (ie. how to fix current disparities in health outcomes based on segregation).

In contrast CE is working to better understand the root causes of large scale issues and how that impacts the environment (ie. lasting impact of plantation slavery on the soil)

#ologies podcast #critical ecology #environmental justice #dr suzanne pierre #podcast thoughts

[arcticdementor]

A reader sent me this announcement of a talk given at Cornell University by a scientist from the California Academy of Science. I reproduce the announcement in full, complete with italicization and bolding, though I’ve removed Zoom links and email addresses. (I can’t find the talk online, though she does have a short talk on “Ecology as a Locus for Social Change.)  I won’t belabor it at length, as I find its content simply flabbergasting, but I want to point out five things:

It is “critical ecology” in that it infuses real science (ecology) with “critical theory”, itself containing a big dollop of postmodernism.

It is written in the obscurantist style of postmodernism fused with modern wokeist strains (e.g., use of preferred pronouns)

It is tendentious: there is no way that this style of science can be objective. Its aim, as suggested below, is simply to confirm preconceptions of the writer and to push her ideology into ecology. Note especially this sentence: “Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice.” This is social engineering, not science.

This is also an example of the invasion of wokeism into science, as instantiated by Steve Pinker’s recent statement on climate change in the journal Science. But at least the Science stuff, however wrongheaded, was explicitly about policy. Here we have what purports to be a form of science that involves hypothesis testing, but the answers must only come out in a preferred direction.

Note the criticism of “objectivity,” as in this sentence: “critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is ‘objective’, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities.”  Note that “objective” is in scare quotes, and is opposed to the lived experience of those in racialized communities.  It is this redefinition of “objectivity” as “the master’s (e.g. white supremacist’s) tools” that poses the biggest danger of science. Science then merely becomes a matter of one’s preferred opinion or “lived experience”: things not checkable by scientific methods.

The entire announcement is indented.

[@mitigatedchaos]

#jerry coyne #whyevolutionistrue.com #critical ecology

[essektheylyss]

Because I'm going to be thinking about this forever, I do want to talk about how Caleb speaks, because I think there's something to be said for how his protectiveness (in general) actually presents itself.

Caleb uses epithets and allusions a lot. He refers to Nott as "my goblin friend," to Jester as "my blue friend," to Yasha as "my barbarian friend." Yussa is at one point "our wizard friend," and Essek is "my Kryn friend," in the two-shot.

He is also, notably, paranoid about being surveiled. He wears the amulet of nondetection for most of the campaign, and it's not unwarranted, given that Trent locates him and nearly burns down the Blooming Grove the moment he's able to get a lock on them. Trent in fact has been shown to use any and all information he can get ahold of about or from Caleb against him, to a truly extreme level. His seemingly single-minded goal is expressed to be to ensure that not a single aspect of Caleb's life and loved ones is safe at any moment, to perpetuate the threat of harm from any direction in order to essentially control and monopolize Caleb's every thought.

In Echoes of the Solstice, Caleb does suggest that he is not concerned with Trent being able to surveil him any longer, but Trent is not the only threat, and, timey-wimey plot nonsense aside, the Hells' inability to scry on him since then suggests that he is likely wearing an amulet at least by that point in the timeline.

The extent of Trent's focus on him and his ensuing paranoia is extreme, and even beyond when he may no longer feel that Trent is a threat to him, he seems unwilling to allow him to pose a threat to others, and people he cares about in particular.

Within that context, it's not difficult to read his use of epithets, particularly in referring to people who are not currently present (rather than using their name aloud), as a form of protection. Some of his manner of speaking implicitly or explicitly presumes that he is being surveiled, even outside of the context of protectiveness; after Vess Derogna's death, he frequently refers to Lucian only by epithets, most often, "our old friend," and at one point establishes "Lady D," (to Jester's glee) as a code name for Vess Derogna for the specific purposes of countersurveilance.

This method of protection, I would imagine, goes double for Essek; not only does Caleb have the habit of worrying over those who would use his loved ones against him, which is of course borne out in Echoes of the Solstice, but he also must consider that Essek has his own enemies, and a stray mention of his name in the wrong company or setting could get his partner killed. It seems even in that gifset, when Caleb says, "I am worried for Essek," after the encounter with Trent at Vergessen, that he first considers obfuscating, stumbling over allusory phrasing before acknowledging that Trent already has the information he needs, and at that point Trent is their only real concern about who might care, given Lucien is far too focused on reaching the Astral Sea to worry about hostages.

When Caleb answers Jester's, "And he's going to hurt Essek," with a silence and an oblique reply, it feels most to me like a further measure of protection, knowing that knowledge is power that can be used against him and his loved ones, and silence is the weapon he has against it.

#critical role #caleb widogast #shadowgast #essek thelyss #cr meta #trent ikithon #echoes of the solstice #anyway I've been thinking about this nonstop nobody talk to me nobody look at me #I am not gonna keep harping on about how interpreting a lack of direct mention of someone = a lack of caring or interest but #I will float alternative readings into the ecosystem. diversify the ecology lmao

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Okay, y'all, it's rant time again. Buckle up.

A new report just came out from Public Citizen highlighting the dangers of using apps and AI foraging guides for identifying mushrooms, particularly when mushroom foraging. It's the latest in a string of warnings that are fighting against a tide of purported convenience ("just take a picture and get your answer instantly!")

I've ranted about this since last August, and I also wrote up a detailed post on how to identify an AI-generated foraging guide. I'm also including info on the limitations of apps and AI in The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go. I'm not just saying this to toot my own horn--it's because nature identification, and teaching it to others, is literally what I do for a living. So this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

I teach a very, very specific sort of identification class; whether we're focusing on animals, plants, fungi, or all of the above, I walk people through a detailed process of how to observe a given organism, make note of its various physical traits and habitat, and use that information to try to determine what it is. I emphasize the need to use as many sources as possible--field guides, websites, online and in-person groups, journal articles, etc.--to make absolutely sure that your identification is solid.

And every year, I get people (thankfully, a very small minority of my students) who complain because my two-hour basic mushroom hunting class wasn't just five minutes of introduction and one hundred and fifteen minutes of me showing slide after slide of edible mushrooms. There are so many people out there who just want a quick, easy answer so they can frolic in the woods and blithely pick mushrooms like some idealized image of a cottagecore herbalist with a cabin full of dried plants and smiling frogs or something.

While I do incorporate a bit of information on getting started with the app iNaturalist in my classes, it is as only ONE of MANY tools I encourage people to use. Sure, it's more solid than most apps because, in addition to the algorithmic I.D. suggestions it initially gives you, other iNaturalist users can go onto your observations later and either agree with your I.D.s or suggest something different and even explain why.

And yet--even as great as iNat is, it and its users can still be wrong. So can every other I.D. app out there. And I think that is one thing that the hyper-romanticized approaches to foraging--and nature identification in general--miss. In order to be a good forager, you HAVE to also be good at nature identification.

And nature identification is an entire process that requires you to have solid observational and critical thinking skills, to be able to independently research using many different types of tools, and be willing to invest the time, patience, and focus to properly arrive at a solid identification--if not to species level, then as far down the taxonomic ladder as you can realistically manage. (There's a reason even the experts complain about Little Brown Mushrooms and Damned Yellow Composites!)

People mistake one single tool--apps--for the entire toolkit. They assume any book they find on Amazon is going to be as good as any other, and don't take the time to look up the author to determine any credentials or experience, or even whether they actually exist or not. It doesn't help that the creators of these products often advertise them as "the only [book/app/etc.] you need to easily identify [organism of choice]!"

I mean, sure, the world isn't going to end if you never question the birdsong results on the Merlin app, or if you go through life thinking a deer fern is just a baby western sword fern. But when we get into people actually eating things they find in the wild, there's often no room for error. There are plants and mushrooms that can kill you even if you only eat a tiny amount. And even if they don't kill you, they may make you wish you were dead for a few days while you suffer through a whole host of gastrointestinal nastiness and other symptoms.

There aren't any shortcuts if you want to be safe in your foraging. You HAVE to be willing to do the work. And any teacher, author, or product that says otherwise isn't being ethical. I'm glad to see more people speaking out against the "fast foodization" of foraging in regards to overreliance on apps and the existence of AI foraging books; I just hope it's enough to prevent more people from getting sick or dying.

#long post #foraging #mushroom foraging #mushroom hunting #A.I. #apps #nature #ecology #environment #conservation #cottagecore #herbalism #nature identification #critical thinking skills #critical thinking #media literacy #mushrooms #fungi #fungus #shrooms

[wildlifetracker]

Panamanian Golden Frog, Atelopus zeteki

Endemic to Panama. Extinct in the wild.

#frog #frogs #endangered animals #critically endangered #mine #endangered #animals #wildlife #nature #amphibians #amphibian #ecology #central america #panama #panama golden frog #naturalist #zoologist #ecologist #nature photography #photography #herpetology #herpetofauna #herping #zoo #zoos #zoo animals #froggie #froggy #froggo #froggggg

[c0mpoundeyes]

Calling anyone in Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Texas: USGS is asking the public to send in dead butterflies and moths for research to understand their decline !

An article with more info:

https://www.kosu.org/energy-environment/2023-07-25/oklahomans-are-asked-to-mail-in-dead-butterflies-moths-in-the-name-of-science

(image: a Sinai baton blue I painted a few years back)

#old art #ecology #i dont usually make posts like this but having worked with endsngered and critically endangered butterfly conservation before #this is very important to me

[troythecatfish]

#memes #tumblr memes #meme #speculative ecology #speculative evolution #speculative biology #speculative zoology #dank memes #speculative evolution memes #relatablepost #relatable af #art meme #art memes #spec evo #specevo #criticizing #critisism #constructive criticism

[cantsayidont]

I am generally fond of the Peter Jackson LORD OF THE RINGS movies (much more so than THE HOBBIT trilogy, which is an unmitigated disaster from start to finish), but I still feel that it was a tremendous error to remove "The Scouring of the Shire" from the ending of RETURN OF THE KING. I think I understand the rationale for omitting it — it further complicates what's already a protracted finale, and it is kind of a downer — but I suspect it's one of the changes to which Tolkien himself would have most objected.

First, it's an essential element in the arc of Frodo. Frodo has already been wounded in a way that even Elrond and Gandalf can't entirely fix, even after they remove the notch of the Morgul-knife. After enduring an impossible ordeal, he returns to the Shire to find that the war has come home in a way that, at least for him, can't be fully set right even after Saruman is dead and much of the immediate damage repaired. Frodo's original conflicts have been seemingly resolved: At the beginning of the book, he's seen in Hobbiton as an irresponsible youth of dubious background who grows into another suspicious eccentric like Bilbo, but by the end, they want to make him the mayor (to which Frodo only very reluctantly and temporarily agrees), and even his feud with the Sackville-Bagginses is ended. Even so, Frodo is left far more alienated than he ever was to start with, which is why he finally chooses to go over Sea rather than live out his life in the Shire.

Second, while it is superficially rather grim, I think Tolkien might have argued that it's actually his most hopeful chapter. Tolkien says in the introduction to the second edition that "The Scouring of the Shire" had its roots in his own childhood:

The country in which I lived in childhood [in Warwickshire] was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important.

Thus, it seems significant that the shabby destruction of the Shire at the hands of Saruman and his men is actually set right remarkably quickly. As soon as Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return, they're able to rouse the other hobbits to action and drive out the ruffians within a matter of days, and Sam is even able to use Galadriel's gift to replace most of the trees that have been carelessly destroyed, with a magnificent mallorn-tree in place of the beloved Party Tree. The Shire hasn't wholly escaped the scars of industrialization, but the hobbits have come to their senses and turned back before it was too late.

That is really the most optimistic element of the story's finale. Aragorn's coronation means a restoration of order to the West, but magic and wonder are fading away or departing over Sea. Arwen has made the choice of Luthien and is doomed to eventually fade and leave the world; in the Appendices, after Aragorn's death, she returns to Lórien, now deserted, and essentially lies down and dies. Tolkien did not feel the Ents would ever find the Ent-wives, so they too will probably never flourish again. However, the Shire endures, in a way that the country where Tolkien grew up did not — not by remaining completely aloof from the world, but by rejecting the new mill and the smokestacks, and by "thousands of willing hands of all ages" deliberately tearing down everything built by Saruman and using the bricks "to repair many an old hole, to make it snugger and drier."

#movies #books #lord of the rings #lotr #peter jackson #return of the king #jrr tolkien #the scouring of the shire #frodo baggins #saruman #tolkien's ecological imaginings are not above criticism #they're still rooted in a kind of pastoral fantasy #but it is somehow heartening to imagine #that the horrors of industrialization aren't irreparable

[queering-ecology]

Chap 12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (part 3, final)

Queer Ecologies

‘what it might mean to inhabit the natural world having been transformed by the experience of its loss’?

‘[the queer artist's] natures are not saved wildernesses; they are wrecks, barrens, cutovers, nuclear power plants: unlikely refuges and impossible gardens. But they are also sites for extraordinary reflection on life, beauty, and community’ (344)

AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts

The artist (Jan Zita Grover’s North Enough) writes about moving from San Francisco, where she has worked as a personal caregiver to many individuals who were dying, and died of, AIDS, eventually to the woods of Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota hoping for ‘a geographic cure’ to her burnout and grief. (344)

‘in their persistence [grief, mourning], generate a form of imagination—an awareness of the persistence of loss—that allows her to conceive of the natural world around her in ways that challenge the logic of commodity substitution characterizing contemporary relations of nature consumption” (344)

“The north woods did not provide me with a geographic cure. But they did something much finer. Instead of ready-made solutions, they offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality and then beyond those to their strengths—their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.  AIDS, I believe, prepared me to perform these imaginative feats. In learning to know and love the north woods, not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them” (344)

Rather than the landscape of her dreams, the land looks more like a candidate for reclamation. Through Grover’s research we learn that the region is one that been ‘systematically abused: logged several times, drained, subjected to failed attempts at agriculture, depleted, abandoned, eroded, invaded, neglected.”

Jack pines are predominant in the region; tenacious, ‘the first conifers to reestablish themselves after a fire” (16), in their own way remarkable even as they are useless for lumber, short lived, and not at all the sorts of trees about which adjectives like ‘breathtaking’ circulate” (345) they are a loud testament to the violence that has generated them.

“the diminishment of this landscape mortified and disciplined me. Its scars will outlast me, bearing witness for decades beyond my death to the damage done here” (20) But still: the love emerges, painfully, gradually, intimately. (345)

She experiences the landscape in terms of loss and change, rather than idyll and replacement. It is all personal; it is all about developing a way of making meaning that recognizes the singularities of the past and takes responsibility for the future in the midst of intimate devastation. (345)

‘Environmental hubris’—fly fishing, the introduction of non-native fish to the river, changing temperatures of rivers caused by logging and diversion; specific policies, politics, and technologies that have had effects on the rivers, the fish, and the other species throughout the river and the north woods (356)

A refusal to demonize the ‘invasive’ species; Grover herself is ‘invasive’ both culturally and personally (white settlers and big city imports) thus her ethical claim is not for purity but for an active and thoughtful remembering of historical violences in the midst of ongoing necessity of movement and change (346)

Seek relationships with Clear-cuts and landfills in order to bring to the foreground the massive weight of human devastation of the natural world; “a discerning eye can see how unstewarded most of this land has been. The charm lies in finding ways to love with such loss and pull from it what beauties remain” (81) (347)

“she does not romanticize the dying even as she might mourn their loss to the world; instead [through Grover] we witness each loss as particular, irrevocable, and concrete: she is their witness” (347)

Can we learn to see these landscapes as creation as well as destruction?

Rather than mourn the loss of the pristine, she carefully cultivates an attitude of appreciation of what lies before her, beyond the aesthetic wilderness to the intricate details of human interactions with the species and landscapes of the region. In this manner she comes to be able to find the beauty in, for example, landfills and clearcuts; far from naivete or technophilia, this ability is grounded in a commitment to recognizing the simultaneity of death and life in these landscapes, the glut of aspen-loving birds in the clear-cut, the swallows, turkey vultures, and bald eagles near the landfill.

--

It is necessary to face our fear and pain; we have to make room in our relationships with the natural world, queer and otherwise, for the recognition that that is what we might be feeling in the first place (355)

#queer ecologies: sex nature politics desire #queer ecology #queer theory #ecofeminism #critical ecology #environmental politics #ecology #aids crisis #mourning nature #ecogrief #colonialism #environmental degradation #melancholia #queer politics #melancholy #environmentalism #climate and environment #environmental justice #forests

[valley-of-the-lost]

How Sarah J Maas treats humans in relation with the immortal species in her books makes me think she doesn't consider why humans are the way we are and that we would indeed have advantages over immortal and technically more physically durable beings.

#voice of the lost #anti sjm #sjm critical #anti acotar #even the waxing poetic about feyres human heart doesn't feel like it understands why thats an advantage for humans #its because we're pack animals #there's safety in packs and being able to form connections with other creatures improves capabilities and survival #also why the hell do the fae seem more technologically advanced than the humans #they're supposedly super powerful what evolutionary pressures are there for them to technologically innovate #are the courts beyond the wall a very bizarre and specific ecological niche #etc etc

[s0larpuppypunk]

One thing I fucking hate about militant/moralist vegans is that,,,,, y'all never seem to ever talk/care about the fact that a LOT of vegan food is ALSO farmed in really horrible ways that fuck over the environment and displace native ecosystems. Like,,,, meat or no meat, things being plants doesn't immediately make it harmless.

Eating animals isn't inherently evil either, we are a naturally omnivorous species. And I don't think we should use indigenous people as "gotchas", but it's important they're included in these conversations and we acknowledge that, as a species, we've been safely and sustainably feeding off of animals for longer than capitalism has existed. ALSO THERE ARE A LOT OF DISABLED PEOPLE OUT THERE THAT HAVE ILLNESSES THAT CAUSE DIETARY RESTRICTIONS THAT MEAN THEY CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT ANIMAL PRODUCTS, DEMONIZING THEM, TALKING OVER THEM, OR DISMISSING THEM OR CLAIMING "There are alternatives, I know better than you, you're lazy/evil for not doing *insert bullshit*" IS AN ACT OF ECOFASCIST EUGENICS. SHUT TF UP.

TL;DR: It doesn't matter if it's animals or plants, I think we can all agree that industrialized farming, no matter what it is, is pretty fucking awful overall. And ANYTHING can be "vegan" if it's farmed and cultivated ethically. Also, people who's diets are core to their cultures and health/survival do not deserve to be attacked, if y'all do that shit, you don't care about anything. You're just an indoctrinated ecofascist POS.

#Solarpunk #ecology #environmentalism #sustainability #nature #vegan critical #personal farming #disability

[she-is-ovarit]

What career field are you in? Leave a reply or respond via tags. I'm curious!

#Natural Sciences #Ecology technically #I was going to make a poll but it seems impossible to group career fields into just 10 categories #radblr #radfem #gender critical

[fatehbaz]

Adam Sills’s well-written and beautifully produced Against the Map is in some ways a strange book to review [...] [from the disciplinary perspective of environmental studies]. Sills shows little interest in environmental history or ecocriticism, even in the “ecology without nature” mode [...]. His basic argument is that cartography, because of print capitalism, seeped into all sorts of facets of life on the British Isles during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It became something that playwrights, novelists, and creative nonfiction types, like Samuel Johnson, developed spaces of resistance to in their publications. Sills highlights the political nature and problematic historical genealogies of maps, an argument that has broader implications for [contemporary] environmental historians who use maps to convey [relatively more “objective” and/or “scientific” information] [...].

Sills begins by accepting the idea, derived from Ben Anderson’s comparative work, that “the history of the map and the history of the modern nation state are inextricably bound up with each other” (p. 1). He then cites two of the key analysts of this in relation to Britain: Richard Helgerson on the literary nationalism of the English Renaissance and John Brewer on the fiscal-military state of the eighteenth century, with its army of surveyors and excise tax collectors. In this historiography, the “surveyor emerges as an authorial figure,” key to the making of the modern state as distinct from traditional dynastic and ecclesiastical authority (p. 3). Combined with cheap printing, the result was what Mary Pedley has called a “democratization of the map” (p. 4). [...]

---

For John Bunyan, the “neighborhood” became a site of resistance (as it is for Denis Wood in his 2010 Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas). [...]

For Aphra Behn, [...] the theater and “built environment” of the “fragmented, chameleonlike ... scenic stage” had the ability to challenge coherent representations of the Atlantic empire produced by maps like those of world atlas publisher and road mapper John Ogilby (p. 65).

From Dublin, Jonathan Swift directly satirized the cartographic and statistical impulses of the likes of William Petty, Henry Pratt, and Herman Moll, who all helped visualize London’s colonial relationship with Ireland [...].

From London, Daniel Defoe questioned efforts to define what precisely makes a market or market town through maps and travel itineraries, pointing toward the entropic aspects of the market (“its inherent instabilities and elusive nature”) that challenged and escaped efforts to stabilize such spaces through representations in print (p. 163).

Johnson’s travels to Scotland redefined surveying, resisting the model put forward by the fiscal-military state in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.

---

The final chapter and conclusion, “The Neighborhood Revisited,” looks at Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), a classic novel of the artificial environment of the estate garden. By the early nineteenth century, neighborhoods were more like gated communities and symptomatic of Burkean conservatism and nostalgia. But in Austen’s hands, their structures of affect also suggest the limits of the controversial map- and data-centric literary methodologies [...] and perhaps more broadly the digital humanities. “The principle of spatial difference and differentiation, the heterotopic conceit, always remains a formal possibility, not only at the margins of the empire but at its very center as well,... a possibility that the map cannot acknowledge or register in any fashion” (p. 234). For Sills, this is true of eighteenth-century mapping as well as the fashion for “graphs, maps, and trees” in the early twenty-first century.

---

Sills’s basic argument, that a certain canonical strain of English literature - from Bunyan to Austen - positioned itself “against the map,” seems quite solid. He makes this point most directly by appealing to the work of Mary Poovey on the modern “fact,” with the map as “a rhetorical mode ... that serves to legitimate private and state interests by displacing and, ultimately, effacing the political, religious, and economic impact of those interests” (p. 91).

Nevertheless, returning to a[n] [exclusively] canonical, Bunyan-centered, “small is beautiful” neighborhood approach [potentially ignoring planetary environmental systems, the global context, in cartography] seems limited and problematic from the perspective of Anthropocene [...]. The global maps and mathematics used by the likes of Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton, which were directly satirized by Swift in the Laputa section of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), did something different than Petty’s mapping of Ireland. High-flying as they may have been, such maps and diagrams were key to the development of [...] environmental thinking by Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Alexander von Humboldt, and others in the nineteenth century. More recently, global mapping [...], like the internet closely tied initially to the modern American fiscal-military state, have [also later then] been essential to identifying processes of climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, dead zones, sea level rise, desertification, and a host of other processes that would otherwise be challenging to perceive. This is no mere “Vanity Fair.” Sills’s book would have benefited from engaging with Jason Pearl’s Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, published in 2014 [...]. Pearl also does close readings of Behn, Defoe, and Swift, choosing Margaret Cavendish instead of Bunyan and stopping in 1730, just before things became picturesque but just after they were financialized by the South Sea Bubble, Newton’s mint, and Robert Walpole. Pearl reproduces maps by Defoe of Robinson Crusoe’s global travels and of Crusoe’s island, Swift of Houyhnhnmland, Ambrosius Holbein of Thomas More’s Utopia [...].

What if rather than “against the map,” we are seeing struggles between radical and conservative cartography [...] engaged in a fight over the future (utopia)?

What if what [...] [some have] called “capitalist realism” [...], what might in the eighteenth century be called “nationalist realism,” is not the only thing happening with maps and the imagination?

---

Text above by: Robert Batchelor. “Review of Sills, Adam, Against the Map: The Politics of Geography in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. May 2023. Published online at: h-net,org/reviews/showrev,php?id:58887. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. In this post, all italicized text within brackets added by me.]

#hmm lot going on here pretty thoughtprovoking for a review #i have lots of thoughts about radical potential of maps for conception of planetary scale and antiimperialism #though simultaneously must remain critical of panopticon aerial perspective of satellite imagery as batchelor says originating with usempire #to acknowledge radical alternatives to imperial mapping in nineteenth century #instead of namedropping humboldt and darwin and chauvinist racist figures i wouldve pointed to #exslaves and abolitionists and their use of global scale conceptions to frame revolutionary atlantic and international solidarity #anyway #abolition #ecology #colonial

[plethoraworldatlas]

The innovation of a 3D-printed device from the University of Edinburgh could pave the way to the abolition of animal testing. The plastic “body-on-chip” device contains human cells from five major organs — the brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver — and simulates chemicals moving through the circulatory system by using positron emission tomography (PET) scanning. “This device is the first to be designed specifically for measuring drug distribution … essentially, allowing us to see where a new drug goes in the body and how long it stays there, without having to use a human or animal to test it,” Liam Carr, inventor of the device, told The Guardian. Future models could also show how organs in different stages of disease react to medicine — as well as how everyday items like foods, aerosols, and cleaners affect the human body — improving precision in biomedical experiments. This device is an example of innovation in biomedical models that could replace animal testing. It could also be cheaper and faster than testing new drugs on live animals. “This device shows really strong potential to reduce the large number of animals that are used worldwide for testing drugs and other compounds, particularly in the early stages, where only 2% of compounds progress through the discovery pipeline,” said Dr. Adriana Tavares of the University’s Centre for Cardiovascular Science according to WION News.

#ecology #enviromentalism #science #animal testing #experimentation #Remember reading about early versions of this tech years ago #Always fascinated me #But I ended up seeing a bunch of people rally against it for the dumbest reasons #I'm sorry I thought the point was to try and get research data and results that can eventually help people #Even the “best animal testing” is still fairly off due to the sheer biological differences #This can help save time and resources AND yield more useful results AND at the very least massively reduces animal testing #But some people decided the scientists who've spend years on this were “attacking scientific traditions” or were “ARAs GONE MAD” #First off “Grand scientific traditions”???? #Second way to either admit you have no relevant knowledge or straight up ignore all the many valid criticisms of animal testing #What were they rallying against? Better testing with less waste? More usable data faster? #The potential reduction in animal testing? (They were mostly mad about that)