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Eco-criticism offers one way to narrate our world, imagine a different world. Playing with call & response, we will explore our epigenetic potential to not only imagine, but to co-create–conspire others ways of being, collective becomings. My primary invitation through our corporeal consciousness is to reconsider what we think we know.
We will watch and discuss:
Objects As Storytellers: CoEvolving through Interspecies Intimacies – YouTube
Objects as Storytellers: We Will Dance With Mountains – YouTube
We will explore infrastructures of storytelling–storytelling as webs of sense-making (sensorial relationality vs. “common-sense,” status quo normalcy–remembering that Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech was originally titled: “Normalcy No More”).
To counter interlocking hegemonies of cultural erasure, we will play with Bioregional Learning Centers, such as my eco-action model S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local): a manifestation of “contact zones,” Mary Louise Pratt’s term for intermedial third spaces of cross-sector exchange, asymmetrical interrelationships that generate creativity—not through conversion, but through insatiable curiosity and a profound respect for and cultivation of difference.
Debilitating the vitality of contact zones, neocolonialism depends on the externalization of costs that reinforce “sacrifice zones:” an unquestioned (neutralized) standard of living that is maintained at the expense of people, wildlife, and more-than-human ecosystems—all seen as dispensable, disposable. Such venal institutionalized norms disregard the lives of present and future generations. Ravaged through high-tech fabulations and economies of alienation, like with climate-crisis injustices, those least responsible for converging calamities are hardest hit.
We will challenge taken-for-granted band-aids: greenwashing masquerading as “renewables,” “coexistence,” “sustainability,” “civilization.” Like sacrifice zones, disparate impacts, externalities, collateral damage, and road-effect zones, all hidden costs must be examined in their entirety—including persuasion psychology and behavioral engineering. We will examine the personal-political permeable borders of these intersections.
I’m asking that we don’t sit back in our self-congratulating human exceptionalism/ white modernity—again under the guise of “interspecies empathy,” but continue to question what we take for granted as the norm/ the ostensibly inevitable.
The quotidian of dominator-culture is founded on and addicted to hidden costs (economic, corporeal, psychological, and spiritual). “We”/“our” refers to those who (perhaps unwittingly) participate in dominator civilizations characterized by a consumption-based middle-class standard of living that depends on toxic systems and the exploited labor of others. We will challenge consumer complicity that sustains the status quo through environmental racism in the United States and green colonialism throughout the Global South. Only then are we prepared to disentangle the interrelational roots of geopolitical, ecological, spiritual, and health crises. Additionally externalizing the costs by dismissing electric vehicles’ embodied energy, this “emission-free” solution promulgates environmental racism as green colonialism— exported out of the United States into the Global South.
Martin Luther King, Jr. declared: “One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”
I’m curious about this palpability…that is what I was referring to when I mentioned epigenetics and shifting our evolutionary myceliation…given that evolution is not a trajectory, but ever-unfolding rhizomatic interrelationships….like mycelium that travel and tell stories beneath our feet…
What if we could evolve our cellular consciousness/ our somatic cognition to shift fundamental relationships that would drive profound infrastructural changes.
A cibopath is someone who has the ability to consume food and know everything about the food’s history–a kind of supply-chain consciousness. Food=cibo & Knowledge/Intuition=path (suffering). Cibopathic capacity represents a cellular knowing of an “object’s” (in this case, food) supply chain—it’s embodied energy, life-cycle analysis, cradle-to-grave awareness. For example, if someone bites into a banana, they get a somatic download of how the banana was grown (with or without DDT banned in the US, but flagrantly used by North American corporations throughout the Global South), the banana eater senses whose bodies were involved in the production and transportation of that banana (migrant workers, cargo ships powered by coal, the coal miners, and on and on)…the imbricated stories of agribusiness and subsistence farming unfold with each bite. Or if someone bites into a hamburger, the story of the cow is revealed: did the grass-fed cow come from a nearby small farm or did the industrialized animal-object/ meat come from a massive-scale CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation), slaughtered indiscriminately or by using Temple Grandin’s “squeeze machine” techniques. I am suggesting that these layers of embodied awareness as we eat could influence the possibilities of our individual-collective epigenetic potential to evolve as we develop/ unveil this kind of somatic cognition.
And, I am asking for others to play with different examples of worlds like this profound attentiveness and sensitivity that already exist. Like a sommelier who can detect the layers of stories in a sip of wine. What if these awarenesses were part of our genetic make-up, our cellular understanding of the world? Wouldn’t we have to make other choices and develop other kinds of infrastructures that support and sustain these choices?
