Saturday, September 28th at 7:00 PM at Chris' house in Whitefish.
Banter 50! Wow. Quite the ongoing tradition.This is Mitch writing this up as a placeholder for Sabine who likely has better insight and her typical great introductory ruminations that provide such good fodder for discussion. The topic speaks for itself, I suppose...what are your thoughts on human interactions with other animal species?
Mitch's Submission.
If I make this banter, it will be because the weather was lousy and I couldn't go to the cabin. Since there is a chance I'll miss it, I'll keep this short.
My first thought was that humans are animals. When I am in the presence of other hairless monkeys, I often find that fact hard to remember (having non-human animals around, wild or tame, is a great reminder of this). I found some decent long form videos on the topic of why we consciously or subconsciously separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom, with lots of conjecture on why (fear of mortality, feeling 'dirty' or 'uncivilized' etc.). It was all pretty long and heady stuff so, instead, I am posting some short videos you can peruse of human animals artistically and with reverence mimicking other non-human animals through body paint and contortions. One could overanalyze the art to make it fit the topic but, really, I just think it's pretty cool.
Link to several short videos here.
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Isaac's contribution:
This had some interesting discussion of the evolution of empathy as an outgrowth of maternal instincts
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/06/10/episode-50-patricia-churchland-on-conscience-morality-and-the-brain/
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Kirk Bryan's contribution:
Here is a documentary that sums up his
message in "Homo Deus"
Homo Deus also deals with the relation of people and animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ChHc5jhZxs
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Sabine's contribution:
Still not fully knowing our topic (though thanks hugely Mitch for posting above!! just seeing this today 9/25/19), or whether we've even agreed on one topic or are showing up split between two topics, I've sort of just been mulling over humans, the eras we've been part of on the earth, and the one we are dragging (have dragged) the other animals into along with our various habits and neuroses, the Anthropocene. This concept seems it may kind of bridge the Homo Deus topic (which I haven't gotten a copy of yet via an awaited library hold) and the relationship with other animals topic.
Greta Thunberg's emotion-laden face from her speech yesterday comes to mind too; I've spent many days since I was her age with that chest-fallen feeling & a screwed-tight face about to burst into tears for feeling viscerally what we are doing to the ice that polar bears need to continue to exist, for the most beautiful, pupil-dilating ecosystems that would be vastly intact without our continual chiseling, for snow geese that would never have to confuse a safe body of water with an unsafe one (Butte) were it not for us, and a thousand other examples that make me fold in half sometimes with a sorrow that shouldn't really be shakeable and set down to get on with one's day best one can. Go Greta; don't set it down and get on with your day (much like Jane Goodall did not, has not - thanks for incl. her pic here, Mitch!).
I sometimes (to get through the day) will weigh my whole sense of humans not having wrecked it all based on particular geese flying overhead above Whitefish that I've seen leave on the same routes this time of year again and again. I concern my poetry with ecocriticism concerns at times, such as a couple published a while back called "Comfort Food" (has a geese migration line) and "Dialogue Between Species" (wolf/human dialogue). I hang seed from my roofline for birds like it offsets the whole house I occupy like a bully (filled with cats!) in a fragile ecosystem. I watch the songbirds sit at said feeder from inside on the coldest negative days in February and worry at the way a particular one will linger, fluff himself best he can, and lean against the glass, peering in (so it seems to my anthropomorphizing mind) at the fire. I say my soul mate, should such a thing exist, was a big bouncy black Newfoundland by the name of Ladybug who I know I made incredibly happy and who made me so incredibly too, in addition to aiding me to see the point of life & the point of not being morose so many times. What do I do without these animals to make me feel better about myself and about humans not being powerful enough to wreck a whole planet of lovelier systems? So, human absorbed, even my sorrows over this!
Yammerings aside, I wish to hear from Trista, our resident geologist in the group, if this working definition of Anthropocene has any merit among actual geologists, or is merely a popular term / concept at the moment only relevant to certain echo chambers: Noun: "t
he current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Example:
"Some geologists argue that the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution." Apparently it was first made popular by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/). Also, I'd like to read this book I came across in sleuthing for podcasts or articles for this blog contribution: Wildlife in the Anthropocene by Jamie Lorimer. And I think this article is interesting, but perhaps too reassuring as to what the anthropocene actually should feel to us: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170801-the-animals-thriving-in-the-anthropocene The photo of this tiger at the head of this last article (http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/07/when-human-wildlife-conflict-is-about-so-much-more/), brings to mind my concern and question for the evening, do we in the Anthropocene era need to assist wildlife differently in certain situations and ecosystems than our previous wildlife policies of hands off / let nature take its course (drowning polar bears, for example; drought-laden elephant herds that die far from the old water sources, etc.). If nature cannot take its course due to our impacts, other than extinction, do we still let nature take that course to try to keep hands off from the wildness & wild genius of our fellow animals we've doomed (polar bears, penguins, ocean life, and so on)? Does this relationship we have with wild animals need to remain the same when it was created under the conditions where we presumed nature could survive us? How awful if our lesser minds (in regard to wildness and being part of a natural system) end up, even in our compassion, erasing the migration paths from the geese's minds, erasing the paths of survival through the Arctic once known for so long by bears who handed it down to other bears. Do we keep them alive by making them all more like us, and less like they had been? Or, do we let them die off, along with their lovely oldest paths that won't be followed or known any more?
These are my cheery fall thoughts,
Sabine
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Pre-meeting Doodle Poll: https://doodle.com/poll/hia6pg8rgau7285p
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