8/25

Today my classmate asked a really good question, which was "How does 'more than human' relate to things such as colonialism?" My first thought is about the Bison of the Plains region of North America, and how they were hunted by Colonizing European Americans as a tool to erase indigenous populations by taking away a major food source, cultural symbol, source of warmth, and more. Nature is a part of us, and people in power can and will use it to oppress others. I also think of the American South which greatly suffers from things like coal mining and factories, which pollute the South, a historically poor area which is filled with Black and Hispanic peoples, who are especially impacted by the pollution due to housing closer to it being far more affordable than housing which does not have to see that kind of pollution. Nature being negatively impacted affects minorities greatly, and when we try to solve problems like that, we have to simultaneously think about the natural world and the human beings which live in it.

it seems foolish to discuss nature w/o talking about endemic poverty which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about corporations given human agency which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about colonialism which seems foolish to discuss w/o talking about misogyny -Tommy Pico, Nature Poem

I find that this quote really speaks to how I see environmentalism. I would add to this quote that it also feels foolish to talk about misogyny without talking about nature, as many arguments in favor of misogyny do use the biological and natural aspects of male and female to justify misogyny. Everything is connected, that's why there is a life cycle, a food web, and more. When it comes to nature, you can always find your way out of that discussion just to be roped right back into the point you began with. When we talk about nature we also must consider how people who experience poverty rely on nature as a source of life, but you also must talk about how those people came to be in such poverty which opens the discussion of corporations using said people like a machine, which you can't talk about without acknowledging that said system was created by enslaving people, particularly people whose descendants now suffer from said endemic poverty, who now have a different way of life due to the changing circumstances brought by enslavement and capitalism, and that different way of life will be taught by women, as women in those positions are both forced to work endlessly for a corporation and their families to ensure survival, an instinct which comes from our very nature as animals. We, as human beings, cannot be separated from nature. As a result, that which we as human beings create, whether it be machines, systems, governments, mathematical equations, words, or buildings, also cannot be separated from nature.

8/26

I was thinking about the more than human discussion and one of my classmates brought up a good point about how we as humans have created a power imbalance in nature, and I thought of the movie Jaws. Jaws is a cultural phenomenon which has heavily influenced how people see sharks, which has made it much harder to do shark conservation. Jaws, as a cultural phenomenon, has demonized sharks so much that the general public sees them as killers first and animals second.

We also talked a lot about Robin Wall Kimmerer's idea of using a seperate pronoun for plants, which was Ki/Kin. In that conversation a lot of interesting points were made, and we kept coming back to the impact using any pronouns for plants could have. Some people argued that it is a pronoun meant purely for objects, and that Kimmerer was creating a new set of pronouns in order to shift people's perception of plants away from things that are inanimate to a view that moreso sees plants as a living being, just ones unlike ourselves. However, others argued that no one pronoun truely refers to non-living objects, and that instead of changing the pronouns we as English speakers use for plants, we should instead be changing our perception of plants first. Its a big "chicken or the egg" situation. Does language change because peoples perceptions change, or do people's perceptions change because of language? What the right answer is, I'm not quite sure. Although someone in class today somebody actually did bring up something I am sure of, and that is the sexes of plants.

In many indo-european languages, the pronouns used for someone often is connected with their gender, or historically, their sex, so in a conversation about the pronouns of plants, the topic of a plants sex and how that may impact how we refer to said plant is a good thing to bring up. Now, we are applying very human concepts to nature, putting things in neat and tidy categories, but we must remember that evolution and mother nature does not care about categories or easy to define terminology. That being said, "plants" is a very broad term, especially compared to the term "human," so this requires quite a bit of generalization and will have a lot of exceptions, but plants usually do not have the same kinds of sexes we do as humans. Plant reproduction varies greatly, so yes, there are some genuses of plant which do have a female and male sex, but many others are completely hermaphroditic, and others have more than two sexes. In fact, just because a species has two distinct sexes does not neccessarily mean that they are male and female, and on top of all that in some plants it can be near impossible to tell, only being possible by genetic testing. So, if we were to use a plants sex to determine which pronouns to use for said plant, it would get very complicated, very quickly.

Diagram of a standard heraphroditic flower (Credit to Holly Thompson)

A diagram of the evolution and various types of plant sexes (Credit to Rishi Aryal and Ray Ming)