9/1 - Rural Roadkill

Chapter Two talks a lot about roadkill, especially mentioning how rural roads have more roadkill than urban roads. What I noticed was that there was no distinction between rural areas, as in areas which are mostly highway with surrounding wilderness, and rural, as in farm land and areas which are populated by humans but not densely. You especially mention North Dakota, which my family comes from. What I have noticed is that this highway rural is very different from farm rural. In North Dakota my family lives in a town with a few dozen farms and ranches, with the only roads being dirt and gravel. Roadkill is a very uncommon sight on those roads from my experience, as cars are few and far between, and those driving the cars are people who are very aware of their surroundings, especially wildlife. You seem to come at road kill from a very urban perspective, saying that those who want to “make use of” the animals they unintentionally hit and kill are, in a way, practicing anthropocentrism. I would argue however that use is a very natural concept. In nature, nothing exists without reason, including death. When an animal dies, they become of use to their environment, scavengers and predators eating their flesh, their insides rotting and becoming a part of the dirt in which plants will extract nutrients from. Usefulness is not a human concept, but rather a very natural one. When I see people making use of roadkill, I see the cycle of life continuing. Taking these corpses to a waste center doesn’t do anybody any good. Nature refuses to waste anything, and humans, as a part of nature, share that trait.

9/3 - Rat Film and Rat Reviews

The movie felt more like it's about Baltimore than rats, kinda using rats as a way to represent the people of Baltimore, specifically the Black American population. They are densely populated in certain areas, where they can be hunted for “being in peoples backyards” and often those who hate the rats the most are just people trying to survive.

I also found the videogame aspect of the film interesting. In all honesty, I have no idea what that was meant to convey. Maybe how rats see the world? It seemed to draw some inspiration from 3d games like GTA with the low poly graphics, eventually switching to pictures from google maps. I’m not quite sure why that was done or why it was important. Same with the forensics mentioned. The film constantly feels like it's drawing your attention to various rats in a rat king, tied together but each moving on their own volition, trying to escape the knot without understanding that the harder they pull the tighter the knot gets.

Both the game and the forensic science scene are built for people to experience a constructed reality. However, in both cases they don’t fully encapsulate the realness of the given situation, in a way similar to the built experiment of the rats.

9/4 - Answering the Unknown

This week was focused primarily on the book “The Sound of Feathers” by Kathryn Gillespie, which takes time to reflect on the attentiveness (or lack thereof) that humans have for the more-than-human. My feelings on the book are definitely mixed, I have a lot of differing opinions than Gillespie, but the main thing I was (at first) frustrated with was the lack of solutions. My family is one that fumes, complaining is a common thing for both my parents and my grandparents. Complaints are used to fill silence, finding small annoyances to bring up. Moreso, my family enjoys debates. My dinner conversations were filled with political, economic, and philosophical debate, questioning and trying to find perfect answers to every topic. Complaining always came with the unsaid expectation that a solution was already reached, and that voicing a complaint was just to fill the void, and if someone had a different answer than you, then you must prove to them that your idea is better.

Over time I learned that most people do not function with, or necessarily appreciate, my family's complaints or readiness to debate. Now I am pretty good about keeping my complaining and need to be right to a minimum, but when reading this book I, at first, kept expecting an answer. A magical solution to the world's problems that has only not been enacted due to the elite class which stands nothing to gain from fixing a problem that prints them money. Yet, an answer never came. Minor fixes were mentioned, but nothing that would truly fix or reverse the harm we caused. Half way through I remember thinking to myself "What's the point in talking about all this? Why bother writing all this if you don’t have a point to prove or a solution to propose?”

I would figure out over this past week the same thing I figured out as a kid, sometimes people aren’t looking for an answer or a fight, but rather are simply airing out their frustrations, or voicing an observation. This book does not ask for the reader to fix a problem, but rather to sit with ideas the reader may have never considered before. For me that concept itself is worth thinking about, trying to understand rather than prove.