simpler

post-humanist

maybe we can't stand
being shut into little boxes anymore
house to car to office walls
maybe we want to live in the open
so
then we can feel
breeze playing on skin
more than anything
maybe we want to let it go
the buildings that reach into the sky
the highways filled with cars
the fear that drives us on and on
maybe we want to let it in
the breeze
the creeping tendrils
the buzzing insects
the dust of the plains

Sharing Suffering

Ways of living and dying matter: Which historically situated practices of multi species living and dying should flourish?  There is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question; we must give the best answers we come to know how to articulate, and take action, without the god-trick of self-certainty.  Companion species worlds are turtles all the way down.  Far from reducing everything to a soup of post- (or pre-) modern complexity in which anything ends up permitted, companion species approaches must actually engage in cosmopolitics, articulating bodies to some bodies and not others, nourishing some worlds and not others, and bearing the mortal consequences.  Respect is respecere  — looking back, holding in regard, understanding that meeting the look of the other is a condition of having face oneself.  All of this is what I am calling  “sharing suffering.”

donna haraway, when species meet,  88.

Honesty and Dishonesty at the County Livestock Show

I spent the weekend before last at our annual 4-H livestock show, helping my daughter, along with about thirty other teen-agers, to show their animals - their chickens, rabbits, pigs, goats, lambs, and cattle. There is a highly charged event: beyond the thrill of competing against each other, there is an emotional edge to the show that cuts deeper than the game of competition, because most of the animals that the kids bring to the show will be sent to slaughter directly afterwards.

What does it mean: to live, to eat?  This is what is experienced at the show in visceral emotional detail.  It is definitely not an activity for the faint of heart.  

To kill a plant is easy.  As the animal rights people point out, it has no face.  A plant, even a mighty tree, does not evoke our bodily sympathy.  We don’t identify with it, muscle to muscle, breath to breath.  We may love the beauty of a tree but we are not pierced by a tree’s gaze.  In witnessing a plant’s  death there may be dismay but there is no nausea, as there is with an animal, especially a fellow mammal. 

But doesn't a plant have just as much right to live as an animal? Resemblance to us humans is a shallow standard for determining what lives and what dies.
It’s just that we don’t want to go there.  Because if we recognized the lives of plants then there would be nothing that we could eat in presumed innocence.  

And claiming innocence is one of the most dishonest things that I know of.  Implicitly claiming innocence by demonizing others is doubly dishonest. If you are a human, you are not innocent.

Unfortunately innocence is what most people see when they see animals and kids together.  They want to see innocence.  Farm animals remind them of their youth, of story-books or of going to grandpa’s farm. Animals and children are cute; they absolutely are.  But the cuteness at the livestock show is a thin veneer. 

What the children are doing at a livestock show is not innocent.  What they are doing is serious. And painful.  And contradictory. It is an everyday, old-fashioned exercise in Isabelle Stenger's animistic science -  the county fair is a site of bodily engagement and risk, where the psyche is put in acute peril because of the contradictions it must hold and the pain that these contradictions cause.
The kids must honor the animals that they raise because an animal will not thrive if it is not honored.  And they must be complicit in the death of their animal without any comfortable distance from the particularities of that animal, that death. Fearing death and facing it requires a dangerous degree of honesty and an iron stomach.  Dangerous to the edge of brutal, this honesty, this experience of another being, this intimacy of bodies and the sharp edge where that intimacy is broken.  Under all of the ribbons and prizes that decorate the show, that is the true, serious, hard work that the children do.  I think it gets harder and more serious, instead of easier, as they get older.  

Some would say: why do it? Why go through all that pain, when one can just be a vegetarian? (Or, worse, a blissfully ignorant end consumer.)  Stop killing animals.  But it’s not that simple.  Animals will be killed, anyway, in order for us humans to eat, under the plow, for instance, under the wheels of the combine.  Animals may not even be born, which is also a kind of killing.  It certainly is a much easier, cleaner kind of killing.  But just because it is easier doesn't make it better.  In fact, it makes it worse because it makes us detached.   Better that there was life, and complicated intimacies and alliances between species at the livestock show, rather than a clean, uncomplicated innocence that never lets animals live - and be entangled with our lives - for fear of death and discomfort.   Better but not easier.

OK, We Need a Laugh, Right?

The sadness of farmers

Yesterday I went to visit Bonk Farm in Waimea, on the northern part of the island.  It was part of our agricultural career workshop for the teens that do 4-H livestock projects.  The farm was beautiful, but the farmer was sad.  I kept looking at his hands that were covered with the fine chalky dirt of the Mana plain. They were strong yet elegant hands, for all that they were caked in dirt and cracked with toil.  Mr. Bonk rubbed at the dirt on his fingers as he told of his many and increasing difficulties in being a farmer.  Partly this is to be expected: it is simply being honest about the heavy burden of toil and care that producing food for others imposes on a mortal human frame.  But he was sad in a way that seemed especially keen.  He said, more than once: "If you go into farming, don't expect anyone to help you, because they won't" 

And there it is, we don't help small farmers like Mr. Bonk nearly enough.  He should really be covered in honors.  He has a verdant, almost glowing organic farm and is clearly competent, persistent, resourceful and cares deeply about the health of his farm.  He deserves the full support of our society and community, but instead it is he that supports everyone else that does not raise their own food.   

There are farmers that do very well financially and see their farm almost purely as a business, there are those who make enough money and are happy with the life they lead with its many non-monetary rewards, and there are those that farm with passion and sadness, almost a kind of rage.  

Which of these are the most "successful" farmers I don't know. 

Animaholic

At the moment,  I have 6 dogs, 4 cows,  2 sheep and a goat in the immediate vicinity of the house, if not actually in the house (2 dogs). Around here, in the deep country, this is not out of the ordinary.
There are also the 16 horses which is an extravagant number.  I am in the 1% when it comes to horse ownership.
That is not to mention the other roughly 3000 cows on the actual cattle ranch.
We are all here because of the grass.  The grass that grows in the open fields, that for 100 years, produced pure white sugar and, when that became economically invalid, were too remote, too depleted, too steep, too rocky for anyone to want for anything else.  So we, the humans, made fences and ran water-lines and brought cattle to graze, and horses and dogs to herd them.
What is my relationship to these animals?  Predator? Slave-owner? Prison warden? Executive Director? Servant? God?  A little of each, depending on the day.
And what is their relationship to me?
All of them either work for/with me or are going to be eaten someday, by somebody.  We all bleed into each other, quite literally. The dogs bite the goat when I'm not careful and I must tend her wounds.  I castrate the calf and cut myself by accident.  We both bleed on the same knife.  I defend their world, this little bios of grassland that we have made together, all of us,  with every bit of stratagem, strength, and endurance I possess.  So that we can all keep bleeding into each other and into the landscape, for now, because its the most beautiful, vital thing I know.
Some humans argue that eating meat is kind of sin - that it is wasteful and cruel - and that all of this land should be converted to cropland or, if it is not suitable for that, left to go wild.  There is some merit to this argument, but it is too simplistic, too rational, too detached, too civilized.  Down that path, we will be growing all of our food in tanks and we will live in a world-city.  Down that path, other animals will be a distant memory, and all of the ways that we can live together will be lost.  All the ways in which we change each others minds and bodies will be lost.  We humans will shed no blood and we will be the worse for it.
It is very difficult to talk about this because our culture - Western civilization - is both too proud and too squeamish.  We are extremely violent but we are afraid of blood.  We are obsessed with food but don't like to get dirty.  We say we love nature but fear flies, mosquitos, maggots, diseases, rodents, and mud.  Not to mention any kind of excrement. Western civilization is about being clean, elegant, articulate, economically efficient and ruthless, preferably without having to see any blood.   That's why it's hard to talk about the unclean stuff.  That's why I need animals, so we can be unclean together.