Reading Ghost Forests and Other Ruined Landscapes
How not to surrender to grief?
Around one and a half years ago, reading Rebecca Solnit’s guide to changing the world, we learned that social and ecological activism can give ‘Hope in the Dark’.
Around five months ago, burning forests in Brazil and Bolivia took us to the Yanomani worldview wondering about their value of growth ‘në rope’.
Today, borderless fires are asphyxiating our hopes.
In the first session of 2020, the Reading Club becomes our ritual to hold and share our feelings of loss. Let’s continue practicing worldviews reading together stories “of encounters between humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and soils.”1
Finally we have the courage to flip to the ‘Ghosts of the Anthropocene’ side of the ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet‘ anthology, which is asking:
“What kinds of human disturbances can life on Earth bear?”2
“We must share space with the ghostly contours of a stone, the radioactivity of a fingerprint, the eggs of a horseshoe crab, a wild bat pollinator, an absent wildflower in a meadow, a lichen on a tombstone . It is these shared spaces, or what we call haunted landscapes, that relentlessly trouble the narratives of Progress, and urges us to radically imagine worlds that are possible because they are already here.”2
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In ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ we read texts together related to natural sciences, art, anthropology, postcolonialism, and (post)anthropocene, chosen from a female perspective looking beyond disciplines.
Those who would like to attend the reading session, please rsvp via email until the 21st of January to betweenusnature@gmail.com
