“The Middle of the Middle: Purgatory, Pilgrimage, and Human and Plant Mobility in a Time of Climate Crisis”
Public Lecture by Stephen Collis
April 26, 2023
In the context of the climate crisis and what has been referred to as the “great redistribution” of life on earth, this talk considers human and more-than-human mobility from the perspective of climate solidarity. Part travelogue, part poetics statement, the talk is grounded in the author’s participation in an ongoing, yearly walk in solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers. It also takes stock of the author’s current position, in the middle of writing a long poem called “The Middle,” which itself engages with pilgrimage and mobility through a re-writing of Dante’s “Purgatorio.”
SPEAKER
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including “The Commons” (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), “Once in Blockadia” (2016), and “Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten” (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. “A History of the Theories of Rain” (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University
Uh my name is am joal I’m an associate with the institute for the Humanities welcome talked by Steve Cullis the middle of the middle Purgatory pilgrimage and human and plant Mobility so I want to begin by recognizing that we’re on the unseated territories of the musam Squamish on the slay Toth uh
Peoples uh this event is hosted by The Institute uh for the Humanities which is going to be celebrating its 40th anniversary this year there’s going to be a series of public events and conferences happening through the fall uh this institute has been a very important has a very important place
Inside of this University and in terms of public discourse in the city so please to look out for um all of those uh activities happening um in the fall it’s great to be welcoming uh Steve here I had a chance to be in conversation with Steve for a live podcast that we
Did at the school for Contemporary Arts at SFU usually there’s an orientation for new students but they’ve started a yearly reorientation around a political theme uh around climate Justice and so Steve was in conversation with all the new art students coming to SFU last fall
Um he’s the author of a dozen books of poetry and Pros including the commons BC book prize winning on the material in 2010 once in bladia in 2016 almost Islands fyis web and the pursuit of the unwritten in 2018 all published by Talon books in the history of the theories of
Rain in 2021 a finalist for the governor General’s award for poetry and in 2019 Steve was the recipient of the writer Trust of Canada lner poetry pies and he teaches poetry and Poetics at SFU so please join me in [Applause] welcoming thank everyone for being here thanks am maybe I’ll add to the
Acknowledgement just that I have now for 20 years almost exactly lived on the traditional ancestral territories of the Wason people uh the land facing the sea I can smell the sea most mornings which I like uh this talk comes out out of having stepped in in 29 2020 uh to to be
Woodsworth chair in the humanities for a year because they didn’t have someone to fill the position and there’s a course attached to that uh chair and um a series of programming so I stepped in and did the programming for the year and taught a a graduate sem or not a
Graduate seminar but an upper division seminar in the humanities department on um things I was interested in and that time it was the German writer WG saal who was who writes about uh displacement um memory and Trauma post World War II and I sented that course around that um
And because I did that the humanities part were very nice and and the way they could pay me is by giving me a research typ end which I would use to travel and then could not travel because it was a pandemic and then finally did this last
Summer so that’s sort of where this is coming from but by that time I realized I’m not going to write about saal what I realized at saal is a a methodology that is all his books involve a narrator who’s traveling wandering a drift in the world and thinking about uh um processes
And structures that that create displacement and create mobility in the world so I I realize that it’s it’s my that it’s my my I’ll let you guys that my methodology is is saalan more than I’d be trying to write something about saal I think I probably quoted here at some point
Um the the wider project that the what I’m going to say today comes out of uh is an attempt to Think Through um my own family’s mobility in the world a very a very privilege kind of Mobility All Things Considered and other kinds of mobilities which connect the work I’ve
Been doing for getting close to a decade now uh with uh um uh Asylum Seekers and and refugees in the UK and and trying to think of Mobility on as wide a spectrum scale as I can like how how do we account for um because all these things
Ultimately relate to colonialism but how do we account for the more prage movements of colonialism and other kinds of displacements and not see them as strictly uh uh um discret categories because I there’s all important differences is important things to be aware of and see the totality of of how
Mobility Works as I did that um I realized there was a wider perspective I wanted to take into too because it’s not just human beings that move of course it’s every other animal it’s also very Mobile on this planet and affect plants and increasingly some we think about
Climate so that’s kind of where this talk comes from although it also um is the kind of talk an artist or a writer might give about the work they’re engaged in right now so it’s also in part of a poetry I’m writing right now and we’ll end with some poetry I’ll read
Toward the conclusion um the other thing I wanted to say okay well this is one little thing I just discovered there’s actually an academic category I didn’t know there’s a field of um multispecies ethnography that’s just getting going into social sciences and I realize probably what I’m doing here is
Multispecies ethnography um um this also feels like a very ongoing uh piece of something for me that started in 2015 when I was asked to tell a story uh uh connected to um migration and displacement in the UK I was invited to write this come there and read it at an
Event um but that led to and so that was eventually published but led to other related things it led to a talk I gave with uh uh academic and potic David herd in England um who is the um created a project called the refugee Tales I was
Actually invited to partake in there he and I gave a talk at a conference in Paris which was then inment she published in 2021 I was asked to do the have you Ben at lecture at at University of Toronto with Wade Compton the Two of Us in conversation which also touches on
The same material I talk about today uh and so on um a story I was asked to write as part of something called hostile environments it was just published online late in 2022 and in fact a talk I’ll be giving I talk I take that back uh a a collabor project I’ll
Be doing this summer um in which which a friend of mine who you’ll hear about in this talk I’m about to give um who’s a displaced person living in the UK will tell his own story with my sort of uh prompting I to interview him essentially
And we’re to tell his story make a part of this project too so this is very much ongoing little bits and pieces where I’m constantly trying to approach this problem which I find so complex and so difficult to approach so there me lots of bits moving bits and pieces in what
I’ve got to say but now property began after that pream the Deep middleness of things compels me this fraught stretch of Life between certain pasts let’s recall of only a few Colonial land grabs Empires and their always new clothes vast carbon incinerations and uncertain Futures can
We yet dream with a utopian lack of guilt of a time all will come to have a relationship to the earth that is welcoming and mutually sustaining I’m writing this in a winged Hut at the back of my mind which is to say deep in an imaginary Forest I find
Whenever I’m surrounded by books and silence that’s a middle of things that necessarily feels like respite and Eddie in the flow as opposed to the middleness that feels like a slow motion tumbling mid-fall as the planet tips and the turtle sloughs all that’s been built off its back
According to naov life is just a crack of light in the middle of two eternities of Darkness positive guy I think the middle is not the still center of a turning world not fulcrum but the active intensed dialectical space created by the energy of polarized opposites within which we all move
Pushed pulled driven and Desiring the middle is thus a space of almost perpetual Mobility where the go between goes between as well as the space of possibility in which direction could still be changed but we all know that the middle is not nearly as sexy as
Either end times or New Dawn middle brow middling Talent middle of the road Stuck In The Middle With You one should avoid changing hes Midstream or sitting on a fence both siding any issue has its limits and a Centrist I’ve offer thought is the worst possible thing the politically indecisive middle of
Ideological nowhere but midd are not centers they’re too Shifty too fluid too fraught for that our critical attention is so often focused on the post these days postmodern post structural post Colonial postum but we we so rarely stop to consider what we are in the shifting
Middle of I don’t think to take one example that we are posthuman yet but we can see that we are indeed on a Long midh human Trek between imagined Angelic hierarchies behind us linking us high in a supposed great chain of being and the Welling but long-thought incidental more
Than human Community pressing creaturely round our thinking for thinking toward available tomorrows to be in the middle is to be in relation when it is declared that we are now post any given concept or condition what is really going on is that we in
The is that what we are in the middle of what we are moving through has been recognized at last the post is a sighting of the far Shore towards which we might be moving a moment where it becomes possible to triangulate our current position we are perhaps with
Dante and Virgil on the shores of the stigan lake Tanto 7 of The Inferno as depicted by William Blake waiting with trepidation to cross to the far Shore where we are is in the middle of a crisis or smack in the middle of the intersection of several compounding crises climate change is happening
Happening in real time there are more displaced people in the world now than at any point in recorded history over 100 million globally and nation states are building more impenetrable borders doubling down an even more authoritarian and nationalist forms of exclusion just at the point when planetary collaboration is most desperately
Needed quote human movement on a scale never before seen will dominate this century and remake our world end quote Gia Vince writes in Nomad Century there could be as many as 1.5 billion climate migrants in the next 30 Years but is not just human beings that are on the move
All planetary life is currently in motion fleeing the rising heat heading north or south towards the poles at measurable rates and there’s an awful lot of science right now specifically geared like a measuring exactly how fast specific species in specific places are and are able to move uh
Forward where am I this can’t be overstated all life mammals fish Crustaceans reptiles rodents Birds insects plants grasses trees everything our human Mobility is part and parcel of a planet-wide movement Benjamin Von brael and nowhere left to go describes this mass movement of Life the great redistribution or Exodus of species as
Global warming made flesh how much of a reality check do we need is it enough that even the trees are on the move like some incarnation of the ants of Middle Middle Earth what I’m also in the middle of is the writing of a long poem called appropriately the middle
The poem takes the middle lines from Dante’s T sets from P from purgatorio the middle book of The Comedy carves away the medieval Catholicism and reveals a new poem about human and more than human movement so just in case anyone doesn’t know Dante’s entire very long uh three book 14th century um poem
Divided in three books of of you one is Hell Inferno purgatory and and Par pariso um his entirety is written in three line tus they’re called three line stanzas so in the middle book I’ve only taken middle lines and once I extract those from a couple different
Translations and Tiny bits of my own translation um I start finding a new poem from that material essentially ah have I already read this part anyway revealing a new poem about human and more than human movement a quotation found in a review of a new translation sent me seeking quote it’s the middle
Section of purgatory that speaks most directly to the self-inflicted wounds of our present condition I’m always interested in those self-inflicted wounds where The Inferno and Paradiso are the Realms of fixity and stasis time does not pass and everyone has their final place of either torment or rest and pergatory all is in
Motion as talinda barolini writes in the undivine comic quote in purgatory all the intersecting lifelines are in motion voyaging in time just as on Earth all parties in any encounter are moving forward along their respective lines of becoming end quote it’s wonderful Dante was he wants to
Talk to spirits as he does in the end Ro he has to jog along beside them because they won’t stop to talk to them he’s got to run with them if he wants to talk to them half the time he’s always out of breath trying to keep
Up there are other things I might note here that Dante himself was living the life of a refugee exiled from his Home in Florence the whole time he was writing the comedy and that Purgatory is where the poet expresses again in Robert H poog Harrison’s words I’m quoting here
Uh a love of the planet and everything that makes it our Cosmic Homeland I was brought up short by my friend Ellie K Gardner who when I explained the process of my poem’s composition asked what’s in the middle of the middle I’m still thinking about this but there is one relatively
Straightforward answer found by turning to Dante across the middle three kantos of purgatory at the very center of the entire comedy stretches a disquisition on love and free will love is the seed in all things and that seed metaphor I’m really interested in it notus so that as
We read in Kanto 17 the natural is always without error but the heart can a by choosing the wrong object or by excessive or too little ardor all is love and all is natural but balance and relation are key and we have choice and agency here the poet argues
Over how we love quote you have and you have inborn a power of discernment Virgil tells Dante in Kanto 18 so though we may believe the loves aroused in You Are kindled by necessity in you too is the power to restrain them in K 16 it is the spirit of Marco
Lombardo who holds forth contending that you although free are subject liete I don’t think we are far from Marks here either and the idea that we make history just not under conditions of our own choosing I want to give Dante’s thought a climatological reading a reading attuned to this era of geophysical
Capitalism let us say that we are free to choose to submit to planetary limits our entanglement with the more than human and the relationship and responsibilities we have materially with the rest of planetary life and we are free to choose to ignore and even defy our entanglement pursue exclusively
Human ends and indeed the ends of only certain human beings feed energy relentlessly into boundless consumption and fall into Cosmic ruin in Marco Lombardo’s telling in Kos 16 that which upsets the balance of freedom and limitations is quite simple bad governance Mal literally means bad guidance whereas Robert POG Harrison
Glosses who I quoted earlier forms of government that promote rather than restrain human cupidity and as and so today bad governance still enables and and encourages the Defiance of planetary limits and nation states captured by the interests of capital negotiate their responses to the climate and migration emergencies largely in bad faith
This is part of what I want to say here today that one dramatic form that the climate crisis takes is in the redistribution of all life on earth that is all life lucky and capable enough to turn Pilgrim and up distance the velocity of climate change velocity is actually literally how scientists
Measure talk about climate change in Mobility that mobility in this context is a crucial shared quality and condition of life as such and throws the human and more than human into the same Stark ecological Exile where all that solid melts into air a shifting ground within which perhaps new forms of inters
Species solidarity might yet be found and lastly that in the middle of the tense space where Free Will and bad governance meet to form deform and reform planetary possibility stumbling and not knowing it more than any that any other as to what is to be done of middling talent and already past midlife
I return year after year to the company of Migrant to a company of Migrant Walkers certain only of the joy of our mobile companionship a Wandering refugia in a time of borders deportations and incarcerations okay lost little shifts here so a shift my grandfather’s first world war flight
Log book shows that he was in the air over Aras France flying a spad at 3,000 ft on April 9th 1917 when the English poet Edward Thomas somewhere in the field beneath him was killed by a stray a stray shell as he stood beside his artillery piece lighting his pipe the
Shell missed Thomas but the percussion of its passing so close stopped his heart his body fell to the Earth without a mark on it end quote it is a the characteristic of our species in evolutionary te terms that we are a species in despair Max Sabal tells elar wle in a CBC Radio
Interview because we have created an environment which isn’t what it should be and we’re out of our depth all the time he continues living on the borderline between the natural world and that other world which is generated by our BL our brain cells throughout April my grandfather’s
Log book mentions the weather more than anything else visibility bad very Misty weather bad fog windy low clouds yet he continued to fly almost every day the Battle of harass unfolding below bloody April it was called with the RFC the the Royal flying core which it was before it
Became the RAF after the war um losing half of its available Flyers Thomas all of whose 140 extent poems were written between the start of the war and his own departure for the front in early 19 17 kept his own journal in the field which betrays an
Effort to observe the war from the perspective of Natural History when Thomas looks out of the battle scarred terrain he mostly takes notes of the wildlife that is somehow still there this is literally the front of War One Hair partridges and wild duck in fields southeast of guns the shelling must have slaughtered
Many Jack dos but has made home for many more and the half-destroyed hulks of blasted farmhouses and barns chaffinches and partridges moles working on Surface more hens in clear chalk stream by incinerator blackbirds too but no song except hedge Barrow Larks singing over no man’s land blackbirds singing far off
A spatter of our machine guns the spit of one enemy bullet a little rain no wind only far off artillery Thomas’s ornithological observations become part part of the structure of military routine he also writes up at 4:30 blackbirds sing at battery 5:45 shooting at 6:30 even the air is animate the enemies
Of the engines of War and the energies of creatures in Flight blurring Thomas writes again enemy planes like a pale moth among enemy plane like pale moth among shrap bursts four or five planes hovering and Wheeling on kestrels listening to Larks and watched airplane fight two planes down one in Flames for
The poet the war was waged against the natural world as much as anything else his true co-nationals as he once said being the migratory Birds I want to pursue intersecting and entangled lines triangulating to find what lies in the middle in the summer of 2022 the walk I join every year in
Solidarity with refugees Asylum Seekers and immigration detainees followed the Pilgrim’s Way West through Dorking Guilford Farnum and Alton to arrive at Winchester a path running parallel to the road Edward Thomas followed on his bicycle in 1913 a journey he records in his book in pursuit of spring an extended Ode to the
Seasonal return of migratory Birds I think this is me sure looks like it I think just point that out um where are we here Thomas writes the Earth the Earth was the Rooks the heaven was the Larks and I rode easily along the good level
Road between the two a key event is the poet purchasing a dingy chaffinch in a bird shop he’ taken shelter in the rain only to release it from his from its paper bag a short distance down the road I love the image of buying a bird in a paper B bizar our yearly walk known as the refugee Tales takes uh involves a week on foot sharing the stories of migrants from town to town as we cross the countryside the community includes refugees and people with lived experience of immigration detention and their supporters and allies and over time
Walking together since 2015 we’ve decidedly become a sort of family when we gather each summer it feels as though we had only just paused walking for a short breather and when we adjourn for another year we know it will be to take up the walk again the following summer as though we
Had never stopped we call for an end to indefinite immigration detention there’s a specific goal in this project but our walk itself has taken on the qualities of our Perpetual mobile a walk We Are Forever in the middle of perhaps my closest companion on these walks is
Osman often this this year we had a this beautiful blue flag that he was often at the front of our column with I decide to often find myself every time I want to write something about Osman I hesitate demure wonder who am I to say anything about this man’s life though he
Himself would push me forward insist I speak if I do so it is because these past these past eight years I can only think through the complexity of contemporary displacement and human movement with Osman in conversation with his own thoughts and words and presence his experience and with him as my guide
Clodia ran Keen has written that quote there is really no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black so I try to write here not from empathy alone but in solidarity in
Friendship and with love love and as I mentioned he’s the person we’re going to tell his story he’s going to tell his story but he just wants me to be there to prompt him with questions to to get through it English is this like fifth or sixth language right so I’ll blame the
Guy I will not retell osman’s entire story and story his entire Journey from arria where he was held in an underground dungeon his flight from there through Sudan and eventually to Libya Sudan Christina sharp writes that quote to be in the wake is to occupy and be occupied by The Continuous and
Changing presence of slaveries as yet unresolved unfolding end quote Osman endured a year of forced labor in Libya to earn his place on an overcrowded and barely seaworthy boat which was scuttled in the Mediterranean more or less a Middle Sea of continuing middle passage in the Wake sharp rights the
Semiotics of the slave ship continue from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee to those ongoing Crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea and of quote Osman argues that the wars that set him in motion Wars as all wars are
In our technological age against the Earth as well as human and more than human beings were provoked by bad government both that of colonial Powers past and current dictators and he’s very clear and has this very thought out um his his take on that such organized Madness set my
Grandfather in motion too and sent me in pursuit of his tracks in Europe over 100 years later shot down and taken prisoner in August 1917 my grandfather was held first in the city zoo in Carl’s room a clearing house for PS then moved to heidleberg and at last to the east to
The tiny Spa Village of bad Colberg there his repeated attempts to escape landed him in Fortress confinement held in a tower basement where pigs were sometimes kept this is the the castle fortress on top of a mountain uh it’s called the vest heldberg where he was I believe his held
It’s hard finding documents but he was sent to Fortress confinement this is the only Fortress around there um and this is a little tiny room at the base of the tower um that the people there at the Museum told me probably was where um some people would have been helped
Prison at some point in time they were very vague and didn’t speak very much English nor my German very much I walked through an eerily ordered Plantation Forest of spruce streets forced migrants all indigenous to the Pacific uh northwest coast from which I come 7 miles to the vest hellberg where
We rode out the final months of the war I’m not positive these are sick of spru because when I was there I didn’t think to check that that later on I was reading and like there’s two main Plantation trees in in Germany and and there Spruce and some are sick of spruce
From from here and some are a spruce that comes from northern Europe and and Asia um so I’m not quite positive what those are but I’m going to call them second spruce CU that fits best poetic license um in the UK too a sick Bru it’s in Wales especially it’s the most common
And Scotland the most common common Plantation tree from this Fortress my grandfather somehow walked back to the English Channel a journey that took him 7 weeks so they arrived in the UK on New Year’s Eve 1918 when Europe went to war with itself in the past Century it employed Tech te
Of strategic dehumanization Mass confinement and genocide perfected in its treatment of colonial peoples around the world only on the losing side of such an internal conflict thrust into camps and abandoned un decimated battlefields held in pens and abattoirs can the European experience what it is
To be Europe’s enemy I do not know what route my grandfather took across revolutionary Bavaria I hoped it might have been through verburg which is a slim chance it was to which I traveled to look at Tio’s remarkable four continents painted on the ceiling of the um the word verburg residences
Extravagant tring house which is like a fancy staircase in the 1750s perhaps the world’s largest painting here are the four continents represented by humans of all Races and a range of often exotic animals and plants move one realm into the other apparently United by ment global trade
It all seems so balanced and equal so multilateral or is it simply that the three continents other than Europe each represented by a racialized queen figure this is Africa are portrayed as welcoming European Traders into the den I am still triangulating still trying to find what is at the middle of
These diverse lines of becoming as my grandfather set off for war in 1915 his parents gave him a copy of Kipling’s poems A Worn leatherbound volume still in our family the gift of The White Man’s Burden he was off to do the Empire’s bidding on the fly leaf he has scrolled
Some lines of verse in an exaggerated ptoa lines for which I have found several possible sources including a minstral play quote when people dehumanize others David living Livingston Smith writes they think of them as both human and subhuman at the same time and is violating the categorical distinctions
That underpin the natural and social order that’s why dehumanized people are seen as harbingers of disease pollution and disorder quote almost every refugees attempts to tell the their the difficulties of their experiences this is in my experience of listening to them includes a comparison to the stationer treatment of animals as
Osman himself says he felt like quote a stray dog among humans sharp also notes that quote those black people trans migrating the P the African continent towards the Mediterranean and then to Europe are repeatedly imagined as insects swarms vectors of disease end quote I think processes of dehumanization are so difficult to
Counter counter because of the very notion because the very notion of the human a privileged category AP Park is predicated on the difference and dis debasement of the non-human this is all kind of obvious thus there is a living space reserved below the human like the
Hold of a ship into which some portion of the human fold can be cut loose and dropped conceptually removed made animal made waste I think to walk the human back from the dehumanizing abyss we must walk the human back in and into the community of the more than human the vibrating
Pilgrimage of planetary life to which all beings belong all beings have their one and only home okay voice hold up today we’re in the middle of the complete redistribution of life on Earth and I think the only ethical response given where we are now in the midst of
At least two and un forun quite likely 3 to 4° global warming this century is to enable rather than resist this Total Mobility in all its varied soob biotic forms human exception exceptionalism got us into this mess and it cannot formulated in the same way at least get
Us out of it I will say it again this is because the human as a category is never stable when founded on artificially lifting human difference above and away from more than human life if as James Bridal argues in a book called ways of being we are in the midst of the
Increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more than human world we nonetheless need as they go on the right A continuing effort to conceptually override our human tendency to separate ourselves from the natural world this talk is part of my contribution to that
Effort this little guy’s uh start I found in that forest in Germany on the side of the path a wonderful little patch of them that I feasted on what I love is is they probably got there on someone’s th the muck on someone’s boot those seeds probably got through or or
Dro someone’s hopefully organic waste they’re tossing on the side of the path I focus on the human plant relation because it is the less obvious partnership in Mobility as Paco C calvo writes in plant of sapiens quote plants underpin much of Life on this planet yet our animal speed makes them
Invisible to us end quote plants move as ecologist leis patela writes by creep of root and shower of seed he’s a poet that’s pretty good but half of all plant species rely on animals to disperse their seeds due to human intervention plants have already lost 60% of the of
Their capacity to track climate change globally due to Def foration the loss of the animals whose guts they use to ride within and this this in a context where many plant species need to shift hundreds and sometimes thousands of meters per year to track their climate Niche which is steadily shifting forward
For Upward an altitude in ecological terms plant Mobility is referred to as seed dispersal a high dispersal capacity diminishes the ex the extinction risks from clim climate climate warming over ecological time scales but many species are trapped inside a restricted range where they display limited dispersal capacity such range restriction is
Formed by a complex of geography and the narrowness of given species Niche but it is also and increasingly so a matter of the scale and nature of the space human activity on this planet takes up when I refer to human activity I actually me capitalism the human in this equation
Kept in focus in order to think relationally one species with another for Capital there are only resources human or natural thus it is less a question of dehumanization than it is a that it is the commodification of Life although the end results is are often the same I am speaking around the
Problem the journey is long and sometimes we must skirt what lies in the middle as we make our way North that human and plant migrants might be facing the same obstacles as worth considering take for example the seeming fixity of both nation states and ecosystem so I think I’ll probably it’s
Time I’ll read these both these quotations these are both books just published late last year migration made us this might be hard to see in the context of today’s geopolitical identities and constraints where it can feel like an aberration but viewed historically it is our national identities and borders but are the
Anomaly and the current groupings he means the the the ecosystems essentially of species on Earth were nothing but temporary communities of convenience what we consider to be stable communities are actually artifacts of earlier climate events so that is this person argues in in past moments of climate change when species have moved
And and remixed what species are with what species they figure it out together again and they’ll and they do it again and again and again obviously the current situation is a little extraordinary the speed that’s happening but nonetheless this is what life on this planet does it moves around and
Finds new communities to join the makeup of species that live together is largely dictated by Chance the Nationalist who wants to keep the borders of their sacran Nation closed and the conservationist who wants to keep invasive species out and restore or preserve an ecosystem’s historical Integrity meet here at the frightful
Borderline lenss of Mobility I’m not saying these are exactly the same but I’m saying there’s something to be thought through here that’s really complicated and tricky neither human nor any other species stays still for long they never have one illusion the hallos scene has produced is that stability might be a planetary
Norm so I come back to Osman kind of huge on screen when I see him each year in the UK one of the first things I will notice is a sprig of lavender tucked in his hat which you can see very clearly in this Photograph that’s one I want it there um
Osman has a history of insomnia and while he has tried any number of medications and remedies he is convinced that for him only lavender works the oils of lavendula being known for their General relaxing effects its name perhaps deres from the Latin Lavar to wash the Greeks and Romans use lavender
In their baths and the Egyptians perfumed corpses with it in the embalming process in 1629 English herbalist John Parkinson recommended lavor for all griefs and pains of the head and brain originally found one thean coasts and growing from the Canary Islands in the west to the AR Arabian
And African borders of the Red Sea in the East the entirety of osman’s Journey from Africa across the Mediterranean Europe was a walk through lavender’s expanding biome I want to call the relationship between Osman and lavender an example of inter species solidarity plants join themselves to people as much as people
To plants the point is not to devalue any specifically human suffering nor is it to Champion some form of absolute Epoch making posthumanism the point is to work with and within the stretching biocommons to which we we all properly belong to rise with an ascendant biot terot what is
Clear is that Our Fate is tied up with the whole of Life a new definition of the term hollene One Planet one fate French Gardener Jil clont has something similar in mind which he calls the planetary Garden the Fe quote the feeling of ecological finiteness makes the limits
Of the biosphere appear like the enclosure of living beings end quote clont was working with the atmology of the word Garden here which like paradise means an enclosed or walled space the enclosure of the planet then refers to the absolute biospheric limits we have reached ecological finiteness in his
Terms and which defines what many are calling the anthropos a word I try not to use if the entire planet is now enclosed why would the gardener not approach it as one vast Garden this creates for clont an opportunity quote to work with rather than against the
Powerful Flux Of Life provoking him to imagine a kind of utopian ecology quote where all of life together including Humanity interacts Without Borders end quote this further prompts clont to oops I’m jump ahead of myself here oh close we go there this further prompts clont to refer to mobile plants as vagabonds
Which DeCamp to abandoned zones that he calls undocumented traps he also calls these abandoned zones a third landscape quote third landscape is a territory of the many species that cannot find a place elsewhere end quote such spaces which we have often called wastes and which are character characterized by a
Der elction that speaks at once to both ruin and development are everywhere humans have being have been quote the borders of the third landscape are the borders of the planetary Garden the limits of the biosphere end quote it is the third landscape through which and into which plants and animals including human
Beings migrate as their ranges shift forward is typically the only space open to them the space of neglect the space human activity has used exhausted and abandoned or which capital might yet redevelop should the market prove favorable it is also the space that might be in question when we consider
Whether or not to assist mobile beings opening Pathways for the redistribution of Life considering specifically human movement in Nomad Century Vince suggests quote we can survive the climate catastrophe but to do so we will require a planned and deliberate migration of a Kind Humanity has never undertaken end quote she imagines the decommissioning
Of major cities threatened by heat and rising sea levels the building of vast new cities from scratch in Northern Canada and Russia V braal considers similar discussions occurring around plant and animal movement quote some biologists recommend at least considering assisted migration and quot however controversial and it is controversial the arguments against
Assisted migration boiled down to fears of playing God and unforeseen consequences and wasn’t our wasn’t it our meddling got us into this mess in the first place anyway arguments in favor run something like this we have already carried out our already deep in the spreading middle of carrying out a
Vast experiment on the entire biosphere can we stop Midway in media res and let things follow their own trajectories from here or do we bear some responsibility to alter the experiment change the inputs guide it towards the best possible resolution do we abandon or do we remediate or is abandonment actually a particular
Kind of remediation this is under the Oak Street Bridge indeed a third pathway for the third landscape might argue that we need perhaps not to intervene further despite having caused the crisis in the first place but to get out of the way at last make space create migration
Corridors leave alone so the natural world can adjust and expand once again in clemont’s Manifesto of the third landscape this is exactly what the planetary Gardener suggests create as many gateways as necessary a permeable network of land such a demand presumes a sort of human exceptionalism that I’ve
Have been arguing against as clont Qui quips quote today the ecological future of the planet depends upon the human species and elections this also presumes a form of inverted free will a choice of what not to do a choice to stand back stand down give way
Make space for the more than human find our freedom in that limitation of entangled and injured interdependent planetary life a dantean love such as we find in and such as we find in purgatorio a terapia that is the seed of a common space of the Future these are
The capacities we need to Traverse the Broken Ground that lies ahead of us diaspora becomes a recalibrated Paradiso only when we imagine the entire planet as a mobile Garden as shardan as Clon calls it it is this of which I see Osman and his lavender as harbingers this
Irrepressible man my guide a gardener of the future planetary Garden I’m how we doing for time I’m going to read just like five minutes four five minutes from the PO that I’ve sort of mentioned in passing a couple times called the middle which is carved
Out of Dante but as I said I suddenly hear the urgency the desires and the dreams of of Migrant people I know anyhow I’m not it’s broken in separate kantos which I’m not going to name I’m just going to read the Meridian stretches like people pondering through thick Vapor a light across the
Sea I didn’t know what took shape as Wings neither ore nor sail more radiant a vessel of such lightness all flung on the beach strangers here harsh and I was not one of them free to return it’s always there memory and voice coming with its body to this country all the
Others settled together in a meadow fly up at once and flee the coast journeying from hide the name I do not know from out of which ocean from some Valley like cattle leaving it so that a thousand years fills with trouble I will not withhold humankind from Mountain to the
Sun when I remember the house and love and the footsteps of the rest of your family never will be safe I would far rather weep than go on talking walk away say nothing then draw closer to the Earth the vacant spe spaces that fill the world with animal poverty attention
Changes then we perceive how humble life tell me if I finish the brief Journey according to the feeling that drives us on our way insatiable sweet Fury the whole Kingdom a hidden line as long as daylight lasts I seem alone the distance shutters so C and Stood Beside her like
The first hearers desirous of sound hurrying along the roadway a chill ran through me nor could I could I myself see anything not to emerge because of slowness but for a wall against myself openly people came some towards Libya some escaping and all returning lamenting their astonishment diminished
So I was moved to know each by name the Fool’s concern for truth to be granted access as much as we in this world need so he disappeared into the Flames he pointed to if my attention turns the whole deep red could answer to the Sun to kiss each
Before they take the first step toward the desert fleeting they return free to come with us themselves the human law Whoever has come a long way to Harbor through the fire words pess and all of them free to walk in this world through the fire amazed open-mouthed and
Whole remember if in mountains caught thick heavy Vapors measuring your steps out of clouds dying Rays on the shore moving light and the lazy ore digging in again and the bird that Delights the mind with itself like a bubble which lacks the water of which it is made now
You’ve lost me then a voice said here is the way up new light struck my imagination quickening desire but who was speaking over her figure veils let’s try to go before it’s dark so spoke my guide and with him turned our steps and felt a wing brush and
Paused there as a as a ship run up on a steep Beach and saw that no creature ever was without love that seeds in you and can never turn against and cannot be divided itself from the other that is root and fruit of everything moving in Step thank You thank you so much Steve you covered a lot of ground there and we have poets in the audience and others uh as well I was just going to start with a comment I really like the MBE quotes as you went through as well I’ve been working on a a
Piece with a friend of mine around friendship and community and borderlessness but this notion of the right to move that Hana orent talks about and MBE does in um in out of the Dark Knight and also the Earthly Community a more obscure uh book of his
But a decolonial vision of the right to move that U the accident of one’s birth shouldn’t determine how one can move across borders and here we have a also a decolonial vision of the right to remain the right to land the right to um and these aren’t necessarily competing
Visions but sometimes they’re presented as such and I’m wondering if you could just speak a little bit to how you think through those um visions of decolonization yeah yeah well I mean I totally agree with you they’re not competing visions and um I I don’t know why I’ve always to
Take a Long View but but I am and I step back and I go well we’ve only moved around this world and you know the two moments in in England that in these years of walking with people that restruck me are are um well one especially is is uh we were walking on
The south coast of England I don’t know we were somewhere um east of Brighton I can’t remember exactly but there’s a May it’s in Brighton actually anyway there’s a marker of um some uh human remains that were found in a former R site and they
Got some DNA out of teeth and did a test and these 2,000 year old um uh buddies remains were were both born in subsaharan Africa and I’m reading this plaque with like three African guys I’m St right now oh there these guys are from we’re talking about that that sense
That we’ve always been moving and the changes we go through as we move um you know well that’s skin pigment or whatever it is but this is what we we do and you know cheddar man the ear remains they’ve discovered and done been able to
Do any um DNA science on in the UK a 10,000 year old uh body is of a black skinned blue-eyed individual’s living in in England 10,000 years ago so these These are meaningful to to people that are moving now these kind of little discoveries that this is normal because
You’re constantly told maybe by the media maybe by the UK government these are extraordinary uh problematic um crisis oriented moments you know I think I do use the word crisis a couple times I talking I was tentative about that word um because I do think and and this part
Of why we look at these things from various angles um that we get ourselves TI ourselves a not so that that that’s s language is very advantageous to certain uh interests in groups see this is an emergency um so I mean I’m not answering your question am I I’m talking in circles but
That’s good good I’m going to open it up questions or comments for Steve I’m going to bring the mic around just because it gets used for the recording so hi Stephen thank you so much um okay I I have lots of questions about uh whole talk fantastic but one in
Particular it was just a comment you made and I wondered if it was off-handed you mentioned I don’t use the anthropos scine very often and I I’m curious with my own work I I also Al I’m treading that path and I just curious what it
Could you elaborate on that a bit sure I mean it struck me as problematic maybe for the GetGo I I didn’t like the word um just just because it’s like you know uh well the era of the human being um so it’s still all about us and and now tons
Of I think there’s a lot of criticism of the term that people have written um so so that it’s not a a revelation of like that’s kind of funny isn’t it just you know we’re recognizing the the problem but we’re still naming it after us you know we’re proud that we’re the problem
And what that word actually indicates and i’ I’ve seen some people just sort of already saying things like well yeah I did use that word an anthropos for but I’m going back to hallene because that’s you know holos literally just means the the the hole is new or the new hole or
The but but even in that uh um interpretation or emology of that word hene it tells us a lot I think that this is the era that things have all come into one as I was saying maybe a better term for all is there definition is the
One Fate One Planet one fate that we’re living in now and that that’s that’s the the wholeness of this era sure that’s got to do with quote human activity um but I think to to limit it to hum to anthropos scine to the anthros is problematic also just
Because it wasn’t just oh human beings you know we we know what happened the last 500 years and it’s it’s a pretty limited list of human beings that actually did they tend to be white and male and wealthy and and that’s what created these conditions now so again you know
Pegging into human nature or something like that seems super problematic to me I’m sure just you to no I mean that’s great I just uh yeah thank you that was great that’s good and I like what you’re doing with the poem um at least to my ear it sounds really good
Um I was thinking two first a thought which is that where this was going to get you though this work that you’re doing with Dante is into a certain U place in purgatory yourself where you also find Dante which is those Terrace of Pride um my question is could you
Elaborate a bit on what you how you figure the middle because Purgatory Purgatory wasn’t there wasn’t Purgatory wasn’t the place it wasn’t part of the the theology until late 12th century yeah and and yet there was always a question there was always a problem what do you do with
There people who are really good and I mean they’re just absolutely good and they go to heaven immediately and if they’re not they’re bad they’re absolutely bad they go to hell but they’re all these people in between yeah with who’ve committed venial sins like talking too much
And so that that was a problem and and the actual establishment of a place in the middle yeah was and um very controversial so I’m wondering what what you’re intending or what you’re accomplishing by um hard as you put it removing um I think the exact verb but the middle line
OFA you know it was a way to interact with that material that was um that took me out of it like what one does using kind a procedural mechanism for working with an older text rather than sort of make it about what I am Desiring to do
With Dante or what my uh interpretation of Dante is just to arbitrarily find a way how do I reduce the material from that and see what I’ve got once I’ve done that and so that that highlighted certain things accidentally probably um and then I’m moving between several different translations so you know
What’s falling in the middle line is different in different translations of course so you get to do all sorts of different things with it but but it was simply a way of I’ve always wanted to write something about Dante and and in like 1993 my sister and I took a weekend
Workshop on Dante’s Divine Comedy as as the Soul’s Journey this kind of young and PR corny I think Workshop in some ways corny anyway um and I’ve always wanted for very personal reason to do something with Dante but it always feels like you know who am I or people have
Done that kind of thing or what could I do and so it was simply a finding a I started think this idea of middleness as a being in process and being in motion and then found these quotations that I like because it was a new translation by
DM black the other one um English poet and translator came up relatively recently that’s the one that PO Garrison’s writing about it’s from a review of that translation that he wrote um the way po Garrison was framing it like the kind of political issues I’m interested in he was kind of
Highlighting in some ways oh okay this is I want to look at that particular translation it’s one of the ones I wanted to use so it’s all pretty arbitrary is what it comes down to um other than you know these ideas that that’s that’s if you add Purgatory to
Those afterlife Catholic dynamics of you know hell and heaven you get this space of well it’s only Parts on earth right that’s the only part of the Divine Comedy when you’re on earth right under the Earth or you’re in heaven right eventually Purgatory you’re in the earth
Like the sun rises and you can hear birds and you know the light is beautiful hitting the water and there’s all sorts of descriptions of nature um all that made a very attractive material to work with yeah and the fact that you know here’s like you know a major
Political intervention in terms of poetry Dante was making an intervention as entire culture that that’s attractive as for me for what you know what I think poetry is for is to do those kind of things um I could say a lot more about this that that idea that it’s it’s bad
Governance that is is the whole problem there’s many very political moments in Dante and hell my God he’s just like all the popes that he hated are being tormented and you there all sorts of political things to say about what’s happening to the popes in in INF Inferno
But um this whole thing about bad government and free will uh is is fascinating to the middle cantos of purgatory 17 18 no 16 17 and 18 um I just that was riveting to me um the other part is great though is is the the when he meets all the love
Poets in the count of 26 or so who are all in fire uncased in Fire and you I read someone saying that you know uh Dante has all the gay people in hell he doesn’t those those are also gay poets in in purgatory and and he clearly just
Loves them he loves their work loves their example their friendship and those are just beautiful beautiful kantos about those those those quer poets that he’s got in in in fire standing there in fire running around on fire in purgatory Duck thanks uh great thanks a lot Stephen um I’m wondering about uh just a little bit more of a description about the walk and how long it’s been going and and its future and its impacts yeah we started in 2015 um the the goal of of uh challenging the UK’s
Indefinite detention system was chosen by people who Liv the experience of immigration detention they said that’s the goal we want to campaign for um when people have been supporting that Community for 25 years came up with this new project so for 25 years there’s a group called The Gap with detain
Detainees welfare group so Gap with airport has A A detention center right on the runway so if you’ve ever landed and flown off on a Gatwick you go right by a detention center with 3 or 400 sometimes even more um immigration detainees who they it’s kind of a form
Of torture cuz they Constant saying you might be on that plane tomorrow you might be on that plane tomorrow you can hear every plane going they they use this really I think it’s just horrible anyway so there’s a group that’s been there for 25 years based in Crawley at
GW aarts supporting by by visiting and trying to find out what these people need what help they need can we make contacts for you where’s your family what ET have you got a good um lawyer and that sort of thing um and this new project came along it started in 2015
Was based on taking the idea of the Canterbury Tales charer so it’s a poet starting this project in part the Canterbury Tales where people on a pilgrimage tell their life stories as they walk along this is what we’ll do we’ll tell migrant stories as we walk
Together so that’s how I got involved I was asked to come tell a story they pair you up with people and and at first they already uh the people we were working with the individuals who stories are being told needed protection because they are you know they could be deported
At any time so part of the idea of having a writer tell their story was to protect them and hide them that’s all changed and we’ve done it for eight years or so now and we published four books collections of stories and increasingly they’re told firsthand by the people who have experienced
Themselves without the filter of another or something like Osman AR can do this summer great you know I’m just to interview him essentially while he tells his story um so the advocacy work just look at the last decade of UK politics um not getting very far uh so indefinite
Detention is is in the UK and this is the case for Canada and Australia too um there is no law saying after X very time you have to to deport or allow someone to remain which most countries have everywhere in Europe it’s 28 days even
The US has 90 day or something like that limit on how long you can hold someone without charging them for something um or throwing them out but in the UK and Canada you could hold someone indefinitely and people been held for up to like a decade in jail but typically
What happens is they hold you for a couple of months they let you out but you have got no papers you can not allowed to you can’t get a job for instance legally you can’t do anything you can’t leave the country you have no passport they they make you carry a
Little piece of paper on that’s the government provides him that says at the Top This is a person liable to be detained so when the cops stop a person of color on the street who in London who are you going to stop in the street top person color check your ID says you’re
They send them back to to the Detention Center so the con are re-incarcerated released reincarceration released and goes on sometimes for a decade or more um so a lot of the people like Osman for instance has has got his case through it he has leave to remain now he
Actually managed to bring his mother and his son who he hadn’t seen for 10 years who had been living in cartoon uh to join him in England now um and that’s that’s that’s him at the refugee Center where he works um serving food and and basically being the mayor of this
Community more um and and checking his laugher plants I uh yeah does that have that answers the question I mean we’re getting somewhere we we produced uh our own public inquiry that we did the last two years that we were actually were able to present at parliament in October so I
Was over there for that and we met with like 25 or so MPS and uh there are positive things going on and then mostly it’s horrible so it’s become a project where you’re less advocating for a change then you’re sort of providing Community to people who have been
Ostracized from any kind of community so they just simply what we’re providing is yeah Community that’s cool had time hi uh this even um I took what you’re what you presented here is like like you’re warning us you’re warning everybody it’s and it was very well done
Um in terms that you like say one picture is worth a thousand words when you took those those horizontal Horizons the photo and then you turned them vertical that you went beyond that was that was an excellent graphic presentation um one thing what stood out
Of my mind is how the major players this is like a literal uh you know um kind of a liberal arts um side of things but there’s two major players right now one is Elon Musk he wants to make a city on Mars and there’s the president president
Muhammad something of U the ruler monarch of Saudi Arabia and he’s building his city in in Saudi Arabia if those two guys got together and worked on you could turn the Sahara into an amazing situation but they’re not it’s the human individual egotism um but the
Question the question okay so to get to the question at the very beginning you st you stated the acknowledgement we acknowledge this event is occurring on the unseated territories of the Squamish tasan Salish peoples tribal tribals you that ident now that this is something I that identifies one side of the equation
So if if it was if you if it was stated we acknowledge that the kaasa Salish Squamish people have not seated their territories to who would they who have they not seeded their territories to well technically the government of Canada now but it was in historical treaty negotiations would have been the
UK Crown okay so who signs off on you know if you look at treaties it’s the queen Who’s the who apparent The Negotiator so so so presently why why is it just that one side of the of the the situ why do why do we not acknowledge
That like in in this state because you hear it everywhere every institution City Hall Library so yeah in part that’s because the fact that there is not a treaty in some of these Land swason There is now no but why do we not ID identify the bad guys like we we
Recognize we identify if you mean do you mean get start to talk with a list of uh enemies well no not no not like okay who like we always identify the the the toas and the indigenous tribal people but we never identify in that statement which
Is which is is so prevalent and so meaningful we we we’re leaving out the the other side like who we never identify the other side of the plans and the animals no no no no I’m saying like like as you as you said the the you know
The government of Canada like why do we why is it always to adledge them because in this situ well not you but everybody like like they it’s such a it’s it’s I mean we understand it it’s it’s an advancement and it’s and it’s it’s verbal and it’s script but we we can we
Not include like say we you know we acknowledge that this that they these people that the indigenous people have not seated their territories to and ADV and identify them you you include both in that one statement I guess I just don’t know what purpose that would serve
I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t fully understand your questions I I don’t know what it would do it it just seems that it’s it’s coming from some official source that you must make this started you know with the first time he started hearing that I remember in Vancouver
Hearing land a was coming out of activist communities was never the government the government came to it very late first the city of Vancouver long before provincial or federal levels the government ever started doing it so it’s been a slow uh movement toward that but I still you
Know a lot of people you know um people who are sympathetic to the whole situation some say yeah it’s become kind of rote and lip service and often when I will do myself do that acknowledgement I’ll try and be a little more thoughtful about it cuz I think it’s worthwhile no
But yeah I’m saying it’s not you it’s not I mean it’s the entirety I’m acknowledging where I live and where I’m speaking is what I that’s how I think of it too there’s a complex situation that I would personally like to acknowledge any more questions
Comments hi thanks um I want to refer to a word that you may or may not like I’m not sure but you crisis you said you mentioned it a couple of times but you didn’t really want to use it has crisis really lost urgency I mean to me you know
Climate crisis nobody cares F internal crisis nobody cares you know is it because crisis is really happening to somebody else and not us I think there are problems with the what we’re thinking about when we deploy that word um so yeah I mean involves a lot of
Things evolv you know we’ve been yelling that something’s a crisis for a long time and the things aren’t happening so yelling this is a crisis doesn’t seem to be getting people to do the things we need them to do so what what I not saying I know what the alternative is
But I I’m a little so I mean personally I do think it’s a crisis but also I don’t know what purpose um I don’t mind using the words so much but I mean I don’t like to overuse it or um I don’t want to scream yell pull my hair out L
And fall on the ground how many hair plow um cuz I just don’t know what it will do so my my my reaction is to try and calm down and I think the last number of years what I’ve been doing um having been involved in a lot of uh more
Direct activist kind of things is to stand back and try and think through some of the bigger pictures and go okay what is this really about why why are we not getting where we need to get to for instance you know in this kind of context the human rights problem
Like why is it that the UK can be completely um ignoring the 1951 Refugee convention uh European human rights laws you what what the the un’s you know the un’s intern um Universal Declaration of Rights human beings these are constantly ignored uh very directly and politicians get called in to sort of
Go it’s it’s having no effect the the idea that there are human rights you know and that’s like in England you know many people like like someone like Osman who who why why you ask this kind of person why why was England where you’re trying to get to why why is that the
Choice and and they well it’s a colonial hangover you know England was very active in the Horn of Africa when when in that kind of colonial project what does England do they come in and say hey we’re here to help you guys we’ll get it all organized for you we’ll show you the
Greatest way to structure things and organize things and give you good best practices and it’ll be just great so they they’ve interacted with this country that that seems to want to help that’s how I mean obviously you know was not the only thing they were doing there
And depends where you are in Africa and look at how blatant it was in some places what they’re actually doing um murdering people but a lot of times they presented themselves as these really going to help your Society you guys have it’s it’s Kipling right all these childish people who haven’t figured out
Yet here’s the adults suring you know come on kids what’s in the fridge you guys got what you need because you got your driver’s license yeah um so there there’s a draw to that Nation right that oh well you guys came and said you’re I don’t what I’ve done
Here um you said you’re here to help us and they think it’s it’s a country that stands for the rule of law and human rights um sounds like the place to be and they have no idea that they more or less the opposite is true they want to
Put you in a plane and send you to Rwanda now right are you at Liberty to say what Osman feels about B governance do you know well I mean what he would say about bad government is is um not surprising I guess I mean you know he’s um coming from a country
That’s been ruled by a dictator for 30 years um who at a moment where it seemed like oh this could be a little Democratic moment and uh tree was trying to get its independence from Ethiopia and and and this is all just postc Colonial chaos and mess um and it’s kind
Of like a strong man muscled in and said you know I take care of everything everybody don’t worry about it so to him it would would boil down to um the inability to to protect ourselves from those kind of figures the powerful the the the more you know whether it’s from
The Elon musks to to the to the thug dictator to whatever you you know want to call this kind of a or think of this kind of a figure um to politicians you know in in in in Parliament you know his his sense of that would be um it’s rigged uh it’s
Rigged by by and for the powerful and and it’s obvious and and and it’s and it’s uh he’s outraged by it like ethically outraged by it by by The Audacity Of what these people do and the stupidity of War since he was as many if you’re a young man
Actually you’re press gang in the Army as a teenager um and he was forced to fight Wars that he had no interest in fighting and um yeah he’s just there’s an arbitrariness to power and privilege in the world that that he finds incredibly uh outrageous and and just
Ethically baffles him would he put his migration and the the refugee condition in the same assessment then or yeah yeah sure yeah I mean he was living illegally in Sudan for a while and it became untenable for a number of reasons and good friends of his who had escaped with
Him tried to do the Smugglers through Libya to um Europe route his best friend drowned in the Mediterranean when his ship went down the year before Osman himself crossed um and you know Italy was a bust and horrible it never would never go back to Italy says in a million years um and
Then it was like riding you know jumping on trains and and walking all the way to Cal he he he says about 25 attempts to to sneak his way into the UK from Cal the last success one was leaping onto a moving train I’m like riding that train through the
Chun thanks for your talk and for this microphone it’s very loud um I was I wanted to ask you a question about the different temporalities some of the different temporalities that were at play in the project or I was struck by certain ones that you mentioned one of
Them was the velocity at which scientists measure movement um and then this question of even recognizing plant movement as migration from a kind of human human life perspective I guess um you also mentioned kind of approaching this from a Long View um going back to Dante and then also when we brought you
Brought up this question of urgency and crisis so then there’s that as well and I was wondering if there’s like a thread or the way that you kind of like weave these different temporal questions together through the different um sites or objects that you’re looking at in terms of the like
Spatial um kind of argument that you’re making I really appreciate this question because I I think I probably haven’t thought through temporality in this talk as carefully as I should my previous book of poetry is all about the up temporality of climate change that is what what a science my scientists tell
Us is that you know when they’re discussing the anthrop theine especially right they go and then this idea that we’re in new geological era the Trope that the image they love is in 30 million years you will to see this you know line in in the Rock You Know
Exposed um um sedimentary layers and you go this line is us you know ruining the planet they love that Trope that that’s you know we we’re thinking in terms of What’s Happen the Mark will leave in 30 million years um that that totally fascinates me I don’t think I’ve thought
A ton about temporality in this talking and and you’re right because there was temporality all over it but velocity is a good thing that I’m to think of and I I sort of I had stats in this paper at some point in time when I take the numbers out I need
The numbers um that that does fascinate me that that the climate has a velocity that is and of course it’s it changes Wherever You Are the planet obviously but um depending where you are um uh they know the speed in which um uh temperatures are rising obviously um and
Therefore to for for a plant or um an animal of some kind that that optimizes at a particular uh climate temperature how how fast does it have to move to keep up with where that um Niche you get these incredible graphs that show you the moving of the the the climatic Niche
You know away from the equator North and South but most of the land is in the north so it’s often people are talking about the north um and then therefore we know what speed animals or plants need to move and which can do that which can’t um and and and it’s fasting that
Think in terms like because there are plants that actually can keep up depending on the conditions locally where it is how fast the climate is moving the niche but there are plants that can and they are moving and how does a plant you know decide which direction to go and it’s fascinating
Question cuz from angle it’s simply well the seeds that survive are the seeds that were cast North or carried North right um but you know how are those seeds moving is it purely uh wind and that sort of thing which certain plants uh species do rely
On is it the animals and if it’s the animals why are the animals moving and how fast and where are they going and all so the collaboration between plant and animals just fascinating um I don’t know there’s there’s a lot to said that but velosophy is one thing I’m really
Interested in but there are you’re right there are multiple temporalities uh like sort of layered on top of each other in here that I’m not I have a I don’t have a good articulation of how they relate to each other anyway we kind of layer
The other we see I can look kind of closely that we got time for a couple more questions hi re hi hi Stephen thanks so much for that talk but also thank you for your care and um it’s hard to I think a lot of us when we
Go into these spaces it’s hard to remember that these stories are not always ours so I really appreciate you taking time to ensure that you’re sharing those that you’re comfortable sharing so thank you for that um I’m kind of curious about the concept of third space am I right yeah it’s
Landscape he says yeah and um I’m just thinking about all the connections you’re making and I’m just genuinely curious um I like the idea both ideas both propositions that you’ve said and I’m thinking about this as maybe a new analytic and the environmental Humanities and I’m curious about your
Idea of the third landscape what’s your idea sure um you know what’s my idea I mean working from Claymont largely uh just really quickly if first landscape is some imaginary out this is Wilderness and second landscape is we’ve altered this like we’re farming it tree plantations parks in a city whatever it
Might be but the landscape we shape the third is the abandoned is you know it’s it’s not well it’s not the place we’re losing using more but it’s it’s where we were and we left and a ton of what we do in the world is that you know that could
Be a the clearcut you know after after the logging that could be um all those abandoned spaces like for the image I I used there of just the underside of the bridge it’s growing volunteer under there um and the fact that these spaces are extensive especially around major
Cities and they are literally this is where the birds are landing nesting traveling through foraging it’s where wild plants are growing weeds and and up to where are these guys I think they’re Cottonwood they mightt yeah exactly and uh uh but you know it’s also places of of encampments of for homeless
People in some places too right this is where where where do people go in these spaces that they’ve also been excluded from for various reasons or are passing through in in um you know uh what we say non-normative ways somebody’s not riding the train or driv in the car uh so so
That these These are spaces of entanglement uh across species that I find fascinating so Um if we’re going to imagine um Pathways like creating spaces in which any species can move through as it needs to Clon suggest and I think it’s fasc idea how can we and people are doing this there’s there’s a project in the UK of mapping these kind of areas around
Cities how can you create links so there is mobility through them fluidity to pass through them because often they’re not linked right there huge gaps and they’re broken up and little patches here everywhere but there’s so much they’re so extensive that it’s actually not that hard to create create
Connections and and create these Pathways for movement and and part of me is is you know I’m interested in that um in us not thinking we can make all the decisions and there still a decision that’s why I say it’s kind of a a complicated sense of of human
Exceptionalism but what about the decision to get out of the way is when and and these spaces are places we might start be able to Think Through the idea of getting out of the way cuz we are so in the way um I don’t know that’s that’s I mean
There’s a lot to be said about that Reena and I just that’s um that’s that’s where I’m at a starting point with thinking to that probably what that space could be thank you I’ve always been interested in them as I’ve thought of in the past as Urban Commons especially around
Somewhere in Vancouver because what grows wild is blackberries nice kind of spaces and you know uh you can have uh an unhoused person might be eating those blackberries a bird might be eating blackberries and someone just picking berries to make a pie for the family might be picking those blackberries no
One’s thinking that some of you need to go buy a store we all know where to get them they’re pretty available this is one of these last few things in somewhere like Vancouver North America you could go forage and and find something really kind of valuable through your foraging and the other
Thing with that that that plant is in the Blackberry the Himalayan Blackberry which is Dom species here is is what an incredible user of the third landscape it is so that plant that particular species uh ruus americanus was brought by R um lu Burbank to California in B
California in in like 1886 it’s grown All the Way North to like Alaska following the path this past we cut trains and roadways and on the Ean side that’s where it goes that’s where you see heaps them right and and those huge canes you can literally visualize it
Walking in 150 years it’s walked thousands of kilometers North through the through these kind of weird spaces that we’ve cut through the world so it’s also just a beautiful to me like I just there’s no more political fruit than the Blackberry it’s a true you know Anarchist commoner of of today’s
World would be a good note and one here okay good thank you um I was just wondering about the and then when you mentioned the Rwanda policy that sort of kind of CAU me thinking about this is the framing of it is sort of the virtue of
Mobility against the sort of status of the state or the nation but there’s also ways in which the state uses Mobility to sort of control as well and so there’s a lot of movement and force movement between detention centers which is going on in the UK specifically around different jurisdictions with so in
Scotland is sort of like is more transparent in the detention centers so there a tendency to move people from those detention centers to ones which are less more restrictive and then I guess the flip side to that would be other forms of immobility which are sort
Of resistance or I don’t know I see like flums like if the alternative to to detention is people finding community and being allowed into kind of local places so just wondered about that sort of framing as of Mobility as The Virtue or is that that’s fascinating I mean
It’s it’s arbitrary what the UK government does right now so if they are um removing you from a Detention Center they’re not giving you right to leave to remain but there just you’re going out we don’t house you anymore they find like a place someone you get like Osman
Was sent to Cardiff uh Wales just arbitrarily boom you’re living in Cardiff now and and you know he he’s he lives in Cardiff now his his kids going to school and learning Welsh and school and and osman’s trying to learn some Welsh and you know but this arbitrariness is fasting but I think
This maybe what you’re referring to within the detention estate they conly move people so if there’s about eight detention centers in the UK nine maybe then there’s all sort of horrible plans they cver to that one former World War One Barracks uh down in folkstone for a
Time being what still is some people there uh they’ve got a barge was it off the out white I think that they’re going to House people on temporarily but they move people constantly you’re never in if you’re inside a Detention Center you’re never somewhere more than a
Couple months and they moov you to a different Detention Center usually in the the night they just come get you take you of a cell put you in a truck drive they don’t tell you where you’re going they drive you to a different Center it could be as far away as
Scotland and and this is where you are now it’s a a purposeful attempt to stop people from making more community and making alliances and forming solid areas with people on the outside who might want to help is that part yeah I just that was
Sort of not with the sort of fre of just Mobility versus the can part of the state is sort of looking at more dialectically like immobility and Mobility yeah yeah so so you’re right from the states there sometimes Mobility but within a series of containments is a strategy for sure
Yeah great I just want to say thank you so much Steve for sharing this uh research and progress