Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree: https://www.botanicalmind.online
Plants and the spiritual
Rhythms of plants
Reading to their surroundings
Intelligent factors react to surrounds
Shapes in nature in art, spirals – ferns, animals with tails and shells have been found in early art
Natural Blueprints
Hilma af Klint – painting
Cosmic tree, trees re-occurring into religions and paintings
Carl Jung – tree
Active imagination
Testing of psychedelics
New Botany – plant consciousness
Plant memory, social and environmental
Sacred and circular aspects
Plants and the black panthers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b06j14rm
“looking at plants should be the last thing you do”
“Plants communicate through clicks”
“Victoria Amazonia – name and lily pad ‘Victoria’ reference to both the fight to get the plant to flower but also Victorian iron work which the under ab-axial side of the leaf looks visually similar to” paraphrased iron with glass.
10 min to 15 min of podcast (Andrea Wulf)
“Alexander Van Humboldt – forgotten farther of environmentalism – 1800 early sets of manmade impacts”
Thinking of nature and landscapes in layers and one way organisms
“dividing up the landscape, vegetation and altitude, cross sections of plants and altitude” “Views as nature, evocative landscape descriptions with scientific landscape”
“scientific and romantic”
New Thinking: Science Fiction:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p086zq4g
Science fiction
Climate change
Hetta howes (host?) Caroline Edwards and Amy Butt Caroline Edwards
“Science fiction as a particular mode discourse or critique” Sci-fi a tool to use technology and critique it
“Critique the present”
Marxism
Typical student as being into it
More people approaching science fiction
‘science fiction as not a ‘real’ subject’
utopian studies – Amy butt
Talking about the world we live in (science fiction)
Difficult to write about sci-fi, discovering scientific reality with creating a fictional world, how to make the fake world seem real
Lit fiction as a dying thing
Technology imbricated worlds
Asking questions for the future in relation to the current self, why would we get to that sci-fi world, why would we think and do these types of things, grabbling with the long term impacts?
Research usage – how is that future going to be
“Our attitude towards resources” domed cities in relation to our current biological systems, stacking up to our own contemporary sustainability – Caroline Edwards
“escapism and imagination”, “imagined and real merge into each other”
key concerns taking an aesthetic around the city as hyper dense vertical and stratosfied dystopia / utopia city taken back by nature, pastoral landscape, getting out of the dystopian city, accumulation of wealthy further up in the sky-rise.
How we might help change how dystopias, utopias might help change the future of sustainability, thinking about what possibilities might occur and seeing how we can change that now or continue if it works and helps.
Climate emergency and resource scarcity is not a new subject Wood, fungal spores and arboreal networks
Triffids (fictional plants)
New materialism
Floods and eco-catastrophes Environmental post humanism
How to implement things such as green walls and other implementations into the world. Metabolic architectural spaces, growing buildings.
Acknowledging the sensuous of the world around us, distict from the worlds around up/ situations we live in.
“Kathleen spencer notions of the absent paradigms, the world of the novel exists complete behind the novel or within it, given fragments of the text, but we are just reflecting on our self, and writing our self into the novel.”
The green man, George Monbiot: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0745dpw
should humans even try to control nature? Environmental campaigner George Monbiot Nina Lyon
Communing with nature
Charlie Jane Anders – Sci-fi story / novel writer
Kate Maltby – renaissance literature
George Monbiot
Re-wild Britain, how did we get into this mess
We have gotten it wrong by frightening people, if we make people frighten they will go into a survival lockdown, care for them self.
Why is it that we want to defend nature – because I love it, do we need to make an argument when it comes to nature.
Nature is just as part of nature as culture
If we don’t put a financial value to nature its value its valued at zero, so if we want to put a road through nature the value is the value is the amount of the road not the nature, but if we give a value to nature there becomes an argument towards and against the value of the road
Economic growth to help grow nature
The poorer countries value their nature more, and feel more guilt when getting rid of nature There shouldn’t be no growth and infrastructure, but do we need to add so much infrastructure
Political powers influence – Nina Lyon
Our feelings have been muted by consumerism
The phenomenon exists, something about consumerism cuts us off
There is a cost of having lots of stuff, it cuts us off from the natural world
If we have lost our interest should we care – Nina Lyon
Destroying nature should be priceless, like being attached to a painting or branch of painting, then someone coming along to say “that will make good fire wood why can’t we burn it?”
Nature can fit into our economy
You won’t have much economy left if we keep taking from our environment Anthropocentric privilege – Nina Lyons
Science as nature, false dichotomy. Technology as nature, magic has its limits and rules, magical scientism, you can’t get away with everything, magic doesn’t just everything, technology a push of a button does a thing and does it. –Charlie Jane Anders
People have a lot of fear and obsession of the apocalypse
Nature is a word we gave to understand the world around us
You don’t uncivilized by taking nature away, if anything we become more civilized
Are we integrally connected to nature to the ecosystem, yes, can we get by by adding further pressure to the ecosystem, no, are we going to have to find a better way of engaging with the natural world, yes we are.
Deep time and the earth: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p087kq4z
Information brought up found in Africa bought up and delved into in the last 10-15 years Deserts drying out, it would have been a jungle and is now a desert.
Holocene Anthropocene
We evolved cumulative cultural evolution
Growth of the brain, more nutrients, brain takes around 20% of our calories we intake. Consonants travel at different tones and travel differently and over different lengths and distances but are more vigorous and rough sounding, some cultures have a more consonant heavy language such as Russian and Mandarin. And some vowel heavy and softer spoken such as French.
The mode of language in writing, letters to sound out (English), characters to make meanings and symbols (Chinese)
Korean creating type writer first, but didn’t really work with the Korean language in the long form at the time period, English maker considered made it first
Evolution isn’t always a straight line
Can’t eat music but it is beautiful and flows, feels good
We can look at the sand and the moon and it’s the same as what our ancestors have seen but us now we project our different ideas towards them throughout time, and understand it differently, especially compared to our Neanderthal cousins.
A large chunk of earth has been living worlds, micro biology, bacterial, algae, single celled organisms
Are we, now, nature?
Geographical and geological changes, continental drifts, land bridges, 500 – 600 ice ages, exposed large areas of land to be accessible. Homosapiens were the first to make it to the Americas
Neanderthals DNA found in some parts of modern Africa
Aluminum is man-made, a lot of materials and metals which have artificially been manufactured.
Chickens as being manufactured and not what they were back then
What now for environmentalism: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b08n24f7
Sustainability, apocalypse
Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Goodman
End of our consumerism, apocalypse, end of the modern world
Connection to the wild and living world, instead of the consumerist world
Humans aren’t a hindrance to the planet, but we are right now.
Identity is an alliance of people and places, airports take the places out of the picture, people from everywhere coming to somewhere
Judging our past self instead of modern people, preferring being surrounded by nature instead of smart phones and tall buildings
Can’t tell people to not live in the consumer world
Don’t have a place where to call home, travelling, consumerism changing our reason or connection to a place, ‘belonging’
Belonging multiply, no-one should define anyone else
Privatizing profits and socializing loses
Studying things which are disappearing
How do we make new laws which are enforceable? laws show what a society has agreed to do with itself and what it thinks about its self, they can’t change hearts, politics comes with laws and can take away from victory.
Environmental law deals with scientists, acting on behalf of earth.
What can I do?
Guaranteed income to convince people on the edge, what would the environment look like when it has been looked after for
Holes in the ground: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b06vs6g0
Mining
Ted Nields
Rocks in their pristine beauty, see the real age or past of the rock Unlocking the glories of the underworld
Underground worlds
Francis bacon – human empire, to map knowledge
Humans so intent of recreating the surface of the earth, nature getting in our way.
What can we learn from the crevices and crevasses?
If we do learn from earth history, we are bound to repeat it
Someone with 2 mins of research is being as listened to as someone who has studied something for their whole life or a large proportion of it
Children don’t know where food comes from anymore, same with materials and minerals and energy.
A danger of romanticizing
Humanized underworld
Llenyd Price 