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ASLE 6: my 2011 bibliography

Last time I attended ASLE I documented the most interesting (to me) books, articles and films that were discussed or even mentioned in various sessions I attended, so I thought I’d take a stab at it again this year to see what it reveals about the preoccupations of those presenters I followed, and my own wandering attentions. The list is much shorter for some reason; could be the sessions I attended or the paucity of my notes.

Bekoff, Marc: The Animal Manifesto: Six reasons for expanding our compassion footprint. and Animals at Play: Rules of the game. (books)
Berry, Wendell: “The Pleasures of Eating” (essay)
Brockman, Terra: The Seasons on Henry’s Farm. (book)
Busch, Akiko: Nine Ways to Cross a River. (book)
Caplow, Florence and Susan A. Cohen, editors: Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing. (anthology)
Chamoiseau, Patrick: Texaco. (Book)
Deakin, Roger: Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain.
Detor, Krista: Chocolate Paper Suites. (music)
Fischman, Robert L: “The Legal Challenge of Protecting Animal Migrations.” (essay)
Geyrhalter, Nikolaus: Our Daily Bread. (film)
Grandin, Temple: The World Needs All Kinds of Minds. (TED talk)
Hardin, Garrett: “The Tragedy of the Commons.” (essay)
Henderson, Fergus: Nose to Tail Eating. (cookbook)
Irland, Basia: Water Library. (book) and A Gathering of Waters: The Rio Grande, source to sea. (water art)
LaChapelle, Dolores: “Ritual is Essential“. (essay)
Laporte, Dominique: History of S**t. (book) (**I’m not being coy, I just don’t want your spam filters to block me for being too literal!)
Latulippe, Hugo: Bacon. (film)
Leopold, Aldo: “Land Ethic“. (essay)
LePan, Don: Animals. (book)
Mazeaud, Dominique: The Great Cleaning of the Rio Grande. (art project)
McDonough, William: Cradle To Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. (book)
McKibben, Bill: Deep Economy: The wealth of communities and the durable future. (book)
Nestle, Marion: Safe Food: The politics of food safety. (book)
Psihoyos, Louie: The Cove. (film)
Reed, Ishmael: The Free-lance Pallbearers. (book)
Robinson, Jennifer M., and J. A. Hartenfeld: The Farmers’ Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community. (book)
Sanders, Scott Russell, with Carrie Newcomer, Krista Detor, Tim Grimm, Tom Roznowski, Michael White: Wilderness Plots (performance)
Singer, Peter: “All Animals are Equal.” (essay)
Steinke, David: Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time. (film)
Walker, Barbara: The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories. (cookbook)
Zurkow, Marina: Mesocosm. (animated landscape portrait)

ASLE 5: Mesocosm, animals and environmental law

ASLE plenary speakers were wide-ranging and various, and I didn’t always have my notebook handy. Una Chaudhuri and Helen Tiffin were the first I heard, on Wednesday. During Chaudhuri’s talk we watched Mesocosm playing out in the background (and heard that the figure in it is modelled on Leigh Bowery, which brought a few random things together for me: having arrived in England in the decade after his glory days, I’d only known of him because of Lucien Freud’s paintings)

Thursday’s plenary speaker Marc Bekoff was stranded because of airport disruptions, so he joined us from his wilderness hideaway by skype, which worked remarkably well, all things considered. He spoke generally about his work which has led to such publications as The Animal Manifesto and Animals at Play: Rules of the Game (which he said brought together his 30 years of research into play behaviour). But his theme, animal compassion, he summarized by saying “Anyone who says that life matters less to animal than our life means to us has never held in their hands an animal fighting for its life.”

He observed that humans have a confusing relationship with animals: claim to love them and yet hunt them or rear them in factory farms, and generally treat them in ways we wouldn’t treat a family pet. They’re very much like us, he said, but also different. Speciesism doesn’t work as a way of establishing a natural hierarchy, where we assign higher and lower designations to animal life using ourselves as a template, because in fact they do a lot of things better than us.

In the Q&A he was asked his opinion of Temple Grandin, which he answered carefully, saying they had met, and that they’d agreed to disagree. He acknowledged her work by saying she’s improved the lives of a minute fraction of the animals who go to slaughter, and acknowledged her “amazing effect,” with which she reaches a very wide audience, informs people about animal sentience. But in Bekoff’s view, she’s not improving the well-being of animals, and it is worth remembering she’s paid by the meat industry.

Next up was environmental lawyer Robert L. Fischman, who teaches at Indiana University Bloomington, and is known among environmentalists for his writings on animal migrations, spoke on themes that affect environmental law at present.

Climate change, he said, currently dominates scholarship and rule making. And observed that in environmental law there is a stark division between people studying pollution control, viewing the environment as a sink; and those studying conservation on other hand , viewing the environment as a treasure trove for goods (natural resources). Pollution control law grew out of public health concerns, while resource management is more rooted in judgements made law, and undergoes conservative incremental change, with changes in ideas of ownership and property.

Which led to discussion of land trusts, the big environmental issue in the US today. In 1980 there were about a tenth of a million acres in trust; tax laws changed around then and so did the interest in land trusts. By 2003 there were 5 million acres, and in 2005 some 12 million acres; and it’s probably doubled since then. Land trusts are a relatively new species of property right, placing values on land and water rather than on the monetary value of land for transformative development use.

Initially, land trusts were isolated zoo-like reserves, but they became stepping stones, and then lines on a map. By the 1980s, biology had taught us that webs of conservation are importan, so reserves must be nodes in a network. The realities of what we’ve already observed in climate change on land and what changes we anticipate mean that connecting our landscape will be very important in allowing both animals and ecological services to adapt and be resilient to climate change.

Bringing it home to the audience, he pointed out that in environmental law and policy, interdisciplinary work means working with social and natural scientists, not scholars from the arts and humanities. Yet what passes for research in this field really is related to the humanities: you search sources and make arguments based on your findings. Storytelling and rhetoric became uniquely important tools in this particular area of law.

Finally, he said, we need to think through to resilience issues rather than stopping with conservation of the present: for example, we have halted the species elimination of buffalo, but eliminated the migration aspects of their lives. We need to safeguard migration corridors as well as habitat. This “connectivity” is too broad a concept to capture public support, but migration conservation is a concept that might be possible to use to promote a more holistic cause.

In the Q&A, the topic of mountaintop removal in the coal industry came up; timely subject for this Vancouver Islander. Is this, the questioner wondered, as corrupt an industry as it seemed? Stepping lightly through his answer, Fischman chose instead to observe that this area rather demonstrates what a clumsy tool the clean water act is to use on mining and mountaintops.He noted that the Obama administration had at least revoked nationwide permits allowing free mountaintop removal. But the clean water act saved as much of the High Sierra as has been saved; negotiated solutions are still needed.

ASLE 4: farmers market and Banerjee on global warming

The Bloomington Farmers Market played an unusual role in ASLE 2011. Not part of the official program, it was located near enough to the campus to lure a number of Saturday morning wanderers away from the last day’s sessions for an hour or two. By happy coincidence, I was one of those wanderers, having run into  a like-minded traveller in the elevator.

We learned later from the evening’s banquet speaker – an academic whose husband grows flowers and garlic to sell there – that it had been a fairly average day with some 75 vendors and about 8,000 visitors. The sun shone on our visit (but not too much) and we had a happy forage through the wares. Cheese there was, including the Wabash Cannonball, which I believe I’d noticed at Goose the Market earlier on my visit, but like so much on offer, I did not dare try to take home with me except in pictures. A bakery with a bread subscription program. Flowers, scapes, honey, maple syrup, lovely beets and salad greens. Some fine coffee sellers. And even a pipe (micro-) band from the local fire department, there to see off a team of local youngsters on a cycling tour to New England and New York. And some Jazzercizers (not the first I saw on this trip, in fact, as a much smaller group had been toiling away outside the market in in Indianapolis while we lolled about indoors tasting beer).

We returned with our spoils and hot-footed it over to hear the day’s plenary speaker, environmentalist photographer-writer Subhankar Banerjee, who walked us through some of the issues he’s been documenting. The Arctic, with its burden of interlocking catastrophes, was one. It was evident from Banerjee’s photos (some of which have had enough impact to be banned) that global warming is very real in the melting north, and is making wildlife migration and the subsistence hunting/fishing lives of aboriginal northerners precarious; it seems certain the impact of development and energy exploration will destroy this way of life.

His talk about the lives of his images and the verbal/visual battle he’s had with Shell Oil on his Huffington Post column was fascinating. His 2001 polar bear image has had, he thinks, some 40,000 reproductions, becoming one of the most well-known visual arguments against Arctic oil exploration; but Obama’s government was prepared to let it happen, until the Gulf of Mexico spill called a temporary halt to the plan. His Climatestorytellers.org website offers a forum for these and other stories of our times.

Banerjee lives in New Mexico and next showed us some images he’s been working on with desert flora, the cholla cactus in particular, in a series called Where I Live I Hope to Know. He’s trying to understand his surroundings by focusing on what’s unremarkable in his everyday landscape. But most interesting to me was his mention of the devastation of the piñon–juniper woodland. The piñon, New Mexico’s state tree, which gives us pine nuts, is (to put it mildly) a slow-growing tree; it reaches reproductive maturity at about 300 years, and can live as long as 1000 years. He says that about 90% of the mature piñons died between 2001-2005, because of development, erosion, fire and – where my ears pricked up – because of bark beetle infestation. Like the mountain pine beetle in BC (and elsewhere), global warming has meant that the beetle can survive the increasingly mild winters.

In the question and answer that followed, Banerjee remarked that in terms of fossil fuels,  we have exhausted “easy energy” sources; hereafter we’re calling on “extreme energy” where any extraction is dangerous and involves a magnitude of devastation, and being caught up doing or responding to that simply delays the debate on how to solve climate change. Our appetite for energy, he observed, from three countries alone – China, India and the US – has the ability to destroy the planet through extraction and consumption.

ASLE 3: food

There were 15 thematic streams running through the conference (though no stream was water, ha ha) and of course my interests leaned most heavily on stream 6: Food production, food consumption, and waste.

Which calls for some mention of foods consumed since arrival.

We wandered over to the nearby pub for a bite the first night, for a lesson in portions and the semiotics of Indiana menus. This is what “lettuce wedge” denotes in Bloomington:

while P’s tuna salad with plantain and vegetative miscellany was similarly scaled for prairie sized appetites, and, one suspects, not targeted at locavores.

And speaking of size, check out this guy’s paws! I was not in a squirrel-eating mood, but later that evening I did enjoy the Ethiopian meal which was all the more delightful for having been served at a restaurant which also had an Italian menu, as the owner is Italian-Ethiopian, which with the Persian chef, makes for some interesting food.

The other favourite was the Burmese restaurant which offered a Tea Leaf Salad and some excellent eggplant.

But. Turning back to the conference.

In Thursday’s session on Food Aesthetics: from Modernism to Postmodernism, Jesse Oak Taylor – in Nose to Tail Modernism – addressed the foods of Ulysses as presented by Fergus Henderson in St John Restaurant and his cookbook Nose to Tail Eating: the ‘everything but the squeal’ menu (Upton  Sinclair, The Jungle); concluding that Henderson was aiming to teach readers how to eat as much as how to cook; that respect for the animal was often seen as part of this (not wasting edible parts) but that of course from the animal’s point of view this was irrelevant (“dinner doesn’t care about the sauce”).

On the same panel, I also enjoyed Dan Philippon‘s talk Little House on the Foodshed, which looked at the idea of the Little House books as models of sustainable consumption and noted that modern day locavores Alisa Smith/J.B. MacKinnon, Barbara Kingsolver and Bill McKibben had referenced Wilder.

There were a couple of panels on food, film and ecocriticism. In one, Robert Boschman spoke on E.coli 0157: H7 poisoning – a personal look based on the life-threatening experience of his two pre-school children that led him to explore food safety from many angles, including the recent appearance of Cargill on the Oprah show; Dominique Laporte’s well known work from the 1970s; Marion Nestle; and the curious repression of drug treatments (that saved his daughters) developed to fight E.coli poisoning. His concluding words were that the experience – and ensuing research – changed his family’s eating patterns forever: although he lives in the heart of cattle country, he will not allow beef of any kind in his home.

Joseph K. Heumann followed, showing Our Daily Bread while speaking on Eco-Food Films: The Documentary Tradition; a little too interesting a film for a backdrop. And at that point I had to flee to prepare for my own reading, on the Creative Approaches to Food and Farming panel where I read food poetry and was thereafter most interested in Stella Capek‘s essay about cheese and bacteria, called A Fine Line.

ASLE 2: gardens

One of the features of ASLE conferences most beloved by attendees is the choice of activities slotted in to highlight the environmental features of the host region. My Friday afternoon pick was a tour of the Bloomington Community Orchard. The 44-variety organic orchard was planted last October, so it will be a couple of years before it’s bearing fruit (although there are berry bushes which will keep volunteers interested until then, perhaps).

It’s administered by a volunteer board and has received grants already from Toms of Maine and Edys Ice Cream. Our guide, board member Ross Gay, said the grants were helpful as they gave the orchard focus through its beginnings, since the requirements – to carry out educational projects and the like – had to be satisfied within a strict time period.

Situated at one end of land that was a former pig farm, the orchard is ringed by deer fencing and punctuated with handmade gates and posts of local locust wood.

They try to use local materials wherever possible: the paths are made from local limestone which, compacted for use, are firm and even enough for wheelchair access. The garden shed was built with reclaimed wood, recycled materials and volunteer labour; the compost included donated leavings from a local brewery (until the eau de organic matter put a halt to that ingredient).

Though water – and nutrients – are being carefully nurtured in the soil (groundcovers like rye and buckwheat are planted, and levelled with sickles), water will be an issue to be faced in the future because the cost of extending the water pipes is prohibitive for a nonprofit. So there are plans for a cistern and water harvesting in the works; meanwhile, in keeping with the permaculture principles being used in its design, the orchard boasts this swale which holds water along the contour of the orchard.

Efficient use of resources means improvising and using sustainable gardening methods. Permaculturalists love comfrey as a dynamic accumulator, its use as a green manure, and its size which keeps down weeds, so it’s been planted around all the trees. The bagged decorations are actually weights intended to train the tree limbs into a horizontal or downward growth; and most of the trunks are protected with wrapping (rabbits and other rodents would be the chief culprits here, I suppose, as the fencing should keep the deer out).

We had time to have a nose round the nearby community gardens as well, where a few people were pottering around on a Friday afternoon. Things were looking pretty healthy, despite a lot of Japanese beetles sunning themselves on corn leaves; a reminder that community includes shared pests… like this potato beetle in its striped pyjamas.

ASLE 1: water

Every so often I end up temporarily on a new university campus, struggling to locate oddly-situated and randomly-numbered rooms in unmarked buildings. While I retrace miles of wasted footsteps, I have ample time to reflect on the importance of signposting and the absence of an inner compass which would allow me to make intended use of the maps and directional notes with which we start these journeys. The friendly young man who checked me into my dorm the other night, one of a clutch of sustainable buildings named for  trees (by his hand mine was spelled ceader) told me that I’d find most of the ASLE sessions by following a sort of path along a creek – “it’s kind of hard to explain,” he concluded.

I did eventually find that elusive path, and the buildings are starting to look more familiar. Somehow I’ve found my way to a few sessions over the past couple of days.

Aquatic Intelligence: A Panel to Explore Relationships with Water has been about the best panel I’ve been to so far  (aside from my own, ahem). Gyorgyi Voros started us off with an overview of the watery module in the Earth Sustainability course she taught, and particularly the role of the “Gathering of the waters” exercise, inspired by Basia Irland‘s similarly named 5-year project along the Rio Grande.

Kate Berry then stepped in to say a few words on Basia Irland’s behalf – as she’d had to cancel – about her Waterborne Micro-Pathogens project: she’s created “scrolls” from sari silk (because this is used in India to filter drinking water) with images of some of “the waterborne diseases that kill a child every eight seconds somewhere in the world.” They’re floated in rivers and hung in wells and other appropriate locations.

Berry, a geographer from the U of Nevada, then carried on with her own paper, The Rhetoric of Water Crises and Metrics of Drought, in which she deplored the shoe-horning of the term “crisis” into every contemporary environmental issue we face, and argued that while engagement is needed, crisis is not. Using this rhetoric pits those who acknowledge the crisis against those who don’t; and entangles it in bigger issues, making it something that endlessly changes and therefore becomes fundamentally unsolvable; and it tends to puts us in a position of having to master a crisis rather than adapting to a changing environment. Later a questioner commented on humanity’s search for stasis in a constantly changing world; although it was also agreed there’s a difference between evolving features and imposed/rapid change of the kind that does get labelled “crisis.”

Finally, Jennifer Wheat, from the U of Hawaii, spoke, in part from her own experience, on Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean: Wild Swimming and Eco-Activism, which touched on such aspects as the difficulty of engaging with something you can’t see – water can look clear but carry contaminants that can affect us by ingestion, immersion or accidental contact; she talked about the deliberate, Monsanto-funded poisoning of mangrove swamps that – though not native to Hawaii – do harbour native fish nurseries and protect against tsunamis; and the difficulties of ownership and custody of shared water.