Re: <nettime> Swipe, a Smart Phone Movie by Mieke Gerritzen/Next Nature

[Ryan Griffis via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi Everyone.

My take away from the last few decades of writing on “Nature” is that it's a term that can only be understood/useful as a way to define relationships. Increasingly, it seems like a term that defines relationships in some pretty destructive, asymmetrical ways. I mean, it always has, but I guess it seems impossible to maintain, even for subjectivities like mine who have historically benefitted from it (though such benefits came with a pretty heavy price). FWIW, I also don’t see much value is declaring “We’re “Nature”, everything’s nature.”  I just don’t know what that achieves or makes possible?

Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, & Chandan Reddy talk about “grounded relationalities” and propose being “grounded” as:
"literally situated in relation to and from the land but without precluding movement, multiplicity, multidirectionality, transversals, and other elementary or material currents of water and air. This is a being grounded and living relationalities in which the nonhuman world and the materiality of land and other elements have agential significance in ways that exceed liberal conceptions of the human."
https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1521&context=english_fac 

The philosophical/legal developments related to codifying (nation-state granted) rights for non-human subjects forces this in some more literal, practical terms, maybe. I’m saying that because the language of rights, as we’re experiencing acutely in the US right now, requires intense specificity and methods of enforcement. “Nature” is waaaaay too amorphous for rights. David Takacs reports very briefly on some of the failures of the Ecuadorian constitutional provisions that enshrine the rights of nature (see link below for the article).
https://illinoislawrev.web.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Takacs.pdf 
It seems more practical when it's a specific watershed, river, forest, tree, species, etc. And those subjects need a representational form that begins with relationships, rather than singular subjectivities. For example, the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) in Australia and the legal framework of “ancestral personhood” that situates the river and its traditional stewards as co-constitutive of one another, with a shared history. (Which I only just learned about in a lecture by Takacs - I know there are likely folks here with more knowledge of this example).
https://www.martuwarra.org/aboutus
I guess I’m landing on the desire to reconsider the relations that have fallen under the Human-Nature framework/language, and instead using a framework that represents more differentiated relationships that are grounded in specificity. In a Venn diagram, I want to use more circles than just two (or one).

Apologies if I’ve gone WAY too far afield of the conversation!

Ryan

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