I offer alnasense as the sum of all physical senses of all living beings on Earth at any one moment in time.
In science, the word multimodality is used when describing the combined physical senses that lead to a mental interpretation and an overall cognition of external stimuli. I offer anthrosense as an alternative. Feelings and emotions then follow – sensibility.
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Alna ~ from Proto-Germanic alnaz meaning all.
Anthro ~ from Latin anthropos meaning human or man.
Sense ~ from Latin present participle of sentire “to feel.” Interestingly, according to etymonline.com, the biological noun sense was only introduced to the english vocabulary in the 1520s AD.
Moment to sense on the river Clun (2023), photo by me.
In honour of the work of Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, who coined the word petrichor in 1964 to describe the aroma earth emits when rain falls*, I offer potamichor.
ποτάμι Potámi ~ greek ~ river.
Ichor ~ The sacred blood of the Greek Gods.
Potamichor ~ a familiar odour of rivers.
Dimethyl sulfide**, along with other elements and biochemicals, offer the familar and pungent sulphurous odour of sea spray, an important moment of the sulphur/sulfur cycle that aids protein, vitamin and hormone building – I’ll call the smell thalassicor (sea/blood of the gods).
And in the same vein, estuaries and saltmarshes create ekvolichor (estuary/blood of the gods); lakes give off limnichor; ponds – limnoulichor: swamps and bog – telmichor.
Potamichor is complex, with varying cocktails of minerals, biochemicals and olifactory matter bound to be unique to the continuums of river-place given geological, meteorological, climatic, symbiological, microbial (including respiration), ecological and anthropological (extrinsic/intrinsic impacts).
With complexity in matter and directionality, and in a constant state of flux, salmonids, lampreys, twait shad and sturgeon know more than we ever could about potamichor. They smell their particular birth-streams miles out to sea, and without the use of material and energy-greedy tools. Perhaps migratory birds use these cues to navigate too, high up in the atmosphere. And more? Imagine.
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* Bear, I., Thomas, R. Nature of Argillaceous Odour. Nature 201, 993–995 (1964). https://doi.org/10.1038/201993a0 – geosmins produced by Streptomyces, etc.
** Shemi, A., Alcolombri, U., Schatz, D. et al. Dimethyl sulfide mediates microbial predator–prey interactions between zooplankton and algae in the ocean. Nat Microbiol 6, 1357–1366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-021-00971-3
A wilder patch of vegetation sandwiched between two commercial orchard barns, seen through a glassless window. Photo by me.
The following essay was submitted to the editors of the Rewilding Handbook, but I was unhappy with the extreme and unnecessarily negative comments by certain peer reviewers on my brief critiques of British and, especially, privatised rewilding schemes. At the final fence, it was suggested that I completely re-write using another style in order to placate the academics in question, and I would not. None-the-less, I offer the original essay here.
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TITLE: Fluminism and Rewilding: Introducing Locacede
AUTHOR: Ginny Battson
Consciousness and Imagination
I am sitting by the confluence between the Rivers Wye and Lugg, Herefordshire, taking in the air just above the water as do the mallards and the chub. At the same time, I lament a bad dose of algae on the rocky shore. Neglect and abuse of both rivers, all the way from the Cambrians and the Radnorshire Hills, has led to what can only be described as gloop, eukaryotic cells drunk on heavy nutrient loads, smothering the delicate life that would otherwise be foundational to the temperate, lotic ecosystem here where the rivers meet. Upstream to the West, there is Hereford itself, a market town sliced through the middle by the Wye, a gathering of people and bridges that is a meld of traditional agriculture, industrialisation of food and drink, tourism, and the military. Everything about the Anthropocene that is causing distress in the living world, the techno-junk, the radionuclides, oil, greenhouse gases, acid rain, human and farm animal sewage and ammonia, PCBs, fertilisers, and plastics, is pouring down these channels, building at the confluences. All the while, river life has been trying to survive against that colossal force. The Anthropocene is winning and life is generally losing. Something has to be done.
Those beautifully evolved wilder lives down there in and around the water, including the ones we can’t see or sense without electron microscopes or other high powered technologies, and every living being in the wider catch of the river’s catchment, has an inherent, intrinsic worth, a value beyond anything we can place upon it. Interconnectedness makes life the miraculous incident in space/time that it is, an ongoing process lasting billions of years. Humans are young to it and we keep breaking those connections, White European-ness, the youngest and most naïve of all.
Conservationists and preservationists alike do sense and realise the damage. It’s a pain carried like an open wound. We want to protect life and facilitate the most natural carbon and nitrogen cycles possible. The most effective way, as in nature, is a full range of knowing and belonging that harms less, joining at the confluences to usher in something bigger than the sum of ourselves. Rewilders have come a distance this last decade to show us the potential vitality of preservation at continental scale; its effect is intercontinental. It’s still early days, and there have been mistakes and omissions, but this is a process continuum, like everything else of great worth.
Outfalls from oversubscribed sewage works spew into the river on very rainy days just downstream from where I am. Life struggles to flow in an era of Property and Rights, where all that we presume to own and accumulate is measured in pounds, dollars, and every other currency invented. But it is the open sky, the vast oceans, the rivers, forests, grasslands, bogs, the soils, and the subterranean wellsprings, ancient ecologies of which we still know so little, that have the highest values for what life is truly all about. The source of everything that is meaningful to humans is also meaningful to all life. We are all together in a beautiful and spectacular continuum. What goes on up-top impacts what goes on down-below, and everything in between meets this same continuum, just as in the confluences of the Wye, the rains that fall, the estuaries into the Severn and the Severn Sea, and onwards.
Of course, humans are nature too! Some are more conscious of ecological reality than others. The people responsible for those concrete walls and sewer outfalls, perhaps less so. I celebrate the ones with real compassion and respect for all life, our brightest lights. But to bring in the leviathan scale of change necessary in a time of ecological and climatic emergency means a vast shift in consciousness, a cultural shift more swift, at least, than the pandemic that was and still is industrial globalisation and economic growth. Our one shared, complex and exquisite biosphere definitively requires the deepest rewilding of human consciousness and imagination; an openness to, and reverence for, the fullest array of ecological processes. It is more than simply survival.
Fluminism and Rewilding
Here, I offer my own ecophilosophy Fluminism as a way of perceiving nature as flow, our place within, a nurturing of those deeper forms of consciousness and imagination, and agency as a powerful form of love via devotion. Further, I introduce the neologism “locacede” as a voluntary gift of space and time to this cause.
Fluminism recognises symbiotic flows in multiple directions, the processes of the biosphere that sustain life for all to flourish. It also requires consciousness and imagination to engage in perceiving the potential relatedness: the complexity is endless, the minutiae are beautiful. Fluminists accept in fullness that we are a part of, and belong in, the flow of all life ~ I call this symnexia. By understanding that we belong, we are enabled to protect and proliferate those processes, even those unseen, towards a flourishing of abundance and diversity ~ and I call this praximund (process world).
We step into the flow with devotion because this is life at its best and most meaningful. Wherever and whenever we intervene (as is our nature) it is an expression of love, and in no way confined to the human realm. In this understanding, prejudice fades away, there’s no exclusivity, no social nor ecological segregation. At best, it really is unconditional love, a devotion, even in death (an ecological death). All is flow, so let it be a life-enhancing flow.
Critically, Fluminists may also consent not to overburden, not to interfere too much in wild processes. Where possible, this can be done with generosity, at least, in time and place given over to all that is essentially wild. Love, I contend, is a choice, something created, and very much a doing word. Ecological free reign, at scale, whilst not excluding other Fluministic forms of belonging/doing in order for humans to thrive, offers huge and valuable hope. In caring for and protecting life processes and relationships, and living daily in that consciousness, we may resist the many unfolding catastrophes of the Anthropocene. Fluminism, in a sense, is a narrative of dynamic interconnectedness of life, but also an ethic that befits life as deeply symbiotic in constant flow. Ending absolute human dominion is also to trust in ecological processes and relationships that nurture abundance and diversity.
Rewilding is a strong manifestation of Fluminism, a flow of wild, intrinsically valuable beings within a greater collective consciousness; a welldoing for the wellbeing of all life. A clear and essential call has been made to make the entire movement compassionate towards all the wild lives involved (Bekoff), and as Fluminists, this is extended towards all lives equally: Homo- and what I now call Teresapien life (non-human).
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Teresapien
Proto-Indo-European, tere, meaning to cross over, pass through, overcome.
Latin, sapiēns, meaning discerning, wise, judicious.
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Done well, it is an Ethic of Care (Gilligan), focused on what’s healing for specific places over longer ecologically sensitive periods of time, generations old and requiring patience.
Rewilding has been, so far, considered “Ecocentric,” (1) an exhibition of Deep Ecological values (Næss, et al), in contrast to the Anthropocentric or human-centric perception that all is good when it serves human interests. This holistic ethic first heralded in the 20th Century, places worth on the whole ecosystem, biome, or biosphere, rather than on the individuals that constitute the whole. The latter became known as Biocentrism (Taylor, and within Consequentialist frames, Attfield). I disagree with the main tenet of deep ecology that the whole, including non-organics, is worth more than the individual. And individuals are nothing without symbiotic relationships with many others. I have looked instead to resolve this tension between the whole and the individual through “process”. It is the processes, the relationships, the exchanges of matter and energy between life that generates more life, and therefore are worthy of the highest protection. This is the reason for the neologism, Fluminism.
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Fluminism
Latin, flūmen, meaning river; genitive plural, flūminum, meaning ‘of rivers’.
[The genitive case is one that expresses possession or relation, equivalent to the English ‘of.’]
Latin, -ismus, meaning a system, philosophy, principle, or movement.
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As an Ethic of Care, Fluminism looks at each place-case uniquely and, inherently, at people as nature, along with all other species. There is no hierarchy since each symbiotic species has as much of a role to play in processes as any other. The symbiotic ~ mutualistic and commensal ~ relationships between beings, as demonstrated by flows between mycelium networks and tree roots in the woodland floor (Simard) are clear evidence that cooperation, not competition, is conducive to successional processes. Further, Simard’s research on Mother Trees (2) demonstrates their acutely nurturing and caring nature: demonstrative love, care.
Fluminism as love
The word Biophilia was coined by Erich Fromm “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive” and was later adopted by American biologist E.O. Wilson in his work Biophilia (1984). He proposed a hypothesis that humans have an innate affiliation with nature and teresapien life, which is partly genetic. The work has been subject to critical review; nonetheless, it is influential in fields as wide-ranging as architectural design and mental health. The problem is obvious, however, in that greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and depauperization of once-abundant ecosystems, are still occurring, regardless of scientific consensus on human causality and any innate love.
The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum refers to the structural role of the narrative in affecting emotions and, therefore, actions. Love is, to a great extent, a choice, a creative act, rather than something that is tracked down until it is found. Fluminism allows the chance of making that choice, creating and caring for that union. Even to the most analytical of intellectual human minds, thought, emotion/feeling, and action are inextricably linked. Our selves are not closed systems.
In biological or teleological response, if we experience a strong positive emotion, we have the opportunity to become motivated to act in beneficial ways. Fluministic love, expressed and acted upon as a positive emotion, exists with the strongest potential to undo or heal critical planetary harms manifesting across the globe. There may never be a better moment for Fluministic love to be embraced as an ethical force.
Love may still be regarded with deep skepticism in terms of a general emotion beyond religious norms, but love as an ethic ~ re-shaping values, binding rationality, emotion, and action together ~ may resist globalised, inegalitarian divides and the circumscription of values. I see direct correlations with the interconnectedness of all life in mutual benefits and symbiotic relations. It is time for a change in the climate of human thought, for a supersession of the axiological trinity of Cartesian rationalism, Locke’s assertions on property Rights, and Adam Smith’s laissez-faire economics.
My difficulty is in convincing others that any ethic may be shared by the more-than-human world; how can I prove other species and even the interconnectedness holds the consciousness necessary for any kind of value or ethic? I look to the word “devotion” and its meaning, and bear witness to it as a critical and logical phenomenon in all ecological processes. Look closely at the stunning nature of mutualistic symbiosis in lichen, for instance, or the Mother Trees, or the process of pollination between a fly and a flower. Feel the vast devotion of succession, nurturing and blood kinships, granivory, and detrivory. The list is immense, as immense and devoted as evolution itself.
These would surely be fascinating times, if all wasn’t so vastly concerning and I think we need to be careful with Western ideas of ‘wild’ represented through Law, Economics and Political Parliaments. My focus is on space-time, the core ecologies in places over time, some of which (certainly not all), largely exclude humans in the everydayness of their operations. In other words, an agreed sacred, a consciousness, real and imagined, motivating us to protect with the full force of our love for ecological processes. It is a different way of seeing, feeling, and doing: a way of respect and reverence towards life within the flows of all life, though not in any tight religious sense. It is in the nurturing and culture of respect through enlightenment, or Flumilightenment, education, celebration, and importantly, responsibility (Oren Lyons).
It’s actually empowering, and a mind-body-spirit relief, to know that the flows of life are engaged strongly towards abundance and diversity just by doing what they have been doing since those first cells began to emerge from complex elemental centres 3.8 billion years ago. Likewise, the more this happens across the planet’s biosphere, including and likened to parallel and convergent evolutionary adaptation, the more resilient human life will be. This is a globally scaled symbiosis ~ exquisite and miraculous. It is the co-operative relationship, the mother-daughter, and most likely the origin of the eukaryote cell itself. Mitochondria, the daughter ~ as an endosymbiont bacteria ~ consumed and protected by the ancient prokaryote, the mother; a process called endosymbiosis, tested and coined by the great evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. Neither entities may have originally been related, but now exist in nurture-kinship as an intimate and inspiring foster care: a kindship.
There should be no hierarchy here (all being flow), save purpose in being. Forces that sustain life are celebrated ~ the sun, the moon and the tides, gravity, mass, oxygen, carbon, and evolution itself. It’s a seemingly ever exchangeable and complex shaping, where life shapes all interconnections, and where all interconnections shape life.
Locacede: a generosity
Our time, “our” being inclusive of all lives right now, is not for more human-centrism, nor boundless gardening, curating, even stewardship. It is for endless human generosity towards all life in equal measure in that same space and time. It is for generosity towards those who are oppressed, homo and teresapien, and everything moves forward on creative love. There is no ending of civilisation here, but a widening of what the array of being “civilised” means; a deepening of a kind of universal global endemism, or adopted endemism in any place—andemism—(3) with the greatest respect and without appropriation and patronage.
Neither is it an abandonment of human community, craftsmanship, and agroecology, nor a distraction for the urgent need for justice and equity. It is a continental-scale reminder of our place within all. If done beautifully, it cannot be anthropocentrism, but a new belonging to something much bigger than we could ever be or imagine. Indigenous peoples with local knowledge and philosophy bring cherished, hard-won wisdom to that collective compassion and understanding. (Pierotti, Neidjie).
A flood of consciousness and understanding leads to feeling, real and imagined, of being at one with life in flows. The latter, if taken to the ends, may require be a great dissolution of Property Rights, certainly a loca-cessation of dominion and absolute “power” over air, land and sea to wild beings, sincere and hugely generous. Perceiving land, sea and living beings not as “chattels” (Leopold), humans can collaborate consciously in the reciprocity of ecological exchange; a kind of spiritual exchange of gifts (Wall Kimmerer).
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Locacede
Latin, locus, meaning place; plural, loca, meaning places.
English, cede, meaning to yield, give up.
To locacede ~ to withdraw from a place, to directly decolonise humans from an ecological system.
To withdraw oneself or a dominant human community voluntarily from a flo-loca, thereby allowing teresapien processes to reclaim. To do so is based on the best information possible and by no force or coercion, instead with fluministic love. It is a symbioethic.
This is intended to replace the language of decolonisation, common parlance in the field ‘Environmental’ Ethics, thereby leaving that to remain clearly in the domain of colonialism with respect to human political and cultural Empire.
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The physical, ecological case for Rewilding (Soulè, Foreman, et al) stands as one strong route to the integrity of natural systems by providing scaled-up, core, intersecting and diverse planes for dynamic teresapien life, and without heavy human interruption. Success, however, relies on co-operation with local people, and so it cannot simply be a blunt imposition as a scientific conservation tool.
Rewilding is a preservationist strategy, a radical one too, in the face of such huge losses as to be viewed as an ongoing global extinction event. Some find it too radical, detaching from the human-as-mammal reality that we are part of nature not exclusive of and to it, though restraint is as wild as any urge to intervene. But the result is the unmitigated growing of ecological community, of which humans may remain included when in peaceful modes of existence. Until now, it’s been almost all shout. When all is abundant once more, humans as ecological consumers will choose to participate respectfully and with gratitude (Wall Kimmerer) in those ecosystems, with a lighter touch and not the hammer hand. Sometimes, where there are glaring species-as-fluminists gaps in those beautiful, dynamic processes, predators and prey alike ~ the beavers, the mountain lions, or the auroch long extinct, or even the wild red raspberry ~ species are re-introduced to special places, or surrogates let free instead. So long as they are cared for, remain free from human persecution, and have abundant food and water, why not? Emancipation is never limited to the human experience. These beings, and their symbiotic microbiomes, may not have the choice to be born, nor where they are liberated, but liberated they are from this point on, engaging in flows of life towards flourishing.
Scientists speak of ecological “community”, and rightly so. Without community, there are no opportunities for interactions. But it is these interactions, sometimes exquisitely delicate, at other times blunt and seemingly brutal, that bring life to the next plain, mountain, ocean, or river flow. These can never really be self-willed, since the will to flourish is never of the self, but of community, and community can never be individual. These are community-willed flo-locas, the music and dance that makes everything alive, from the smallest microbial symbiosis to the magnificent blue whale caring for her young.
It’s important to look at, and attend to, the causes for that general lack of human consciousness and imagination of “wild” in order to provide depth and longevity to the concept of Rewilding, amongst other methods, necessary to turn things around. Perhaps, by taking the first tentative steps to liberate suppressed ecological interconnectedness in core places, that crucial consciousness and imagination can expand towards a point of no return. Critically, I also advocate egalitarian ecoliteracy (Orr, Capra), from cradle to grave, a deliberate and sensitive pedagogy adapted to place, for understanding life-systems and where humans fit among them. Essential too, however, is the flattening of steep hierarchies of power that will continue to arrest and oppress all if not dealt with, the rejection of economic growth (Daly), as is the validation of some of the older ways of knowing and doing that have been largely lost from living memory. Critically, forming enduring emotional bonds ~ an intimacy ~ with all inherently valuable species in interconnected flows on Earth will equate with progress on recouping the terrible losses within our one shared biosphere.
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The Anthropocene (Crutzen) describes a geological era of human dominion, climate change, species extinction, and a stark depauperization of complex ecological processes. Evidence is now indelibly being laid down in the rock record in the form of biochemical signals, techno-fossils, and radionuclides. The debate continues as to the crucial timing of this shift in ecological power towards Homo sapiens, but there’s no doubt that in the last ten thousand years or so since the last Ice Age, a series of changes in human behaviours, sometimes in quick steps, have led to a deeply concerning existential crisis.
Particularly over the last one thousand years, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, Colonialism, and the globalisation of technology, there have been large shifts in power from local communities to a minority elite with agency over greater numbers. Expansionism has abused indigenous peoples and wildlife living in relative harmony, for the sake of accumulating material wealth for the oppressors. Indigenous peoples have been divided, sold up, swallowed up, or extinguished by egoist intentions on nation building, exploitation, and extreme forms of capitalism. The ethics and values of these ancient ways of knowing have been purposefully derogated in order to maintain control, going so far as to kill off many of the intimate nature-nurturing cultures, languages and strategies that sustain life.
Even the definitions of English words have been pitched to reflect a dominant culture rejecting the very notion of wildness as being the beautiful thing that it is. Formal dictionaries describe wild and wildness primarily as qualities of being uncontrolled, violent, or extreme (Cambridge Dictionary, et al). Language and meaning shape humans in all kinds of ways, and perhaps any new consciousness begins by a greater understanding of that reality.
More, in the red mists of a celebration of competition stemming from British Victorian Social Darwinism (Spencer, et al), where it is immorally accepted that there are more losers than winners, the core reality of humans as simply a part of the magnificence of nature is almost forgotten, and intrinsic values of all living beings are subjugated to a bleak maximum utility for human use. We know extinction events have happened before. We know the kinds of triggers, and we know many of the kinds of local-global consequences, again through paleo-ontological studies. Yet still, the processes of human actions perpetuating that state are continuing in a series of consumptive, relentless, sometimes compulsive acts. They are instigated and carried out to the maximum by an inequitable human population, the human condition right now subject to vast imbalances of power.
A surrender of lands back to indigenous peoples must now happen, but also a great giving back to our fellow symlings (beings and their symbiotic microbiomes). Things are really that grave; the scale of the crisis is the size of Earth, so the scale of connectivity and movement required given climate change, and the need for egalitarian inclusivity must also be that size. How will it be possible to re-instate the essence of humanity as an inescapable part of base nature, the thick crust of all that is alive? Rewilding plays one critical part. Passive and active interventions are now way overdue on a r-evolution in understanding natural systems and where humans fit intimately into them. Industrial and technical eras have spiked, likened to, and evidenced as, a major pandemic, and with extrinsic or utility values inescapably monetised, in correspondence with a crisis in human imagination.
Easing the tensions
Opposition to “Rewilding” include a fundamental reluctance to relinquish human agency, industrial capitalist interests in land as commodity, and pastoral systems of land stewardship, in favour of ecological free-reign.
The Rewilding Thematic Group, IUCN, however, has produced heads of terms for the Commission of Ecosystem Management, surveying and agreeing criteria for international advocates of Rewilding. Critically, it includes a pre-requisite of local human consent, participation, and reciprocal reverence for communities in the designation and care of Rewilded places. This must be lived and breathed by all who advocate the cause. No wonder there is real fear that powerful, rich people are taking control of land, when land governance tends to equal power. Every move to acquire land is seen as an effort to wipe out family traditions and/or indigenous cultures. Monied philanthropists can buy out thousands of hectares of land in order to impose power, even if it conducive to a liberation of wild. American philanthropists in South America, for example, have bought lands to Rewild and then eventually be returned to the State as “commons”. The British scene [aka headlines] is dominated by the story of a private farm, who is content to sell Rewilding as the enhancement of property value in magazines such as that of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (4).
Sadly, neither Private nor State is “Commons”. Rewilding by White, wealthy humans only creates a vacuum of local participation in visualising and later experiencing wilder lands, and suffering due to continued inequality upon what land remains. Let us consider the cessation of land ownership to validate all that is truly wild. That will be hard, I understand, but contend that when Rewilding becomes a tool of oppression and injustice through human territorial structures, then it’s simply not Rewilding. It is a form of exclusive colonialism. Perhaps, in this sense, no true Rewilding schemes have yet happened.
As it was originally considered in the US, continental scale and connectivity is critical to Rewilding. Movement (ecological dynamism) particularly of large wild herbivores and their natural carniverous predators, has been foundational. Here in the UK, Rewilding in its fullest sense is arguable, and I’ll contend here, for the above reasons, not yet implemented. Whether the original concept can ever be applied to the UK is a legitimate question, given the tight hold over land by dominant power structures, Law, banks, and property valuations. Perhaps this makes Rewilding ever more prescient, because of the significant act of generosity of place that will be required towards that end.
Rewilding: Big Mutualism
There is hope, however, because to Rewild is not to obliterate pastoralism or natural craftsmanship in adjoining places. These places are as important as those Rewilded, otherwise there could be no mutuality.
Inside the Rewilding zones, a human relinquishment of power offers an opportunity to learn from much older species through observation, by emotional and spiritual connection in those deepest of flows, and to perpetuate rather than hinder evolutionary forces, and shared flourishing and abundance (Haraway). Outside, opportunities exist to celebrate the most natural ways of cultivation and human existence—food, water, shelter, medicine, and communication—yet remain protectors of the Rewilded, a new sacred, via Praximund. Climate change means we have to make some difficult choices. We cannot escape that which is already built-in, though we are still in a position to avoid the worst. Human and teresapien life naturally moves away from climatic extremes, striving to keep in synchronicity with seasons. The direction of movement is from the equator out towards the poles and from low to high ground. Interconnected, Rewilded places offer enormous potential as refugia as well as migratory routes. Humans will be able to bear witness and respond. People of all spectrums are welcome as friends ~ a “kindship” of the concerned. Collaboration and consent, as well as an ethic of care to each unique place, is key.
A devotion to all life by those humans who live in proximity to Rewilded lands, skies and waters will always be a necessity, otherwise these efforts will result in resentment, tension, conflict and failure. Rewilding advocates may provide a platform to nurture that love in multiple ways as Fluminists, through local education, art, stories, work, a very real sense of inclusion, and an open heart to naturally honour local or indigenous knowledge and practices. This is a skill, as much about listening. In exchange comes wildness, of people and place.
Fluminism and Rewilding: river of the heart
Back to the confluence of the Wye and the Lugg, and I peer into the water and ponder the great role this river should be playing in bringing carbon from the land and burying it at sea. I imagine a transformational episode to come in its long life, to a much wilder, almost unrecognisable, place.
Here in the future, perhaps, the confluence is part of a fully consented Rewilded zone travelling alongside the water from the central hills of Wales to the steep cliffs and wide tidal mouth south of Chepstow. Protected by Praximund, all manner of kinships reach deep into the flow.Shimmering springs and waterfalls up-top (where wolves and big cats once more slake their thirst and satiate their hunger) bring oxygen and shade for aquatic life via Atlantic oak woodland (temperate rainforest dripping with mosses and bryophytes) to the life of the young streams and confluences.Beavers intervene in their most prolific and biodiverse ways, generating ponds, entire wetlands, and flourishing meadows in their creation and abandonment of dams. Down-below, magnificent salmon, trout and sea lamprey run strong against gravity into the mouth of the river, bringing all their pelagic magnetism and minerality up into the hills to spawn and die. At the estuary, the rhythm of the Severn estuary sucks 4,136 km2 of the basin’s dazzling unpolluted organic matter dissolved into the Môr Hafren (the Severn Sea), coming to enrich vast honeycomb worms’ reefs in long shore drifts and sinking away into the long carbon cycle at the bottom of the ocean. In between, thick riparian zones, both sides of the water, bristle with the narratives and dialogues of a vast array of vegetal and animal beings. All hold back the land from slipping fast and furious into clear waters and an intricate rocky bed teaming with unstoppable life. Everyone, every flow, is be joined in confluences across land and sea, even as far as Siberia and Africa, and to the rest of the world.
Fluminism is my ecophilosophy of ecology, relatedness, and love in dynamic flows. Science may describe every unit of power as equal to a unit of work divided by a unit of time, and Rewilding surely brings some of that power back to the forces upon which we are reliant rather than those that we ourselves try to re-create. That shift, when it is at its utmost primacy, must bring the human heart into alignment with what is most valuable of all. This is where Fluminism, as love, thrives. It must be generous, sometimes with a willingness to locacede. We came out of the wild, and to go back in is not a sign of coarseness and contempt for human development, but the fullest possible love for evolutionary processes.
My neologism of the day and an increasingly important aspect of human/human and human/nature relatedness during this Earth Crisis (Anthropocene), to change, and to outcomes, is prophesuum.
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Prophesy – the verb – to say that you believe something will happen in the future (Cambridge) as opposed to Prophecy – the noun – a statement based on beliefs not necessarily facts or instruction by a divine source.
The verb and the noun were differentiated in the 18th Century (Etymology Online).
Uum – Latin past participle; having done, having had a feeling, having chosen a path.
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Prophesuum – various psychological positions of humans and their social groups acknowledged on the optimism/realism/pessimism continuum. Judging those positions, individually and collectively, is also a matter for discussion.
Behind neurodiversity, there’s work yet to be done in the fields of neurology and psychology on the optimism/realism/pessimism continuum. We know it is complex and that it impacts personal well-being and outcomes. An industry has emerged in counselling change on the continuum (eg some aspects of CBT, ACT) but less research is available on exactly how much capacity for change on the continuum each of us has, the impacts of genetics/experience, culture, the microbiome (key), and collective implications.
As in neurodiversity, related or not, our various intersections on the prophesuum (and the conflicts it may generate) will contribute to Earth Crisis outcomes.
We are already bearing witness to anger between “solutionaries”, frustration and annoyance between those suffering more or less from Earth Crisis (inequity, LIFE, climate), and theprophesuum of the powerful is a huge influencer upon moral imaginations, changes and, therefore, outcomes. Inequity, but also, a general numbness to human diversity, strikes again.
There will be extremes – doomerism and pure faith in human techno-fixes, for instance. But if it is not a deliberately conscious activity, shouldn’t we all still be kind? Or are the bad consequences of these stances enough to keep justifying our anger? Recognition is a start. I ask for more discussion, research and insight from a diversity of cultures.
It IS complex. People can be optimistic and pessimistic across different aspects of life. But I think it’s time our movement valued the spectrum as meaningful, whether or not there is some flexibility for shifting along it (unlike neurodiversity, which is clearly structural, in a biological sense).
There’s no overall name for the continuum or spectrum, as far as I am aware, so I offer prophesuum. I ask all to pay attention and to try to assimilate what this also means in terms of public assertions, politics, daily struggles, and media communication. As ever, compassion for other states of prophesuum will surely help to resolve conflict, as frustrating as it may originally seem. Power and hierarchies still remain an eternal ethical quandary and critical touch paper, also in the fields of Justice and Rights.
There is a habit by most (not all) science-oriented academics and writers of analysing the present and simply adding external changes (temps, economics) to predict futures. In this way, they are missing out on the potential of shifting human values – a moral imagination deficit.
Moral, mood, mode, modern, medicine – linguistic PIE roots “med” to take appropriate measures, Sanskrit midiur – I judge. As opposed to manner, mandate, from PIE root “man” and “do” meaning hand to give – the hand that does – the habit.
News is coming thick, fast and shiny this week from the scientists of the cosmic/quantum universe. The JWT is functioning: Our capital-ite synthetic eye is peering much deeper into space/time. Quantum ‘entanglement’, recently more narrowly defined linguistically as ‘memory‘, has been proven to be possible some many kilometres apart.
Apologies to Schrödinger who coined the term in 1935 – but we do need to update our language. And “memory” falls short, because the union is presently active.
Entanglement? I don’t see the difference between the biological and the physical, the arguments made between individuals, wholes, and the sum of parts meaning more than the sum of the whole. They apply in both cases. There is flow between entities, the union being at one, not entanglements like bodies writhing on a Twister mat, or knitting.
“I” is “we”.
Life itself began/begins this way (I support Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiosis and more recently Abouheif, et al, and eco-evo-devo). If the quantum world operates this way too, life’s true belonging in dynamic fluministic unions of energy and matter, etc, extends way back into time to universal beginnings. I think I may have resolved my doubts as to whether fluminism is restricted to life only. Maybe not.
I once again, however, challenge the word ‘entanglement’ in this regard, and refer all back to sym as a linguistic root, though not universally, especially when there are many languages, universes. Universes (and time) probably overlap and we humans just don’t have all the senses or tools (not least because of inequity) to identify and information-ise them. Other species might, who knows.
Theories come and go, are built upon, evaporate, sometimes new truths just reshape them. And our language must follow.
I offer symphysica as an alternative word to describe the physics of quantum atomic communion. In years to come, even this too may seem rudimentary. Rudimentary, right now, to the many philosophers in the domain of eastern religions? Absolutely, no doubt!
I also see that both symbiosis and symphysica unite to be both the organic and inorganic way of biology and physics, at least in this universe I sense via my (our) observations, memories, imaginations, and the human science I read.
I offer oririosis as the parent of both symbiotic and symphysical communions, and oririan as my human cultural acknowledgement of these times, a word in an almost geological sense (think decolonisation of Cambrian, Devonian, et al).
Because these words in my language of English are potentially “life-changing” towards the positive, extreme capitalism’s long and destructive reach ought to be kept under a very tight leash! Is this possible? Such quantum revelations are not simply about selling faster computing and a new surge of anthropocentric economic growth and consequential planetary/solar system/inter-galactic) stripping…
These are all preparation processes for and of life.
Oriri – latin root of origin, meaning rise. Please, all rise, at least to this particular universe.
My sincere thanks to philosophy scholar, Laura Muñoz, coordinating editor of 15-15-15, Manuel Casal Lodeiro, Professor Jorge Riechmann, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid , and my daughter Gracie Battson for her Spanish translation skills. Please click on the image for the link.
Biophilia, Fluminism, Symbiocene. An interview with Ginny Battson – 15/15\15 (15-15-15.org)
Talk by Ginny Battson, recorded largely by the River Lugg (fieldwork of place) for playback at the English Shared Conference, Manchester, July 2022.
Transcript.
[above gentle rush of water, some traffic noise, birdsong, including cooing woodpigeons, and occasionally duck wings flapping in water]
From Ginny Battson to Paul Evans
Hi Paul, I wonder whether you would be good enough to offer your thoughts on a new word I have been forging for this idea of introducing a little magic to non-fiction. You said you’d be disappointed if I didn’t come up with something!
I recently attended an online event with Catherine Wilcox and Charles Talioferro, and asked them what they thought of using highly imaginative interventions in non-fiction. Could they be considered a deceit or distinct opportunities to reflect in the context of ecophilosophy? Catherine was a little resistant at first, but very interested in the idea as research. Charles asked me to consider were they magic or science fiction additions? Of course, they would need to be distinct in order not to fool reasonable minds – the closer to real life the more likely they are to suffer falstalgia!
The word is miratic(s).
mir (from latin, mirus – wonder-full), as in miracle, mirage, mirror (looking, reflective).
atic (from latin, aticum – belonging to, related to).
“ic” is also an adjective, and the sound may echo erratic (adjective or geological noun). Elements found perhaps where they shouldn’t!
I’m thinking of introducing it to the world via the recording I am making for the conference.
Warmest wishes, Ginny
From Paul Evans to Ginny Battson
The miraculous erratic! fabulous ……………I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed – the miratic is the fantasy of the commonplace, that liminal space between fact & fiction, not about belief but resistance to empirical hegemony – all the best, Paul.
I’m perched on a mud cliff above the Lugg just as it turns the bends through Mordiford in Herefordshire under an old bridge, and off down to join the Wye. I am watching swallows, swifts, house martins, flying right above the water and then dipping their beaks into the liquid lotic flow in order to take a drink on the wing. I am sorry I can’t be there with you today. I am actually awaiting the test results of pathology on a tumour that was removed about three weeks ago. And I felt that I’d probably be better to wait around the phone today than sit with you wringing my hands.
I am an ecophilosopher, writer, and walker, not necessarily in that order, and the creator of Fluminism, an ecophilosophy of love and ecology. I coined the term symbioethics to nurture a new era of recognising humans as fully symbiotic beings in flows of matter and energy living among many other symbiotic beings. An ecolinguist, I also create neologisms and I identify concepts to improve human/nature relationships.
So I’ll read you an extract from my research, which again is critical and creative combined. This is called Deus Ex Machina, and I wrote it after visiting the Severn Bridge, the old Severn Bridge, that is, with my daughter, watching the tide come in and out. The Severn Estuary of course is where five major rivers drain, with all their positive organic matter, but also their problematic matter and energy. Um… heavily polluted… ecologies that are just about holding on, species surviving seemingly at the very edge of what is possible. And with… with love. You’ll hear one of those additional imaginative miratics that I spoke of in my correspondence with Paul that I read out to you at the beginning of this talk. I’d really be interested in what you think. I propose that they might or might not … may or may not be little portals for the human imagination in the ethical, the moral imagination of… thinking about nurturing and caring, healing, putting things right with all that’s wrong in our relationship with nature as part of nature.
[Recorded earlier at home]
Deus ex machina, Latin for ‘god from the machine,’ is a term derived from ancient Greek theatre. In tragedy and sometimes in comedy, to miraculously resolve a dramatic plot corner or catastrophe, actors who played gods were carried onto the stage using some kind of machine. The machine could be either a winch, like a crane, to lower bodies from above, or some kind of lift to bring them up into vision through a trapdoor. Playwrights like Aeschylus and Euripides fashioned them as devices to wow, to draw a crowd, to evoke a feeling of awe and moral surrender to the idea of some greater power. And men still do it, with their grand openings of giant bridges and launches of ships and Space rockets, except this time the power is more honest and blunt ~ a self-aggrandisement of the human money-chain, domination of land, air, sea, and now space, the techno-brain, Western capital power labelled as “investment” and engineering prowess. There’s no masking anymore, no suspended disbelief. First, there must be the desire for something spectacular to resolve our plot corner or catastrophe – humans have been wired to find exhilaration in novelty—and these men meet that demand. They exploit for their own agendas, political expediency and money—it is usually both. Exquisitely controlled, it’s an assertion of the power that was once the domain of the gods, and we are all still buying in. But it’s a plot flaw, a device to replace the real work needed for life’s genuine resolutions, not least the peaceful and loving alignment of human life within all living systems. To do it often means overcoming many of our fears. Deus ex machina side-steps the need. It’s is an easy “out,” distracting when doom looms closer, where the long haul to resolution is seemingly short-circuited. There will always be a price to pay after the curtain call, and it’s usually borne by the vulnerable and voiceless.
…
Like a passenger plane crashed into the jungle, or a ship sunk in the ocean, the trauma is here right now in the estuary, perhaps overrun by roots and holdfasts and tendrils, a reef-like sanctuary of sorts for the animals that live in the shadows. But the wreckage is also a poison, with its paints and oils; an unwarranted picturesque artwork, bleeding its mythology into an ancient ecology. These are the sunken coal barges, the car ferries, the timber ships, The Brunswick, Ramses II, The BP Explorer, and a Victorian railway bridge demolished by deathly collisions in a place that is so turbulent and dangerous, yet full of life and those trying to love, even under a slick of oil. At the same time, this is also a place where old bones and magnificent auroch horns still dwell, trapped with split oak planks and mussel middens of long-dead ancestors. Even the footprints of Mesolithic human children still just appear at the lowest tides, real and tangible to those lives where murk is the ticket to life. Up here on the bridge, we don’t have to face any of it. We can cruise along at speed thinking about our busy lives and where we are going today, glimpsing the sparkle of the setting sun on the horizon, unaware, unconcerned, of what lies beneath. As if 14 metres of tidal rip, and all the junk and the heavy metals drained from the land—Cd, Cr, Ni, Zn and Pb—have no bearing on us and our daily lives. Enter, giant burnished silver bristle worms, filamented, glowing white heat in the sub-mud, articulating their armour in little, sudden jerks. Lead sabellaria worms the size of cranes harden to each rising tide, sucking in plastic, spitting out fire. Nickel prawns the size of men pop up from the vast trap doors to dance for bronze two-ton gobies; automaton puppets. The separation from reality—that suspended disbelief—becomes horrific, and the “jumpers”, by whatever turmoil tears through their minds, make an assumption that stepping from the bridge is the end of it. Broken bodies, broken minds, the troll of this bridge is in the myths of industrial Capitalism.
[birdsong]
I think being an ecophilosopher is already a creative endeavour, but when it comes with communication with others I do feel that with such new times, difficult times, with our planetary boundaries being so stretched, and overstretched, that we need to think about new and creative ways of communication, and fluminism, as it is a philosophy of love, I do believe that it might have a place – I certainly want to find out whether there is any mileage…mileage in this idea fluminism has a place as literature. After all, what do we do mostly when we write, if not care? It’s a devotion! Writing is a devotion. When it goes towards life, then I think it could well be fluminism. I hope so.
Please do feel free to visit my website, which is seasonalight all one word dot com, and you are welcome to leave notes beneath my posts, or contact me via Manchester Writing School, Place Cluster, David Cooper. My supervisors are Paul Evans and Gregory Norminton. Thank you for listening.
___
Miratic(s) ~ highly imaginative yet obvious fictional additions to creative non-fiction in order to make a moral point, to evoke emotion, or to raise serious questions.
We are entirely into the gardening season, and I am protecting my wildflowers that grow along my front wall with polite signs (and additional cartoon butterflies), asking neighbours kindly not to “weed”. I am the only person along my row of terraces to allow the flowers to grow freely. Last year, we had red admirals breeding in the low-lying pellatory-of-the wall and plenty of solitary bees and wasps foraging among the dandies and groundsels. This year, a tiny aubretia appeared from nowhere. I hope they grow into a fine clump of purple.
I understand gardening, and even farming, sometimes require us to make choices in confined places. Who do we allow to grow in order to save others? The balances are difficult, given Britain’s appalling declines in wilder species and their flolocas. Instead of using the words “weeds” and “weeding”, I want us to use alternatives that are more compassionate and positive – less derogatory and prejudiced. I offer “spulling” (selective pulling) at least, as the verb to describe the activity – we spull some wildflowers when they are too dominant over others, for instance, in order to save vegetables, crops, or other flowers we might be encouraging. As kin, we may choose to transplant them to places where they may thrive. In my community flolocas, there are no weeds, just herbs, wildflowers, flowers, plants…
I have “retired” from Twitter after 12 years. But I have an Instagram account @wordlycreations, where I offer more of my neologisms. I hope to “see” you there one day. Meanwhile, seemingly stuck between a rock and a hard place, I know I have cancer again (at least, a small tumour in the breast), but I don’t yet know the type of cancer and any treatment plan (more spulling, I hope). That is until tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I’ll know more.
Whatever the outcome, just knowing can help manage daily acceptance. My acceptance is to continue loving and living, do what I am best advised to do by the experts, and trust in the life-saving, healing processes once more. This isn’t a fight, more a (rocky) path I need to travel. I hope it takes me to good living communities full of beautiful wildflowers, their valued symbiotic bacteria/fungi, and their gorgeous pollinating friends.
Boon or bane, I was born downstream from this place I stand now under unfurling beech leaves, just past the Victoria walking bridge. Down there, around the bend. See it? A red brick hospital is now apartments with annual ground rents and an alloted view. I’ve grown up with my feet in this river, with the mayfly larvae, on sunny picnic days at Bredwardine beach too, knowing— turning wet pebbles in just my toddler’s knickers and sunhat – I was part of it all. This river taught me how to listen and swim. When you are bred into quiet waters and their teresapien communal places, you’re bathed in that soft green song. It’s always jarring when being sent out by necessity into modern industrial life, each time under massive amps, like a bet, to survive the prevailing wantonomy. But this is my song, albeit still brimming with mystery. I belong to it, though mostly, still, despite everything that has happened to me, that particular melody from Builth to Hay.
As an adult, Earth sciences have revealed a small number of those mysteries in my head, connecting the flolocas of the Wye to the planetary-scale picture. More personal study of Environmental Ethics and various hard-won and generous Indigenous understandings from special places, say over the last 15 years, have led me to a broader view of the combination of processes, the most loving ones tending towards life, not against, has lead me to share Fluminism with the human world. Though the popular way of publishing has limited me to a very small corner of that world, I admit my own kind of language code—almost my entire inner world has been dominated by unfamiliar language to most who operate within a largely job-oriented mass vocabulary and education system geared to “capital”— has, more than likely, hindered me too.
I saw and heard Peter Kalmus’s emotional pleas on the Guardian website as he stood protesting in his white science lab coat. And I understand the rawness of this moment for him, especially as he has embraced the role of influencer in his writing and communication, and is devastated that the message on reducing emissions is just not reaching its intended spot.
Teresapien-centric people have been feeling this kind of pain for decades.
It’s a jagged, flesh-tearing and deep pain; breathtaking in its pervasiveness and in all aspects of one’s being. Climate change came, for us, on top. We bear witness, daily, to war crimes against those we love, and immediately feel the pain of all our peoples, of all walks, oppressed by the same structural abuses.
But it’s almost impossible to earn sympathy from those who are unknowing. When life is about political intrigue or ratings, or even putting food on the table, we are dismissed as sentimental or as having too little else to worry about, despite life, by the longest, farthest distance, not in subservience to human life but its indifferent foundation.
What should it take to make a real difference, to make the unknowing know? Shall we lay down our own lives in front of mass media cameras to protest—to rely on editors—to risk being outdone by celebrities or dismissed as more waste: shall we go to war with the employers of the unknowing, bashing those too who struggle to exist: or shall we instead radically for-form the shape of our collective morality and fluministic consciousness through mass, egalitarian education?
“I’ve tried everything else.” No, we haven’t.
I now stand still on the Old Bridge. So many people rushing to the banks in town to check-in money or cheque it out. My river, life’s river, is the Wye. The Wye asks questions of us in every ripple. Listen to those questions flowing beneath us all. All the upstream feeder tributaries reach this very point too.
This is a collective, but a collective overfed. I have watched our symling kin of the water and banks dwindle in energy transfer, shrink in territory, and wither under the strain of obesity and noise. River lives need few nutrients but for the cycling drifts from their own flolocas and the rocks the water scours. They need peace [I will write more on this in time]. As ever, the landscapes and flolocas in which we participate, knowingly or not, are burdened with the fat of all our human wastes. Human excreta— including pharma—washes in with the wastes of a meat industry too, but also from the silt from the inefficient machined numbness of commodity ag-tech, the maximalist financial schemes of the boroughcrats, the steel plough blades washed off by an ever intense rainstorm or blown off in drought; in-filling and culverting of the brooks; roads-more-roads and individualism, the poisons and shipped-in minerals from all over the globe not taken in by the living bodies of the fields we have fenced out from the rest of nature. The fishhooks. The tourists’ money.
Yes, please do test the waters with your proprietary chemistry kits and citizen projects – I’ve lost count of the times I have called on those paid to do it – and try to prove to the regulators that they need to enforce each separate unit of Law in order to punish the ignorant or entitled through the Courts (at least, the community—in its very Western way— is now trying to belong).
But if you sit and “feel” it happening for a lifetime, you also feel the atomic devastation seep into your own. There is no gap. The pain is soul-splitting, trust me. And few hear, or even wish to hear, the real meaning of those particular cries.
I look around at all my fellow Herefordians crossing this bridge at their speed, and wonder at their bliss when they stop to look over the thousand-year-old war bridge (to facilitate or block the trade with Wales). It must be an utter joy to find delight here (I remember the feeling as a child). But I now feel less to celebrate—though kingfisher balancing on the willow whip sprouting from the litter debris downstream does give me momentary hope. I ask these people, do you know this place? Do you really feel our belonging?
You do belong. All of you. Not to the tarmac nor the thousand-year-old bridge, nor the banks you are racing towards (that still fund wars). But to this place beneath. This kind of flower-bank laying slant into wet eddies of a living continuum. Let there be peace, just here.
~~~
Note: I wrote this before learning of the life given to raise ultimate awareness of this kind of pain outside the Supreme Court, Washington DC. Rest in peace, Wynn Bruce, of Boulder, Colorado.
From Ginny Battson to Paul Evans
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