Architectural Reflections and Symbioethical Philosophy:

Many years ago *creak*, I began my journey in architecture studies, inspired at the time by the creative spirit at the Centre of Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales.

My undergraduate thesis, published in 1993, examined Kenneth Frampton’s concept of Critical Regionalism. I concluded that local, shared traditions—rooted in the materials and memories of a place and shaped by its climate and ecology—are invaluable. Modern technologies can then transform this wisdom into creating beautiful, efficient buildings in and around which to live, work, and play. Critical Regionalism stands as a positive resistance to pulp Modernism and the empty symbolism of Post-Modern architecture. I spent time studying the work of Alvar Aalto and Carlo Scarpa, who both offer fascinating examples of these ideas, and I was lucky enough to visit some of their remarkable buildings and grounds in Finland and Italy.

Eventually, I stepped away from the egotistical and rather ruthless business of architectural CAD duplication that most graduates entered in the early 90s.

Urbanizations as Places for Life:

Much later, I came to write about my own neologism, Kinnages, published online by Humans and Nature in 2017. I like to imagine urban areas as vibrant, interconnected places from below the ground up, where flora, fauna, funga (click to sign the FFF petition), and humans alike can flourish together. We know it’s possible to grow food in cities, enjoy both private and shared spaces, and make responsible use of water, renewable energy, and waste in ecological cycles. To create welcoming communities for everyone, human and teresapien, we need to learn the inherent wisdom of a Place, spark creativity, and work together. This means thinking beyond just lowering emissions and planting individual trees as if they are carbon-absorbing street furniture, and stretching our moral imaginations. Kinnages metabolise. Once this way of thinking spreads, the old practice of creating short-lived, human-centred designs for private markets—at the expense of life on Earth—will feel outdated and embarrassing.

On Fluminism, Symbiosis, and Materials:

At the heart of this vision is Fluminism.
If flow and resistance are to embody mutualistic love, the organic and inorganic processes of Nature within and without any retrofit or new development brief must enable LiFE to thrive.

T H R I V E !

LiFE, buildings and grounds in sym-ial relationships.

The idea of symbiosis in its parasitic form isn’t at the forefront of my mind here (though it has its place in the chaos of life). Industrialising the living essence of mycelia symbiosis into bricks, including the loving, connecting hyphae, then dehydrating them to death, exclusively for human use, is not part of this plan. Worse still, fashionable desire isn’t part of this plan. How does mass use of this material show reverence for living beings any more than, say, intensive tree plantations, clear-cuts, vast sawmills, and more death by the lorry-load? I understand that, just by existing, we cannot avoid all possible harm to other species, but this is a deliberate act with the intent to expand at scale! Try again.

Any real embodiment of the sym-ial means letting the natural flows—both organic and inorganic—move through our developments, giving LiFE places to thrive in relative homeostasis with our buildings and landscapes.

Symbioethical Design Principles:

Choosing materials and construction techniques with care—whether cob, stone, recycled, or reused—shapes both the look and feel of our buildings and surroundings. Sometimes, the design process becomes wonderfully complex, even accounting for the tiniest living things, like microbes or organisms nestled in rocks. On a broader scale, we should pay attention to how our designs impact these invisible communities and ourselves. But this is also about considering how light, noise, air, plants, and pollinators respond to new places and changing climates, and how they may impact epigenetic inheritance in all the species that inhabit them. There will be mistakes, but we will learn from them.

When we design homes and workplaces, we can do so in a way that encourages life to grow. It becomes a purposeful act, with measured ecological companionship. Technology may be required to maintain “One Health,” such as preventing the transmission of zoonoses, harmful spores, rising damp, or ants setting up home in the sugar bowl (if, like me, during the last heat wave, this turns out not to be your thing). And from the pre-planning stage, we can be mindful and practical about the ecological and dynamic management of water, waste, and transport.

All-Species Communities and Collaborative Practice:

Imagine communities built for all species—intentionally planned for any place on Earth, even floating marine homes that can weather storms and tsunamis. I see endless possibilities for collaboration, especially between builders and ecologists, as well as among various species. Like beavers, fluminists might appear to be disruptive by their structural interventions, but they are, in fact, generous creators of opportunities for LiFE. So let’s put on our thinking caps!

Etymology and Neologisms:

“Substrate” comes from the Latin substratum, meaning “that which is laid under”—from sub, “under,” and sternere, “to spread.”

“Architecture” finds its roots in Latin architectus, from Greek arkhitekton, meaning “master builder”—arkhi, “chief,” plus tekton, “builder,” and ultimately from the PIE root *teks, “to weave” or “fabricate.”

With this in mind, I offer “substrarchitecture,” or more simply, the verb “to substrark,” as possible life-enhancing words for practical movements.

Valuing Vernacular Wisdom:

I value the hard-earned wisdom of local and Indigenous communities, as well as genuine involvement from everyone, just as much as formal architectural methods. I’ll continue to develop this neologism, along with the idea of land as commons (see “locacede”).

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(PhD “Rivering” by me, extract from Chapter Shine).

River LiFE in-sees, and it is symial. Look again at gold to read how bacteria and river sediments commune. Or just feel the diatom-slip, your bare feet on silica-films under the water, films coating the bed of a healthy river. 

Diatoms— I love them—despite their smell turning my stomach. They are spectacular bionts, kwelical frustule forms of silica life. They only last a few days, yet they are just a little older than Homo as a family; a living array of opal-quartz jewels, minute glassy beings in a plethora of single-cell shapes around a nucleus, asexually reproducing every damn day. They eat the sun (photosynthetic beings converting energy to sugars)—and busily account for 40% of the oceans’ primary productivity. And they are busy fixing atmospheric nitrogen too—the kind of nitrogen that a lightning strike generates out of thin air. And they have a urea cycle like animals not plants! They are abundant in all water and watery places, but they love brightness, as do I. Some diatoms have become dinotoms, temporary or more permanent endosymbionts within other little beings called flagellates. They are so new to this symbiosis that they have retained their vital genetic character, although their silica skeleton has been gifted to their holobionts.

Continents constantly weather, silica falling through LiFE expressed in bones, connective tissue, in cascades of forms washed through deltas and estuaries, flushing off—or shaken off—continental shelves, and into the pelagic deeps to form a siliceous ooze. Trillions of diatom skeletons form layers of diatomaceous earth (we use it for cat litter and toothpaste), pressurised again to form diatomite, quartz and shimmering opal, ready to be sub-ducted into magma and ejected back up to form new volcanic continental crust. All is connected. What is time? Ha! Silica-rich igneous rocks become the mountains once more, via orogenesis and its vast, slow collision of continents. Exposed to the night stars after millions of years in hiding, silica is raw again to the elements, and down comes the snow and the rain…we walk upon moments, swim amongst fractions. Silica is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust after oxygen, and cyclically bio-essential. We would not be here if it were not for the rivers that carry it.

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If ever there were more a complex and dynamic system to present before a one-brain judge, or even an AI system of some future AI-driven court room design, it would be River. Offer rivers new and relevant names, even deities made of silica. Personify and perceive ancestral spirit. Relay stories, as we have, always. But in an adversarial human court of law—rivers, river life, river halos of water and life, aquifers, mountains, forests, species, farmed animals, humans, parasites, bacteria…viruses…the silica-carbon geochemical cycle, geology, magnetism, gravity, the Sun, the Moon, relatedness, process, love: nature? Right against Right, where do we find room for all the lawyers? Who dares to separate again, and then speak on behalf of the separated? Courts are human constructs. Do we really need more of those battle lines? Anthropocene could do with its own kind of weathering, eventually to be sub-ducted under more meaningful crusts, melted into magma.

There will be always be problems and resolutions, flow and resistance, between multiple forces of nature. They are natural. Please don’t get me wrong. Between humans, Rights are a legitimate route to criminal justice from a place of severe injustice—sometimes the only route. That is, at least until extreme individualism, hierarchies, and pathocracies are slung into the distant past, and Ethics of Care become the norm. Humans are able to express their own pasts, but also the present and futures. At the same time, they can find commonality among diversity, given the will. Empathy for quieter, stymied voices should mean amplification, and we can take care to really listen, especially in defining and preventing pain and suffering. 

All clans require rules, and criminality is real (diatoms help to forensically track it). But criminality is so often charged by cycles of unnecessary trauma, especially in early childhood. The current inequitable fugue of detachment, fuelling such trauma and planetary destruction helps no-one in the end. Even so, Universal Rights—concrete Rights descended on all like ash from the fires of the powerful—cannot surely articulate uniqueness of relatedness and experience. This is where my deep sense of soul finds justice, in the minutiae/grandeur of relatedness, the silica-enriched connective tissue, and why Ethics of Care (Gilligan) rings so true for me. They mean diverse sensitive responses to diverse experiences of diverse beings and kinships (nurture or nature). They mean circles, not polar opposites.

This means case by case. 

This means panels of advisors, thoughtful and considerate of childhoods, relationships, places and times; yet guilt, nor rehabilitating forms of punishment, are not forgotten.

Perhaps a less arguable legal declaration is one that ensures all humans have access to those Ethics of Care, learning and sharing the real wisdom of relationship, living place, and safe place in an ever moving world. Call them Ethights. Roundtable Ethights. We don’t need adversarial systems. Even against increasing forces of destruction, I ask we be less aggressive about our responses. We don’t need the culture of testosterone fuelled warring terms like “battle,” or a “fight” in court, or even the assertion of enforcement before the utterance of kinship, mentorship, and responsibility. Look instead to the symbiotic ways of nature, and the silica cycle, of which we are all part – those ethights.  

It won’t be easy. Nothing good comes easy, not even love. But in this way, like the removal of river-damming concrete (also silica-derived), conflict tends to give way to connection. Read the sedimentary varves, the layers upon layers in the swirls of a beautiful river pebble, to glimpse seasonal pasts and otherwise volatile futures. Look at the bone beds of catastrophe, or slick anoxic mudstones made under pressure, black without bioturbation, without LiFE. I think we can do better. 

ETHIGHTS ~ eeth-ites, or ˈiːθaɪt (IPA transcription) ~ legal declarations that ensure access to Ethics of Care (Gilligan) as a route to justice from human actions, for both organic and inorganic causes.

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Physics informs us that relativity exists between everything in the universe. Flows of information travel in all possible directions by wave and particle, force and probability. So it is the same for LiFE on Earth. Biology informs us that LiFE is alive with flows of information within and between cells, and between beings, using a plethora of processes. It happens between generations.

At continua of scales of magnitude and frequency, language, generated as bundles of recognisable, absorbable energy, moves back and forth between humans through multimedia and space-time. Our epoch-making physiology of speech and sign, sight, sound, and touch (for example, Braille), is transmitted between biological senses and brains, and we have adopted all kinds of technologies to enhance and collate. There may be exquisite nature-close forms of language that have been lost to the vast entropy of the universe. If we stop to think about it, these systems, in their vast total forms, are awe-inspiring and beautiful.

No matter the transmission device–biological, physical, chemical, technological, or a combination of either or all–we come to absorb and understand words in repetitive patterns and as sensory shortcuts to meaning. And we can do this from a relatively young age if given the chance. But, as in evolution itself, language mutates, evolves, and semantically shifts at many levels between the myriad of organisational groupings and moments of usage.

In meaning, we absorb, process, and act – cause/effect/repeat. We fuse our memories and emotions with language in positive and negative ways, and we shrink, reject, or propel different values expressed through ethics that we apply from this kind of embodiment. We are beings of bias, searching for patterns for survival whether or not they are before us. Sometimes we resort to making them up. And language-as-pattern can either satiate this evolved urge and settle our anxieties, or motivate and catalyse change towards new goals. Words can be acts of persuasion and confusion, and sometimes the perpetuation of misinterpretation can even help individuals or groups to achieve certain goals.

All things are relative, and the human species has an almost unlimited potential for linguistic, cultural, mental, and physiological differences. Diversity, like LiFE, is good; covers all the bases in a dynamic world but even changes in mood may impact perception, as may microbiomes affecting the gut-brain axis, or the specific place or trajectory we find ourselves within (or without) the biosphere–high in the mountains, down deep in a cave, on the ISS. Again, as a social species, who we are with matters, and across language barriers, and via our antennae-like constructions of space-time– (more often than not) to human scale.

Wittgenstein says you and I together may perceive a “beetle-in-a-box” placed before us slightly differently. We may both take for granted a mutual familiarity and imagine that the experience is exactly the same for each of us. But that might be false. Our uniqueness of embodiment, or consciousness, may interfere with the communication of the exact inner experience. How do you perceive the “idea” of an organic, complex living being if I say to you that they are “trapped” in this geometric block of space-time? “Trapped” to kill, or rescue and release? What else is going on in your imagination? What is the box made of? Could it be toxic? Try articulating both what you simply observe and what you feel, through words. Would there be any knock-on effects of any difference in articulating our perceptions? How do we now feel about each other? Should we try to shift our view to match each other, to lie, or is that wrong? Would a difference magnify as the story is passed onwards?

Interpret or change the meaning of particular words in any significant way, and as a social species with a strong evolved tendency for evaluating, if more people begin to imagine one thing over another, we are more susceptible to follow. Are “beetles” good or bad? For whom, what? There is power in the amplification and there are consequences. Cultural expression is influential and encourages feedback loops and paradigm shifts, and social guides or regulatory political policies emerge with their own set of consequences.

Economy, zoenem, ilesariany.

I have been making a purely unscientific note of the frequency of the use of the words “economy” and “economics” on BBC News. I’m sure language AIs could provide a more accurate representation of the data, but the sum of the everyday use of “the economy” seems gargantuan, with a gravity generated almost as big as a Black Hole. The audience is bound to be effected/affected. The words, as a packet of information, are passed between a certain narrow set of people and mass audiences and are therefore highly influential in society. The same goes for “Economics” although seemingly in the context of experts discussing “it.” I noticed “it” is almost always described as “THE Economy”, with a definite article defining it as one particular thing, as if there is no other kind. The journalists and editors refer to “it” and barely question what kind of economy “it” is. “It” is objectified as if it is an unstoppable growth machine shapen intermittently by the chaos of external forces. A hierarchy of values is taken for granted. There is no mention of how this hierarchy is organised (with the exception of GDP and capital growth or recession), and how a different order may direct action by way of conscious change.

Over human history, there have been many different systems of production and exchange. British journalists don’t see it as their job to set “the economy” or “the UK economy” in the context of this very rich history, nor refer to “it” as any kind of choice, especially now as Conservatives and Labour are so similar in outlook. The BBC itself justifies its own existence by its role in growth rates.

“The principles relating to the BBC’s political impartiality and independence from political influence are central to our coverage of politics and public policy.”

That is until it comes to economic policy.

They make comparisons with “the” economies of other nation-states–mainly the US & China– and, of course, “the global” economy. In that sense, we are perpetually reminded that we are running at maximum VO₂ in a global competitive race, with status reports issued each year issued from the World Economic Forum. It’s exhausting and, in terms of embodiment, traumatic for too many, human and teresapien alike. The critical distraction of survival within this elitist constructed process means very few are able to even think about it, let alone feel enabled to change it.*

Formal definitions of the word “economy” vary, but we may say it is generally the rationalisation of anthropocentric efficiency of resources, goods, services, and labour. Its etymology seems (anthropocentrically) clear, stemming mainly from the Greek oikonomia meaning household management, or thrift. The modern political sense of the word, in English, has seemingly developed only in the last three or four centuries and corresponds with (brutal) Colonialism and, more recently, its ignominious legacy of corporate Globalism (call it neoliberalism).

An economy is now more of a political value system of exchange with variable parameters that are designed by an elite– some may say more of an art. At a macro scale, there’s an obvious time lag between cause and effect. I remember my sixth-form economics class one Autumn, and how we were very excited–and then quickly horrified–by a new computer macro-economic modelling system. We could play with inputting new data to the variables, and in multiple combinations, and could almost immediately see the predicted consequences for a hypothetical human population, which were usually devastating. Stop-Go! It struck me then how narrow those choices were because they were based on a narrow set of values leading to “growth of GDP”.

There have been many systems with many variables and different goals in human history, generally broken down into taxa (as per huma-usual), such as traditional**, command, centrally planned, market, and mixed. Britain’s 19th-century laissez-faire fuelled Empire caused an inordinate amount of suffering within our national boundaries and beyond, and the social kickback can be broadly traced to that suffering – disease outbreaks, mass-fatalities in expanding industries, oppression – leading rebellions, uprisings, strikes, independence movements, and new labour laws, and then in the post-war periods of the 20thC Britain the introduction of a Welfare State and the NHS. Those very safety nets, even within a capitalist system, are now under significant attack by the extreme free marketeers in power, as are the small strides made in the protection of nature, including our atmosphere (the correlation is clear).

In my usual way, I am looking for moments in the cycles of cause/effect to highlight or tweak them in the hope of spurring more thought towards real care for Life as our central ethic. As we are human, and we use language, and I have learned the power of words as small acts to effect big acts, I see the overall repetitive use of the words “the economy” as a negative feedback loop. This is because, I suggest, their centrifugal mass of meaning has changed, in the context of GDP and capital growth, plus inequitable distribution, at the expense of vast numbers of vulnerable people and our interconnected biosphere. And I now think the words are beyond retrieval in our market-saturated culture. “The economy’ as equivalent to neoliberal growth is, of course, simply a hypothesis and remains unproven. Again, I would love someone to test it. But I think it is such an important problem that it’s worth forging alternative offerings now: words that may just shift the centrifugal mass of meaning towards wellbeing and the cycles of LiFE as central to developing new systems of production and distribution, and indisputably built into their etymology.

ilesariany (il-es-arian-ee) ~ from proto-celtic ~ to silver (to fund) wellbeing.

zoenem (zo-ee-nem) ~ zoe from Greek for “the cycles of life” and nem from proto-indo-european for “to give, to take“.

Caring, more so as fluministic devotion, is a precious process concerning an equitable flourishing of all possible living beings of our biosphere, not just an object like a house built for humans alone. Perhaps it was inevitable that I offer alternatives because the etymology of “economy” stems from an intensely exclusive, anthropocentric, and eurocentric value set sadly carried forward for at least the last 3000 years.

Meanwhile, please see the latest news on planetary boundaries and tipping points (hint: not good).

*See Steady State and how it fundamentally challenges the growth paradigm which is so abysmally taken for granted as a “successful” strategy.

**A fascinating array of systems, generally closer to nature, by way of immense cultural diversity across human history.

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Staring at the mycelium-split quarry face, I see you, rosy woodlouse, gliding across the Mocktree lime. Lightning streaks across the ridge above the wild ash giants, phasing all, and we wait stock-still, just for a moment, drenched in white light. Blinded by the crystal mural on the old, hot, sea bed like a rainbow, rain plunges around our antennae in a wet bomb. So we hide in the fault lines of this shot-blasted corner hewn by labouring men buried in the village churchyard. Ancient Silurian reef sands once storm-washed into our bumping fissure from the closing Iapetus 430 million years behind us, and again just like us. And in the quiet, in the darkness, we can taste primordial life a billion years old, touch the symbiotic mother-daughter cells, and feel the broken trilobites, our very own ancestors, calcified into stone-memory as perfection of extinction. 
      We smell the water honing vertically, as if we are magnetised to rods, to form our own unique streak along the deepest roots of those toppling giants, roots now lashing about and down to hold on to life itself. The streak - pulled, cool glass - we spill over the edge, the Wenlockian roseate coral edge, and we flow flush with all the genes into the sump where farm and road junk was dragged out a few years back. Dainty oxalis now grow out of the bog beside a rising pool - is where the black Norman fallow come to drink; see all their hoof prints and ticks, and where the overspill leaks through the old kiln walls and across an A4113 slope that freezes rough in winter. Waves of flat sheets, we creep through roadkill pheasants, squeeze through rubber tyre treads, until we soak the road-salt into a sheep valley above the Saxon ghost kings of Kinton. Magnets once more, we attract the bound-water into a now-nameless brook, and gush through a concrete culvert built cut-cost by volume house builders. 
      Life-water! It is devotion, this risk we take. Flow on to the Teme, the Severn, the Severn Sea, to the Irish and away to the Atlantic, to those big volatile skies rushing back to Mocktree.



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A short passage from "Rivering," a work in progress, photos by me.

I’m very happy to inform readers that a Chapter introducing my neologism symbioethics has been published in a new anthology by Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, Spain. I begin by setting the word within the general canon of environmental ethics or ecophilosophy, and then I call for more research into areas of symbiosis and symphysica as a form of welldoing for wellbeing.

I hope to open up hearts and minds to the basic, natural “symial” and fluministic processes that sustain life in abundance and diversity, and I ask all to apply this understanding in areas including, but also beyond, conservation, not least in language and art, other cultural forms of communication, but also spanning education to peace studies, architecture to space exploration, artificial intelligence to issues of planetary “One Health”, genetics, and more.

The work sits with an international and trans-disciplinary group of highly esteemed researchers and writers from the world of Ecological Humanities, Social Sciences, Economics, and Cultural Studies, with an editorial emphasis on togetherness, anti-anthropocentrism, equity, and eco-socialism. So I am seriously honoured to have been invited to participate! I offer my sincere thanks to the publishers, editors, and fellow contributors for this wonderfully positive, thought-provoking collaboration. The biosphere is desperate for more positive action!

Last but not least, many thanks and abundant love to my daughter Gracie who, having just turned 18, translated a difficult piece during a complicated time last year (just after my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment), under the watchful guidance of the great and compassionate Dr Jorge Riechmann, whose own marvellous book Simbioética was also published last year. I also recommend this book wholeheartedly, and I am extremely grateful to him for his support. 

“Humanidades ecológicas – hacia un humanismo biosférico” is edited by José Albelda, Fernando Arribas-Herguedas, and Carmen Madorrán, and is available to buy now, including a digital version, via the website, or may be ordered through any good and independent bookshop. 

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