a more human nature

Clippings and half-formed thoughts on nature, conservation, technology, history, architecture, & other nerdery. Follow me on twitter @hannahjwaters.

[hanjeanwat]

Zaria Forman (Twitter) paints large-scale climate change-impacted landscapes. You should probably watch this time-lapse video of Zaria at work. 

Current shows: 

Art in Embassy Program American Embassy, Finland Dec 2015 - Dec 2017 (approximately) ​ Harvard University Center for the Environment Cambridge, MA Aug 2016 - May 2017 ​ Buy her prints online.

[mineraliety]

[hanjeanwat]

This desire not to be cis is rational and makes perfect sense, especially if you are female. I too believe my thoughts, feelings, aptitudes and dispositions are far too interesting, well-rounded and complex to simply be a ‘cis woman’. I, too, would like to transcend socially constructed stereotypes about my female body and the assumptions others make about me as a result of it. I, too, would like to be seen as more than just a mother/domestic servant/object of sexual gratification. I, too, would like to be viewed as a human being, a person with a rich and deep inner life of my own, with the potential to be more than what our society currently views as possible for women. The solution to that, however, is not to call myself agender, to try to slip through the bars of the cage while leaving the rest of the cage intact, and the rest of womankind trapped within it. This is especially so given that you can’t slip through the bars. No amount of calling myself ‘agender’ will stop the world seeing me as a woman, and treating me accordingly. I can introduce myself as agender and insist upon my own set of neo-pronouns when I apply for a job, but it won’t stop the interviewer seeing a potential baby-maker, and giving the position to the less qualified but less encumbered by reproduction male candidate.

The idea that gender is a spectrum is a new gender prison | Aeon Essays — Interesting unpopular opinion on feminism & the problem with self-identification as cis/trans

[hanjeanwat]

The paradox of “the environment” is that it emerged in public parlance just when it was starting to disappear. During the heyday of modernism, no one seemed to care about “the environment” because there existed a huge unknown reserve on which to discharge all bad consequences of collective modernizing actions.The environment is what appeared when unwanted consequences came back to haunt the originators of such actions

Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters”

[hanjeanwat]

[A]nxieties about the entanglements of human life and technology, of the movements of the body mapped onto the geographies of power, have a deep pedigree in Judeo-Christian thought. Biblical scholar Robert Alter notes that, as early as Exodus 30:12, when a census of Moses’s people comes bundled with a “ransom” of a half shekel in symbolic exchange for the counted’s life, there has been “a folkloric horror of being counted as a condition of vulnerability to malignant forces.’” Beginning in the Davidic narrative of the Book of Samuel, Israel’s most famous monarch chooses to count his subjects, with disastrous results.

Technology and Apocalypse in America—Blog—The Appendix

[hanjeanwat]

[W]hat is clear is that [the "war on science"] isn’t simply about the public misgivings about technological products or doubts about the veracity of scientific knowledge. Rather the challenge facing science is a constitutional shift in ways in which democratic societies accommodate scientific understandings and regulate the increasingly uncanny and complex products of technological development. In this context, the old certainties of the implied ‘social contract for science’ – in which scientific authority is marshalled to ‘speak truth to power’ – is unlikely to provide reliable guidance in negotiating the complex interweavings of scientific expertise and modern democratic governance. As Shelia Jasanoff has recently argued, ‘today’s constitutional changes necessarily involve renegotiating the manner in which states and other authoritative institutions employ the power of expertise, and contests over those processes have become a fixture of modern democratic politics’.

Re-Thinking the ‘War on Science’ | Techno-Fables

[hanjeanwat]

Being an adult is to feel hyperfamiliar with everything. When we were young we did drugs because they were exciting and new. New is a lost cause but these days I’d settle for weird. I welcome synthetic curiosity. Whether you’re pulling out your medical marijuana card or doing ayahuasca or dabbling in psilocybin, LSD, or DMT, it’s to other the familiar. I understand Burning Man. I even get “the second weekend of Coachella.” I know why people have children. Seeing yourself in another person must be fun when you’re so over yourself on your own. I wonder if not having kids is what being a vampire feels like. Where you’re just sort of casually unimpressed and stuck there.

Eat Pray Roll — Matter — Medium

[hanjeanwat]

Love relationships between men and women do involve power structures because men in this society have different kinds of, and more, power than women do. The problem for a woman in a relationship is how to maintain her integrity, her own personal power while also in a relationship with a man. Being in love with somebody is an experience that breaks down ego barriers. The positive part of that is a feeling of “cosmic consciousness,” and the negative pole is a feeling of loss of self. You’re losing who you are; you’re surrendering—the fortress has fallen. But is it possible to have an equal exchange in a society in which things aren’t entirely equal?

Margaret Atwood - Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 121, Margaret Atwood

[hanjeanwat]

Pondering the Gospel narratives, Gregory of Nyssa – Augustine’s slightly older peer – suggested that we read Christ’s life as something like a 33-year ruse. The Devil had deceived Adam and Eve into disobeying God’s command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Making a bad deal seem good, he promised them that contrary to what God had told them, they would not die if they ate the fruit, that they would be like God himself. Deceived, they ate, and in eating they became Satan’s slaves, subject to death and disease, pain and suffering. To undo this tangle of despair, Gregory argues, God decided it would be best to deal with the Devil much as the Devil had dealt with Adam and Eve. The Devil had disguised himself as a serpent, so God disguises himself as a sinless man, the only sinless man in the world, a man whose virtuous purity is worth more than every other sinful person combined. And so, much like the Devil, God makes a bad deal sound good as he tempts the Devil to overreach, to crucify the innocent Jesus and, in so doing, to lose his grip on all of humanity. Of course, the Devil would act in so foolhardy a fashion only if he failed to recognise that Jesus is Christ. ‘It was beyond the Devil’s power,’ Gregory writes, ‘to look upon the unveiled appearance of God, he would see only in Christ a part of the fleshly nature which he had of old subdued through wickedness.’ Gregory summarised this divine plot in a striking metaphor: ‘The divine nature was concealed under the veil of our human nature so that, as with a greedy fish, the hook of divinity might be swallowed along with the bait of flesh.’

Christian metagame How science made an honest man of God – Dallas G Denery II – Aeon

[ghiblicinema]

studio ghibli + grass rolling in the wind

requested by benjaminmiedema

[meowazaki]

[hanjeanwat]

Some of us move in ways that seem fated, pre-ordained, a slow but definitive march to glory. Others of us move like poor, wild things, running scared. We are unsure, but we're still running. We will always be unsure. There is still hope for us. We might just make something beautiful, some day. We might just surprise ourselves. I choose to believe that. I choose to believe it, every single day.

Ask Polly: Are You Sure? -- The Cut

[itscolossal]

Cats Waiting for Fishermen to Return

[st-pam]

I might change this drawing in the future

[earthstory]

In Antarctica icebergs aren’t always monotone white, surprisingly they can appear striped too, making for a pretty view. Different colours can indicate different conditions including where the iceberg has been. Blue stripes indicate a layer of melt water was present that very quickly refroze not allowing any bubbles to form. Brown, black and yellow stripes can show that the iceberg has picked up various types of sediments during formation, which can take hundreds of thousands of years. A green stripe can form after the iceberg has broken off and come in contact with algae rich seawater. -Matt J Photo taken by Oyvind Tangen several 100km north of Antarctica

[cavetocanvas]

Sonia Delaunay, Electric Prisms, 1914

[mttbll]

At the end of the day, there’s this beautiful feeling in a short story of fully being myself, not just the self I happen to be today. Through the miracle called rewriting, I can manifest on that story literally thousands of times, tweaking it and changing it. And in the end, that story is more me than I am.

George Saunders (via mttbll)