#post-wild

[anniekoh]

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn (2021)

In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves, looters slipping through otherwise silent neighbourhoods. Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment give us a glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re not there to see it. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.

By turns haunted and hopeful, this luminously written world study is pinned together with profound insight and new ecological discoveries that together map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we’re gone, and how far can our damage to nature be undone?

Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss & Grief                     

Edited by Ashlee Cunsolo & Karen Landman

We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges, including global climate change, large-scale industrial development, rapidly increasing species extinction, ocean acidification, and deforestation – challenges that require new vocabularies and new ways to express grief and sorrow over the disappearance, degradation, and loss of nature.

Seeking to redress the silence around ecologically based anxiety in academic and public domains, and to extend the concepts of sadness, anger, and loss, Mourning Nature creates a lexicon for the recognition and expression of emotions related to environmental degradation. Exploring the ways in which grief is experienced in numerous contexts, this groundbreaking collection draws on classical, philosophical, artistic, and poetic elements to explain environmental melancholia. Understanding that it is not just how we mourn but what we mourn that defines us, the authors introduce new perspectives on conservation, sustainability, and our relationships with nature.

An ecological elegy for a time of climatic and environmental upheaval, Mourning Nature challenges readers to turn devastating events into an opportunity for positive change.

[solbacka]

[post-wild]

Zheng Bo

Pteridophilia, 2016 - ongoing

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Connecting queer plants and queer people, Pteridophilia explores the eco-queer potential.

1 Six young ​men walk ​into a forest in Taiwan, making close contact with ferns. They establish emotional and physical relationships with the plants, relying on their bodies rather than words. Ferns are very common in Taiwan​. They​ are valued by ​indigenous ​people but not by Japanese colonists​ or the Nationalists​.

2​ A man makes love to a bird's nest fern​ (Asplenium nidus) and then starts eating it. Zheng reflects on our current moral outlook that it is “natural” to eat plants but “unnatural” to make love to them. Bird's nest fern is a popular delicacy in Taiwan.

3 Zheng collaborates with three local BDSM practitioners who in turn collaborate with three ​fern species​ - green penny fern (Lemmaphyllum microphyllum), flying spider-monkey tree fern (Cyathea spinulosa), and elephant fern (Angiopteris palmiformis)​ - to expand BDSM practice.

4 For centuries humans have been in love with furled fronds of young ferns. Inspired by Yaoi anime, this chapter follows a young couple in their acts of love with fiddleheads.

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http://zhengbo.org/

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More images in https://post-wild.tumblr.com/

. POST-WILD is a collection of documents that trace the direction towards alternative forms of relationship between HUMAN and NON-HUMAN, between domesticated and wild. POST-WILD is an exploration into the imaginary of the human history as portrayed in art, media and social studies. . Research curated by Aitor Frias, architect and co-founder  of AFAB 

[fuckyeahdarkextropian]

We are already running the whole Earth, where we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notion of untrammelled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us. This garden isn't restricted to parks and protected areas. The rambunctious garden is everywhere. Conservation can happen in parks, on farms, in the strips of land attached to rest stops and fast-food joints, in your backyard, on your roof, even in city traffic circles. Rambunctious gardening is proactive and optimistic; it creates more and more natures as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left.

Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World by Emma Marris