Foreword

We are not scarcity.

We are multitudes.

We are generations.

We are but part of all living.

We can thrive again

…when we slow down and take notice.

We can all be mother(ing) earth—“the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life.”¹ (Thank you Alexis Pauline Gumbs channeling Walt Whitman.)

This special issue started out as panic.

What have I not been doing?#!

It’s been a process of “learning by doing” and reflecting.

“Global Warming & Radical Hope” experiments with reimagining what an online journal can be—one that advances thinking and reimagining together as a network collaborating with generous criticality and being the change we want to make—we must make.

The five source texts we’ve started with serve as a beginning point to understanding this ginormous “hyperobject” of global warming that is now linked to the cascading impact of the zoonotic-linked wild more-than-human COVID-19 virus. The scale is so out of our common culture’s imaginative parameters that time and space have become too abstract for our everyday lives. The living planet going through phases of human-precipitated global warming is now spawning collateral “tipping point” consequences when equilibriums become imbalanced.

We can all thrive.

We are not scarcity.

We are but part of all living.

We are multitudes.

We are generations.

This nonconventional issue of PUBLIC takes on this outsized challenge. We must go beyond the eight blind men and the elephant parable—common human senses are not designed to be sensitive enough and to gain perspective enough on this hyperobject. Certainly, science and technology, big universities, big government, giant multinational corporations, giant tech, driven by ever-growing profitability have reached a cannibalistic stage. We’re eating our young. Extreme profits for fewer and fewer are wrecking the planet on an unprecedented scale and speed.

Adding to these collapses, the public trust in the US, from where we write and design, is so fundamentally divided that any feeling of shared human purpose undergirding this republican democracy seems too brittle and elusive to respond to the UN’s IPCC Clock. The material, cultural, and spiritual commons that has for so long been a place of fugitive refuge has become so fractured and privatized we have little sense of who a “we” might be.

With a commitment to creative nonfiction, really to public history, public science, but actually public scholarship, this issue of PUBLIC poses this outsized XXXXLLLL to the nth power question. Can we find an expressive design and language that approximates the scale and complexity of our living planet in order to convey the scale, the immensity, of accumulated time in all places; the nuance and precious diversity of all places, indeed, the soil itself or a drop of water; that infinity of our exterior lives but also our inner lives?

We’ve invited friends and respected colleagues to riff off of these five source texts as a starting point on how to make urgent change happen. Their responses range as widely as each of their inner-sights varies. Improvs are expressions of cross-cultural playfulness across differences. Or it’s being inspired like Carol Bebelle’s poem. This activity seems especially urgent given how our commons have become just as siloed as hyperspecialist gatherings happily nattering away in their in-group jargon. We can’t afford to be so precious.

Then, we hope this site inspires your interventions, your own riff on this riff. We want to explore how can we assemble enough creative nonfiction devotees to create our own social network of global warming mitigations, our own counter-hyperobject expeditions—each of you going off to discover a linking piece of this impossible puzzle.

In the meantime, glean quickly through these five source pieces and see what catches your eye or snags a tone or locates an elusive point. Follow links. There is no wrong way to approach this nonlinear issue of PUBLIC. Go down a rabbit hole. Slow down with just one thought. Formulate it and send it to us. Shedding the baggage of the pre-pandemic, can we “begin again” and walk through this pandemic portal “lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”²

If we slow down and take notice…

We are but part of all living.

We are generations.

We are multitudes.

We can all thrive.

We are not scarcity.

—Jack Tchen

Note that the material in the passages is already published work and is the property of its original rights holders; it is reproduced here with their kind permission.

 

Notes

Afterword

We have so much to learn

Chief Vincent Mann says we need humility.

I’m slowly processing his meanings.

It’s more than human modesty.

It is a stance, a way of being necessary to learn, to pay attention, to attune…

All life is of the land, waters, and air…

“Do not pick the first nor the last.”

When droplet falls into slime

When the soil clinging to the mushroom

When the breeze whiffs fetid—it is us.

Can this be understood as alive, together, not feared. All this intimacy is…

…Indigenous local knowing.

How can we tell the stories of the hyperobject?

We need millions of dreamers, dancers, artists, and poets—a civilian cultural corps

Who, with humility, dare to venture outside the infinite beyond, and inside the bottomless depths, to rediscover and reconnect to the millennial traditions (that’s been tossed out like yesterdays newspaper) and to a grounded furturity in a peoples’ science. More of the “new,” more Western-style, commercial more-modernity is not the answer.

To decenter the smug assumptions of Big Universalisms

• To decolonize the hierarchic categories and classifications
• To unsort the tested, ranked, and mangled
• To open up knowing, relinking that pill you swallow to their medicinal roots

To embrace what mere humans can yet fathom.

What are the yet insufficient English-language words of spatial temporality we strive to fashion?—“hyperobjects” and “ki” and “kin” are just suggestive. George Carlin’s classic schtick on “Stuff” (“A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”) hacks at the insane logic of shopping as happiness. Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the power of compressed time/space or “chronotopes” does help explain the extractivist power of Big Gas fracking and selling more fossil fuels. Poet Meena Alexander’s formulation of “palimpsests,” also Kara Walker’s “Sugar Sphinx” at the Old Domino Sugar factory in NYC, the Indigenous demonstrations at Standing Rock, we can go on and on…

These creative, improvisational, organized actions get at the immensity of this extractivist political culture in ways that become increasingly understandable.

What are the deeper insights buried in the planets endangered languages? A nuance of time and place squashed by the 24/7 day work week.

How have our human sensate performers learned from the far greater than human complexity and nuance of manitou, of dao, of asili, of gaia?

How can ecosystems be further simplified in terms we can grasp?

Well, we can’t within our limited human forms.

We can’t without being in touch with all that is living

Helping us see what personhood can’t

Smelling the musty humus. We can’t

Sensing the lobsters leaving their habitats, walking northwards. We can’t.

Viral cells large enough for all to witness. We can’t.

El Niños echolocated enough to sense. We can’t.

Technology can help us understand the grander complexities of manitou. But we are not nature’s creative masters.

We know, we know, we can’t thrive without

Watersheds, arboreal forests, mother trees, mycelia networks, bugs, bees, blue moons, wetlands…

Can we act

Before the glacier melts more?

Before the scorched twig ignites?

Before the saltwater corrodes all shiny machines?

Radical hope?

So much is lost.

So much is still known.

We can support revival.

The knowledge

In finding

The seed

Placed in

The enriched soil

At the right time

In the here/now.