articulating human as nature:

CLIMATE AS ASSEMBLAGE: IMAGINING AN ECOLOGICAL METAPHYSIC – takes from Jane Bennett ideas of assemblages

Human interventions have resulted in striking changes to the global climate. I work from the understanding of anthropogenic climate change as the product of 250 years of emissions brought about through industrialization and continued by our fossil fuel economies and lifestyles. The instrumentalism of such activities can be traced back to our modern metaphysic, where inanimate matter becomes object and falls away from ‘man,’ the knowing, active subject. In this thesis, I specifically address how this division of passive object from active subject pervades our understanding of climate and conditions the ethics of our human responses to climate change. I argue that our current frame of thinking about climate that I term climate-facing mischaracterizes climate and our position in it: climate-facing is inaccurately dualistic, separating climate from human life when the two are mutually constitutive and when other, nonhuman forces are also involved. Instead of climate-facing, I propose that we reimagine climate-as-assemblage, that is, as an ongoing, interactive process of co-fabrication that incorporates both humans and nonhumans. I draw from vital materialist Jane Bennett to explore the concept of assemblage, and I offer an indication of what this reconceptualization would look like for climate. Climate-as-assemblage brings to light numerous and diverse nonhuman forces, or actants, and taking these seriously requires a reconceptualization of agency that can be broadly disseminated across these instead of restricted to human subjects only. This revision—distributive agency—fits particularly well with climate, and I indicate how it might guide us on questions of climate engineering. I suggest that we should consider scholarship and action that complement climate as assemblage and that align with an ethic of distributive agency as we proceed in our relations with climate.

bio indicators in citys and the working workshop as participation:

https://www.academia.edu/2397638/Becoming_urban_sitework_from_a_moss_eye_view

This question of how cities are continually becoming urban stems from several theoretical deliberations that push at the edges of what is normally assumed to characterize urban ecologies or urban dwellers (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006); that relocate the sites, bodies, and processes of spatial participation or sitework (Woodward et al, 2010); and that suggestbecoming may be a more apt way to understand subjects as they are incorporated into and expanded through ecological communities (Braidotti, 2006).

Mosses are in- between and peripheral organisms that work across material, affective, political, socionatural, and imaginative registers of sites. In this sense, mosses become urban in multiple and distinct ways. They incorporate the materialities of London by responding to and serving as indicators of air or water pollution levels. They may also have varying distributions depending upon temperature and water availability, as well as urban development patterns and climate change. Their spores may make far-flung journeys or persist in sites to which they are particularly well adapted. Mosses may signal sites of inactivity and decay, of neglect or vegetal invasion. They inhabit urban ecologies analogous to cliffs or streambeds, or display a unique capacity for growing within urban-specific forms, including Astroturf and tarmac (Porley and Hodgetts, 2005, pages 124–125).

Bryophytes are distinct expressions and indicators of urban ecologies. With moss, detections, speculations, and projections of urban incorporations may be made. Incorporation is not just a material effect, in this sense, but also a register of urban process and experience. Incorporation, as will be discussed below, is at once an attempt to think through other types of ‘corporations’ in the City of London, but also a technique for registering the processes and sitework in which nonhumans are embedded. Moss, as an apparently valueless and marginal organism, provokes different encounters with the incorporative processes of the City.

• seems like a nice example of participating non violently with the non human in a particularly vibrant matter kind of way.
• incorporation is kind of similar to autographic – urban incorporating are evolving urban traces. but incorporating is more than the trace alone, ‘Incorporation is not just a material effect, in this sense, but also a register of urban process and experience. Incorporation, as will be discussed below, is at once an attempt to think through other types of ‘corporations’ in the City of London, but also a technique for registering the processes and sitework in which nonhumans are embedded.’ In this sense, ‘incorporation’ could be synonymous with the theatrical, participatory engagement of humans with non-human bio-indicating, material traces. If a trace is a corporation (never an isolated unit but an object of traces), a autographic intervention is an incorporation.

In what ways is it possible to ‘see’ and experience incorporation in process?

• again; seems like this could be translated to ‘ in what ways is it possible to metaphorically become the autographic process or phantom image?
• also, I should make the point that the intervention to visualise the autographic process is the workshop.. the trace is visualised through the indexical analysis of moss that is the provided to the participants. (must like metaphor, you must ‘participate’ in being a participant…

In the City of London, an urban district ostensibly devoted to the running of finance, walking the Square Mile in search of mosses during a busy Friday lunchtime is explored as a collective practice for engaging with concrete urban ecologies. In what ways does this mobile and situated method draw attention to expanded urban communities? Or, in other words, in what ways does a rather literal practice of “botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin, 1999, page 372) reshape understandings of what constitutes “cosmopolitan bodies” (Clark, 2000)? The moss walk is a forum for asking: How might one overlooked yet pervasive group of nonhuman organisms provide insights into how specific urban incorporations take place? What new forms of urbanism emerge by studying these incorporations? And how might these alternative perspectives suggest possibilities for practicing new urban incorporations and ways of becoming urban?

• walking workshop as forum

London is a city with a long and detailed history of walking practices, guides, and narratives. From wandering and rambling to loitering and sauntering, walking is often a practice for accessing overlooked parts of the city, and for plumbing the depths of urban inhabitations that are well outside the official narratives of city life (Mabey, 1973; Sinclair, 2003 [2002]). The moss walk draws on these resonant practices of walking in London to develop a material enactment and engagement with urban ecologies. Working from within a practical ontology, the paper revisits the moss walk itinerary, and brings together moss identification and lore discussed and encountered during the event, and works through theoretical resonances related to more-than-human urbanisms that informed the event and are discussed in more detail here. This paper develops a mode of site-writing that moves in space and time with the walk while digressing along the way.

• what could I learn from this? take from a history of the meaning of embodiment of objects and meaning, and translate this into objects to be participated in through ‘wearing’

The walk did not have a singular narrative, but rather followed an itinerary where each moss-stop became a site for exploration, observation, discussion, and speculation. In this sense, this engagement with bryophytes in the City of London is not a process of ‘following’ scientists in the field. Anna Tsing suggests that a new type of “science studies” is emerging that engages with scientific practice as a way to mobilize publics, engage in philosophical speculation, and to “trespass across the boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities” (2011, page 19; see also Gabrys and Yusoff, 2012). This presents a much different way of engaging with scientific practice and “citizen science”—not necessarily as an ethnographic object of study (Ellis and Waterton, 2005), but rather as a multiply constituted, concrete, and practical ontology that seeks to contribute to the expanded development of new forms of environmental engagement and narrative.

• citizen sensors. aestheticising the experience of incorporation, empowering the human and the non human into a symbiotic relationship that is neither natural nor technology, scientific nor humanitarian, ethnographic nor aesthetic but amalgamated and egging and accepting of contingency of outcome.

From this gathering site of urban community activity in east London, the walk participants set out to investigate the possibilities for encountering the more-than-human life of mosses in the city, and in the process to consider how to describe cities as incorporations of urban dwellers, materialities, politics, and ecologies.

• the encountering g of more than human life is basically what autographic is. participation with the non humanness of material traces – not specifically unanthropocentirc but maybe a middle ground between the confused harnessing of supernatural embodiment of these signs and the total disregard and damage of them. it is obviously un anthropocentric to feel the desperate need to change our actions for the needs of the ‘climate’ because we are the climate. (reference to ‘climate as assemblage instead of climate facing’)
• this necessary anthropocentrism needed to induce change humanity needs in order to not become the 6th mass extinction (past tense) is maybe equatable to the anthropomorphism needed for a non human to gain juridical rights… (the rights of nature example)

Whether shoring us up or predating our short if furious planetary transformations, a whole host of organisms works in and through dynamic environments with us. 

• an autographic theory is ultimately trying to do this!

Nonhumans do not simply return to the city, but rather become urban as part of the urban political ecologies in which they are situated and to which they contribute (Gandy, 2002; Heynen et al, 2006; Kaika, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2006). 

• interesting as because slow violence is sort of defined by its inability to be present, it is discursive of representation, it seems only right to try and display time slices of such a hyper object in the urban ambient forum. no one can participate in the witnessing and incorporating of melting ice caps… therefore acknowledging rises in urban air temperature or pollution may be more relatable …

Becoming urban then also involves rethinking forms of becoming through discussions of sitework and ecological views of subjects. This sitework, as I develop it here, is informed by Keith Woodward, John Paul Jones, and Sallie Marston’s discussion of the “work” of sites as consisting not just of given arrangements, but of actively laboring bodies that “participate in the production of the fields of force through which they aggregate” (2010, page 273). Here is a way of understanding sites as immanent and formed through situated practices that traverse and transform human and more-than-human materialities

• concepts of site work… can I some how both make the point this is the sensor participation that is in opposition to aesthetic in some regards (in the timothy morton regard.. and also link it to participation through wearing…

But another version of urbanization emerges through these writings that points to the ways in which new urban subjects, bodies, spatialities, and temporalities emerge as distinct and shared forms of life. Cities are not fixed a priori agents acting on their urban inhabitants, but rather are sites of continually articulated ecological community.

This moss-eye view investigation is informed in some ways by the architectural perspectives that are standard fare in drawing classes: the bird’s- eye view from above, or the worm’s-eye view from below, each figuratively offering a different view on space. While these perspectives may seem to suggest simply contrasting vantage points, in other writings the politics of viewing from above and below are seen to open up possibilities for alternative spatial practices. p2929

• could maybe bring back in this idea of spacial texture… sort of different but still about associating new sensual qualities of a imagination sensual object in order to grasp it better. not so much ontologically but in terms of feeling and experiencing it…

No longer a matter of viewing from high or low, instead in the process of viewing mosses new practices of receptive and situated vision emerge. 

• a sort of metaphor for the new insight autographic visualisations gives us…

the practices of viewing here are embodied and emplaced (Ellis, 2011; Haraway, 2007; Hayward, 2010), but also incomplete and speculative, opening onto the perceptive capabilities of other urban organisms.

• lovely summery of these new perspectives created through the very real participation with the non human… embodiment as participation!

As we pass through Cutlers Gardens, I note that Devonshire Square is the site of various ‘green’ or sustainability initiatives, including the placement of a stuffed polar bear in the main lobby as a way to remind office workers of the relationship of their environmental practices to the imminent if distant destruction of habitats and species. Here, the viewing of a relatively abstract if completely inert charismatic megafauna stands in for the environmental practices and more-than-humans to which we are meant to have a sense of accountability. And yet nearer at hand are any number of less charismatic organisms that already populate our cities. We live alongside a whole host of other forms of urban life, and we rely on more extended networks of urban ecologies that influence the spatial processes of the City of London—and the Arctic. The polar bear might be seen here as a detached entity, a symbol of environmental degradation and abstract obligation. Would a renewed attention and receptiveness to the multiple incorporations of urban life all around us provoke other types of environmental relationships through our encounters with more-than-human urban dwellers? p2929

• she uses an example of a stuffed pole bear as an intended reminder of the broader effected network of environmental depredations… it could be seen that the polar bear acts in a similar ilk to what ice watch does. in the contexts they are received, they both act as detournment esq shock factor images that bring us to zoom out and access the issues of the globe – those unseeable by the body but instead by the symbolic stuffed megaforna, the phantom image or the autographic temporal access……

If corporations are entities that are formed through processes of incorporation, then what other corporations might emerge through different engagements and participants brought into urban incorporations? Karen Bakker has suggested that the “nature” that analyses of “neoliberal” economies take into account is often informed by distinct categorizations of more-than-humans that render them profitable. In this respect, an analysis of the role of the corporation in the city is already an analysis of human and more-than-human modes of incorporation—and a designation of which “co-constitutive” participants in urban life are seen to be most relevant to these economies (Bakker, 2010, page 717; Braun, 2008, page 668).

A multispecies view of moss, however, does not immediately reveal the ways in which these organisms may be ‘coconstitutive’, since bryophytes do not obviously provide humans with obvious material or resources through which coconstitution may be articulated. The hazy verdure and perpetual green that is present but often overlooked in peripheral urban space is typically composed of mosses and assorted weeds. Bryophytes are not of apparent relevance, but they are part of the processes whereby other urban incorporations become possible. Carpeting cities as well as exurban landscapes, moss accumulates and exchanges materials for ongoing urban transformations, since invertebrates inhabit moss and birds make nests with it; other plants take root within the substrates, water, and nutrients that mosses gather (Porley and Hodgetts, 2005, page 30). The most prevalent flora in the UK is without apparent relevance to its economies—and may not even neatly fit within an ecosystem services agenda (Yusoff, 2011). But other exchanges, economies, and incorporations emerge through these urban ecologies that exceed the ‘nature’ that might usually be visible within the corporation of London.

• the idea of something like moss being relevant to the entire networked ecology of an urban space – ie even the 2008 financial crash… the idea of these urban ecologies ‘exceeding’ the idea of nature that most consciously encounter or ontologically acknowledge. speaks of the duality of human vs nature i refer to at the beginning of the report. participation as helping to acknowledge the incorporate realities of our ambient spaces.

If corporations might be understood as transformative bodies that undertake processes of incorporation, how might alternative approaches to incorporation point to new processes of urban formation? Becoming is a political and ethical focus in this sense, since the processes whereby urban natures emerge are connected with vested interests in mobilizing distinct types of natures. The making of urban subjects occurs through these neoliberal economies: what if we were to take into ‘account’ more-than-human subjects that are outside the usual for-profit economies, but instead are located in more ‘nonprofit’ relations: what other subject formations and ecological communities might emerge, and what forms of sitework would make this type of becoming urban possible

• idea of ‘becoming’ as what I’m searching for. to participate in climate data is to ‘become it’, to be ‘in-formed by it’, to sincerely participate.

Part of the reason for mosses’ flourishing is their ability to withstand extreme and inhospitable landscapes. Not only do many species of moss inhabit potentially unaccommodating urban environments, they are able to grow on the edges of geothermic pools, in icy Arctic landscapes, in sites with metal and salt contamination, and directly on rock surfaces from maritime to alpine zones

• one huge upside to workshop as intervention (something Offenhuber doesn’t explicitly state within his framework of categories of autographic intervention but I wonder whether it would under a form of ‘framing’ that meets ‘indexing’ or ‘registering’ maybe) is the fact that one is not only experiencing the trace infant of one but a discussion can arrise between intervener, object and participant. instead of an autgrpahic visualisation being intrinsically alluring of a broader object such as global atmospheric conditions – a discourse arrises out the exerpieience. leader can new implications to the metaphorical table.

(lots of specifics about mosses p2933)

In some cities in Europe mosses are suspended in cloth bags over freeway overpasses and later harvested in order to undertake mineral analysis and map air pollution levels at these sites 

• feel like this could be a good example of Offenhubers combined approach to visualisations – information vis + autovis… (include his diagram?

Urban environmental health can then be registered through moss. This Wood Bristle-moss demonstrates the particular relationship moss has to sites and time, since it is an accumulator, collector and exchanger of minerals and pollutants in sites that may vary according to the ongoing processes of cities. Moss incorporates the material effects of urban ecologies, across time and space, so that the becoming urban of London settles into a much different register through the more extended time of vegetation, which stores, processes and makes available distinct forms of energy (Grosz, 2004, pages 217–220).

• ‘registering’ – is this correct in terms of offenhubers categories ?

From here it is possible to consider this other, temporal and potentially allegorical dimension of moss, an organism that collects and sediments past events but also anticipates future resources, as well as decay and sedimentation

• summarising the temporally distributive nature of autographic visualisations

In fact, an image of the Bank of England in ruins seems to have been a formative part of its architectural construction, when the former Bank of England designed by John Soane was developed with accompanying drawings by Joseph Gandy that make the Bank of England resemble a vegetated Pompeii, a ruined site in the center of the city. The appearance of vegetation overgrowing architectures stimulates and provokes imaginings of the city in ruins. Indeed, multiple forms of vegetation flourished in the bombsites of postwar London. Moss in particular has a relationship to ruins, covering them and indicating slow time in places that have become still and overgrown, inscribing the accumulation of time in place. This is a different type of green city, a city of remnants and remainders, of wildlife and unmanaged green.

• seems to reference ideas that corraolat with mortons analysis of ice watch- symbolic imagery (double check the correct term for this from indexical design work by offfenhuber) that intersects with a universal imagination of sorts… the symbolic nature of ruins of moss is rather different to that of melting ice but why and how could this still work in the favour of a climate crisis agenda?

Passing the Bank of China adjacent to the Bank of England, we return to a consideration of the corporation and forms of lively incorporation in the city. Corporations are not just discrete entities, organizations, sites, buildings, brands, products, or services, but are also a set of interdependent spatial relations that may become explicitly evident or available for study in these concentrated urban districts. Of course, the economic power relations of the City of London are congealed into urban form—they have their materiality—but the solid edifices of corporations also have their relational fissures, gaps, and connective sinews that are intertwined with these architectures. In contrast to those allegorical friezes that adorn the pediments of grand City buildings, whether gargoyles or lions or ladies of Justice, the “Moss- eye view” walk nominates an unofficial allegorical figure that can be found throughout those less prominent but by no means less extensive cracks, gaps, and margins that run through the City. Moss carves its way, in an uninvited fashion, into the City’s stone, brick and concrete, suggesting that it too is a lively and provocative organism that embodies tales of the City.

• okay so, quite an important passage as Gabrys begins to allude to the philosophical implications of understanding the over looked nonhuman through severe engagement – but writes about it metaphorically and aesthetically…. through the experience of participating with an intervention lead by Gabyrs, there is maybe potential for a experiential aestheticising of the moss.
• she also sheds light on other traces implications such as areas that were bombed during wars or even broader history – From this site we pass through the Barbers Physic Garden, a site of which John Gerard was master in 1607. Here, we consider Gerard’s various uses for moss proposed in his Herbal, as he was particularly attuned to the tendency of moss to grow on bones and at charnel houses, and so proposed that this type of moss might be “a singular remedy against the falling evil” (1597). – she basically uses the tour and the lens of the traces of moss as a way into all forms of history and learning and human impact.

In this walk, mosses come into view as exchangers of urban materials, energies, temporalities, and imaginaries. From bio-indication of pollution, to stabilizing substrate and making nutrients available for other vegetative organisms, while also opening up other temporalities of becoming urban, moss and bryophytes are involved in dense material exchanges that take place across time and in relation to environmental change that is both localized and more widespread. 

Yet this is not a plea to recognize the usefulness of mosses as an organism or resource or service, as much as an attempt to draw out other (nonprofit) urban exchanges that are taking place within more-than- human urban ecologies. From a moss- eye view, these other exchanges and openings emerge across more-than-human and human spaces, which are distinct from the more restricted economies of the city.

• …. okay so what am i doing? am I shamelessly taking a more exploitative view of moss? bio indication is about becoming the planetary diagrams but also about utilising their autographic properties… I am exploring how autographology could engage us with the signs of embedding climate destruction… moss eye walking seems to be passive yet a b ut exploitative way to do this. it is autographic in practice but what is it doing in regards to my report. interestingly; with typical visualisations of climate data, participants participate with agent-ness similar to stumbling upon a tile arranged wrong amongst a gridded floor. we don’t really think much of this encounter other than breeze are eyes across and internally acknowledge how ‘thats a bit of a shame’. It’s irregularity that isn’t really effecting us in a deep or meaningful way. If i am to argue that some if not all autographic practices have the potential to make us stop and actually engage with the realities of embedding and lived 6th mass extraction, how is moss walk doing this? Moss and the sub level nonhuman incorporations can exemplify vast amounts of expierencable data, including the of pollution and climate effecting traces – but to feel these realities one has to choose to participate much more readily than breeding past a few states on a new article. how do we get a person to participate in being a participant in the first place?

It may be that micrological yet processual encounters with embodied entities such as moss within the managed space of the Square Mile may help us to think about urban ecological communities differently—through shared incorporations. 

While much walking research focuses on the perambulations of solitary walkers, often with the intention of exploring phenomenological issues related to embodiment and self-landscape relations (Edensor, 2000; Wylie, 2005), other walking literature specifically emphasizes its role as a method steeped in ‘sociability’ (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Lee and Ingold, 2006) and politics (Cresswell, 2010; Pinder, 2011; Shehadeh, 2008 [2007]). In these accounts, walking is an event that articulates distinct forms of collective experience— and how by walking together, collectives may be incorporated, contested, and practiced in relationship to places, whether through protest marches or daily commutes.

• really really great ideas coming through here about the broader implications of the action of walking. interesting relationship between the fact one outcome of engaging climate data may be collective action or protest… how walking is this intrinsic action. becoming the urban ecology as protest.

For Thoreau walking does not just facilitate the movement between places, but involves a transformation in the way we occupy places (2008 [1862]). These journeys are the basis through which it is possible to form relationships to environments and more-than-humans. While walking could be seen to “articulate”, as de Certeau suggests, urban practices and the possibilities for alternative everyday spatial practices (1984 [1980], page 94), because it is a highly textured urban practice it is not merely enacted at a discursive level—it is also embodied and incorporated through social, material, political, and collective encounters. Walking is a practical method that connects up places and experiences, but also permits for wandering, digression, and resonance—the point is that walking is a form of sitework where sites emerge through the relations that walking sets in motion (Ingold, 2010). 

• taking the concepts I outlined about spacial texture to a physicalised level in that walking is the most physically texture way to experience a trace. if emotionally participating in the aesthetics of an autogrphic piece is one was to understand the social texture of a trace, walking from he moss eye is a way of becoming the spacial texture, the sensual qualities of these locals.

Walking activates an embodied and yet also collective relationship to places, which allows for the introduction of distinct ways of sensing and thinking places that might otherwise be entrenched within everyday urbanisms. Such a situational understanding of walking as sitework suggests that this is a method that is characterized by its singularity. It is a “practical” ontology, in which, as Braun suggests, by expanding on the work of Nick Bingham, “assemblages have no pregiven form, but emerge as the result of what people and things do” (2008, page 670; Bingham, 2006). Through practices, distinct and embodied worlds emerge that are entangled within what these practices make possible and available. This paper has discussed the walking event not as an illustrative case study, but rather as a practice for encountering and enacting urban incorporations.

as – climate data is intrinsically slow and difficult to ‘see’ due to its temporal distribution (a reality of hyper objects) – it is worth noting that theses autographic visualisations live within a system of relationality to climate change. They can be seen as directly metaphorical of the climate crisis (ice watch) and may go one of either way, make us more afraid or more emotionally evolved, or we can frame signs of localised sysmptoms of the crisis and maybe was people into the realities of the issue. a kind of subversive aesthetism verses a more agentic assemblage of becoming ecological environments and therefore maybe feelings their broader destructions ?

• maybe reference the geoglyphs to live by paper – stuff on the local being an index for the global

SENSING LICHENS PAPER BY GABRYS

From specifying fertiliser to outlin- ing techniques for staking, insulating, watering, and labelling plants, the NASA ozone garden guide develops a methodical and standardised approach to cultivation in order to ensure the comparability of obser- vations when examining plants for ‘ozone-induced foliar injury’. This is a garden that requires particular practices as a means to generate insights into botanical processes, including the labelling of leaves as they emerge with small tags, studying plants with magnifying glasses for initial signs of ozone damage in the form of ‘stippling or purpling of leaves’, and photographically documenting plants as they undergo possible ozone- related air pollution. Levels of ozone exposure in the plants are indicated by studying the varying levels of spotting and turning yellow, thriving and wilting.1 Here, gardening becomes a means by which to engage with the specific vegetal operations of bioindication.

Bioindication is a process occurring across multiple organisms as they are affected by, sense and even transform their environments. Many vas- cular plants can be studied for ozone injury. Still other organisms such as bryophytes (or mosses) can be examined for evidence of air and soil pol- lution, while fungi can be assessed for indications of forest health, and molluscs can be probed as indicators of water quality.

Tuning in to these processes of world-making, here I analyse bioindication as expressed through lichens both to understand how other organisms experience pollution, and to articulate how environmental subjects and particular worlds are formed through indications of environmental pol- lution. Bioindication as a process in part then reorientates environmental sensing towards engagements that are less focussed on singular entities as they are influenced by pollutants, and more towards the sprawling affilia- tions that are worked and reworked through environmental pollutants. Environmental pollution as a ‘conflict’ in this way is expressed not merely through exceeding acceptable pollution levels or challenges made to polluters, but also through the transformations of environmental health, ecologies, diversity and more that occur when pollution trans- forms organisms and their environments over time (and as a register of ‘slow violence’)

• reference to slow violence

Bioindication signals the ways in which there are multiple modalities for ‘taking measure’ of environments, which could in turn generate alternative and speculative engagements with pollution.

• brilliant quote for how bioindicators can be both practical and speculative tool for new ways to measure the changing environment in a maybe reactive way regarding combatting a warming planet

In this register of reworking environmental conflict and environmental sensing, I ask: what does it mean to sense environments together with other organisms? What environmental inhabitations – and conflicts – are expressed with and through lichens? And how could these fungal-vegetal modes of sensing environments go beyond representational modes of politics, to more ecological and generative encounters with environmental politics and worlds in the making? This ‘going beyond’ representation points toward postcolonial debates about representation that unfold in this special issue, while also engaging with the literature on world-making. It is also part of the gardening and gardens that inform this article: how are worlds worked and reworked, not exclusively as human endeavours, but as the making and remaking of environmental subjects and relations?

• what does it mean to become with traces or become the trace. how can we be truly anthropocentric in engaging with climate data
• is it in a large part a good way to plant humans and non humans on a level playing ground in a collective imagination? if the bioindicator is seen as equal to biologist using the index of the bioindicator (and that facts this registering produces) then we have won at de anthropocentrising? bring the more than human down to the human level (or up if you a lichen or thinking in the traditional hierarchical structures of human as apex)

Processes of sensing pollution through organisms not only rework the boundaries of these organisms, they also amplify engagements with pollution to include questions of measurable values at any given time, addressing the ongoing and accumulative effects of pollution in lived environments. Such a shift in focus might also challenge the ways in which pollution as an environmental conflict is experienced and addressed.

• was to access slow violence

Following on from this inquiry into how lichen-based bioindication generates particular registers for sensing environments, I consider how the spread and distribution of lichens demonstrates situated changes in environments both as pollution becomes evident in its accumulation and in its anticipated future effects. Much attention to environmental pollution evades issues of accumulation and change over time, focusing instead on abstracted indicators or technological fixes that are seemingly removed from the pollution-based conflicts that inform lived experiences. Lichens’ bioindicative modes of sensing expand the registers of environ- mental sensing to include these extended and relational effects of environ- mental change by demonstrating how organisms and ecologies transform through pollution. By extending the bioindicator garden with which I opened this article I consider how a speculative bioindicator garden – unfolding from a lichen point of view – could generate different approaches to environmental sensing by engaging with ecological relationality and organismal contributions to environmental-political pro- blems. This speculative bioindicator garden is developed in relation to prior fieldwork and practice in the European Arctic, as well as fieldwork and forthcoming practice, on the topic of environmental sensing.10

In addressing questions about bioindication as a means to engage with the conflict of environmental pollution, I develop a speculative approach to creative practice, both as a propositional way of addressing how to work with and through bioindicative modes of sensing, and as a method by which to engage with the modalities of creative practice that could be designated as ‘an experimental art’, following Stengers, which involves ‘reclaiming as the transformation of experience’. Such practices of experimentation can be applied across arts and sciences, as they search for responses to the ‘intrusion of Gaia’ in this time of planetary distress.11

• bringing in an aestheticised perspective on ways of making traces engaging

An environmental citizen, in this view, would be less a responsible consumer-subject amen- able to behaviour change, and more an environmental entity or bundle of entities. 

If, as Jennifer Wenzel writes on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, ‘decolonization demands not only a new humanity and humanism but also a new materi- alism and political ecology: a shift in the valuation and disposition of nature’,14 then here TallBear points to the ways in which indigenising environmental subjects can be a practice for attending to earthly relations as a way to realise new political and social engagements. Environmental conflict, in this sense, can register as much and even more so in and through the more-than-human entities with which humans are in relation. Speculative environmental citizenship is an attempt to rethink the subject through these relations. Lichens are one group of organisms that can draw attention to these environmental attachments and formations of subjects through the signalling of pollution.

• a feel as though jenifer garbys is a perfect example of a sencere attempt at a OOO autographic practice

(lots of highlighted bits on lichen facts)

Multiple indices now exist for assessing the bioindicative characteristics of lichens and what they indicate.22 The indices include the designation of ‘zones’ where lichens might be normal, struggling or absent (a lichen desert); as well as a ten-point scale of lichen sensitivity that identifies a gradient for the presence of sensitive leafy lichens to the presence only of hardy crusty lichens, or the absence of lichens, which also maps onto approxi- mate levels of sulphur dioxide.23 In addition to these indices, there are seven ‘clean air lichens’ that the Natural History Museum of London has identified as also providing a relatively good indication of the quality of air in London environments. Citizen scientists can identify and map these clean air lichens in order to contribute to ongoing docu- mentation not just of air quality in London, but also of the effects of air quality on urban ecologies

• here we find the tools that prove it IS possible to use the autographic traces of pollution as climate diagramming its violence and speaking the broader issues – climate data localised – but the thing that is missing is the distinct form of visualising – or intervening – and this is what the report must assess?
• maybe i begin the report under the assumption the endevear is to most successfully engage a public – but through my research decide it is about doing what garbs is doing – become with these ecologies, incorporate with them, how to learn a living with the none human – in order to feel the looming issue of the crisis… does it express enough urgency? maybe one has to choose between a passive becoming or an emotive aesthetic awakening ….

(must eventually read the section on speculative garners