A Desire to be Otherwise: On Eco-survivalism A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Todd Harlan Morehouse IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Bruce Braun April 2018 © T. Harlan Morehouse 2018 Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude extends to Sarah DeSilvey, Ewan Miller, and Norah Miller, each of whom offered considerable encouragement and patience as I worked late nights on this dissertation––often appearing as a weary shadow around the household. Your love and support mean everything. I am also indebted to my colleagues at the University of Vermont, who have extended welcome professional support to me as I completed the dissertation while balancing a full-time teaching load. I am especially thankful for the frequent and enlightening conversations with Dr. Pablo Bose, Dr. Cheryl Morse, and Dr. Ingrid Nelson. My thanks also extend to the excellent students at the University of Vermont, who have traveled along with me on a tour of weird ideas. This dissertation, of course, would not have been possible without the insightful input of Dr. Bruce Braun, who has provided encouragement as well as displayed considerable patience as I worked through the inevitable struggle of a dissertation. My thanks also extend to other members of the greater University of Minnesota community: Dr. Luke Bergmann, Brook Bernini, Kai Bosworth, Timothy Currie, Noah Ebner, Dr. George Henderson, Dr. Elizabeth Johnson, Dr. Bill Lindeke, Dr. Stuart McLean, Dr. Arun Saldanha, and Meagan Snow. Lastly, my deep gratitude goes out to the Ridgefolk. (You know who you are.) Each of you, in your own way, have taught me so much. Most of all, you have taught me to not only fight for the world, but also to fall in love with it again. i Dedication To all the things, especially the weird and eerie ones. ii Abstract Drawing on two years of ethnographic field research conducted in an eco-survivalist community in central Vermont, this dissertation examines the ideological, philosophical, and political contexts of eco-survivalism and neo-primitivism. In particular, this research focuses on how the practices around which the community coheres–– ones commonly relegated to a pre-civilizational past––shape community members’ understandings of past, present, and future human-environment relations. Toward this end, this dissertation explores three primary practices––lithic tool making, animal tracking, and herbcraft––and discusses how such practices are capable of fostering intimacy with, and knowledge of, the world. Through an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and speculative mode of investigation, the findings suggest that while there are many risks––both conceptual and material––associated with eco-survivalist practices, they nevertheless offer insights for addressing present environmental uncertainties and offer a potential set of strategies for navigating future environmental challenges. iii Table of Contents List of Figures.............................................vi Chapter 1. Introduction: Writing with Ghosts.................1 1.1 Ghost stories.......................................1 1.2 The scope and plan of the project...................4 1.3 Some disclaimers...................................10 1.4 Onward to the heart of the matter..................18 Chapter 2. Disrupting Divisions: On Writing as Method.......20 2.1 On robins..........................................20 2.2 Field methods......................................23 2.3 On writing as gathering as method..................26 2.4 On the methodological implications of the nature- society dichotomy..................................30 2.5 Bringing together storytelling and theory..........37 2.5.1 Nonhuman geographies and methodologies......38 2.5.2 Environmental humanities....................41 2.5.3 New materialisms............................43 2.6 On stories that matter.............................49 2.7 Onward to gathering stories........................51 Chapter 3. ‘The Murmurs of the Past and the Potential of the Future’: Eco-survivalism and the Body.......................53 3.1 Toward a future body...............................53 3.2 The techno-futurist and transhumanist gamble.......56 3.3 The lure of past bodies, technologies, and environments.......................................61 3.3.1 Eco-survivalism and technology..............64 3.3.2 Eco-survivalism against the human...........66 3.3.3 Politics of the transhistorical body........69 3.4 Desire without authenticity: the body, technology, and time...........................................75 3.4.1 The body as open-ended......................77 3.4.2 The body and world..........................80 3.4.3 The body in time, the body in memory........85 3.5 Toward an open future via the past.................93 Chapter 4. Tracking and the ‘Arts of Noticing’.............102 4.1 Introduction: beyond the backyard.................102 4.2 Literature review.................................106 4.3 On writing and walking............................110 4.4 More-than-human methods...........................118 4.5 Tracking and movement.............................123 4.6 Tracking and perception...........................127 iv 4.7 On technique and the body.........................132 4.8 Sensing precarity, practicing ethics..............135 4.9 On telling stories with the world.................147 Chapter 5. On the Poison Path: Writing with Atropa belladonna.................................................152 5.1 Entanglement in the marsh.........................152 5.2 On plants, poisons, and methods...................157 5.3 The Nightshades: A materia medica.................162 5.4 Dark histories and plant knowledge................173 5.5 On the promises of the pharmakon..................178 5.6 On risky entanglement.............................181 5.7 One last go with the nightshades..................188 Chapter 6. Conclusion......................................191 6.1 Upon reflection...................................191 6.2 On limitations....................................193 6.3 On uneasy alliances...............................199 6.4 Toward a different utopia.........................202 Bibliography...............................................206 v List of Figures Figure 1. Diagram from Ingold’s Lines: A Brief History.....148 Figure 2. Illustration from Köhler's Medicinal Plants......165 Figure 3: The Greek Fates (Morai)..........................167 Figure 4: Illustration of Cat’s cradle.....................182 vi Chapter 1: Introduction: Writing with Ghosts Those who have come before us, those whose well- trodden paths we walk, whose bodies and behavior we inherit, have also had their tolerance tested by the elements they relied upon, in more ways than we can ever know. We follow not only their successful moves, but also their hesitation, their stumbling or their overreaching. And even their disappearance (Clark 2001: 193). 1.1 Ghost stories What makes for a good ghost story? I pose this question not necessarily in reference to the kind of ghost story that causes one––with a rapid heartbeat, white knuckles, and dilated pupils––to jump in fright at ‘the reveal’. Such stories have their place, for sure. Rather, I have in mind the kind of ghost story that suggests something is not altogether right. That something about a given present moment, a lived experience, is subtly broken in a way that suggests reality is not as rationally ordered as perhaps assumed. I think here of Derrida’s (1994) discussion of the ‘spectral moment’, which does not subscribe to a linear and modalized impression of time, moving from past to present and into the future. “We are questioning in this instant,” writes Derrida of the spectral moment, “we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least what we call time” (1994: xix). With Derrida, the 1 unease of the spectral moment does not hinge on the particular figure of the ghost––its shape or sound––but rather stems from a mixing of temporalities, wherein what is often considered long gone suddenly shows up in the present. Unwelcomed. Unannounced. At such a moment, which cannot be reduced to a simple ‘now’, we come to realize that time does not adhere to what we thought it was–– orderly, predictable, universal––but is rather out-of- joint. I also think of Mark Fisher’s discussion of ‘the weird’ and ‘the eerie’ (2016). For Fisher, ‘the weird’ involves the sensation of wrongness. “A weird entity or object,” writes Fisher, “is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or least it should not exist here” (2016: 15). In contrast, however slight it might be, for Fisher ‘the eerie’ is “constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. [It] occurs either when there is something present when there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something” (2016: 61). Whether taking a cue from Derrida or Fisher or both, any good ghost story ought to draw attention to that which breaks the illusion of comfort and control. It ought to suggest that reality, and our presumed capacity to shape it 2 in accordance with reason and rationality, does not so easily bend to our will. Things are always much stranger than they appear, provided we know where and how to look. The time is ripe for such stories. Whether looking to climate change, oceanic acidification, massive loss of biodiversity, etc., the contemporary global environmental condition seems to suggest that something has gone