South America Podcasts
-
Hello Interactors,
Last week my daughter showed us a glimpse of the Empire State Building from her friend’s dorm room. Every time I see that building, I think of the original black and white movie, King Kong. The image of that poor animal atop what was then world’s tallest structure getting pummeled by machine gun fire sticks with me for some reason. Maybe it’s because it was unfair. That creature was captured from his homeland and brought to America only to be gunned down? What kind of society does this?
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
FAREWELL TO THE KING
Merian C. Cooper got the idea of King Kong from the French-American explorer and anthropologist, Paul Du Chaillu. He was the first of European origin to confirm the existence of Central African gorillas in 1860. This made him a much sought-after speaker in the late 1800s, and his books were immensely popular. Cooper’s uncle gifted the then six-year-old nephew with one, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. It tells of one gorilla locals noted for its “extraordinary size”:
“They believe, in all this country, that there is a kind of gorilla — known to the initiated by certain mysterious signs, but chiefly by being of extraordinary size — which is the residence of certain spirits of departed natives. Such gorillas, the natives believe, can never be caught or killed.”
And then, while Du Chaillu was out hunting with locals, an encounter occurred. As Du Chaillu recalls,
“When he saw our party he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face . . . with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest.”
And so, they did what they believed to be impossible but predictable. Du Chaillu continues,
“[The gorilla] advanced a few steps— then stopped to utter that hideous roar again- advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, just as he began another of his roars, beating his breast in rage, we fired, and killed him.”
Cooper went on to call this creature King Kong and made a movie about him. He wanted King Kong to be portrayed as being 50-60 feet tall. After all, he was kidnapped from a fictional small island that was also home to dinosaurs.
It turns out a gorilla that size is biologically impossible. For every doubling of height comes a tripling of weight. The joints and bones of a creature of this size simply could not bear his weight. King Kong was also impossible to portray on the big screen. Animators and cinematographers had difficulties portraying an animal of that size in the 1930s. Consequently, King Kong ends up appearing much smaller. Instead of weighing a couple hundred tons, let’s assume this mythical beast was shorter and weighed something more like 15 tons.
Still huge, that would be about two times the mass of an elephant requiring about 12,000 watts of metabolism to survive. And that is just the energy required to keep the organs running and nothing else. Around the time the original King Kong was being released, a biologist named Max Kleiber was plotting various animals’ metabolic rate and mass on a graph. To his surprise, the dots on the graph loosely aligned along a straight line sloping upwards with a mouse near the origin and an elephant to the upper right.
Kleiber had discovered a scaling law in nature known now as Kleiber’s law. For most animals, their metabolic rate scales to the 3⁄4 power of the animal's mass. Put another way, for every doubling of size the energy needed to survive decreases by ¼. Theoretical physicist and former President of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West, and his colleagues, believe ¾ scaling occurs due to the nutrient distribution through the efficiency seeking fractal-like structures of the circulatory system. The ‘3’ in ¾ comes about, it is believed, because the particles needed to arrange these mechanisms exists in a three-dimensional geometric universe.
Animals observed in the wild maximize their energy to survive. Every bit of energy spent above and beyond what is required for their body to function only pushes their caloric needs into debt. GPS tracked tigers, for example, reveal highly optimized search strategies over space and time in their hunt for prey. A lounging cat may appear lazy to us, but their maximizing their energy.
Early human hunter-gatherers were seemingly not that different. For similar reasons, they had to be deliberate about the energy they used. However, as their cultures evolved, along with their brain, they became increasingly effective at harnessing that energy. They used some of their energy to fashion spears, arrows, and hooks out of wood, bones, and rocks. They also used wood to make fire for heating, cooking, and controlled grassland burns to promote plant harvest renewal. In doing so, they were not only expending their own energy, but also the energy stored in that wood and other forms of biomass.
The appropriation of elements of the ecosystem for energy to support biological and social well-being, like plant harvesting, animal domestication, or consumption of biomass like wood and coal, is called social metabolism or sociometabolism. The social metabolism of these early societies sometimes had small effects on the ecosystem, but other times catastrophic. For example, the misuse of fire could lead to imbalances in ecosystems with detrimental cascading effects on plant and animal populations.
The arrival of North America’s first homo sapiens, as another example, coincided with the extinction of 33 species of large animals. Similar extinctions occurred upon the arrival of humans in South America and Australia. It turns out even the earliest human colonizers had detrimental impacts on the environment.
PLOTTING THE PLODDING AND MARAUDING
By studying existing hunter-gatherer societies, scientists can estimate the social metabolism of ancient hunter-gatherers. Geographer Yadvinder Malhi analyzed this data and determined,
“The energy use per capita of a hunter-gatherer is about 300 W, and this is almost entirely in the process of acquiring food for consumption, and to a much lesser extent other materials and the use of fire. This sociometabolism is greater than the 80–120 W required for human physiological metabolism, because of the inefficiencies in both acquiring foodstuffs, and in human conversion of food into metabolic energy, and also in the use of biomass energy sources for fuel.”
Malhi then plotted where a hunter-gatherer would sit on a Kleiber plot relative to the biological metabolism of other animals. A typical hunter-gatherer’s combined biological and social metabolism puts them just between a human and a bull.
The social metabolism of homo sapiens continued to grow steadily, and along with it their capacity to harness nature for their lifestyle. And then, 5,000-10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic revolution, a simultaneous innovation occurred around the world – farming. The start of the Holocene witnessed the emergence of agriculture in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, the Yangtze valley, New Guinea, West Africa, Meso-America, and the Andes. The end of the ice age softened the earth, human language and communication had evolved and spread, and coincidently the colonization and exploitation of ecosystems.
Agriculture, the colonization of plants, allowed for geographically condensed energy to be grown which could support larger populations of people. This put a huge dependency on area of land needed to support and grow plants and animals. But these new densities of biomass reduced the amount energy required to roam large distances hunting and gathering. As a result, many hunter-gatherer societies could not compete, and Iron Age plant and animal farmers came to dominate. These clusters of agrarian societies grew around the world and with them languages and cultures. Soon the age of the agrarian came to dominate human existence. Using data from a well documented 18th century Austrian agrarian society, Malhi went to work to plot where a typical ‘agriculturist’ may fit on the Kleiber plot. He surmises:
“Compared to the hunter-gatherer sociometabolic regime, by the 18th century human sociometabolism per capita had increased by one to two orders of magnitude.” Given the population density such a society could support, the “per unit area energy consumption” grew “three to four orders of magnitude greater than that of a hunter-gatherer society.”
This plops the typical human agriculturalist below a rhino on the Kleiber plot. In other words, an active member of an 18th century agrarian society would have consumed as much energy as a resting animal nearly 10 times their mass. It seems over-consumptive human habits started early in our evolution.
Agrarian societies and hunter-gather societies were both constrained by land area. While agriculturalists were more efficient with land use than hunter-gatherers, they were nonetheless constrained by land. This is especially true for their primary source of fuel for heating and cooking – trees. That all changed with the birth of the Industrial age and the discovery of coal.
The potential energy in trees is stored solar energy from the relatively recent past. Coal is solar energy stored in biomass that accumulated and fossilized over millions of years in the deep layers of the earth’s outer crust, the lithosphere. For the first time in history, humans could exploit energy stored in deep time. Coal could more easily be transported over great distances. In theory, this would reduce the need to further exploit land and wood, but instead their destruction increased.
The Industrial age brought new forms of locomotion and transportation networks accelerated the expansion of colonization, land development, and the destruction of grasslands, swamps, and wooded areas. Healthy, thriving ecosystems were sacrificed for new and expanding cities and farms. Coal powered machines extracted elements from nature to make fertilizers, sawed, split, and planed trees into lumber, and stamped, squeezed, and shipped goods around the world feeding growing economies and their consumers. Fossil fuels accelerated and intensified the destruction of the biosphere and continue to do so to this day. The energy use of the biomass past to support today’s social metabolism puts in question the biomass of the future, including its human consumers.
CAPITALIZING ON A MONSTER APPETITE
Malhi identifies two key factors of industrial social metabolism:
* The amount of biomass needed for biological metabolic survival (i.e. food) is small compared to fossil fuels and other high-density energy sources.
* Fossil fuels used for building transportation networks meant population centers need not be co-located with food and energy production.
So where does the typical ‘industrialist’ sit on the Kleiber plot? Just above an elephant. That is, the amount of metabolic energy needed for a human to lead a typical industrialized lifestyle today is the equivalent of a resting elephant. Imagine the streets of the most populated cities being roamed by humans the size and weight of an elephant. Streams of cars on the freeway being driven by a five-ton mammal with an insatiable appetite. That’s us. Well, many of us, anyway.
Those numbers are for the average ‘industrialist’ in the UK where Malhi teaches. American’s stereotypically love our exceptionalism, and we are certainly exceptional in this regard. Sorry, Canadians, you’re implicated too. North American’s are the King Kong’s of energy consumption. Our dot on the Kleiber plot sits where a mythical 15-ton mammal would sit. The typical human in the United States and Canada consumes energy like King Kong. That’s well over 100 times the mass and energy needed for basic survival and 10 times more than agriculturalists that existed just 200 years ago.
When Du Chaillu and his native guides shot the king of the forest, Du Chaillu did not exploit the energy of that innocent animal as food. He instead chose to eat the deer they also killed. But the local hunters, who allegedly had long pursued the so-called king of the jungle, did. Including his brain. Eating the brain from the skull of a gorilla, Du Chaillu reported, was believed to bring “a strong hand for the hunt…and success with the women.”
Perhaps this played into Cooper’s storyline in King Kong. After all, it was a native tribal king on Skull Island who offered to trade six tribal women for the attractive American blonde woman, Ann Darrow, accompanying the crew on their expedition. She is then captured by a band of natives and offered up to King Kong as a sacrifice. But King Kong is felled by a gas bomb by American explorers and shipped back to New York to be put on display. King Kong then breaks from his chains and hunts down Ann. That’s what leads to the iconic scene of King Kong getting massacred atop the Empire State Building. War pilots fire machine guns from their planes as King Kong swats at them like flies while intermittently fondling the captive heroin, Ann.
King Kong, the movie, has since been interpreted as a story of race (King Kong as a metaphor for a Black man stolen from his homeland in bondage), sex (a white blonde woman who, fetishized as a sexual object pursued by Indigenous and Black men, must be saved), and rebellion (King Kong, as a Black man, breaks from his shackles and must be violently subdued). He has rebelled and therefore must be killed.
But before this interpretation, King Kong was said to represent FDR’s ‘New Deal’. Cooper was a devote anti-communist and conservatives like him regarded the New Deal as a menace – an imprisoned import of a policy from a faraway land unleashed on society. Just like King Kong. It must be killed.
I’ll offer my own interpretation:
King Kong is an outsized mythical beast so absurdly huge that it can’t bear its own weight. When it does manage to move, it destroys the environment in its path. What is erected before us, since the dawn of the Anthropocene (or is it the Capitalocene), is an over exploitive and consumptive way of life that is off the charts. It has ‘an immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms.’ It has ‘fiercely-glaring large deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face.’ It ‘seems to me like some nightmare vision.’ What stands before us is this king of environmental destruction. And it must be killed.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
Hello Interactors,
I’m back from planting our kids at college. Now we watch our not-so-little Weed’s grow from a distance. I had a recent visit from a plant scientist friend last week that inspired me to dig into the blending of traditional Western science and Indigenous knowledge. Each have a lot to offer human adaptation strategies to the effects of climate change, but to do so will require new approaches and increased sensitivities to generations of abuse, neglect, and disrespect. This is part one of a two-part series that starts with a grounding in what integration exists today and why it’s important.
As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.
Please leave your comments below or email me directly.
Now let’s go…
TEARS OF JOY AND SORROW
It was cause for celebration, but hers were not tears of joy. It was the ten-year anniversary of the largest dam removal in United States history. The Elwha Dam was completed in 1921 to dam the 45-mile-long Elwha River for electricity generation under the settler colonial banner of “Power and Progress.” A second larger dam was built in 1927. The Elwha is the fourth largest river on the Olympic Peninsula that sits on the western most Pacific coast of Washington State. It was once home to the country’s second largest salmon run behind Alaska. After the dams were built, they robbed these fish of 40 miles of habitat.
They also robbed the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe - ʔéʔɬx̣ʷaʔ nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ – “The Strong People” of their food source and economy while submerging their spiritual land and identity in 21 million cubic yards of sediment. That’s over one million dumpsters full of rocks and sand. If you stacked them, they’d reach over 700 miles into the air. Placed end to end they’d stretch over 3000 miles across America coast to coast.
And now, ten years later, the salmon are running again, habitat is getting restored, and the sediment is redistributing. So why the tears? For scientists to accurately measure the successes of dam removal – and further justify the removal of more dams worldwide – the federal, state, and tribal governments agreed to a moratorium on fishing the returning salmon. It seemed a worthwhile compromise to the tribal community, but after over one hundred years of suffering their losses – and seeing the fish run as their elders had once seen – their yearning for a return to their cultural heritage has intensified over the last decade. Recent years of healthy salmon runs have tested their patience with colonial powers continuing to dictate their way of life – even as they simultaneously celebrate their joint successes.
It was the U.S. Congress who passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act in 1992 to restore dwindling salmon populations, but it was the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe who had fought to have those dams removed even as they were being built. They also helped fund the research necessary for successful removal. And now they want to live as they once did – in a self-determined and self-sustaining autonomous but integrated coexistence with their neighbors.
A friend of mine is a plant scientist for the project who attended the celebration event in Port Angeles, Washington last week. The early economic growth of this city depended on the electricity generated by those dams. He told me the words and subsequent tears by the woman representing the tribe was the most gripping and poignant moment of the event. It left many scientists conflicted about the proper path forward.
Continued research will help with planning of future dam removal projects, including what would displace the Elwha project as the largest dam removal effort in history on the Klamath River. This project involves the removal of four dams that stretch across the Oregon and California border.
But what is more important? More data collection and academic papers supporting future dam removals or resuming the human rights of an abused and afflicted Klallam community? The answer won’t come from the scientists, but from deliberations between multiple levels of governments, agencies, and departments strewn across many jurisdictions.
BRIDGING BARRIERS
The Elwha dams are representative of countless ecological discontinuities brought on by colonial expansion and attempted erasure and conversion of Indigenous cultures and populations around the world. The Elwha dam removal indeed created a precedent that inspired ecological restoration projects worldwide. And while the collaboration between members of the Klallam people and U.S. government officials, volunteers, and scientists has largely been healthy, the tension that spawned the removal in the first place still remains – competition for fishing rights.
These dams posed an immediate threat to the Klallam people and their way of living, as they still do for the Klamath people and others like them. But a greater compounding threat grows more imminent every day – the effects of climate change. Despite minimal contributions to causes of climate change, Indigenous populations suffer the greatest risks of the effects. This is most apparent and acute right now in Pakistan as one third of that country remains flooded.
Pakistanis are indeed in need of outside help. But too often Western aid swoops in with relief and then disappears leaving them with little support for how to survive the next disaster. Just as profit seeking colonists left the Klallam people with little support for survival. But instead of resorting to fatalistic language and traditional paternalistic hero mentalities that portray Indigenous communities as helpless and hopeless, some scientists and activists are shifting toward community-based adaptation strategies. These efforts start by first experiencing and understanding how these communities are affected, but then recognizing many of them also have deep ancestral knowledge and history of how to adapt to a changing climate.
To strike a healthy balance between Western government aid and scientific knowledge and local needs and culture will require increased sensitivities to historical traumas inflicted by colonization, extreme capitalism, and forced acculturation. There is a myriad of language, linguistic, and cultural gaps that challenge the documentation, translation, and integration of Western scientific approaches with Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge so that it is accurate, complete, and fair. Meanwhile, the planet is warming, the environment is shifting, and the pressure for adaptation systems and mechanisms is mounting.
To bridge these knowledge gaps requires a concerted effort around the globe to establish consistent approaches to Indigenous knowledge integration in scientific literature. In 2020 a group of researchers started by asking this fundamental question:
“How is evidence of indigenous knowledge on climate change adaptation geographically and thematically distributed in the peer-reviewed literature?”
What they found is the number of publications per year focusing on Indigenous knowledge and climate change adaptation has grown considerably over the last ten or so years. Between 1994 and 2008 their search yielded just six scientific publications that included evidence of Indigenous knowledge. There were that many in 2009 alone. Ten years later, in 2019, the number grew sevenfold to 42.
The majority, 133 of the 236 sampled, came from the field of Environmental Science. Social Sciences (97) and Earth and Planetary Sciences (50) had the second and third most publications respectively. Then came Agriculture and Biological Sciences (36), Medicine (22), and Health Professions (14). The word-cloud they generated from the corpus ranked these as the most common words: ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, ‘drought’, ‘community’, ‘perception’, ‘impact’, ‘food security’, ‘agriculture’, and ‘adaptive capacity’. Given the most repeated words all relate to health and survival, researchers in the health and human services academy and industry have some work to do.
In terms of geographic distribution, a large proportion of publications study regions in Africa and Asia. The most studied countries are India, Zimbabwe, and Canada. There is no worldwide count of Indigenous populations and most studies don’t mention tribal names, so it’s hard to determine fair distribution. However, based on the data available, the authors suggest the biggest gaps may be in central Africa, northern Asia, Greenland, Australia, parts of South America and Polynesia.
Of the attributes of Indigenous knowledge represented, most publications (170) included “Factual knowledge about the environment and environmental changes” like precipitation, temperature, ice thickness, and wind speed. Two of the least represented attributes were:
* “Cultural values and worldviews (61) like relationship to land, stewardship, values of reciprocity, collectiveness, equilibrium, and solidarity.
* “Governance and social capital” (61) like food sharing and social networks as well as informal social safety nets.
These seem to me to be valuable sets of knowledge in the face of worldwide human ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’, and ‘capacity to adapt’ to the effects of climate change. Some scientists are shifting from describing the facts of climate change toward better understanding of human mitigation, migration, and adaptation.
BLENDING BARRIERS
One of the reasons Indigenous communities are so helpful is their cultural lineage and oral history traditions include solutions, strategies, and innovations of past human adaptations to a changing climate. This all despite past attempts by evil colonizers to suppress and destroy their knowledge, traditions, and even their existence. But these people and civilizations gained and sustained through generations of ecological experimentation. They benefited from innovations in grassland growth, fire management, and crop alteration.
Over decades and centuries, they evolved countless trials of seed germination, hybridization, and dispersal to achieve maximal crop yields. (e.g., symbiotic ‘Three Sisters’ crop clustering). They also developed predator management schemes enabling them, and their crops, to survive and thrive. Their mediation of the environment provided a mutualistic food web rooted in natural forms of ecological reciprocity. But this knowledge was not and is not static.
They had to endure and adapt to environmental dynamism at varying scales of time and space. Change occurred at a local level with daily shifts in the weather but also at a regional level from sudden climatic and geological perturbations like earthquakes, floods, droughts, and volcanoes. All of which had effects lasting decades and centuries.
These events led some populations to hunker down and innovate new methods of survival amidst a changed but familiar environment, while others migrated near and far to survive. For those who didn’t make it, their knowledge is lost. However, some traces of their existence, their paths of migration, shelter, and food habits do, and we rely on archeologists to bring those facts and interpretations to light.
But even in the best of situations, as evidenced with the Elwha project, balancing hard quantitative science with qualitative humanitarianism while in search of adaptation and survival strategies poses a host of challenges. Not the least of which is the fact that within these works exist many gaps in human and environmental knowledge across the spectrum of global space and time.
But a new approach in archaeology and ecology is emerging called ‘archaeoecology. It strives for a more robust intellectual understanding of the interaction of people and place that spans the globe and the past 60,000 years of existence. It’s a proposed blending of ecological and archaeological research that, when augmented with Traditional Ecological Knowledge, can fill gaps of the past so that plans can be made now for how humans can survive in the future. And as the Klallam people have reminded us, regardless of the past, the time for healthy adaptation to a changed environment needs to start now.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
Hello Interactors,
The next couple episodes will be a little off beat as I’m coming to you from the east coast of the United States. It’s time to deliver our little birdies from the nest so they may build their own. Dorm room nesting is a common sight this time of year among many young human adults seeking knowledge and independence. It can be observed in the towering cities of New York City and the smallest lowland wooded enclaves of Waltham, Massachusetts.
For this momentous trip I’m listening to a book about a young man who launched to places further away than this. It’s a book I wish I had consumed long before now – The Invention of Nature by historian Andrea Wulf. It tells the tale of a man few have heard of but have most likely have heard the name – Humboldt. Alexander von Humboldt. His name graces more geographic places, plants, and animals around the world than any other. That’s because he was the first person to travel the world scientifically articulating what traditional Indigenous knowledge keepers have known for millennia – that all of nature is connected by an intricate web we now call an ecosystem.
Born in Germany in 1769, he was the most celebrated scientist of his time. Upon his most famous and influential trip to South America, in his twenties, he observed how Spanish colonialism had ravaged the land. Acres of native vegetation had been cut and burned to make way for monoculture cash crops like sugar cane, wheat, and corn where all profits were then sent to the Spanish monarchy. Streams and rivers had been diverted to water these thirsty crops leaving lakes, ponds, and subterranean reservoirs dry. Local plants and animals, including Indigenous populations, were suffering as a result.
The local Spaniards and Creoles believed there must be a leak in the earth causing these conditions, but it was Humboldt, through meticulous geographic, geological, and meteorological observation, who determined it was the crops that had caused the devastation. He surmised that between the increased temperatures caused by the loss of trees and vegetation (that naturally cool and release moisture into the air) and the drying up and hardening of the soil (thus depleting the earth of groundwater) that significant damage was being done to the area.
He posited that such destruction at larger scales around the world may alter climatic patterns. He introduced the idea of human induced climate change in 1800. He further observed that these negative effects originated with infective colonialism of European and American profit seeking imperialist machines that relied heavily on the abduction and trade of human slaves from Africa and local Indigenous populations to work the fields of these monocultural crops.
Governments and corporations didn’t just ignore Humboldt’s warnings, they accelerated the pace of production and destruction. That insistence continues to this day as countries and corporations fight for access to natural resources and cheap labor – far out of the reaches of complicit eyes and ears – to feed the beast of rampant worldwide consumerism. As Humboldt warned, over 200 years ago, at the peril of earth’s resources and their interconnected web of life. You can’t say we weren’t warned.
Alexander von Humboldt remained a harsh critic of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery until the day he died. He witnessed firsthand the early devastating impact greed was having on the planet and its inhabitants – most especially Black and Indigenous people. Humboldt was a heartfelt man, but his true love was science. He abhorred politics and politicians though remained popular among them all, except Napoleon.
Thomas Jefferson was particularly enamored with Humboldt. They shared a common affinity and thirst for botanical, astronomical, and geographical knowledge. Humboldt shared with Jefferson all he knew of South America and Mexico who was starved by the Spanish of any information at all. While he shared in the spirit of two science loving naturalist friends, that knowledge turned out to be instrumental in helping Jefferson, and the United States, increase their imperial standing in the world and its widespread ecologically damaging capitalistic dominance. Humboldt endeared himself to Jefferson mostly because he was impressed with Jefferson’s commitment to liberty.
Though he disapproved of Jefferson’s adherence to slavery, he was wary of criticizing Jefferson directly for fear of disenfranchising their friendship. However, his diary, and the diary of others, reveals he did so in private to Jefferson’s friends and colleagues. Some history scholars criticize Humboldt for not using these opportunities to sway the opinions of these powerful men, but Humboldt believed science should rise above politics and the best way to share science was to share it with everyone who would listen regardless of their political or governmental affiliation.
Humboldt worked tirelessly, day and night, wherever he happened to be living. Scientific luminaries and academics could not understand how a single man could be so well versed in so many subjects, be seen in so many places on a given day or night, while continuing to discover new insights about the world – all with boundless energy. He spoke so fast and on so many topics, in three languages, that people said one could learn in two hours of listening to Humboldt what would take months to master on their own.
He was a slight and nimble man with thin delicate hands. These attributes served him well squeezing into caverns and mines and placing sensitive miniscule blossoms into tiny glass vials. But he also had the strength and determination to endure extreme altitudes climbing rocky trails with shoes ripped to shreds. Upon total failure, he would hike barefoot. With his feet sometimes bleeding, he would stop every few hundred meters to take measurements with his barometer, altimeter, and sextant while collecting rock and plant specimens, drawing diagrams, and illustrating landscapes. It was he who first speculated on plate tectonics two hundred years before their full understanding by observing common plant species and geology between, say, a western coast of one continental land mass and the eastern coast of another.
It's unfortunate that one of the most intriguing, intelligent, and ecologically committed scientists to have ever lived, who inspired everyone from Charles Darwin to Henry David Thoreau, eventually succumbed to the realities of endless European wars and political turmoil. These ordeals limited his travels to other lands he desperately wanted to visit, explore, and further connect his web of knowledge and the web of life.
Given his broad and groundbreaking studies, travel, and international fame makes one wonder why Humboldt is not a household name today as it once was in the 1800s despite being in countless scientific books, journals, and maps. Is it that the complex connections and relationships that make life possible and sustainable are too difficult to teach or comprehend? That can’t explain why Newton or Einstein are so popular. Maybe it is just easier to teach the memorization of the scientific facts of biology and physics and the strict classification schemes of rocks, plants, and animals, than the rich interdependent interactions on which each of them relies.
Or perhaps we’ve grown ambivalent. Have we grown too comfortable to care about the workings of the world? Maybe Humboldt’s ideas are too threatening to the very institutions of colonialism, unbridled capitalism, and the over exploitation of natural and human resources he warned everyone of. Has overt capitalism made us too comfortable, complacent, and complicit? Perhaps those in power think it best not to perpetuate the ideas of a man critical of those systems that maintain the power of few, the comfort for some, and the education of many.
Napoleon thought so. He tried to have Humboldt banished from Paris, the heartbeat of scientific discovery and individual liberties at the time, suspecting him a subversive threat to Napoleonic domination. After all, it was politics and power struggles by the Napoleonic Wars that interrupted Humboldt’s continued quest to document, communicate, and share the scientific knowledge of ecosystems; the roots of which exist in traditional indigenous knowledge colonists squelched, shunned, or stole. Perhaps the same power and politics that held Humboldt back continue to hold us back today.
But we’ve had over 200 years to adjust course and have done nothing. Is it too late? I think not. Besides, there’s too much at stake for us all to remain ambivalent. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend this book. May it mark the beginning of your own journey. Let’s all follow in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt and share with our web of connections the ecological web connecting all of life.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io -
This episode is in EnglishFurther down you can also see the movie SUSANA.
In this episode of SAQMI Play we meet the Argentinian filmmaker Susana Blaustein Mūnoz, who became an early queer pioneer with her neverendlingly relevant autobiographical film Susana.
This film from 1980 marks one of the first Swedish lesbian stories to be portrayed in moving images - although Susana is not originally from Sweden, she lived in Stockholm for a while in the late 70’s - and was hanging out in circles involved with Lesbisk front (Lesbian Front). Christina, her Finno-Swedish girlfriend at the time, who was also new to Stockholm, also appears in the film. 40 years later their reborn love is depicted in the short film Old Love Dies Hard, which was meant as a longer follow up to Susana,But seems not to have made it past the 8-minute long documentary form that its in today.
Susana Blaustein Munoz had her broad international breakthrough in 1985 with the documentary film Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, which was nominated for an Oscar.
Las Madres is a film about the Argentinian women who challenged the nation’s military rule and waged a tremendous struggle for the right to know what happened to their children who’d disappeared during the years when Argentina was a military dictatorship. Every Thursday the women gathered in front of the President’s residency at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Their white scarves became a symbol of their movement, and the movement grew famous across the world.
Susana Blaustein Munoz, now 68 years of age, has an art degree from the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem - Israel, and a master in film from the San Francisco Art Institute in the US. Today she once again lives in her hometown of Mendoza in Argentina.
In just a sec we’ll let Susana talk about her work herself. Straight off the bat she mentions her self-portrait Susana, which came to life while she was studying film in San Francisco. Susana is a kind of diary of moving images as well as a meeting between two sisters who’ve chosen different ways of living their lives.
Susana weaves together cinema vérité and interviews to create a collage of stills, amateur films, and animations, to portray the cultural context in which female, sexual, and ethnic identities are formed. In the film, she asks her family members, lovers, exes, and friends to talk about her in front of the camera. What do you think about Susana? she wonders. Just like many of Susana’s films - The film ended up being censured by the Argentinian state. She says that today it’s almost impossible for her to work as a filmmaker in her home country.
Malin Holgersson and SAQMI’s founder Anna Linder had this discussion with Susana on the 28th of June, 2021.
Susana is sitting in her home in Mendoza in Argentina and Anna and Malin are sitting in Anna’s home in Majorna in Göteborg.Text by Malin Holgersson. Translated to English by Alex Alvina Chamberland. Voice by Sam Message.
Trailer for the film SUSANA:
Related material:
Screen: 'Las Madres' of ArgentinaText by Walter Goodman, The New York Times, April 2, 1986
Swedish article:Relationer blir film långt borta och nära, SvDText av Henrik Sahl Johansson, Publicerad den 4 augusti 2014.
Texts and films by Susana Blaustein Muñoz:
Filmography:SUSANA, 1980, US/Argentina, 25 min, Black/White, 16mm. Experimental documentary about Susana Blaustein Muñoz life. In this autobiographical portrait, Susana leaves her native Argentina to live her life outside the strictures of Latin American cultural and family pressures. Susana interweaves cinema vérité interviews of her family and lovers with snapshots, home movies and even a Disney cartoon to render the cultural context in which female, sexual and ethnic identity is shaped.
See the film SUSANAPrice: 40 skr. The money goes directly to the filmmaker.Las Madres; The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 1985, 64 min, 16mm. Co-directed and produced with Lourdes Portillo.Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1986, Las Madres documents the courageous political actions of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine women who gather weekly at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to remember the children that "disappeared" during the Dirty War (1976-1983). La Ofrenda - The Days of The Dead (El Diade Los Muertos), 1989, 62 min. Produced and Directed by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Blaustein Muñoz. Filmed simultaneously in Oaxaca DF and San Francisco. A documentary exploring the varying cultural practices of the "Day of the Dead" in both Mexico and Chicano/a communities in the United States. Nominated for Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 1989.My Home: My Prison, 1993, 60 min. My Home: My Prison is based on the autobiography of Palestinian journalist Raymonda Tawil, one of the first Palestinians to engage Israelis in dialogue twenty-four years ago. She was arrested several times by the Israeli military and accused of being a collaborator by some of her own people. Yet today, she is considered a pioneer of the peace process in the Middle East. My Home, My Prison is also about the struggle for women's rights. Raised in a misogynistic society that limits the freedom of women. Raymonda grew into a person who dared to speak her mind. Now exiled in Paris, she remains controversial; her daughter Suha married Yasser Arafat. Directed with intensity by two Jewish filmmakers. Erica Marcus and Academy Award nominee Susana Blaustein Muñoz, the film, set against the backdrop of the last fifty years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, goes beyond traditional documentary by interweaving archival footage, interviews and reenacted scenes from Tawil's memories, accompanied by dramatized excerpts from her writings. It screened at the Haifa Film Festival 1994 -1996.Ave Phoenix, 1995, 27 min. Short Film. Directed, produced and written by Susana Blaustein Muñoz. Starring Mira Furlan a former actress of Emir Kusturica. Sponsored by AFI in Hollywood,Awakening from Sorrow: Buenos Aires 1997, 2009, 40 min, Directed by John Knoop and Karina Epperlein. Produced by John Knoop, Susana Blaustein Muñoz, Karina Epperlein. A documentary about the rise of the movement called HIJOS. Children of the disappeared. The film is about a crucial moment in history when the grief of young Argentines - whose parents disappeared and were tortured and killed during the 'Dirty War' (Argentina's dictatorship organized mass killings of civilian dissidents during the 1970s until 1983) erupts into public action, and becomes a cornerstone for social movements from South America to Serbia. Until these young people began to organize and demand explanations from their government, the predominant coping strategy has been to pretend that the missing are still alive. This film documents the power to transform pain into action to lift the veil of repression that has gripped a generation of young people.
Old Love Dies Hard, 2013, 8:30 min. This autobiographical film shows that there is no agelimit for falling in love. The story of Susana and Christina takes us from Stockholm to Buenos Aires. Susana and Christina met in their 20`s and reconnected via Facebook 35 years later. Their love was rekindled at age 60 and they made a commitment to settle together. Never say never is the message!
See the film Old Love Dies Hard:
Credits SAQMI Play:Producers: Anna Linder and Malin HolgerssonDesign and code: Vincent OrbackComposer: Amanda LindgrenEdited and Mixed by Malin HolgerssonVoice: Sam MessagePublisher: Anna Linder
SAQMI Play is produced with the support from The Swedish Arts Council and Gothenburg City.
-
This episode is both in Swedish and English
If you are English-speaking, you can find the English introduction further down which makes the talk easier to follow.Längre ned kan du även se filmen SUSANA.Further down you can also see the movie SUSANA.
I det här avsnittet av SAQMI Play möter vi den argentinska filmskaparen Susana Blaustein Muñoz, som med sin ständigt aktuella självbiografiska film Susana tidigt blev en queer pionjär. Filmen från 1980 är en av dom allra första svenska lesbiska historier som skildras i rörlig bild, Susana bodde nämligen i Stockholm ett tag i slutet av 70-talet och hängde bland annat i kretsarna kring Lesbisk front. Christina, hennes dåvarande finlandssvenska flickvän som också var ny i Stockholm, figurerar i filmen. 40 år senare kommer deras pånyttfödda kärlek att skildras i kortfilmen Old Love Dies Hard, som skulle blivit en längre uppföljare till Susana men som verkar förbli den drygt åtta minuter kortdokumentär den är idag.Sitt breda internationella genombrott fick Susana Blaustein Muñoz 1985 med dokumentärfilmen Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo som nominerades till en Oscar. Las Madres är en film om dom argentinska kvinnor som utmanade landets militärjunta och drev en enorm kamp för att få veta vad som hänt deras barn, som försvunnit under dom år Argentina var en militärdiktatur. Varje torsdag samlades mödrarna på torget Plaza de Mayo i Buenos Aires framför presidentens residens. Deras vita sjalar blev ett signum och rörelsen känd över hela världen.Susana Blaustein Muñoz, idag 68 år, har examen i konst från Bezalel Academy i Jerusalem i Israel och en master i film från San Francisco Art Institute i USA. Idag bor hon återigen i sin hemstad Mendoza i Argentina. Vi ska alldeles strax låta Susana själv berätta om sitt arbete. Hon nämner direkt sitt självporträtt Susana som kom till när hon studerade film i San Fransisco. Susana är en slags dagbok i rörliga bilder och ett möte mellan två systrar som valt olika sätt att leva sina liv. Susana väver samman cinema vérité och intervjuer till ett collage av stillbilder, amatörfilmer och animationer för att gestalta den kulturella kontext i vilken kvinnlig, sexuell och etnisk identitet formas. Hon ber sina familjemedlemmar, älskare, ex och vänner berätta om henne framför kameran. Vad tycker du om Susana? undrar hon. Filmen blev censurerad av den argentinska staten – som flera av Susanas filmer. Hon säger idag att det är nästintill omöjligt för henne att arbeta som filmskapare i sitt hemland.Malin Holgersson och SAQMIs grundare Anna Linder, hade samtalet med Susana den 28 juni 2021. Susana sitter i sitt hem i Mendoza i Argentina och vi sitter hemma hos Anna i Majorna i Göteborg.Text av Malin Holgersson.
SUSANA, 1980, US/Argentina, 25 min, sv/vit, 16mm.Experimentell dokumentär om Susana Blaustein Muñoz liv. I sitt självbiografiska porträtt lämnar Susana hemlandet Argentina, för att leva sitt liv utanför det kulturella trycket från den latinamerikanska samhälls- och familjestrukturen. Det är en personlig och privat berättelse, likt en dagbok i rörliga bilder. Susana är en politiskt viktig film och en av de allra första svenska lesbiska historier som skildras och som bör ingå i ett svenskt kulturarv. Fler filmer av Susana längre ned:
Trailer till filmen SUSANA:
Relaterat material:
Screen: 'Las Madres' of ArgentinaText by Walter Goodman, The New York Times, April 2, 1986
Relationer blir film långt borta och nära, SvDText av Henrik Sahl Johansson, Publicerad den 4 augusti 2014.
Texts and films by Susana Blaustein Muñoz:
In this episode of SAQMI Play we meet the Argentinian filmmaker Susana Blaustein Muñoz, who became an early queer pioneer with her always relevant autobiographical film Susana. This film from 1980 marks one of the first Swedish lesbian stories to be portrayed in moving images, since Susana lived in Stockholm for a while in the late 70’s, and for instance hung out in the circles around Lesbisk front (Lesbian Front). Christina, her Finno-Swedish girlfriend at the time, who was also new to Stockholm, appears in the film. 40 years later their reborn love will be depicted in the short film Old Love Dies Hard, which was meant as a longer follow up to Susana, but seems to remain the slightly over 8-minute long documentary short that it is today.
Susana Blaustein Muñoz had her broad international breakthrough in 1985 with the documentary film Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, which was nominated for an Oscar. Las Madres is a film about the Argentinian women who challenged the nation’s military rule and waged a tremendous struggle for the right to know what happened to their children who’d disappeared during the years when Argentina was a military dictatorship. Every Thursday the women gathered at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in front of the President’s residency. Their white scarves became a signum, and the movement grew famous all over the world.
Susana Blaustein Muñoz, now 68 years of age, has an art degree from the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem in Israel, and a master in film from the San Francisco Art Institute in the USA. Today she once again lives in her hometown of Mendoza in Argentina.
In just a moment we’ll let Susana talk about her work herself. Directly she mentions her self-portrait Susana, which came to life while she was studying film in San Francisco. Susana is a kind of diary of moving images as well as a meeting between two sisters who’ve chosen different ways of living their lives. Susana weaves together cinema vérité and interviews to create a collage of stills, amateur films, and animations, to portray the cultural context in which female, sexual, and ethnic identity is formed. She asks her family members, lovers, exes, and friends to talk about her in front of the camera. What do you think about Susana? she wonders. The film was censured by the Argentinian state – just like many of Susana’s films. She says that today it’s almost impossible for her to work as a filmmaker in her home country.
Malin Holgersson and SAQMI’s founder Anna Linder had this discussion with Susana on the 28th of June, 2021.Susana sits in her home in Mendoza in Argentina and we sit in Anna’s home in Majorna in Göteborg.Text by Malin Holgersson. Translated to English by Alex Alvina Chamberland
Filmografi:SUSANA, 1980, US/Argentina, 25 min, Black/White, 16mm. Experimental documentary about Susana Blaustein Muñoz life. In this autobiographical portrait, Susana leaves her native Argentina to live her life outside the strictures of Latin American cultural and family pressures. Susana interweaves cinema vérité interviews of her family and lovers with snapshots, home movies and even a Disney cartoon to render the cultural context in which female, sexual and ethnic identity is shaped.
See the film SUSANAPrice: 40 skr. The money goes directly to the filmmaker.Las Madres; The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 1985, 64 min, 16mm. Co-directed and produced with Lourdes Portillo.Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1986, Las Madres documents the courageous political actions of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine women who gather weekly at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to remember the children that "disappeared" during the Dirty War (1976-1983). La Ofrenda - The Days of The Dead (El Diade Los Muertos), 1989, 62 min. Produced and Directed by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Blaustein Muñoz. Filmed simultaneously in Oaxaca DF and San Francisco. A documentary exploring the varying cultural practices of the "Day of the Dead" in both Mexico and Chicano/a communities in the United States. Nominated for Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 1989.My Home: My Prison, 1993, 60 min. My Home: My Prison is based on the autobiography of Palestinian journalist Raymonda Tawil, one of the first Palestinians to engage Israelis in dialogue twenty-four years ago. She was arrested several times by the Israeli military and accused of being a collaborator by some of her own people. Yet today, she is considered a pioneer of the peace process in the Middle East. My Home, My Prison is also about the struggle for women's rights. Raised in a misogynistic society that limits the freedom of women. Raymonda grew into a person who dared to speak her mind. Now exiled in Paris, she remains controversial; her daughter Suha married Yasser Arafat. Directed with intensity by two Jewish filmmakers. Erica Marcus and Academy Award nominee Susana Blaustein Muñoz, the film, set against the backdrop of the last fifty years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, goes beyond traditional documentary by interweaving archival footage, interviews and reenacted scenes from Tawil's memories, accompanied by dramatized excerpts from her writings. It screened at the Haifa Film Festival 1994 -1996.Ave Phoenix, 1995, 27 min. Short Film. Directed, produced and written by Susana Blaustein Muñoz. Starring Mira Furlan a former actress of Emir Kusturica. Sponsored by AFI in Hollywood,Awakening from Sorrow: Buenos Aires 1997, 2009, 40 min, Directed by John Knoop and Karina Epperlein. Produced by John Knoop, Susana Blaustein Muñoz, Karina Epperlein. A documentary about the rise of the movement called HIJOS. Children of the disappeared. The film is about a crucial moment in history when the grief of young Argentines - whose parents disappeared and were tortured and killed during the 'Dirty War' (Argentina's dictatorship organized mass killings of civilian dissidents during the 1970s until 1983) erupts into public action, and becomes a cornerstone for social movements from South America to Serbia. Until these young people began to organize and demand explanations from their government, the predominant coping strategy has been to pretend that the missing are still alive. This film documents the power to transform pain into action to lift the veil of repression that has gripped a generation of young people.
Old Love Dies Hard, 2013, 8:30 min. This autobiographical film shows that there is no agelimit for falling in love. The story of Susana and Christina takes us from Stockholm to Buenos Aires. Susana and Christina met in their 20`s and reconnected via Facebook 35 years later. Their love was rekindled at age 60 and they made a commitment to settle together. Never say never is the message!
See the film Old Love Dies Hard:
Credits SAQMI Play:Producenter: Anna Linder och Malin HolgerssonDesign och kod: Vincent OrbackKomposition: Amanda LindgrenKlipp och mix: Malin HolgerssonAnsvarig utgivare: Anna Linder
SAQMI Play produceras med stöd avKulturrådet och Göteborgs stad.
-
Katie Spotz is an endurance athlete, author, and philanthropist. She's the only American to have rowed solo from Africa to South America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
-
Mary Shelley’s novel tells us that Frankenstein’s Monster is partly made from dead livestock… and evidently the Monster’s wife is mainly assembled from fish. What if the happy couple went to live on their own in South America? Lovecraftian children? What if Nazi scientists discover this after they lose World War 2? Also, how Frankenstein … Fortsätt läsa Sweconpoddar 73 – How Frankenstein formed Karl Marx and made a Mermaid as well as a good AI →
