Introducing a new mini-series
The best way I can think to stress test a political position is to look at what it means for the whole of life and not just the narrow human realm. I’ve spent a good chunk of these pages arguing that it’s not only possible to build a revolutionary politics on the patterns, habits and characters of the living world, but it’s a joy. You’ll also know that it’s not necessarily a safe bet. It is as easy to find metaphors and proclivities towards cooperation, autonomy and diversity as it is to find gestures of competition, hierarchy and purity. The world’s not neutral, but it’s so vast and strange that if you want to pick only the most fascist cherries, you can.
I’ve been inspired by the anthropologist Radhika Govindrajan recently, whose Animal Intimacies is rocking the (admittedly fairly niche) world of multispecies anthropologists. She’s got these same concerns about learning about ethics from other beings as us. In India, where she works, Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist movement have weaponised the ideal of the ‘mother cow’ to construct their particular version of ethno-purity and to exacerbate paranoia about Muslim desecration of it.
She’s not interested in contributing to this, so instead of focusing on animals, plants, fungi etc in the abstract, she chooses to pay attention to the unique weirdnesses of an individual or a specific community. That way (just as Rebecca Solnit noted of George Orwell) she can avoid the laziness that precedes authoritarianism and remain continually alert, present and astonished by the world.
There are probably other important principles for a militant antifacist eco-civilisation. But I like this one because it prompts me to write about something I wanted to write about anyway: our 10m2 garden in north London.
I’m coming to the end of a nearly three-year stretch tangled up in countless intimate relationships with the plants, the insects, the soil life, the visiting mammals, the birds and the fungi encircled by our rented house’s property boundaries, and I want to tell you about it.
It would be easy to do a classic Eden rewrite about the refuge this place has offered from the hostile city, how all these lives that live here have bolstered me through a long and painful period of illness, about the essential solidarity offered by the living world for those of us struggling against our idiotic economic system. But à la Govindrajan, let’s keep it weirder.
Let’s get into the seedy underbelly of this place, gossip about some longstanding conflicts and see some surprising resolutions. There’s a lot of wholesome stuff here, and there’s a lot of failure, murk and strangeness.
Episode one: Gastropoda
If a big bird eats these small snails in our garden that’s okay. If a frog eats them that’s okay. But if I smush them with my sandal that is less okay. If, however, I cook them up in wine and serve them to my housemates, it would be unpleasant, but it would be okay. Living and dying is somehow more palatable if it goes in a particular direction up the trophic ladder. When I kill them without eating them I match up our fates: we’ll both be consumed by things smaller than us.
Slugs and snails have thrived in human suburbanisation. Our buildings and gardens give them nooks and crannies to live in and plenty of tender annual plants to gorge on. In a single spring, there are over 15 billion slugs in the UK. Each eats an average of 800 grams of plants a year. That’s an annual devouring of 12 billion kilograms of greenery (compared to 7 billion kilos of veg by humans).
For those of us who grow our own food, they are challenging. We want our garden to be a convivial multispecies entanglement. 15 billion slugs occupy the land between here and there. An academic: “If gardening can be understood as ‘a collusion of incipiencies that makes all determinations, all utopian projects, ultimately, vain’ (Lulka 2012), then the slug is one of those incipiencies.”
For proof, see our shredded lettuce, vanished peas and courgettes kept in a state of perpetual childhood, hope preserved until it isn’t. Gastropod (the zoological class in which slugs and snails sit) combines the Latin words for ‘stomach’ and ‘foot’.
Our utopian attempts to establish some nonhuman, trophically appropriate population check have failed. We dug a pond to attract frogs to eat them. But the concrete labyrinth they’d have to navigate to get here has proved too much. We almost organised a house swap to treat our neighbour’s chickens to a mollusc all-you-can-eat. But they were part of another all-you-can-eat organised by some foxes before we managed (a different sort of trophic betrayal). Our friendship with an alley cat (who you can bet will get their own post here soon) discourages ground-hunting birds.
Which means I need to become chief predator. So I go out at dawn and dusk when the light is real nice, and I find slugs and snails, and I kill them. I think it’s important to face up to this role of mine. I want to acknowledge their death, and, I want to honour it. This doesn’t mean I do.
The other night I had an intensely psychedelic dream. I had a “realisation” that slugs and snails secretly harboured a ‘quantum consciousness’. All this time, they were interdimensional beings, communicating across a vast web of invisible life, playing a vital role in keeping the universe coherent.
The realisation didn’t survive waking. But when you look really closely at a slug or a snail it’s easy to imagine it to be true. Some internal fluid expands and contracts them into the world at will. They share an evolutionary branch with extraordinarily intelligent aliens like the octopus or the cuttlefish. They are ecstatically sensitive to the garden, forging a web of slime roadways for one another based on their profound olfactory ability to map a place.
A few years ago, on a vast autonomous zone in France, a group of anti-speciesist liberation activists destroyed a snail farm another resident was developing as a cottage industry. Unlike the freeing of beagles say, the idea of thousands of snails freed to a life of self-determination absolutely slayed me. That was then.
Today I appreciate the snails in our garden for making me look at it more closely. They expose fragility. They make me more grateful for successful harvests. They make me “deepen into” my Buddhist-lite practice of non-attachment.
Eva Giraud, a sociologist, has weighed in on the big turn towards entanglement in the humanities to say that, yes we are all connected to everything else, but that connection often depends on and facilitates certain disconnections. It’s a pretty abstract point. I read it as a call for a mature kind of cosmic oneness. To say instead that there are different kinds of intimacy, that some things require a loving no, that this, more than just seeing when and how things work together, is the hard terrain of ethics. To entangle, I’ve learned, comes from the Italian tagilen, which means “to be involved in a difficult situation”.
Loving this series Greg! Looking forward to reading the next part.