[-empyre-] Residual Contamination

Sat Nov 11 08:58:08 AEDT 2017

Hi Catherine, Marisa, Renate, and the rest of you out there,

Thanks for these thoughts and meditations- I’m enjoying the way you are weaving in the positive side of contamination alongside its horrors. The contamination narrative is omnipresent as toxicity (I just came from a workshop involving Hawaii-based artists and ocean plastics- the amount of plastic being ingested by phytoplankton and entering the food chain is truly harrowing) BUT, as you suggest, it's important to work on reclaiming the contamination metaphor in the sense of eschewing the search for/heralding of purity- Tsing gets at this nicely in her work (I’ll need to listen to the edge effects interview!) As Catherine knows from our work at the Environmental Performance Agency, working with weedy plant species we come up against the narrative of “bad contamination” a lot- the idea that species boundaries and geographies should be immutable, and “pure” native genomes are more desirable, leading to a denial of the flexibility and fluidity of the way plants share genetic material, hybridize, evolve even in short periods of time (this ready ability to be “contaminated” is a feature, not a fault, in a rapidly changing and unpredictable climate). I find that looking back at Stephen J. Gould’s “An Evolutionary Perspective on Strengths,Fallacies, and Confusions in the Concept of Native Plants” (Arnoldia, Spring 1998) is helpful in laying out common misconceptions around nativeness, fitness, and genetic superiority. I should probably read it again ;)

Also in terms of eschewing purity, and connecting back to last month’s multispecies conversations, I find passages in Patricia Reed’s recent article "Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization <http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/140674/xenophily-and-computational-denaturalization/>” to be spot on- she reminds us that it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s so common when contemplating the bettering of one thing to assume it means the deterioration of something else- a kind of binary purity that is in dire need of contamination. She puts it this way (referencing Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble”, also relevant here):
"To stay with the trouble means there is no easy way out, forcing us to navigate through it…not with an “anything goes” attitude, but with careful attention paid to how the “trouble” informs the way we fashion distinctions in the world…a clear, fundamental distinction must be drawn between decentering and dehumanization. The decentering of the human does not equal dehumanization; rather, it can simply enable something other. That said, this process will not just “naturally” occur, so to care for and nurture this important non-equation requires a corresponding perspectival recalibration; plotting where we are, in the generic, and provoking a reframing of the human in view of its humiliation.”

Looking forward to the rest of the month!

Best wishes,

-Ellie Irons
ellieirons.com

> On Nov 8, 2017, at 12:23 AM, Catherine Grau <catherine.grau at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
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> Just a quick response to Marisa and questioning feasibility of remediation... 
> Maybe rather than remediation, we can think about transformation. Cultivating transformation. 
> 
> On a small scale (for now), recovering traditional / ancient cultures of food-making, such as making bread with sourdough or lievito madre, are a path for disrupting the dominant commercial food paradigms of highly processed foods that cater to global markets and economic viability. Rather than having GMO seed monopolies and a long shelf life of flour, we opt for the nutrition and longer shelf life of a handmade sourdough bread, which maybe requires returning to local and small scale grain farming. 
> Besides the glyphosate tangent, what I struggled with most in making bread with natural leaven were the rhythms, cycles, the time commitment, the process of nurturing and attention... The form of presence it entices. Working with an obviously living agent, a living process. But the fact that it is difficult to balance DIY bread baking with precarious contemporary urban lifestyle is also what is actually so exiting and promising about it. What would it look like to restructure my lifestyle around symbiotic nourishment?
> 
> I listened to this interview with Anna Tsing today where she speaks about her book "Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet": http://edgeeffects.net/anna-tsing/ <http://edgeeffects.net/anna-tsing/>
> And, although I struggle, I would love to find the enthusiasm with which she engages the subject of contamination.
> What I love about her is this radical openness to the concept of change rooted in the celebration of life that is surviving and emerging from the "ruins".
> 
> I'm just beginning to nurture that narrative. Hope it rises!
> 
> xo
> Catherine
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> Catherine Grau
> ///\\\///\\\///\\\///\\\
> EPA - environmentalperformanceagency.com <http://environmentalperformanceagency.com/>
> chancecologies.com <http://chancecologies.com/>
> 
> 
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 9:26 PM, Marisa Tesauro <info at marisatesauro.com <mailto:info at marisatesauro.com>> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Renate and others who are walking through contamination with us this month,
> 
> Catherine takes us on an interesting journey into the residual contamination in the soil and gives us an accurate timeframe, in general terms there is a constant bombardment that leads to a layering effect of residual contamination where the natural course of insects cannot do their work, the soil can’t escape this residual pollution, the crops carry the residual contamination, our source of nutrition carries these residuals to our cells and organs and once again leave their residual trace.  I don’t believe a word Monsanto says, they would poison their own grandmother and not think twice.
> 
> I also thought about residual in regards to the finger lakes issue: antibiotic runoff due to medicine cabinet purges into toilets or places where they eventually end up in the water supply, agriculture and even water treatment plants that can’t deal with these types of substances. In fact there are high levels of residual antibiotics in animal manure that gets used as fertilizer and then leaches into the soil and eventually makes it way into the waterways. The natural ecosystem of the finger lakes is effected and I am interested in understanding why exactly there is high phosphorous level in the finger lakes? 
> 
> As I said in my earlier email the residual is often times more powerful than the act itself: the pro glyphosate team claims that 80% of glyphosate can evaporate in a 2 hour period after being applied or that it doesn’t drift into neighboring fields. That seems a little like magic to me, is it that the chemical compound evaporates but the residue is absorbed by everything in its path? The residual chain is charted quite well in regards to soil, water and our bodies as we can see from the data on glyphosate found in urine and breast milk as well as waterways and soil testing. I have also read research on farmer’s families and levels of glyphosate found in the urine of the farmer as well as family members, the numbers are not reassuring and further the need to look at the residual contamination from all sides. 
> 
> When I first started feeding my starter (which was started in Italy) and making bread my acupuncture said to me that I would be better off to get my flour from an Italian source because as Catherine states even the top organic flours on the US market admittedly have residual glyphosate levels. Things were getting more complicated in my simple plan to make my own bread for myself and my family and how ironic as making bread is a chemical process where the residual contamination is crucial in the process: the bacteria on my hands help make the bread rise properly. The starter is its own ecosystem where bacteria, CO2 and flour live in harmony and you have to be careful to care for that ecosystem carefully, measure properly, feed the starter when it needs to be fed amongst the most important points. Bread when baked like this should be extremely nutritious, but if residual contamination of the not good kind such as pesticide residual contamination, the chemical makeup of the bread changes and when we eat the bread our body doesn’t know what to do with the foreign residuals, the synthetic residuals and they find a cell to hang out in or an organ to sink into. How do we cope with this complex situation of residual contamination and where do we go from here-what are the remediation options (for this specific topic, I don’t always believe in remediation)?
> 
> And if this also sounds bleak, I do apologize but this is one reality of residual contamination where there might just be an opportunity to re-strategize together,
> Marisa
> 
> 
> 
>> On Nov 7, 2017, at 12:22 PM, Catherine Grau <catherine.grau at googlemail.com <mailto:catherine.grau at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Dear Renate, and those out there thinking through contamination with us,
>> 
>> A bit more about residual contamination:
>> I just did a quick search:  There are about one billion tons of pesticides used per year in the US; 5,6 billion tons in the world. That's two tons per person in the US and almost one ton per person worldwide (not quite, we are currently 7,6 billion people). And as we already know, everything that we put out into the environment finds it's way back to us. There is no away. Even though Monsanto declares that glyphosate gets decomposed in the soil by microbes within 2 - 200 days, I doubt - because we continually spray, the soil gets no breaks, and many new and old independent studies show that the soil life and insect life is being decimated by the chemicals. With dying microbes, who decomposes the chemicals? 
>> 
>> Residual contamination to me is like looking at how weather happens, everything is connected in a rhythm of cycles and transformations and travel. When you tell me about high levels of phosphorous in the finger lakes region, I immediately think of chemical fertilizers (due to soil depletion). Chemicals travel, run-off into the ground water, downstream, in the oceans (Last year a comprehensive study of residual contamination in west coast waters made headlines, which tested positive for over 80 chemicals, mostly pharmaceutical - anti-depressants, birth control, caffeine - and pesticides), in our tap water, in our food supply, bio-accumulating in our bodies... Glyphosate is now found in the urine samples of 93% of US Americans that get tested. Many mothers are now sending in samples of their breastmilk - and testing positive for glyphosate. When I began my search for glyphosate-free flour, I found out that the two main organic flours available here (Bob's Red Mill and King Arthur) both openly admit to their flours testing positive for glyphosate. It's pretty much inescapable. And that is just one chemical. 
>> 
>> Apologies for dumping on you this pile of really daunting information (and I'm stopping myself from going on), but I just want to illustrate the gravity or how deep residual contamination penetrates. Our bodies are literally (chemically) part of the larger contaminated bodies of water and soil and biological matter. That reality / concept, just like the scale and impact of it's dimension and temporality, is an example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects"... as scale of objects (the uses it mostly to talk about climate change) we need to learn how to encounter.
>> 
>> 
>> Promise, I will scale back down into the tangible dimensions of the starter dough in my next post.
>> 
>> In contaminated togetherness,
>> Catherine
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>> Catherine Grau
>> ///\\\///\\\///\\\///\\\
>> EPA - environmentalperformanceagency.com <http://environmentalperformanceagency.com/>
>> chancecologies.com <http://chancecologies.com/>
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 11:48 PM, Renate Terese Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu <mailto:rferro at cornell.edu>> wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Catherine wrote:
>> Snip
>> " By way of the dominant western culture, many of us build and enforce these mental boundaries where places are labelled and confined as distant / separate from us.
>> …As part of my art practice, I have spent many years (and a long way to go) exploring ways of unlearning my western (mis)education - and rooting that
>> practice in re-weaving the deeper connections or belonging to an inter-dependent, living, breathing world.That path for me has been to work
>> through the body and reclaiming somatic ways of knowing…Marisa and I would like to start off this discussion by honing in on the concept of *residual contamination* - as a place of linking back to our bodies and a way of disruption the narrative of static and confined notions of place.”
>> Snip
>> 
>> 
>> Dear Catherine,
>> How exciting to hear about how you are  thinking about contamination  related to somatic awareness.  I am looking forward to hearing more from both you and Marisa but I thought I would share one of my connections to contamination as it relates to water.  Those of you who know Tim Murray and I know
>> that we live in the middle of upstate New York in a small hamlet.  We live on a fifteen acre lot, almost adjacent to the forest reserves of New York State. The delicate balance of our bodies and our environment are apparent to us everyday as we drink water from the deep wells within the earth’s  aquifers below the rock strata via our well.
>> 
>> All of the underground water in our surrounding Ithaca flows into the Finger Lakes. The five lakes appear like the five digits or fingers of the hand, but the lakes were formed by glacial slow freezes and thaws that gorged deep lakes. Ithaca NY sits at the base of one of the middle lakes called Cayuga, the same name as the American Indian tribe, part of the Iroquois Confederacy.  The history is as deep as is the 435 feet of deep green lake water.
>> 
>> Just this past summer the entire lake was put on lock down literally.  State Parks  and private swimming and boating areas were deemed unsafe for humans because of blue-green algae bloom contamination that caused skin irritation and sickness upon contact.  Environmentalists have been studying the effects of high phosphorous leaches into the water that have been known to cause the algae blooms.  High lake temperatures also have been proven to also cause the blooms.
>> 
>> There is not a day that goes by that I don’t intentionally think about this bio/environmental network that is so directly relational to all of our health and safety. From our the health and environment of our bio-networks to language, communication, and relationships contamination slowly seeps without boundaries. Perhaps the starter dough may be a great place to talk about the interrelationship of those factors.  Looking forward to your sharing more experiences and resources. But perhaps I also might ask for both of you to talk a bit more about “residual contamination.”
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Renate
>> 
>> 
>> Renate Ferro
>> Visiting Associate Professor
>> Director of Undergraduate Studies
>> Department of Art
>> Tjaden Hall 306
>> rferro at cornell.edu <mailto:rferro at cornell.edu>
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