Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia (original) (raw)
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315577975
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Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2014
In response to the pressing need to re-constitute the ways we live with non-humans, more-than-human geography’s distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provides an everyday ethic that can accommodate more-than-human difference. I do this by analysing how life is stuck together and pulled apart in the British domestic garden, drawing on life history interviews and ‘show me your garden’ walking tours with experienced gardeners. The article is aligned with a widening bestiary of companion species in geography, and considers the appearances and disappearances of a domestic monster: the slug. Therefore in contrast to existing literature the paper explores gardening’s darker aspects. First, I describe how slugs and gardeners are ‘sticky’: joined together by shared histories, curiosity and disgust. The paper then shifts to examine how gardeners practice detachment: distancing themselves from the act of killing slugs but yet avowing the violence of their actions; acknowledging the limits of their capacities to bend space to their will and imagination; recognising the vulnerability of slugs, and being transformed by that recognition. The analysis shows first, that the emphasis on gathering together and relationality obscures what lies outside relations, and second how detachment emerges not as the negation, but as an enabling constituent of more-than-human ethics. In conclusion the paper argues for looser mappings of relationality and ethics that attend more fully to the distance between species.
The coherence of official environmental discourse in Singapore is torn apart by the continued existence of two conflicting visions of the state-led landscaping project. On one hand, the idea of the " man-made garden " favors exotic lifeforms at the expense of native biodiversity. On the other hand, the increasingly popular notion of the " ecological garden " seeks to create a sacred space for native species at the total exclusion of foreign ones. This ideological incoherence directly contradicts the Foucauldian paradigm of ecological biopolitics which takes rational governmentality as its axiom. Consequently, this paper argues for a paradigmatic shift in the field of ecological biopolitics by proposing the " gardening paradigm " as a replacement for the mainstream Foucauldian paradigm of ecological biopolitics. Rejecting the Foucauldian paradigm's assumption of a rationalist state, the gardening paradigm demonstrates how the aesthetic and ecological imperatives of gardening influence state biopolitical management of non-human populations. The ecological imperative seeks to create a nativist utopia for local biodiversity by entirely excluding all exotic species while the aesthetic imperative seeks to create a cosmopolitan microcosm which often privileges exotic ornamentals at the expense of native species. This zero-sum situation forces the state to practice biopolitics by making non-human populations live and die based upon their overall contribution to the garden. At the same time, this paper will also account for the emergence of biopolitical tensions between the aesthetic and ecological imperatives by using the " gardening paradigm " to trace the historical evolution of official environmental discourse in Singapore. This narrative will illustrate how the ecological imperative, in the guise of " natural heritage, " has broken the continuity of Singapore's environmental discourse. By creating a parallel discourse alongside the predominant aesthetic imperative, this discontinuity has resulted in the two discordant visions of the garden city. Citation: Goh, Ngee Chae Joshua, “Ecological Biopolitics in the Garden City: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Discourse of Natural Heritage”. Yale-NUS Undergraduate Journal. (2017): 80-98
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A large body of work over the past few decades has revealed the manifestly dramatic impacts of urbanization on species' distributions and ecologies, many of which result from gross changes in land use and configuration. Less well understood are the rather more direct interactions between people and biodiversity in the urban arena. While there is a general concern that urbanization impoverishes human contact with nature, daily interaction with biodiversity in urban greenspaces and the widespread provision of food and nesting resources for wildlife form a part of many city-dwellers' experience. Using data from the UK, we show that supplementary resource provision aimed explicitly at enhancing avian populations can result in high levels of additional foraging and nesting opportunities, particularly in urban areas. However, our data also indicate that levels of such resource provision are strongly positively correlated with human population density at a regional scale, and within a large city. The proportion of households participating in bird feeding depends on social and economic features of the human population, suggesting that strong covariation between human and ecological communities will result. Indeed, we demonstrate that the abundances of some urban-adapted bird species are positively related to the density of feeding stations across the urban landscape, although such relationships were not apparent for other species that commonly use garden feeding stations. It has been suggested that interactions with nature, such as feeding birds, could have beneficial consequences for human health. A better understanding of this potential feedback is required.
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I investigate conflicts between advocates of natural versus manicured lawns and conflicts between proponents and opponents of lawn herbicides. Conflicts over lawns and lawn herbicides provide valuable insights into the cultural and symbolic dimensions of environmental issues generally, because the lawn conflicts tend to be fairly pure instances of conflicts over values, perceptions and meanings rather than over divergent material interests. Lawn controversies have to do both with risk perception and landscape as a symbol of social identity, hence the study of these conflicts contributes simultaneously to environmental and cultural sociology.
This volume offers a varied and informed series of approaches to questions of mobility-actual, social, virtual and imaginary-as related to visual culture. Contributors address these questions in light of important contemporary issues such as migration; globalisation; transnationality and transcultural difference; art, space and place; new media; fantasy and identity; and the movement across and the transgression of the proprieties of boundaries and borders. The book invites the reader to read across the collection, noting differences or making connections between media and forms and between audiences, critical traditions and practitioners, with a view to developing a more informed understanding of visual culture and its modalities of mobility and fantasy as encouraged by dominant, emergent and radical forms of visual practice.
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Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal, for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualizing urban gardens as commons-in-the-making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top-down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a 'common' in common.
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