Friday, May 25, 2012


"A monkey that sneezes when it rains, a worm that lives more than a mile underground, and a hairy blue tarantula made the list of top 10 most interesting species discovered in 2011." Despite massive extinction, we continue to "discover" new species. As Aristotle proclaimed "Life is said in many ways." These animals reveal to us that there are may ways to comport oneself. Why should we limit ourselves to human-ness and our narrow ideas of what it means to live and to be human on this planet.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Wormwood Forest: a natural history of Chernobyl

After an much earlier blog post on radioactive boar, I'm writing a bit on the animals who occupy the "exclusion zone" in Chernobyl. Mary Mycio's book Wormwood Forest is a useful primer. Google books preview here.


Convulsion, Chen Sheinberg

Anat Pick presented on this work, Convulsion, among others by the video artist Chen Sheinberg.
Here is a dung beetle turned over and struggling a hopelessly long time (at least in human observational terms) to get up-righted. 

I'm posting it here because it is a moving piece for thinking the alien-ness of other animals and yet a connectedness (J. M. Coetzee in Lives of Animals calls "imaginative sympathy") with other creatures.

[note, while not in the video, the beetle eventually makes it back on its feet with some human help.]