The grasshopper, the hawk, and the squash vine
This memoir prose piece was accepted for the A Room of Her Own foundation’s online volume, WAVES. …
“The one-cent stamps fly off our shelves…”
In the central Post Office of Athens, Georgia recently, I needed to add thirteen cents to my letter’s postage. I asked if they still carry one-cent stamps. “Oh, yes. They are our best sellers,” said the grey-haired man behind the counter. …
A mention in Yale E360…
What ecologists are learning from Indigenous people
by Jim Robbins
…“…It may not just be facts about the natural world that are important in these exchanges, but different ways of being and perceiving. In fact, there are researchers looking into the relationship between some indigenous people and the very different ways they see the world.
Ecomyopia in the Anthropocene
“… ecomyopia [we] define as the tendency to not recognize, to ignore, or fail to act on new information that contradicts political arrangements, social norms, or world views…”
I was tickled that this cartoon was reproduced in the 2021 book, The Anthropocene in Global Media: Neutralizing the Risk, edited by L. …
Edible grubs in Australia
“In the Arandic [language] system, edible grubs are a part of the plant on which they are found, in much the same way a fruit or tuber is. Note that it is not known whether all edible grubs present in one tree species (named the same in Arandic languages) are a single scientific species or whether numerous species can live in a single plant.” …
The eye of the filbert worm moth
“No one knows the purpose of the tiny eye just above the compound eye” of the filbert worm moth, eater of acorns (and filberts, presumably). –p. 790, “Life in a nutshell,” National Geographic June 1989. …
Free for All: Foods, Landscapes, and Lives in the Paraguayan Chaco
Ethnobiology Letters 2016
This short memoir essay revisits my education in foodscapes with the Ayoreo community of Jesudi in the Paraguayan Chaco through stories and experiences of food procurement and distribution. From landscapes in which food was free for all (non-monetized) to contemporary encroachments and land-grabbing in the Chaco for globally-connected markets, the transformations have been rapid and witnessed by Ayoreo and other dispossessed indigenous groups. …
Listen to an excerpt of Ei Posinho’s life story
Recorded in Jesudi, Paraguay 2011. Posted here with her permission. …
Pocket ecology
Research project (inspired by a mom who took photos of the contents of her preschooler’s “treasures” in his pocket every day):
Carry around a stack of info forms/ permission to ask opportunistically when out and about: Would you like to participate in an art anthropology project? …
The Names
The names at first are those of animals and of birds, of objects that have one definition in the eye, another in the hand, of forms and features on the rim of the world, or of sounds that carry on the bright wind and in the void. …
We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play
“We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.”
“Time is a game played beautifully by children.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments …