397) Rosamund Portus: A preemptive mourning of bee decline

Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration

Kaméa Chayne

Earth Sciences, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.8 • 694 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“When I talk about extinction as a bio-cultural process, what I’m seeing or what I’m talking about is the fact that there’s lots of different species who are alive and who are working within a cultural entanglement which is shaping their capacity to either thrive or perhaps become endangered and go into decline... I see art as giving people a way to engage with that grief, and to engage with that emotional connection with the subject, but also to engage with a sense of agency over it.”

In this episode, we welcome Rosamund Portus, an artist, writer and researcher of environmental humanities. Drawn to bees at an early age, by way of her exposure to gardening, Rosamund conducted her undergraduate dissertation on humans’ understanding of bee culture. She later pursued a Ph.D. in the social and cultural dimensions of bee population declines. In turn, Rosamund has gone on to complicate black and white “whodunit” narratives around species extinction, while advocating for creativity and art as pathways of relational becoming.

Speaking from her context of living in the U.K., and through a lens of “bio-culturalism,” Rosamund is interested in how modern, consumerist, human culture (at least in the West) have become entangled with a perception of bee culture, particularly the trope and role honeybees in agricultural systems. She invites us to challenge what renders a “meaningful” life and death, which species get to matter within mainstream extinction dialogues, and how storytelling plays an important role in enriching our capacities of engagement with bees, other species, and ourselves.

(The musical offering featured in this episode At the Edge of It by Oropendola. The episode-inspired artwork is by Cherie Kwok.)

This episode was brought to you by our supporting listeners. Join us on Patreon to help us keep our show alive: www.greendreamer.com/support

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I have a quick but important ask. As you're probably aware, Green Dreamer is an independent
0:07.9	podcast and we don't take on corporate advertisers to fund our work because we don't want those
0:13.7	considerations to influence our curiosities or our abilities to question whatever it is that we want to question.
0:22.3	So if you value and believe in our work, this is our call out.
0:26.8	We need your direct support in order to continue this podcast.
0:30.7	And you can help us out so, so much through a paid substack subscription to my newsletter at
0:37.3	camaya.substack.com or through a one-time
0:40.4	donation at greendreamer.com slash support. It really means a lot to have you here and we're so
0:47.6	grateful for whatever form or level of support that you're able to share with us.
0:56.0	You're listening to Green Dreamer, a listener-supported podcast, and I'm your host, Kameh Shane.
1:02.0	As we embark on a new year for the show, we would love to invite you to join our Patreon community,
1:08.0	where we'll begin to share bonus episode offerings, some of my own reflections on
1:12.2	these conversations, and more. If you've been with us for a while, you also know that we often
1:17.6	explore ideas and perspectives that go against mainstream currents in order to seed more
1:23.2	imaginative thinking for what could be. So if you value our platform and curiosities and intention and want to support us to break
1:31.1	through the noise of mainstream media, join us today on Patreon at greendreamer.com
1:37.0	slash support.
1:40.5	We need to be really careful in the way that we handle bees and we can't just see them as part of that agricultural system without having care for them as living creatures.
1:49.0	Today we're speaking with Dr Rosamund Portis, who's a researcher and artist working in the environmental humanities.
1:59.0	Her current research focuses on young people's and children's
2:02.2	experiences of environmental change, and her PhD, which she finished in 2021, examined the social
2:09.5	and cultural dimensions of bee decline with a focus on creative explorations of bees' lives.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kaméa Chayne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Kaméa Chayne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.