[TEASER] The More Than Human World

Upstream

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a free preview of the episode "The More Than Human World" You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast

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"The More Than Human World" is a phrase that I (Robbie) came across years ago when reading David Abrams's book The Spell of the Sensuous." It immediately struck me as a profound and beautiful perspective on how we perceive of and imagine the world of beings that make up the world that does not include humans. Everything else. And yes, it is more than. Much more than. Especially in an anthropocentric social order that barely values the lives and beings of humans themselves, let alone beings which are not human.

Today's Patreon episode is a reading of a beautiful story told by the author and philosopher Loren Eiseley. The story is about birds, machines, and much more, and is aptly titled "The Bird and the Machine"—just one chapter in a book of stories and essays written by Loren Eisley titled The Star Thrower.

You might want to keep a box of kleenex close by, this one gets a little emotional.

Covert art: Carolyn Raider

Further resources:

Dispossessing the Wilderness Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Mark David Spence
The Star Thrower, Loren Eiseley
Loren Eiseley Society
Mount Eerie

Related episodes:

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Robbie here with another episode in our Patreon reading series. And I thought I would
0:07.6	do something a little bit different this time. I've been doing a lot of very political readings,
0:13.5	like explicitly political. And I think, you know, I don't know if it's because it's sort of the
0:19.8	holiday season or what,
0:22.1	but I thought I'd try doing a reading that's a little less overtly political and a bit more
0:28.0	like a story.
0:29.7	Not that there aren't politics imbued in this story that I'm going to read today, but
0:34.6	it's definitely more of, yeah, like a story than, you know, say
0:39.3	an essay on political economy or imperialism or something like that.
0:44.9	I was originally going to read a couple of readings, but I decided to ax the John Muir story
0:53.0	that I was going to read because, you know, I don't know, I remembered
0:57.5	that John Muir was actually pretty fucking shitty and has a very racist legacy. In my youth, I guess you
1:06.4	could say I really loved Muir and I had this book of writings of his that I read over and over. And
1:13.1	there's a story in there about him going out in like a giant windstorm one night in California
1:22.1	and climbing to the top of a huge tree and just hunkering down for the night and riding this windstorm out in the tree.
1:31.0	And the way that he describes it is it's very magical. It's a really well-written piece.
1:37.9	And he talks about like the tree swaying so far down in the wind that he could almost touch the ground at some points.
1:46.0	And I was going to read that, but yeah, I just, I remember, you know, hearing about his racist
1:51.8	legacy and then I investigated a little bit myself. And yeah, not only did he say a lot of
1:58.1	fucked up things about the Awanichi tribe in what is now called Yosemite,
2:04.6	also about the Cherokee. He said racist things about black people as well. And he actually played a pretty prominent role in dispossessing indigenous people in order to create the national parks.
2:20.3	And there is a great book actually on this, which I have not read, but I think it's definitely
	...

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