made in relation

We all know how vital the water is. The trickling sounds of a mountain creek, the refreshingly cool dip on sun and work-warmed skin. An eagle soaring above, a dipper hopping along the rocks, some ducks floating in the current. Water’s rivers form the connective tissues of earth, the lifeblood of ecosystems. Water takes infinite forms, as does the diversity of worlds that it brings life to. What does it teach? Where does it take us? What does it need from us?

by clara daikh | spring 2022

On water stories… stories that divide and stories that connect. And on and how we might come to live in the midst of drought, grief, anger, and fear.

Because need ways of being that don’t divide us and that offer solace and healing in the face of grief and fear… and because we need space for the strong feelings and for one another. This writing is a practice… of orienting to the more-than-human, the pains that move us, the care that binds all beings, and the ecologies that emerge on this damaged planet. Longing for sacred ways of seeing and of being — with others… amongst it all — widens my eyes stories of the Klamath Basin. These stories tell of a broken relationship to water and the rippling and painful effects of this particular violence throughout an ecosystem.

About this project

on the south fork of the trinity river, where my skin knows joy and my heart knows home

stories of an anthropocene

On a planet made of water, air, and life, it is strange to imagine their scarcity. We talk about the loss of these as tragedies — how can humans have ruined the commons? ¹ We have come to say ”the anthropocene” to evoke the gravity of our species’ power, and perhaps our mistakes — we humans have somehow outcompeted and then trammeled all else from the top of all earth ecosystems.

We tend to discuss “environmental problems” through human eyes and with human language, focusing on the relationship between humans and non-human environments or non-human beings. Rocks and rivers and trees and beavers and salmon all have lives and relationships of their own, most of which make human life possible. These problems are not just human problems — we ought not to see ourselves as alone in facing them.

Ecosystems happen through interactions between individuals and among groups of species. They emerge, they aren’t static². Humans have come to have a tremendous impact on these ecosystems, but this anthro-scenic environment is also lived-in and co-created by other beings. It makes me wonder about what it is to be human, what it might be like to be a member of another species — or another life form altogether — on the planet these precarious days. What stories might they tell of themselves, of us, of our shared home?

But humans are the storytelling beings. We tell not just our own stories, but stories about these other animals and life forms³.

Not all humans tell the same stories… and so we have conflict about what is real. Humans are created in God’s image⁴, sculpted from corn ⁵, or evolved from primate ancestors ⁶. Humans are a plague on this earth, are here to protect it, or are just animals subject to the same natural selection as all species– doomed to be selected against someday⁷. Our stories don’t simply describe what and how we see— the stories we tell create realities and change ecosystems… they even seem to enact global geologic-scale change.

Many anthropo-scenic stories situate both problems and solutions in human systems: conservation, solar power, subsidies, etc. The popular “Anthropocene” story rightly speaks to feelings of guilt, grief, rage, regret, and responsibility. Here, I see humans calling one another to a species-wide reckoning. But this story of “The Anthropocene” evokes an image of one human anthros that has caused the planet’s problems: flattens the unevenness of human impact as well as the very idea of what it means to be human in this timeline. “Anthropocene” pains, I’ll call them, are felt most viscerally among the marginalized and undervalued: women, the 99%, the global south, non-human bodies, non-white bodies, the list goes on. Humanity is not one thing, and we can’t be told in just one story.

How do our stories orient us?

What do they orient us towards?

What do they orient us away from?

⁸

In her book, Robin Wall-Kimmerer tells a story of her ecology students who love the earth and yet can’t fathom that Earth loves them back. I recently had a similarly curious conversation with my family of biologists— where we struggled to make sense of the human species in the planet’s story. How have those who love and even worship the beautiful ecologies of this planet come to feel alienated from it? These moments aren’t coincident with one another, or with the stories I find here. This global moment⁹ lives in many ways, but in all bodies— especially aware of pain and rage, how greatly we depend on one another for care, how much what we (invisibly?) carry can harm others, and how remembering the past is an imperative to finding kinder and more expansive ways of living on this planet. I enter this work and this writing with these strong feelings in presence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus#/media/File:Cryptococcus_neoformans_using_a_light_India_ink_staining_preparation_PHIL_3771_lores.jpg

Pleurotus¹⁰ and Cryptococcus neoformans¹¹.

So I’ve been curious about how stories shape worlds. Many stories of today evoke ecological crises, destructive human disturbance, division, inequality, and resource scarcity. We hear them on the news, we tell them to each other when we are most overwhelmed, we feel them in our bodies, we see them in our landscape. Do these narratives bias what we see and prime our bodies toward threat, fear, urgency, and scarcity? Must they?

Some other stories take care to orient us differently. The Capitalocene offers a way of seeing our crisis as embedded in ways of seeing decided by the paradigm of capitalism. What is seen as valuable¹² is what which is useful, provides energy, is productive, and what offers capital or profit. Perhaps this flattens the story to obscure what is offered by capitalism to us in the face of these crises, such as many reasonable, market-based solutions to carbon emissions, for example.

What language might we find that opens us not just to necessary critiques of the past, but to a call to our present, and which is spacious enough for multiple diversities. Diversity of stories, diversity of ways of being on a damaged planet, diversity of feelings, diversity of solutions.

There are so many humans doing the work of re-storying. Asking the big questions of our time and looking for ways of seeing, coping with, and finding beautiful ways to live despite the dystopian imagining of anthropocene and capitalocene worlds. Donna Haraway sees this moment as “made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen – yet” ¹³.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wonders what manages to live despite capitalism and asks how we can find “healing on a damaged planet” while looking for more-than-human others to be social with… that we are already social with¹⁴. Tsing sees this epoch as one made of contaminated diversity— one which is “always becoming [through] collaborative adaptation to human-disturbed ecosystems… in which many other species can live”¹⁵.

Taken together, as pieces of a puzzle– or an ecosystem– these stories help me find more easeful ways of coping with and making space for the pains that I sense around me. These losses cannot be fixed, repaired, or even healed, and we know well how these harms and crises will persist. The griefs, rages, and alienations that are felt today don’t only need to be met, but listened to— and certainly not simply offered painkillers or “fixes”. Don’t we know that will only delay more pain, even more desperate to be listened to?

“Why is pain so persistent, even after its existence has been noted?
The message of pain changes as the pain persists. A new pain simply calls… in the direction of curing only the symptom… but we need to be driven from symptom consciousness to attend to the larger system …
Somebody gets paid to make the pathological trend more comfortable… treat the symptom to make the world safe for the pathology. But we even look into the future and try to see the symptoms… coming. We predict the jamming of traffic on the highways and… enlarge the roads for cars that do not yet exist. In this way, millions of dollars get committed to the hypotheses of future increase in pathology…
pathology is a relatively easy thing to discuss, health is very difficult. This, of course, is one of the reasons why there is such a thing as the sacred.”
Gregory Bateson, 1991¹⁶

In this work, I ask: what forms of life, relationship, and language are rising to and emerging from spaces with deep divides, complex histories, traumas in all bodies, and no clear solutions? And how might the language of pain and care illuminate these emergent ecologies and how might stories help us to cope with and rise to life together in worlds of strong feelings and ecological crises?

Here I explore some stories with a particular eye for the webs of relationships they evoke… the ways they describe, participate in, and create ecosystems. Making sense of the kinds of relationships enacted in these stories may help to explain and and perhaps repair all our relations with ourselves, with each other, and with the ecosystems we belong to. In this work, I join among those insisting on broader perspectives that don’t alienate our species from each other and from our home… that are finding ways of holding immense grief and uncertainty while remaining open to the play and joy on which creative futures depend… and that follow multispecies stories to find agencies beyond our own human ones with which we already collaborate and depend. My argument comes as observations, questions, and playfulness. I see this work as a practice in careful ways of seeing and of re-storying to make visible and care for what I am coming to value. It is a foraging for stories to repair our relations with ourselves, with each other, and with the ecosystems we belong to.

The Klamath Basin

Stories of the Klamath Basin these days evoke the worsening water crisis, just one of many global examples of wicked water problems that are only getting more dire. Despite its divides, the crisis has brought together dozens of “stakeholders” as they face worsening droughts, lower rivers, and species die-offs each year. The decommissioning of hydroelectric dams, severe droughts and wildfires, and conflicting interests in limited water are urgently demanding new approaches for everyone in the region to come together and find ways to live despite this.¹⁷

A diversity of stakeholders exist in the Klamath. Most visible of these are the Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, and Hoopa indigenous tribes, the region’s irrigators, environmental activists and conservationists, ranchers, farmers, PacificCorp (dam owners), local and national governments, and various organizations. Other more-than-human stakeholders in the region include Spring Chinook and Coho salmon, suckers, eagles, and sandhill cranes, some of which are advocated for by tribes and conservationists. Even more more-than-human actors are present in this context — these include laws, stories, and ideas, which have lives and powers of their own. Interactions among all these more-than-humans make worlds through varied ways of being in this region. Here, I’ll explore some of the stories that have been most illuminating to me. ¹⁸

A note on the map

This little overwhelming map traces my process and images the ideas I’m playing with.¹⁹ While following stories and voices through Klamath Basin worlds, I drew this map, inspired by Actor-Network Theory. Taking Basin-situated stories and scholarly works along for the journey, the evolves into meandering and grasping for small-views at infinite worlds. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory allows me to follow more-than-human actors — including ideas, categorical groupings, more-than-human beings, stories, etc — to “try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands” ²⁰.

Photographs by Edward Curtis in 1923 ²¹

Stories of the Past

For time immemorial prior to white settlement of the area, the region’s ecosocial diversity was kept strong by adaptive collaboration among all life-makers of the ecosystem. Salmon, among other river-dwellers such as suckerfish and lamprey, have always been sacred to indigenous peoples and are are keystone species to the entire bioregion ²². Salmon are born knowing their ancestral home waters and they bridge marine to mountain ecosystems through the vital nutrients they carry in their bodies back upriver at the end of their lives. Indigenous human peoples also support the ecosystem with their practices of story and ceremony that not only ensure healthy salmon runs but which guide their relationship with other Klamath Basin beings as well²³.

New to the ecosystem (and to the web of ecosystems of which this one is part) are not only white-bodied humans but agriculture, ranching, timber and river resource extraction, Western philosophical/legal/religious systems, and colonial stories such as frontierism and manifest destiny²⁴. Alongside anthropogenic disturbances and historical traumas are emergences of new lifeways and relationships of “contaminated diversity” among more-than-human actors in the region along with “polycentric networks of governance” finding ways to meet the region’s challenges²⁵. In the last several decades, members of the Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, and Hoopa indigenous tribes, the region’s irrigators, environmental activists and conservationists, ranchers, farmers, PacificCorp (owns dams), and government officials at multiple scales have come together in conversation to work through their water crises. Many more-than-human stakeholders in the region include Spring Chinook and Coho salmon, suckers, eagles, beavers, and sandhill cranes are also finding advocacy in these conversations. Other actors in these interactions include “water rights,” concepts of home, intergenerational traumas, various commitments to histories and futures, legal systems, and strong feelings.²⁶

Listening to Klamath Basin Stories Today

What beings and relations have emerged amidst this damaged planet? Which have been lost? Which thrive above others? Which live unnoticed?

To so many who were born here, that’s really home. And it it just feels like the right place to be.”
Becky Hyde, Rancher²⁷

Home and Conservation

All sorts of species make their homes here. Thousands of birds land in the upper basin refuge along their yearly migration. Fish and otters dwell in the rivers. Indigenous peoples, farmers, and ranchers. To each eye is a different home landscape, but a knowing of place and a commitment to what is worth being there for. Entanglements to home, and to life.

Entanglements to certain ways of life, a particular ecosystem, and the desire for things to stay as they are have encountered challenges. Conserving some protected species over others and over the river system as a whole has meant death, grief, and conflict for many.

“I can’t help but be really enamored with Sandhill cranes. They just have such a presence in the world. I mean, their sound when they come back in the spring is really defining it just, it permeates the whole space, even if they’re several miles away. And there’s a lot of family stories around cranes… so there’s a real, you know, sense of importance around them”
Becky Hyde, Rancher²⁸

Knowing and Sensing

The place itself seems to care for those who live there. Sensation brings joy and vigor to daily life and the loss of those rhythms as climates change brings sadness and uncertainty to bodies that long for these connections. Interspecies sensibilities, affections, and attunements are everywhere in Klamath Basin worlds but the mass media storytellers and an urgency to engage with conflicts suggest no need to for recognizing these entanglements. What are those storytellers entangled with that matters more to those who listen, and how has that come to matter more? What we see is entangled with what we think we know and what we are looking for.

“If we don’t have the Klamath River and we don’t have healthy fish runs, it’s really hard to be a Yurok person; It’s just as important to our people as the air that we breathe.”
Barry McCovey, Yurok Tribal fishery department director²⁹

Salmon, Water, Life

Identity is made in relation with others. Indigenous people in the region see themselves as salmon people. They feel, in sensation and in emotion, that their bodies and cultures are extensions of the ecosystem. Salmon and water are entangled with life itself. The intimacy of what one is is created in the stories they tell and the kind of relationships they enact through those stories. Without these more-than-human kin, life loses meaning and purpose.

“Nature is obviously quite complicated. Everything is intertwined … Agriculture came in and just modified absolutely everything you can think of in terms of wetlands and hydrology and the way the ecosystem functioned…
Fall of each year when the lake dies, all the fish die.”
Alex Gonyaw, senior fish biologist for Klamath Tribes³⁰

Landscape, Change, Grief

We know things are all connected and that this is why they are sacred. But how does this appear in the landscape? In our laws? In the stories we give to our actions? In our bodies? Bodies of hundreds of fish lie dead along the river after the government decides to reduce water flow from the dams. The landscape is scattered with loss and grief, especially for the tribes who feel intimately entangled with these creatures. Dams punctuate the river, which changes its flow through and entanglement with, the land, the rocks, and the plants it comes into contact with.

How do we come to be in relation to the concept of change? What do different beings feel about it? Good when it brings about capital and energy and money. Bad when it brings about death and loss of a way of life. Good when it brings about healing and restoration.

“I’m mad… I’m mad that there’s the attitudes out there that think this is okay. We’re killing this basin just by the death of a thousand cuts, and the cuts all stem from water and mismanagement and single species management of that water. That’s why people are upset — we were promised water in perpetuity and we were invited by the government to produce food and a plethora of food out of that. Somewhere there’s balance, theres gotta be balance. And for us to all say its one or the other isn’t being practical. That isn’t the way this country survives — a nation that gives up its food supply, its youth, its prodigy that is coming up, to go do something else — that’s a nation that’s doomed to fail.
Scott Seus³¹

Agriculture and Industry

Our feelings become entangled with our histories. Governments become entangled with notions of growth and progress. Landscapes are shaped around ideas about what can be owned and what uses it has— ways of seeing become entangled with ways of valuing. People become entangled with governments.

“Those fish were created specifically by our creator to take care … They’re part of our subsistence, a part of our culture, and also a part of our worldview.”
Don Gentry, Klamath Tribal chairman³²

Tribe and Ecosystem

Stories that tribes tell about salmon evoke responsibility and a sensory knowing of place and of ecology. They enact ceremony and ritual to ensure the return of the salmon, to express their gratitude, and to give back to that from which they have taken. Fish-human entanglements mean co-creation and mutual caretaking.

“We talk about cultural values and why sucker fish are important to tribes and why coho salmon is a sacred fish to the tribes down on the Klamath river… and just the same, this field of horseradish is cultural identity to my family, for my son. The ability to raise that, you know, that its as important to me as that fish is to them.”
Scott Seus, third-generation farmer, mainly grows horseradish and peppermint

Farmers and Rights

The region’s first white farmers were granted land and government support for starting agricultural endeavors and for giving their labor to the development of the land. Stories of who we are in relation to a place or a thing or a being determine how we see our entanglement with it. Farmers come to be entangled with crops, livelihoods, and family… with certain pasts and certain futures. Some get entangled with certainty itself. Identity becomes important as rights-based ethics are also entangled with individualism and stories of Manifest Destiny. What we think we know becomes what we think we see. So how do we remember how much we can’t see?

“The tables are turning now; The power dynamics are changing, and it’s really hard for the irrigators to come to terms with.”
Hannah Gosnell

Energy, Loss, Restoration

As the region is seeing more and more success with this cross-ecosystem engagement, new questions continue to emerge. Dam removal is agreed upon and in planning. Entanglements between river as energy and power plants start to loosen as the river ecosystem is started to be valued for life-force. But pictures painted of two-sided conflicts shape how we see who loses and who suffers. Who is restoration for and why? Who loses and why? Who takes time to grieve and how?

“Because I’ve worked in conflict so much, one of
my sort of perfect days would be to be out on the land with other people that love the land, like tribal people or conservation people or other farmers or whatever, just trying to solve problems together, but being out on the land while we’re doing it.”
Becky Hyde, Rancher³³

Love and Place

There is such love and openness here. What gives some of these people to keep showing up and listening to one another, or helping others to do so? Some entanglements are life giving and inspire love and care.

“I think what we need from the cities is for them to recognize that we need them to care deeply about the environment, but we also need them to realize that they’re eating food, you know, I think that it’s very easy to look at, say, the Klamath Basin and be like, OK, there’s the the tribes and the fish and then there’s ag… And then it’s really easy to say I’m for just the tribal part, right? And if the ag community would just disappear, then everything would be healthy and okay again. And the reality is, people say that while they’re eating dinner. So I guess I would like the urban public to share the accountability, of how how we survive day to day.
Becky Hyde, Basin Rancher³⁴

Intimacy and Isolation

How do we come to care about and become entangled with another? Does proximity matter? Humans are entangled through experience and through story. Much of what we hear is across distance. It becomes easy to alienate and isolate when stories talk about individuals and about difference. We become entangled with ideas and with stories and words. We become entangled with ideas of rights and our own needs. And maybe we come to care openly for stories which we are quite distant from, yet with which we feel entangled.

From this process, I find several themes among stories, strong feelings, and sensory expressions. Language of water rights— various claims to rights, use, history; some confusion is common among stories and is applied to understanding how non-human species relate to humans in the context of how scarce water is allocated. Water rights language evokes specific histories that show up today as trauma, rage, desert, and injustice. Emerging also among conversations surrounding the drought are shared though varied concerns over future generations, whether preserving existing livelihoods for future generations of humans or cultivating a stronger entire ecosystem to survive worsening conditions in the future. I notice chronic stress in human faces, water systems, energy, animals, and the voices of those that tell stories. Many evoke sacred relationships with family through the stories they tell about past, present, and future, though who is included in “family” varies among human groups. There is a strong love of place evoked through sensory descriptions of sounds, quality of light, rhythms of days, seasons, and of wildlife. Grief and traumas run deep over loss of sacred fish, loss of crops, inability to support families, rapid landscape change and unfamiliar, dry terrain, worsening wildfires, death among wildlife. Visual marks of these stories and feelings lie in dry land, dusty, dead crops, low or fully dry riverbeds, dams, and public signs. Language of “water wars” highlights scarcity and competition about one most essential source (water) and pits water users against one another. There is also lots of frustration over being misunderstood or unseen and a general exhaustion over the whole situation, but people are repeatedly showing up to conversations about these complex issues via facebook groups, interviews, community gatherings. Humans, fish, birds, and waters all know this place to be home, and care it into being through their daily interactions with it.

Among the stories and expressions of strong feelings in the Klamath Basin, I come to big questions of rights and responsibilities. Both these ideas are alive and important across Klamath Basin conversations, though languaging of rights makes most visible the resource scarcity and pitting of stakeholders against one another. While these are defining issues in the crisis surrounding water, they limit questions and ethics of responsibility. Stories which emphasize relationality and responsibility to water among other more-than-human stakeholders, are equally present but largely unseen and thus undervalued. There are many examples of abundance in the region where relationships of care make life possible and meaningful. Cross-stakeholder engagement as well as regular daily interactions among humans, fish, other animals, and the landscape itself reveal ways of being together and ways of belonging that foster responsibility and care among “messmates.” As Haraway might observe, “staying with the trouble means making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles”³⁵.

Put into this context, many life-giving and care-giving entanglements already exist but are undervalued when language is given to stories and entanglements that reinforce scarcity and competition. Language of relationship, which looks to ways we are brought into being by interactions with others, starts to re-orient the looker toward care, love, and mutuality. It brings issues of water rights into conversation with what is needed for balance: responsibility in relationship– not just relationships between human groups, but relationships with water, with the more-than-human animals and landscapes that make these lives worth living, with our ideals, and with our stories.

REFLECTIONS ON PROCESS

Following, Listening, Wondering

WHAT IS MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY SPECIES, THESE MOMENTS, AND THE KLAMATH BASIN ECOSYSTEM? HOW DOES THIS WORK COME TO MATTER?

Since I remain situated in my own position of little proximity to this context, many of my analyses are meta-level and personal.

What is my existing/emerging relationship with Klamath Basin ecologies? How do I enter in reciprocity and care? What responsibilities do I have given my relationship with this work? Do I have any rights when it comes to these ideas and this place? What do my strong feelings have to bear on this work?

Coming to care about this means I’ve come into greater recognition of my responsibilities given my positionality as a student, a scholar, a white-bodied person raised by the West, and one that belongs to groups that are removed from all that they depend on. I’ve been intentionally exploratory and non-conclusive in my scope, opening more questions and possibilities than I resolve. This aims to start a process of “continually developing new ways to learn about others, extending our ways of living and knowing. We are participants as well as observers; we recreate interspecies sensibilities in what we do. We don’t just identify non-humans as static others, we further learn them and ourselves in action through common activities”³⁶. Much of the foraging I’ve done has been in trying to understand which stories are being told — and specifically whose lives and which relationships they include and don’t include. The visuals, the compilations, the slow uncertain reflections is my process. I find this process as a practice of coming to see what already exists and which can be given more of our attention.

I envision this as wandering… an explorative project driven by the humble methods of personal curiosity. If anything, my argument is in my process, the way it seeks to notice, and in the questions it raises. It’s informed by scholarly, personal, and sensory stories. It remains open for you to do your wandering too.

This work may be seen as “an act of listening for what is, what has been, or what will be, regardless of whether it makes sense, blurs any easy distinction between the epistemological and the ontological, the methodological and the ethical. It becomes a practice of the self in which, in the interest of making common cause with others, we allow ourselves to be shaken, displaced from our customary dispositions and beliefs and even from our customary forms of love… [In doing, we] nuance the discourse on care so that both the ambivalence of our desires and the messiness of our attempts to care can come into view”.
Lisa Stevenson³⁷

MULTISPECIES Ethnography and care

Put another way, my process is in practicing a particular kind of noticing — which involves CAREful listening, seeing, and translating of the stories I find. This kind of attunement is essential to relationships of care — it is in fact something we already practice in our most loving relationships, but which we rarely extend to ”others,” both of our own species and of other species. I am inspired by work that others post-humanist and post-anthropocentric disciplines have done to cultivate their seeing in this way³⁸. Multispecies ethnography is one such process which takes various methodological approaches to exploring more-than-human sociality through following, attention to assemblages and attention to form, and a release from orderly or expectant thinking³⁹. This looking involves critical, thick descriptions of the maps and visuals toward understanding the lives of beings I can’t talk directly to (salmon, water, trees, etc), as well as the ways that humans in the Klamath translate their relationships with these beings. Authors including Anna Tsing⁴⁰, Donna Haraway, Merlin Sheldrake⁴¹, and Radhika Govindrajan⁴² offer beautiful and rich examples of multi-method, multispecies, and multi-sited ethnographic works. These works practice the art of noticing, or art of inclusion (described in Tsing 2013) where the human looker/storyteller both expands from and implodes the human/nonhuman-nature binary in taking another species’ perspective and noticing their agencies and relationships.

I am inspired by work that post-humanist and post-anthropocentric disciplines have done to cultivate their seeing in this way⁴³. Through diverse storytelling and attention to assemblages and form through maps and visuals, we may start to understand the lives and sociality of beings we can’t talk directly to (salmon, water, trees, etc), as well as the ways that humans translate their relationships with these beings. Authors including Anna Tsing⁴⁴, Lisa Stevenson⁴⁵, Merlin Sheldrake⁴⁶, and Radhika Govindrajan⁴⁷ offer beautiful and rich examples of multi-method, multispecies, and multi-sited ethnographic works. These works practice the art of noticing, or arts of inclusion, where the human looker/storyteller both expands from and implodes the human/nonhuman-nature binary in taking another species’ perspective and noticing their agencies and relationships.

Following “other-than-humans” and “performing environmental research that focuses on relational narratives, as opposed to traditional human-centered and human-exceptionalism stances,” can give agency to these “other-than-humans” by making them visible participants in the design process and yield radically different approaches to “sustainability” or “conservation”⁴⁸. In this project, I’ve tried to explore what these approaches might reveal in the Klamath Basin as a particularly vibrant and evolving ecosystem comprised of a great diversity of life forms, stories, perspectives, and assemblages.

“The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to human arrogance. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember — as wilderness also tends to do — that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to those of every other creature or of the earth itself is likely to foster responsible behavior”
William Cronon⁴⁹

Robin Wall-Kimmerer describes the grammar of animacy as one way of making multispecies worlds visible to humans. This translational tool helps us to see agency in not just non-human animals, but plants, water, rocks, fire, and sky and to come into responsible relationship with them through story⁵⁰. Also here is a responsibility to recognize the histories of ways of knowing and the way dominance fits into the story. Traditionally Western, academic, and rights-based ways of knowing have historically dominated over and rendered invisible and invaluable traditional land-based and indigenous ways of knowing. Much of the work I’ve explored is increasingly valued by Western contexts and in dominant society, but they are not novel ways of seeing in this place’s ecosystem or among its storytellers.

In this work, I’ve been wondering about what strong feelings are calling us to notice— in the Klamath Basin, in broader conversations about shared crises, and in individual engagement. I asked, what pains are most present in the Klamath Basin today? And how does attention to relationality, stories, and strong feelings help me to think about which entanglements need to be strengthened and which need to be loosened? What kind of care is needed to meet the grief, frustration, and alienation that the Klamath Basin drought situation is calling attention to? The Klamath Basin context is one among many with centuries-long histories of compounding strong feelings and a current situation that is getting more parched and conflicted every season. The pains and traumas we are experiencing now run deep— as individuals in the form of depression, trauma, and disease… and as groups in the form of the “—isms,” ecological crisis, species alienation/loneliness, intergenerational traumas, and the dissolution of social fabrics of trust. These persistent and varied expressions of pain point to deeper hurt fueled by histories of imbalanced relationships. Reparations are needed not “just between humans and nature” or between the humans in power and those who have been colonized and exploited, but also in the ways of seeing and knowing in which we approach one another and our more-than-human kin. What we choose to see, and thus what we choose to value, shapes how we show up in the face of our pains and collective challenges of today. Relationships of reciprocity and care are already everywhere, even (perhaps especially) in places of deep divide and scarcity of nearly all else. Leaning into (focusing our vision on) those existing relationships might help us cope, find hope, and find some greater balance alongside one another in the face of it all.

It remains vital to find discernment in ways of seeing, knowing, being, and belonging that support the entanglements that support balance and living together on a damaged planet: “At the root, is the notion that ideas are interdependent, interacting, that ideas live and die. The ideas that die do so because they don’t fit with the others… an ecology”⁵¹. Some entanglements must be loosened because they don’t support diversity in ways of seeing/knowing/being/belonging that give these ecologies strength, but some entanglements need to be loosened so as to enable more dynamic emergence of adaptive ecosystems.

None of this will be possible if these strong feelings are not met with the care they have been asking for — the attention and the listening… not the cure or the painkiller. Shifting to emphasizing care, rather than only focusing on what’s wrong or needed, may help in finding vitality in presence to each other in the moment. This kid of presence and care is found in the moments of walking along the river and of sharing in appreciation for the beautiful land that feels like home. This becomes about holding space for the very powerful and unavoidable loss and uncertaint while staying committed, accountable, and responsible to being together— in joy, in gratitude, and in care.

As I’ve slowly learned through this process, care work and attunement must be cultivated among other bodies. Sacred ecologies are brought into being through care and feeling by present bodies as much as by the stories we tell of our relations. Being able to cope among one another on a damaged planet means coming to find home, love, and intimacy in sociality. Only through holding one another can there possibly be space enough to face what traumas we carry from yesterday, what pains overwhelm us today, and what fears we have for tomorrow.

“It is possible and indeed necessary to open up the imagination and to open up the practices for a world which can yet be but is not yet. And that’s a collective task that can’t be done just in the effect of work, and critique, and condemnation. That has to be done so as to give eachother heart for a world which can still be even in the grip of the kinds of extreme urgency that I think all of us are feeling very deeply”
Donna Haraway⁵²

“In mourning, a subject is able to face loss, and understand that loss is real, and not reversible, and is not the whole story. That loss can be incorporated into a subject that then becomes other than it was but is in a vital way, not by forgetting, but by remembering vitally so as to make something vital with each other still possible.”
“And so it’s not about living within that, it’s about refusing melancholia and insisting on mourning with others, so as to find those ways of living well as Earthlings in a thick present. But without the fantasy that denies wounding, that denies death and denies our own complicity in it.”
Donna Haraway⁵³

“Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable… the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact… it is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick” and so “conceiving of wellness as the default… invents illness as temporary… When sickness is temporary, care is not normal.”
Johanna Hedva⁵⁴

“To do this kind of work over time, this kind of work and play with each other, really means you show up. You show up at the demonstration. You show up at the meeting. You show up at the journal collective. You show up in the writing venture. You read each other’ stuff. You read the pamphlets. You help write the propoganda. You become informed about struggles that are not necessarily your own but which you are in alliance with even sometimes from a great distance”
Donna Haraway⁵⁵

Footnotes

1
Tragedy of the Commons
2
basic biology
3
see this quick paper I wrote for a religion and medicine class exploring interspecies stories
4
biblical creation story, which Lynn White classically blames for our ecological crises
5
Mayan creation story
6
darwinian creation story, which we like to call ”science” in order to evoke authority, yet which is a story nonetheless
7
some common, perhaps over-essentialized stories you might hear among biologists and environmentalists
8
Video by Ruvim Miksanskiy: https://www.pexels.com/video/video-of-forest-1448735/
9
this is 2022: pandemic et. al.!
10
fascinating interspecies play happening among ammateur mycologists teaching fungi to live off of cigarette butts
11
radiotrophic fungi that can use radiation as an energy source to stimulate growth, found at Chernobyl
12
https://claradaikh.us/diverse-economies-in-the-pacific-northwest/
13
Haraway, Donna J. “Staying with the Trouble.” In Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press, 2016.
14
Tsing, Anna L. 2013. “More than Human Sociality.” Anthropology and Nature 14: 27–42. and Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
15
Tsing, Anna. 2012. “Contaminated Diversity in” Slow Disturbance” Potential Collaborators for a Liveable Earth.” RCC Perspectives, no. 9: 95–98.
16
Bateson, Gregory. 1991. “Ecology of Mind: The Sacred.” A Sacred Unity. Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Bessie/HarperCollins.
17
I first encountered these stories in an engagement project I worked with Oregon Humanities to create, where we brought together some key humans to talk about their lives and relationships with the Klamath Basin. For your own background and consideration of how Klamath Basin stories are told, explore these videos.
18
Gosnell, Hannah, and Erin Clover Kelly. 2010. “Peace on the River? Social-Ecological Restoration and Large Dam Removal in the Klamath Basin, USA.” Water Alternatives 3 (2): 362.
19
I’d hoped to create a more animated and guided walk through my map so as to make it easier to follow along between visual and textual analyses, but technical difficulties and limited time have lead me to a good enough solution until for now. Please take your time following my map in sections as you read and enjoy the space this leaves open for you to make your own connections.
20
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oup Oxford.
21
Photographs from Edward Curtis collection found at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ecur/
22
see my earlier work on Sacred Salmon
23
Bolado, Carlos, Stephen Most, Steve Michelson, Jack Kohler, Pikiawish Partners Firm, Specialty Studios, and Inc Native American Public Telecommunications. 2008. River of Renewal. San Francisco, CA: Video Project.
24
Bolado, Carlos, Stephen Most, Steve Michelson, Jack Kohler, Pikiawish Partners Firm, Specialty Studios, and Inc Native American Public Telecommunications. 2008. River of Renewal. San Francisco, CA: Video Project.
25
Chaffin, B. C., Ahjond S. Garmestani, Hannah Gosnell, and Robin Kundis Craig. 2016. “Institutional Networks and Adaptive Water Governance in the Klamath River Basin, USA.” Environmental Science & Policy 57: 112–21.
26
My sources for these stories are various news articles from the past few years, documentaries and short films, the Klamath Basin Crisis facebook group, and some interviews. I do not explore them all fully here.
27
Hyde, Becky. 2022. Exploring Cares and Daily Interactions. Interview by Clara Daikh and Alana Converse. Zoom.
28
Hyde, Becky. 2022. Exploring Cares and Daily Interactions. Interview by Clara Daikh and Alana Converse. Zoom.
29
Kirkpatrick, Nick, Laris Karklis, James Cornsilk, Mason Trinca, and Alice Li. 2021. “Climate Change Fuels a Water Rights Conflict Built on over a Century of Broken Promises.” November 22, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/klamath-river-basin-drought/.
30
Kirkpatrick, Nick, Laris Karklis, James Cornsilk, Mason Trinca, and Alice Li. 2021. “Climate Change Fuels a Water Rights Conflict Built on over a Century of Broken Promises.” November 22, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/klamath-river-basin-drought/.
31
Kirkpatrick, Nick, Laris Karklis, James Cornsilk, Mason Trinca, and Alice Li. 2021. “Climate Change Fuels a Water Rights Conflict Built on over a Century of Broken Promises.” November 22, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/klamath-river-basin-drought/.
32
Kirkpatrick, Nick, Laris Karklis, James Cornsilk, Mason Trinca, and Alice Li. 2021. “Climate Change Fuels a Water Rights Conflict Built on over a Century of Broken Promises.” November 22, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/klamath-river-basin-drought/.
33
Hyde, Becky. 2022. Exploring Cares and Daily Interactions. Interview by Clara Daikh and Alana Converse. Zoom.
34
Hyde, Becky. 2022. Exploring Cares and Daily Interactions. Interview by Clara Daikh and Alana Converse. Zoom.
35
Haraway, Donna J. “Staying with the Trouble.” In Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press, 2016.
36
Tsing, Anna L. 2013. “More than Human Sociality.” Anthropology and Nature 14: 27–42.
37
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. “Life beside Itself.” In Life Beside Itself. University of California Press.
38
Gatto, Gionata, and John R. McCardle. 2019. “Multispecies Design and Ethnographic Practice: Following Other-Than-Humans as a Mode of Exploring Environmental Issues.” Sustainability 11 (18): 5032. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11185032.
39
Tsing, Anna L. 2013. “More than Human Sociality.” Anthropology and Nature 14: 27–42.
40
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
41
Sheldrake, Merlin. 2020. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House.
42
Govindrajan, Radhika. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. University of Chicago Press, 2018. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226560045/html.
43
Gatto, Gionata, and John R. McCardle. 2019. “Multispecies Design and Ethnographic Practice: Following Other-Than-Humans as a Mode of Exploring Environmental Issues.” Sustainability 11 (18): 5032.https://doi.org/10.3390/su11185032.
44
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
45
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. “Life beside Itself.” In Life Beside Itself. University of California Press.
46
Sheldrake, Merlin. 2020. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House.
47
Govindrajan, Radhika. Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. University of Chicago Press, 2018. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226560045/html.
48
Gatto, Gionata, and John R. McCardle. 2019. “Multispecies Design and Ethnographic Practice: Following Other-Than-Humans as a Mode of Exploring Environmental Issues.” Sustainability 11 (18): 5032. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11185032.
49
Cronon, William J. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 1995, 24.
50
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
51
Bateson, Gregory. 1991. “Ecology of Mind: The Sacred.” A Sacred Unity. Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Bessie/HarperCollins.
52
Haraway, Donna. 2019. Interviewed by Ayana Young.“DONNA HARAWAY on Staying with the Trouble.” For The Wild. https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/donna-haraway-on-staying-with-the-trouble-encore-269.
53
Haraway, Donna. 2019. Interviewed by Ayana Young.“DONNA HARAWAY on Staying with the Trouble.” For The Wild. https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/donna-haraway-on-staying-with-the-trouble-encore-269.
54
Hedva, Johanna. 2016. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine 19.
55
Haraway, Donna. 2019. Interviewed by Ayana Young.“DONNA HARAWAY on Staying with the Trouble.” For The Wild. https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/donna-haraway-on-staying-with-the-trouble-encore-269.

Made in Relation