Embodied Encounters/Objects as Storytellers

My New Anthology and Future OOO (Object-Oriented Ontologies)

Self-Portrait at the Salton Sea, Bombay Beach January 2025 (part of my OOO Eco-Aesthetics series)

Today I begin my supply-chain/ object-oriented ontology (OOO) visiting scholar artist residency at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creative Art & Technology. I will be living in the Creativity and Innovation District where my collaborators and I will present this December with follow-up events early 2026. Continuing to animate relationships for my new book with Vernon Press, Radical Art in Action: Unlearning What We Think We Know, this series is part of my upcoming collaborative project with Warren Wilson College’s new Art & Climate Studies Initiative. My ongoing collective-action research follows the material I taught for Báyò Akómoláfé’s We Will Dance With Mountains:
Act I: Supply-Chain Consciousness & Our Epigenetic Potential!

Through deep noticing/ paying attention, we will explore how we are all interconnected through ordinary things (infrastructures of storytelling, objects as storytellers). This individual, collective, and infrastructural/spiritual practice potentially uproots the interlocking mechanisms of environmental racism and climate capitalism. We will play with studio-thought experiments about how to use speculative-designed objects and maps to reorient intersectional community members—drawing deep attention to the supply chains of familiar personal objects while prioritizing collaboration over individual convenience.

Also see FearTalk—my discussions with Michael Fischer on discordant objects and a vocabulary of aesthetics.

One of the joys in NYC during my east-coast climate justice performance tour was my conversation with the extraordinary philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz.

Body and Religion Journal heading with my video still using Liz Grosz’s face projected into my self-portrait.

Grosz inspired my essay for my 4th anthology during 2024-25,
Body and Religion Interdisciplinary Journal,
Editors Dr. Wesley N. Barker and Dr. Emily Holmes,
Special Issue, Irigaray and Religion:

Embodied encounters: exploring Irigaray’s philosophy in art and activism

Visit here to read my past Monthly Essay Series with Mother Pelican ~
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

and past May essays:

May 2024 Apocalypse of the Familiar: Transforming Digital Normalcies through Apocalyptic Parenting

May 2023 On Beauty and Becoming Just~Cleanliness is next to
Godliness Stateliness: Assimilationist Hygiene through Private Property

May 2022 Radical Self Accountability: An Antidote to Greenwashing

May 2021 Confusion as a State of Grace: Climate and Kinship in 2021

And…in celebration of Rachel Carson’s birthday: May 27, 1907

Painting by Micaela Amato Amateau for Zazu Dreams

I weave the spirit and wisdom of Rachel Carson throughout Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era.

In the magical realist narrative Carson’s spirit intermingles with that of Stephen Hawking.

In A Guide to Zazu Dreams in case you are perplexed (a nod to Maimonides): Referring to Walter Benjamin…In a similar vein, Rachel Carson wrote about her plan to “achieve…a synthesis of widely scattered facts, that have not heretofore been considered in relation to each other. It is now possible to build up, step by step, a really damning case against the use of these chemicals as they are now inflicted on us” (Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, 340). While Carson focused on the environment and Benjamin on the marketplace, Zazu Dreams integrates both for social, spiritual, and self-emancipation.

Below are some of the myriad references to Carson throughout my approximate 400 endnotes:

Endnote 100 (excerpt). The connection between Judaism and Buddhism has been a subject of much interest. The Jew and the Lotus is one of the most popular books addressing the relationship between the two and the recognition of God in all things. Once again in the context of Hinduism: Spinoza’s theory can be classified as a version of ‘qualified Advaita Vedânta,’ the beginning of Jewish Modernity, where everything that we ordinarily think of as existing, does exist as a part of God. Spinoza’s pantheism has also played a role in environmental theory. Along with Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, Spinoza was an important inspiration for the founder of the deep ecology movement, Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. Einstein, like Spinoza, did not believe in a personal God who cares about what humans do. Instead, Einstein marveled at the majesty and complexity of the universe, which he believed could be attributed only to some higher power. In 1930, he wrote: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious.”

155 (excerpt). Sand grains are both porous and permeable. There are spaces between sand grains and connections between those spaces. Water, air, bacteria, oil, and gas live in between grains of sand. “The world’s largest accumulations of oil and gas are found in the spaces between sand grains” (Welland 264). Like Spinoza as a lens-maker for the microscope and telescope, Rachel Carson was in awe of the simultaneity of macrocosms and microcosms—worlds literally between grains of sand: “…our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the micro-droplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea” (Ibid., 60).

182 (excerpt). Many alternatives to fossil fuels, such as fracking, were once thought to be ‘clean’—leaving little carbon footprint. We now know how incredibly dangerous fracking is to the earth’s stability and to our bodies’ health. The first ‘modern’ oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in1860, 20 years after peak whale oil (in which the whale population had been decimated for oil economy). In 1861, Vanity Fair published a drawing of whales celebrating the new oil wells. Little did Vanity Fair or the surviving whales know that the replacement fossil fuels would nearly equal the devastation to whales and their ecosystems. Fortunately for the ecosystems of our cosmos, as Ralph Nader states: “The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”

Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, a book that has shortsightedly been identified as the contemporary Silent Spring, misses many key paradoxes in various environmental movements. Such undeserved association with Rachel Carson obfuscates the hypocrisies within western environmental movements. In her documentary film of the same title, she tells the audience that repeatedly, when she asks people what they think about climate change, they answer with “one word: China.” She then goes into a brief exploration of the solar/ smog dichotomy in China. She fails to do two things: 1) Examine the fact that one primary reason there are so many factories in China is because of Western consumer-demand for both high-tech gadgets and cheap, disposable single-use products; 2) Examine parallel contradictions in Western countries’ economies.

Both China (whose “renewable” electricity growth between 2010 to 2012 was double that of the U.S.) and Germany (who is lauded as implementing the primary green economy globally and who runs its country on 30% “renewables”) are still building coal plants. Simultaneously, China’s coal pile-use households, even more than their corporations, may be contributing to their pollution dome. “China is in a process of dismantling some of its oldest coal plants that have low-efficiencies. Germany is building plants that can burn lignite coal—this is a very low-energy density substance and can have lots of sulfurous chemicals from combustion. In both cases, the idea of ‘energy transition’ must be interrogated in relationship to energy use and demand (meaning cultural as well as infrastructural dynamics), and within the context of transnational processes and political economies” (conversation with Jia-Ching Chen, Professor of Geography, Penn State University; see also: www.climatecentral.org/blogs/chinas growing-coal-use-is-worlds-growing-problem-16999).

Again what we see is always, only partial; we can never see the whole picture, and if we think we can see the entire picture, we are cheating ourselves and our children. Klein’s film neglects to address one of the primary underlying causes of global scorching: CONSUMERISM. It took Klein an hour and 18 minutes to only briefly mention consumption habits, let alone corporate driven consumer society. It is obviously gratifying to see a film that demonstrates global grassroots victories that cut across class, gender, and nationhood. However, Klein’s entire film was anchored in an us-versus-them division. Even within the 99%, consumers are capitalism. A Greek activist Klein interviews is reluctant to identify her belief that capitalism is the ‘core of the problem.’ But, what is this core without consumers? Without convenience-culture/ mass consumer-demand, the machine of the free-market would have to shift gears. We can’t blame the oil companies without simultaneously implicating ourselves, holding our consumption-habits equally responsible.

269 (excerpt). Salt harvesting ranges from very low-fi, small-scale family operations to high-tech commercialized techniques, massive-industrial productions. As we have learned from history, the moment we identify a ‘resource,’ large-scale production takes off and frequently havoc ensues. This includes ongoing road construction (and all the destruction that road building entails), recreational development, corporate monocultures, agribusiness, urbanization, dangerous mines, excessive logging, smuggling, abusive working conditions for both the laborers and the earth, and air/water pollution. Vandana Shiva explores the concept of “resource” rampant in proclamations from both the Left and the Right, and, reminds us that convenience culture addiction to “resources” is rooted in the rhetoric of imperialist-driven anthropocentric progress: “Resource implied an ancient idea about the relationship between humans and nature—that the earth bestows gifts on humans who, in turn, are well advised to show diligence in order not to suffocate her generosity. In early modern times, ‘resource’ therefore suggested reciprocity along with regeneration. With the advent of industrialism and colonialism, however, a conceptual break occurred. ‘Natural resources’ became those parts of nature which were required as inputs for industrial production and colonial trade” (“Resources,” ed. Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and Power. London: Zed, 1991: 206-218, 206).

We must shift from framing nature as a resource—something useful to society, something that fulfills our consumer desire (under the guise of “needs”). When we recognize plant intelligence and the sentience of all objects, we cultivate knowledge through spiritual intelligence. Reminiscent of Rachel Carson, Isidore the Farm Labourer of Madrid, and Leah Sha’rabi, Tyson Yunkaporta urges to remember that “[t]he whole is intelligent, and each part carries the inherent intelligence of the entire system.” He describes how all objects become “embodied extension[s] of our neural processes.” Historically, we see the curse of countries having an abundance of natural ‘resources’ (including silver, gold, tin, oil, cacao, and now salt). They tend to be at the whim of the international aid organizations, particularly the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). For instance, control, extraction, and exportation of natural ‘resources’ positions members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Angola, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela) as frequent victims of their own treasures. In 1976, Pablo Perez Alfonzo, the Venezuelan founder of OPEP (Organizacion de Paises Exportadores de Petroleo), decried fossil fuels as the “el excremento del diablo.”

301. Unlike many unintended victims (including both people and wildlife), beetles are an example of how the assumed target may actually be completely off-target. In the case of beetles, their phenomenal capacity to adapt has proven that they cannot be the target of successful chemical extinction. Beetles out-survived pesticides intended to eradicate them and instead passed genetically based immunity onto its next generation. In response, these chemical controls have been replaced with attempts to sterilize pests by radiation, genetic engineering (GMOs), and the accession of predators, parasites, and pathogens. Because plants, animals, and humans are impacted by all of these pest-eradication methods, a domino-effect of ecological crises is now the norm. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring opened the door to public awareness, but industry, advertising, and convenience-culture has distorted the facts. One of too many examples, DDT and BHC, both proven carcinogen-inducing chemical pesticides now banned in the US, are shipped to other countries (predictably to the global South); the US then imports those products and the cycle of cultural and corporeal sickness continues. Arundhati Roy reminds us: “Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons—[Western ‘civilization’] virtu ally invented all of it” (112). She decries the relentless waste exported to the “Third World:” including dams, old weaons, superannuated aircraft carriers, and banned pesticides (Ibid., 15). Since Roy’s The Cost of Living was published, we must now add high-tech trash to the litany of hazard ous waste shipments sent to non-industrialized countries. This environmental colonialism includes computers, TVs, cell phones, audio components, baby monitors, e-waste, e-scrap—containing mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium, and other toxins that may leak into the soil and ground water (Chris Carroll, High Tech Trash, ed. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Best American Science and Nature Writing. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2009: 33).

The politics of disposal go hand-in-hand with the politics of production—equally devastating manifestations of consumer colonialism. For Samsung’s new smash hit cell phone, cobalt-powered handset Galaxy S7, children laborers in the Congo (as young as seven) are ‘employed” to extract cobalt, a mineral used in rechargeable cell phone batteries. In the process, they inhale toxic dust— potentially leading to fatal lung disease. While Samsung boasts “the longest battery life ever,” their child-labor cobalt-supply chain is responsible for uncounted illnesses and death (secure.avaaz.org/en/dark_side_of_galaxy_ cs/?bmVMybb&v=73055&cl=9582518532). Proponents of overcoming ‘The Digital Divide’ (non-industrialized countries gaining ‘access’ to modern technologies —mobile devices, laptops, etc.), many of whom originate from countries who suffer the most from the production and disposal of such consumption, too often fail to recognize the wrenching irony of such imperialist practices.

Correction from one of my previous Substacks addressing the Theater of the Absurd as Wild and I drove across the US: the word Kill got deleted…the billboard read:
Kill Relativism, Not Babies

Please email me with your reflections & questions: photo@carajudea.com