Upstream - [TEASER] The More Than Human World

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

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 As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. "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: Decolonizing Conservation with Prakash Kashwan Post-capitalism w/ Alnoor Ladha  Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hey everyone, Robbie here with another episode in our Patreon reading series. And I thought I would do something a little bit different this time. I've been doing a lot of very political readings, like explicitly political, and I think, you know, I don't know if it's because it's sort of the holiday season or what, but I thought I'd try doing a reading that's a little less overtly political and a bit more like a story. Not that there aren't politics imbued in this story that I'm going to read today, but it's definitely more of a story than say an essay on political economy or imperialism or something

like that. I was originally going to read a couple of readings, but I decided to axe the John Muir story that I was gonna read because, you know, I don't know, I remembered that John Muir was actually pretty fucking shitty and has a very racist legacy. In my youth, I guess you could say, I really loved Muir, and I had this book of writings of his that I read over and over, and there's a story in there about him going out in like a giant windstorm one night in California

and climbing to the top of a huge tree and just hunkering down for the night and riding this windstorm out in the tree. And the way that he describes it is, it's very magical. It's a really well-written piece. And he talks about like the tree swaying so far down in the wind that he could almost touch the ground at some points. And I was going to read that, but yeah, I just, I remember, you know, hearing about his racist legacy and then I investigated a little bit myself and yeah, not only did he say a lot of fucked up things about the Awaneechi tribe in what is now called Yosemite, 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. And there is a great book actually on this, which I have not read, but I think it's definitely on my list now by Mark David Spence titled, Dispossessing the Wilderness. So if you want to learn more about that history, check that book out. and fuck his legacy. At some point in my life, maybe I might have tried to thread the needle between appreciating his writing and acknowledging the harms he caused, but honestly, fuck it. What's the phrase? Kill your darlings. I don't know if that really applies here, but I'm more than happy to just fucking put John Muir into the dustbin of history because there are so many other voices out there with so much to say and we don't need to clog the feed with more racist manifest destiny bullshit.

So with that said and speaking of other voices, the reading that I did choose to do today is by Lauren Isley and it's from his collection of writings titled The Starthrower. And I first came across this book almost a decade ago now, which is kind of crazy to think about. And I remember reading this particular chapter and just like weeping, like just fucking sobbing uncontrollably when I was done. And I haven't read it since then, but it's a story that I think about often. And I'd say has definitely influenced the way

that I view the more than human world. And that's a phrase that I got from David Abrams that I really love. You could think about it as like the other than human world, but I love the more instead of the other, because there is so much more in that world, right? And the wisdom and the beauty and the sophistication and the emotion that exists in that world, which is so easy to overlook in our hurried, anthropocentric lives under late capitalism,

that connection between ourselves and this more than human world, this other world, is just so severed. And this story really touches me and makes me feel that there is this connection there, and that there is so much more to this more than human world out there. And I just moved to the woods recently, actually, and I'm living in a cabin now, so no longer in a big city, which is really beautiful and nice and I really like being out here. I've been immersing myself in nature in a way where the story by Lauren Isley just felt like a really appropriate reading to share with you guys. I've also been listening a lot to the new Mount Eerie album which is really good and I've been a huge fan of Phil's music

since forever. I remember when The Glow part 2 came out and I was in high school, I think I was in high school, yeah. I just like became immediately obsessed with his music and it's been super inspiring for me and my own music and my own sort of like recording and production. I guess you could call it career that I had before I got into podcasting. I used to work in studios in like the Bay Area in San Francisco and I used to work in studios in the Bay Area in San Francisco, and I went to audio engineering school and stuff. Music was a huge part of my life for many years, and it still is, but not nearly as much as it was in the past.

Phil's music was probably my number one inspiration. I used to read a lot of the interviews that he would do and stuff. He's just a very deep and wise human being. And I was introduced to so many different poets and authors and ideas. I'm pretty sure he introduced me to Gary Snyder and Rabindranath Tagore and the music of George Ivan Gurdjieff, all of these different things that I learned through reading about and listening to Phil's music. But anyways, this new album is really good.

And the song, Night Palace, which is also the name of the album, has some really relevant lyrics to sort of the theme of today's episode. And one of the lines he says, living close to the ground, I talk back to birds way more than I used to, a spirit world found out past where belief blows away. And I really love that idea of talking to the birds, like talking back to the birds.

It makes me think about our presence out in nature when we're there and how it's so easy to forget that we're in this whole different world with so much going on that we're so close to normally. So hopefully in doing this reading I'll bring you guys into that world a little bit with me. I don't know much about Lauren Isley aside from the fact that he's dead now. He was an anthropologist and an educator and a philosopher and a writer, highly influenced by Charles Darwin. He also had some pretty trippy readings that verge on sort of the absurd and mystical and into sci-fi realms. I think he could be put maybe into the deep ecology category, but I'm not quite sure if he would have identified himself

there. But yeah, let's get into the reading. It's titled The Bird and the Machine. And I don't know if this is really the sort of reading where I'm going to pop in very much with my own stuff, and it's not very long either. So let's see how it goes. I am really looking forward to rereading this piece. So here is The Bird and the Machine by Lauren Isley. I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their feathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling

cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows, along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continental way. It's a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things as though it wanted to make a design or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.

It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until they do more things, maybe even make themselves. I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe. Well, who knows. But you read about it more and more, with no one making any protest. And already, they can add better

than we, and reach up and hear things through the dark, and finger the guns over the night sky." And just as a quick aside, this book was published in 1978, so this is a long time ago, this is like 50 years ago, and it's always fascinating reading about how people in those generations marvel at the budding sort of incipient creation of whatever technology that just seems so taken for granted now in our generations. Particularly, I'm thinking here about drones, and I'm thinking about like military drones. I think that might be part of what Lauren Isley is referring to when he talks about fingering the guns over the night sky. This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me

in my biological books and journals until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age. Make no mistake about it. The robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain, they say now, is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out. It's mechanical, you know. Nothing to get superstitious about. And man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea.

Well, he's got it all right, and that's why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair with the article crunched in my hand remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads, Machines are getting smarter every day. I don't deny it, but I'll still stick with the birds. It's life I believe in, not machines. And just as a quick aside, it's so interesting threading that needle between sort of the Marxist inclination towards technological advancement and the deep ecology, deep ecological hesitancy and aversion to technology, at least unnecessary technology.

And this is something that we talked about in our episode with Gavin Mueller on the Luddites and the idea that actually Marxism doesn't have to have this blind techno-deterministic aspect to it, which I think is mistakenly attributed to Marx, although I think a lot of Marxists do understand the importance of technological advancement and particularly talking about the development of traditionally underdeveloped countries. And then at the same time, this sort of blind devotion to technology and this sort of like the philosophy of technology, right? And how technology advances faster

than our society can really cope with culturally and keep up with in many profound ways. And I think, I mean, we're seeing that with phones, right? Like the development of the smartphone and it's being regulated or even understood exactly what it's doing to our brains, at least popularly, is a very important debate. And I don't think many people could deny

that it's at least having a profound impact on us as a species. So anyways, I always find it very interesting because I come from a very sort of Luddite, like a closeted Luddite past. And I was always really moved by and inspired by sort of an aversion to what I would think of as like sort of unnecessary technologies. And then there is this idea in communism where you advance the productive forces fast enough and far enough, where it's kind of like a prerequisite for Marxist communism is that you have to have a certain amount of automated technology that's advanced enough that it allows for the abundance that allows for communism.

So it's just a very interesting nuanced conversation. I don't think that it's at all an irreconcilable contradiction. But at the same time, it's something that I do find that there is a tension there sometimes, at least in myself. Okay, let's get back to Lauren Isley. Maybe you don't believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I'll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century,

he quickly saw the resemblances. What, wrote Hobbes, is the heart, but a spring, and the nerves, but so many strings, and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body. Tinkering about in their shops, it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine, quote, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, end quote. The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country, dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers.

They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes, and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny puppets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer. Then, in the 19th century, the cell was discovered,

and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines, the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself devolves away into an abstract chemical machine, and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about. The wheels get smaller and smaller, and they turn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it, the life is gone. And so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first

place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret, and we can make them better in time. Machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese. I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is, to me, a fine sight and more complicated, I think, in his multiform activity than a machine mouse running a maze. Also, I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man.

It leaves a nice, fine, indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn't got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself, he doesn't really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly, intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive, and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds.

I'll never forget those birds. Yet before I measured their significance, I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then, and left alone in a great desert, part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm. So, there is a break in the text, and now we're going into a new section, which I believe is where he will begin recounting the story that he's been sort of leading

up to this whole time. As the long months passed, I began to live on the slower plains and to observe more readily what passed for life there. I sauntered, I passed more and more slowly up and down the canyons in the dry baking heat of midsummer. I slumbered for long hours in the shade of huge brown boulders that had gathered in tilted companies out on the flats.

I had forgotten the world of man, and the world had forgotten me. Now and then I found a skull in the canyons, and these justified my remaining there. I took a serene, cold interest in these discoveries. I had come, like many a naturalist before me, to view life with a wary and subdued attention. I had grown to take pleasure in the divested bone. I sat once on a high ridge that fell away before me into a waste of sand dunes. I sat through hours of a long afternoon. Finally, as I glanced beside my boot, an indistinct configuration caught my eye. It was a coiled rattlesnake, a big one. How long he had sat with me I do not know. I had not frightened him. We were both locked in the sleepwalking tempo of the earlier world, baking in the same high

air and sunshine. Perhaps he had been there when I came in. He slept on as I left, his coils so ill-diserned by me, dissolving once more among the stones and gravel from which I had barely made him out. Another time I got on a higher ridge among some tough little wind-warped pines, half covered over with sand in a basin-like depression that caught everything carried by the air up to those heights. There were a few thin bones of birds, some cracked shells of indeterminable age, and the knotty fingers of pine roots bulged out of shape from their long and agonizing grasp upon the crevices of the rock.

I lay under the pines in the sparse shade and went to sleep once more. It grew cold finally, for autumn was in the air by then, and the few things that lived thereabouts were sinking down into an even chillier scale of time. In the moments between sleeping and waking, I saw the roots about me, and slowly, slowly, afoot in what seemed many centuries, I moved my sleep-stiffened hands over the scaling bark and lifted my numbed face after the vanishing sun. I was a great, awkward thing of knots and aching limbs, trapped up there in some long, patient endurance that involved the necessity of putting living fingers into rock and by

slow, aching expansion bursting those rocks asunder. I suppose so thin and slow was the time of my pulse by then that I might have stayed on to drift still deeper into the lower cadence of the frost, or the crystalline life that glistens pebbles or shines in a snowflake, or dreams in the meteoric iron between the worlds. It was a dim descent, but time was present in it. Somewhere far down in that scale, the notion struck me that one might come the other way. Not many months thereafter, I joined some colleagues heading higher into a remote windy table land where huge bones were reputed to protrude like boulders from the turf. I had drowsed with reptiles and moved with the century-long pulse of trees.

Now, lethargically, I was climbing back up some invisible ladder of quickening hours. There had been talk of birds in connection with my duties. Birds are intense, fast-living creatures—reptiles, I suppose one might say—that have escaped out of the heavy sleep of time, transformed fairy creatures dancing over sunlit meadows. It is a youthful fancy, no doubt, but because of something that had happened up there among the escarpments of that range, it remained with me a lifelong impression. I can never bear to see a bird imprisoned. We came into that valley through the trailing mists of a spring night.

It was a place that looked as though it might never have known the foot of man, but our scouts had been ahead of us and we knew all about the abandoned cabin of stone that lay far up on one hillside. It had been built in the landrush of the last century, and then lost to the cattlemen again as the marginal soils failed to take to the plow. There were spots like this all over that country. Lost graves marked by unlettered stones and old corroding rimfire cartridge cases lying where somebody had made a stand among the boulders that rimmed the valley.

They are all that remain of the Range Wars. The men are under the stones now. I could see our cavalcade winding in and out through the mist below us. Torches, the reflection of the truck lights on our collecting tins, and the far-off bumping of a loose dinosaur thigh bone in the bottom of a trailer. I stood on a rock a moment, looking down and thinking what it cost in money and equipment to capture the past. We had, in addition, instructions to lay hands on the present.

The word had come through to get them alive—birds, reptiles, anything. A zoo somewhere abroad needed restocking. It was one of those reciprocal matters in which science involves itself. Maybe our museum needed a straight ostrich egg and this was the payoff. Anyhow, my job was to help capture some birds and that was why I was there before the trucks. This was a clip from our Patreon episode, The More Than Human World. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and other

benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream Podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.