Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

A snowy start to the day at Watlington station, King’s Lynn. December 18 2009. Lewis Collard/Wikipedia Winter frost fairs were common on the frozen River Thames between the 17th and 19th centuries, but they’ve become unimaginable in our lifetime. Over decades and centuries, natural variability in the climate has plunged the UK into sub-zero temperatures from time to time. But global warming is tipping the odds away from the weather we once knew. These days, people in the UK have become accustomed to much warmer, wetter winters . In fact, winter is warming faster than any other season. This is bad news for those holding out for a white Christmas – the Met Office reports that only four Christmases in over five decades recorded snow at more than 40% of UK weather stations. A frost fair on the River Thames, painted by Thomas Wyke (1683-1684). Thomas Wyke/Wikipedia Chr...

Salmon anatomical plate drawing. Source: University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections (Sp Coll RQ 271) If you carried out a survey of what people think is the most important thing that we can do to stem the tide of ecological ruin sweeping the planet, challenging Euro-Modern ontologies of nature (beliefs and ideas about reality, or ‘nature’s nature’) probably wouldn’t emerge as a number one priority on the list. In a time of crisis, where time literally feels like it’s running out and the apocalypse is already here for some people, carrying out this kind of philosophical reflection might feel like ineffective political strategy. Yet a challenging of our assumptions about ontology is precisely what a growing chorus of theorists and activists are calling for. For my PhD project, I want to examine how heeding these calls might allow us to better understand the nature of the ecological crisis we are facing.   Specifically, my project is building upon decolonial scholar...

A still from Bee Movie (2007), directed by Simon J. Smith and Steven Hickner ‘According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.’ You might recognise these words as the opening from the animated film Bee Movie (2007). The film is as known for its memes as its compulsive heteronormativity. If you are unaware: not only are there many happy nuclear bee families, the star of the film, Barry, is a male worker bee. On top of that, the human woman with whom Barry takes on the honey industry and fights for equal bee rights appears to develop some warm feelings for him. Needless to say, Bee Movie is fun but not a cinematographic masterpiece. Jokes aside, the 2007 film is a good indicator of an influx of documentaries, memoirs, novels, and poetry collections starring the Western or European honeybee. Perhap...

Looking at your hearts, suspended in their jar, I try and imagine the two of you still alive. I know that if you were anything like your closest living kin, you would have bonded for life. You lived a long time, and it would have been a relationship that had gathered and deepened over years. By the time you came together this final time, the congregations that were so important to your kind were already a thing of the past. Perhaps you were aware of how empty your world had become. Although you were alone on that low rock, it could be that you were accompanied by the memory of the multitude that had once been. By this point it was already too late. There were too few of you to recover what had been lost. Even so, maybe you would have nodded to each other and tried to make the best of it. Maybe you would have started showing off, just as those before you had always done; turning your heads from side to side so the bright white around your eye would have caught the light. Maybe then, wit...