We’re back! After a long hiatus due to professional/ life stuff, I’m happy to share with you my interview with Gary Shaw, Professor of History and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. Continuing our series on horses, we explore another angle of the long-standing relationship between humans and horses, looking at the role that horses played in human transportation and warfare. As we brace ourselves for the impact of A.I., I find it instructive to look back to a time when our transportation and military technologies depended on other animals. It’s impossible to fully comprehend the impact of the shift from horse and buggy to car, but, as we grapple with the scope and limitations of our humanity - and, I would argue, with our animality -, thinking back to a time when other animals were more fully embedded in our lives may serve as a useful counterpart and help us in our attempts to make sense of our present moment.  In our conversation, Gary Shaw and I discuss two areas of his scholarship - the development of horse travel in twelfth-century Europe and the role that horses, such as the Duke of Wellington’s horse Copenhagen, played in battle during the period of the Napoleonic wars.

The title of Lydia Millet’s last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple directions, abounds in Dinosaurs, which is at once a moving human narrative and a reflection on the ways in which our frailty puts us at the mercy of our shortcomings as a species but also, ultimately, serves as an opening to discovering how much we care about the natural world. It was, as always, a great pleasure to talk to Lydia Millet about these and other matters. I hope you too will enjoy our conversation.

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship with the natural world. 

If you'd like to listen to part 1 of this discussion - https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11992722

If you'd like to listen to my conversation with Johanna Drucker about the invention of the alphabet - 
https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11826284

There’s a funny little corridor tucked away behind a park in the Village of Pleasantville, New York where I live, where bears and bobcats amble through, walking atop the Catskill Aqueduct, the 100-year-old artery that delivers water from the Catskill mountains to New York City. Fellow resident, Michael Inglis, who has been hiking this patch of semi-wilderness for the past twenty-five years, has recently written a book about it, Woods and Water: Walking New York’s Nanny Hagen Brook. He calls this a “liminal space,” existing as it does at the margins of a human-dominated landscape. After reading his book, I asked him if we could take a walk along the Nanny Hagen brook together. As we explored off-trail, he pointed out the surprising number of native plants but also the corrosive effects of human influence, including the predominance of invasive plants that have escaped from suburban backyards into the wild. What ensued for me was a reflection on how human culture literally shapes the natural world, but also the ways in which nature can push back and be surprisingly resilient, when given the chance.

When we think of major innovations in human history, what comes to mind are inert technologies - from the wheel to the computer - but one of the most significant developments occurred as the result of the relationship between humans and another animal, horses. The domestication of horses brought about a major sea-change in human society, as we became much more mobile.  It affected everything from agriculture to warfare to the dissemination of language and culture. To discuss the domestication of horses and the impact of this relationship, I spoke with  William Taylor,  Assistant Professor and Curator of Archeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  As Taylor explains, our understanding of this history continues to evolve thanks to new scientific tools, such as new types of genomic sequencing, but also due the work of anthropologists who observe present-day horse culture in Mongolia, contemporary Ukraine and other parts of the Eurasian steppes where the domestication of horses first took place. 

Jennifer Lynch Fitzgerald tells the story of her relationship with Maddie, a mustang rescued in Habersham County, Georgia from a man who was collecting horses to sell for meat.  When Maddie was found, she’d been tied to a tree for months, was malnourished and very angry.  Jen tells how, in spite of her limited experience with horses, she learned to train or "gentle" Maddie.  She discusses what she's learned about horse language and what it's meant to her to develop a relationship with an animal who was once wild.  This is the first installment of a short series of episodes on horses.  Horses have played such a significant role in human history that they are an important part of the nature/ culture nexus.  Before we delve into the history, however, I wanted to start with a story of a relationship between one human animal and one horse animal. 

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I’ve mentioned this book numerous times on the pod. It’s fair to say that David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass are the two books that really kicked off the idea for In the Weeds. And it feels like time to dig into Spell. All the more so since my current episodes are exploring the question “how did we get here?” Not only how did we materially arrive at our current environmental crisis but how did we, in the West, develop a culture that led to this mess, a culture that separates the human sphere from the natural world?

Environmentalists have been debating this question for some time and, as Abram himself acknowledges, there is not just one answer, though he does propose an intriguing one in Spell that I talked about in our last episode:  that the invention of the alphabet might have had something to do with it.

To discuss The Spell of the Sensuous, I reached out to Trevien Stanger, instructor of environmental studies and science at St. Michael’s College in Vermont and all around smart and thoughtful guy.

We examine the two influences that support Abram’s shift from a mechanistic to an animist view of the world: phenomenology, a philosophical movement started by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, and the teachings of indigenous shamans that Abram encountered during his travels as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician in Southeast Asia. Most of all, we try to understand what it would mean to experience the world the way that Abram would want us to, as a dynamic and relationally-rich encounter with the more-than-human.

There’s a lot to unpack and we take our time, so we only get about a third of the way into the book. We will continue our discussion in an upcoming episode.

And, yes, I have a cold :)

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me.  But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their language.  All modern alphabets can be traced back to this origin.

Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and author of numerous books, including her most recent, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), talks to me about this fascinating history, from what archeology has uncovered to the alphabet’s central role in information technology. We also discuss a theory put forth by David Abram, in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, that the alphabet opens “a new distance […] between human culture and the rest of nature,” as it turns our powers of perception inward and focuses our attention on human-made sounds and words.

Links to some of the things we discuss: Two key archeological sites where inscriptions of the first alphabet have been found:  Serabit el-Khadim and Wadi el-Hol. Sandstone sphinx at the British Museum with Proto-Sinaitic letters. The Acrophonic principle. The Ahiram sarcophogus and shards found in Israel. Unicode. See also in-the-weeds.net.

William Bryant Logan’s book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike.   Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for which he was given the task of pollarding trees. Pollarding is an ancient technique for pruning trees that, along with coppicing, was used for millennia to cull woodlands without having to destroy the forest. These techniques were an integral part of managed woodlands, in which people kept livestock, harvested different kind of food and cut wood that was used for everything from energy to building ships and houses to creating floating walkways. This managed cultivation was not only productive for humans; it also allowed trees to live longer and created more biodiversity than existed in unmanaged woods. All of this, as Logan explains to us, was possible because of the remarkable regenerative property of trees, which allows many species of trees to resprout in the most unlikely situations and in the most unlikely ways. In theory, at least, Logan tell us, trees can live indefinitely and, in some unusual cases, they seem to do just that.

William Bryant Logan is the author of Sproutlands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is a long-time faculty member of the New York Botanical Garden where he teaches pruning. He is a certified arborist and the founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. He has also been a regular garden writer for the New York Times and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden and Garden Design magazines. 

Picking up where we left off in the spring, we return to the topic of farming through a conversation with John Roulac, entrepreneur and executive producer of the movie Kiss the Ground. 

Roulac’s latest project, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, supports initiatives in Central America and East Africa that teach farmers how to grow what are sometimes called food forests. 

Food forests  mimic the structure and diversity of natural forests; they have the ability to restore ecosystems and bring diversified nutrition and economic development to rural communities.

This approach to farming – new by contrast with post-World War II industrial-style farming but based on techniques that are thousands of years old – is a relatively inexpensive way to make farming sustainable and, in fact, beneficial with respect to carbon capture, climate resilience and biodiversity, among other impacts. Ironically, Roulac notes, there is little investment in this low-hanging fruit among the solutions to our environmental problems.