The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: politics

  • The History of Cartography

    The History of Cartography

    An in-depth interview with Matthew H. Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley, editors of Volume IV of The History of Cartography.

  • Marching Orders

    Marching Orders

      The drums began to crescendo, War horses and infantry prepare; A performance all to common in history. Footsteps echo through corridors, Marching to the drumbeat’s cacophony. Left, left, left-right-left The energy becomes a symphony! Left, right, left Orders obscured by the drums Unclear, of who may be the enemy. In the distance, perceived dissension;…

  • Songs We Learn from Trees

    Songs We Learn from Trees

    Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje give the lowdown on the Amharic poetry of Ethiopia. Then poetry by Solomon Deressa, Gebre Kristos Desta and Liyou Libsekal.

  • Compassionate Climate Activism

    Compassionate Climate Activism

    Vermont-based environmental and social justice advocate Chris Gaynor on the compulsion to protect, educate and care for our species.

  • Collaborations on the Corner

    Collaborations on the Corner

    Collaboratively produced paintings on cardboard by Phill Hopkins and Jadene Imbush – part of a larger project on the UK’s burgeoning homelessness crisis.

  • The Hockey Stick Poster Child

    The Hockey Stick Poster Child

    The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research — Wald, Schnee und Landschaft (WSL) in German — sits on top of a hill in Birmensdorf, just outside Zurich. Tree-ring research first became part of WSL’s research mission in 1971, when Fritz Schweingruber started his work there. Fritz is a botanist, an archeologist, and…

  • To Dig a Hole (You Create a Heap)

    To Dig a Hole (You Create a Heap)

      Here’s a joke… Question: Who made money during the Gold Rush? Answer: The ones who sold the shovels.     “You were asked to dig a hole? Do you understand how that sounds very strange?” When I told this to a friend, they seemed perplexed. And while I was initially confused by their response,…

  • Rural Art is…

    Rural Art is…

    This is an extract from Myvillages, ‘Rural Art Is…’, in The Rural, eds. Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra (London: Whitechapel Gallery/Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019)   If you don’t like monocultures – whether in art or agriculture or elsewhere – you will like this book. The Rural questions and frustrates the current cultural hegemony…

  • The Cooked and the Half-Baked

    The Cooked and the Half-Baked

      “The great press baron, Lord Northcliffe, used to tell his journalists that four subjects could be relied upon for abiding public interest: crime, love, money, and food. Only the last of these is fundamental and universal. Crime is a minority interest, even in the worst-regulated societies. It is possible to imagine an economy without…

  • Borders

    Borders

      On the Eve we eat menudo. Onion mimics moon from a small bowl, glinted fractals of itself. Cilantro’s diced flesh lingers in the air. Bolilllos wait, steam rising. We all wait. I have inherited this––my life on this schism of wild land, purple montañas littered by desert primrose, a muddy river and barbed wire…

  • Rooting

    Rooting

      . . . . . . . . . .Chihuahua Desert   Blood slid to soil and our roots splintered wide like needle-edged leaves of agave. We can never escape this desert root, dry to core and apt for bitter survival, snide thirst. A cacti can be barren then, overnight, sprout flame petals, but…