The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: George Monbiot

  • Wolf yollez

    Wolf yollez

      ‘We’re not far from wolves.’ – Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’   Human-canine relationships are some of the most conceptually disordered and uncertain of interspecies relationships, precisely because the history of domestication is so long and so complex. The type of canine perspective offered by contemporary writers such as Donna Haraway…

  • from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling

    from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling

      a wolf is a tunnel into the earth …… full of teeth (and what should I call a sideways stalag mmm-/t-ite?) not just the wind howling through the steppes’ hollow torso? a zero-sum game? an eremophage without organs? the little bumps ‘become’ horns……the horns become penises the penises teeth …… the teeth : skeletons…

  • Open Call: Wolf Crossing

    Open Call: Wolf Crossing

    In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…

  • Plant Migrations

    Plant Migrations

    With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…

  • Parakeets and Purity

    Parakeets and Purity

    Because the land, the country, is such a focus of horticulture, there are important moments when its extraordinary fetishisation has connected it with movements of the extreme right: rhetorically, to simplify, the land becomes the fatherland.   George McKay, Radical Gardening         I live in north-west London. Sitting in the living room…