On this page you will find:
-questions that wonder: what multispecies attunement might reveal that strictly human ethnography does not?
-collaborative survival explorations
-thinking with transductive ethnography

In late November, I took a walk through the grassy, forested space on my family’s property in Butte Creek Canyon. I went into my nature exploration with my project in mind and tried to explore my surroundings while keeping Stefan Helmreich’s theoretical concepts in the background of my mind. Transduction, and how it produces a sense of immersion in ethnography, felt appropriate in a landscape that had experienced a substantial environmental change and was in the process of becoming something new. New life populated the area as well as the remnants of pre-disaster existence. As I walked through the grassy clearing, trees around me and branches above me (some dead, some struggling, few producing new foliage), I listened to the flow of the creek and the animal lives happening around me. These sounds did not feel any different than what I remember from before the fire, but the landscape around me had so clearly changed. This, I argue, warranted a transductive approach.

Helmreich defines transductive ethnography as “a mode of attention that asks how definitions of subjects, objects, and field emerge in material relations that cannot be modeled in advance.” (Helmreich 2007) While the statistical data of how many acres burned, estimates of animal and plant life lost, and records of what trees have regrown can be clearly defined, the feeling of being in this changing place requires physical presence. I believe this is one of the beauties of ethnography in this mode. My short walk through a place that I remembered as one thing that has morphed into something new, yet not fundamentally changed, helped me think about more-than-human lives. I heard birds and small animals (some I could see, some I couldn’t), listened to the creek that is home to fish and other microbial life, and saw the trees around me—all of which experienced disruption during the fire. However, they were remaking the landscape slowly, through adaptive processes like restructuring nests, repopulating the creek, and fresh grass sprouting amidst remnants of burnt foliage.

My takeaway from this particular experience can be used to reflect on the collective experience of resilient beings after the Camp Fire. Humans are more attuned to their own species’ changes. They are rebuilding homes, moving back onto previously scarred land, and restructuring their disrupted lives. More slowly, but just as surely, non-human animals and plant life are evolving with humans, not separately from. If we are to get accustomed to our damaged planet and learn how to flourish in destructions wake, human beings must realize the validity of our multispecies co-habitants. If nothing else, we can take solace in the new life that sprouts around us, just as we grow into new forms of existence. Here I borrow a term from author Donna Haraway; “sympoiesis.” Sympoiesis means a making-with, a type of co-evolution and becoming anew in the Anthropocene, suggesting that nothing truly organizes self-sufficiently. Haraway argues in her book Staying with the Trouble, that “recuperation is still possible, but only in multispecies alliance.”

"We need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in order to flourish--again, or maybe just for the first time--on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered." (Haraway, 2016)

Photo from my walk, discussed below.