Rosamund Portus: A preemptive mourning of bee decline (ep397)
“There are lots of different species who are alive and working within a cultural entanglement which is shaping their capacity to either thrive or perhaps become endangered and go into decline... I see art as giving people a way to engage with that grief and emotional connection with the subject, but also to engage with a sense of agency over it.”
In this episode, we welcome Rosamund Portus, an artist, writer and researcher of environmental humanities. Drawn to bees at an early age, by way of her exposure to gardening, Rosamund conducted her undergraduate dissertation on humans’ understanding of bee culture. She later pursued a Ph.D. in the social and cultural dimensions of bee population declines. In turn, Rosamund has gone on to complicate black and white “whodunit” narratives around species extinction, while advocating for creativity and art as pathways of relational becoming.
Speaking from her context of living in the U.K., and through a lens of “bio-culturalism”, Rosamund is interested in how modern, consumerist, human culture (at least in the West) have become entangled with a perception of bee culture, particularly the trope and role honeybees in agricultural systems. She invites us to challenge what renders a “meaningful” life and death, which species get to matter within mainstream extinction dialogues and how storytelling plays an important role in enriching our capacities of engagement with bees, other species, and ourselves.
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Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Oropendola
Episode-inspired artwork by Cherie Kwok
Episode Referencs:
“Generation Anthropocene,” an article by Robert MacFarlane
Braiding Sweetgrass, a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Where Honeybees Thrive, a book by Heather Swan
Mourning the Anthropocene, a book by Trey Barnett
Learn more about the works of Brigit Strawbridge Howard, Michelle Bastian, Eileen Christ, Lily Hunter Green, Samantha Walton, Elin Kelsey, Britt Wray
Expand your lenses:
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Rosamund Portus: The colony collapse disorder crisis blew up around 2006, in the mid 2000s. It started with the story of a man called David Hackenberg, who had that particularly troubling experience when he went to pay a visit to his hives one day, and essentially he found that they were completely empty. He was in no way prepared for this because he recalled that when he last went to visit his hives, that they were "boiling over with bees"- that's a quote by Cox-Foster and van Engelsdorp, who are very engaged with research on colony collapse disorder. So apparently over half of his 3000 hives seem to have essentially been deserted and that he had no real idea as to why this was happening. This was what is colloquially known as the first reported case of colony collapse disorder, it's been labeled the ground zero for this event occurring. And since that event occurred, many more cases started to come out and we saw this real crisis start to arise around the disappearance of honeybees- the mystery of the disappearing bees. And we know today that in the last few years, the kind of rate of bona fide cases of colony collapse disorder has dropped, and that it is the result of various different factors that come into play.
We pin [colony collapse disorder] as the reason why honeybees might be in decline, but there are so many other factors that are playing into that.
And it's been hailed as the kind of buzzword for honeybee decline or honeybee collapse.
Kamea Chayne: Well, in typical whodunit plots, they're typically very specific culprits of the murder that get revealed at the end. But most endangerment and extinction stories aren't that simple, and of course, the same is true for our bee populations as well. As you write, "As Winston contemplates, the honeybee collapse has been particularly vexing because there's no one cause, but rather a thousand little cuts. However, the idea that we may never truly find a satisfactory answer to this ecological whodunit is a fact which only continues to fuel this mystery narrative."
I'm curious to hear you talk more about the impacts of this problem being framed in an overly-simplified way as a whodunit mystery, as well as this invitation to see the more accurate and complex perspective of the "slow violence" that our honey bee populations have been experiencing.
Rosamund Portus: I dedicated a large proportion of my thesis, which was centered around unpacking what was happening with the bee crisis, to actually figuring out or trying to figure out what on earth was really happening. There's a myriad different factors which come into play here.
If you look at honeybees, you also have social and political debates coming into play as well.
To put that into context, I did a lot of work with people who are, or align themselves, as natural beekeepers. And the reasons that they articulate or that they focus on the bee loss may be very different from people who work with honeybees in a more commercial sense or in a more scientific sense. Not to say that naturally isn't scientific, but just trying to articulate the different perspectives that people might come from. So someone in a natural beekeeping community, for example, might suggest that one of the reasons that honeybees are weakened is because we replace a lot of their natural food, honey and pollen, we replace that with sugar substances.
I remember talking to a natural beekeeper who said that replacing their food sources or trying to boost them with sugar substances was the equivalent of somebody taking away our fruits and vegetables and giving us something like Lucozade in replacement and then saying to us, "Why are you sick? How can you be sick?" And so to her, that was the real strong reason as to why honeybees are in decline. And yet, when I speak to people working from a more entomological perspective, there was a sense that natural beekeeping was really damaging, because it was allowing disease to spread. Whilst it worked on the premise that bees with the strong bees would survive, this one person I was talking to said that actually bees won't survive. They have been weakened to the point where they need our aid, they need our support, they need the sugar substances. So you have different perspectives coming into play that it's not just black and white, you do have different debates coming in.
There are obviously some very clear reasons. Dave Coulson is somebody that I recommend to anybody who's interested in learning about bee decline and he thinks about all insects. He doesn't just focus on honeybees, he doesn't just focus on bees, he focuses on lots and lots of wonderful insects. He is known for his work on wild bees particularly, but he talks about the fact that habitat loss is one of the major factors. And so the major factor which affects bee species, he has in one of his books a quite funny quote about the fact that in the UK, particularly, one of the main reasons that we lost a lot of our hedgerows and a lot of our spare wilder bits of habitat is because during World War Two we were cut off from the food supply coming in from Europe and other countries. And therefore he says very kind of in a very joking way, Hitler is to blame for the loss of bees. And interestingly, he later mentions that in another book. So I think maybe some people commented on it sort of saying he wasn't quite blaming Hitler. But yes, he does talk in a very clear and very accessible way over all the factors and all the different social and political ongoings that actually impact impact bees' lives. So, yes, habitat loss is a major factor and it's one that affects them a lot.
And going back to honeybees, there is a lot to say that honeybees have been weakened through the way in which we've interacted with them as humans. So speaking from a more natural perspective, a natural beekeeping perspective, there is the sense that the hives that we use do not reflect the natural log hives that honeybees would have made their own homes. There's a sense that we take too much of the honey and we do not enter into a relationship of care with them, but we see them much more as products to consume from. And that's a really damaging factor in how honeybees have developed and how they've been able to grow and thrive as a species. There's lots of nuances in that. There's work on the fact that when you take wax from the honey beehives and you recycle that wax and you put it back into another hive, that could contain diseases that are being spread around in the hives, for example.
We need to be really careful in the way that we handle bees, and we can't just see them as part of the agricultural system without having care for them as living creatures.
There's a brilliant work by Eileen Christ, and she talks about the fact that once we start to see animals as part of agriculture, we take away their agency. And I think that's really interesting in the case of bees, because they are seen as this very romanticized species who have this capacity for culture, and yet, there's also this complete other way in which we see them, which is part of our agricultural system. In a way, I don't really feel like I've come to understand how those can sit in connection with each other, they seem like they should rule each other out, and yet they haven't managed to do that. In that sense, [honeybees] are a really interesting case study for thinking through why, despite the love and care we have for them, we're still not, I don't want to say, allowed them to become into this state of vulnerability, but certainly have not helped them in protecting themselves from what we're doing as humans to the world.
Kamea Chayne: It certainly can become problematic when people start to understand honeybees as singularly serving the purpose of supporting our agriculture system because they have wonderful, complex lives of their own beyond the function that they serve for people and for communities.
What I've come to observe for mainstream narratives to do with extinction is that I think a lot of them overly rely on these categories of not endangered, endangered, and extinct. And these are more quantitative measures based on data and overall population size and status. Technically, we could say that the human species is not endangered given our thriving population, but how about the quality of life that a lot of people are experiencing? So even among species that aren't categorized as being endangered, what might we be alerted to in terms of their transforming cultures, dynamics, and states of aliveness, and then even amongst species who are endangered, there are also similar, more qualitative nuances in their stories as well.
In an article you write about honeybees, you share, "The effects of climate change have disrupted the interrelationship between plant and pollinator, starving bees of their floral food. Human-led experiments have led worker honeybees with shorter lives and more docile natures. The social and biological natures of bees have become infected that through human endeavor." You started touching on all of this, but to these points, I'd be curious to learn more about how particular human-led practices and experiments, or otherwise climate change at large, have transformed the cultures and dynamics and natures of honeybees. What more can you share on this front?
Rosamund Portus: I would direct you to the work of Jake Kozek, who I feel is much more expert on how our practices have influence on honeybees. He writes a phenomenal article which outlines how honeybees' biology have become weakened through experiments, but also through the way in which we treat them, the way in which we embroil them in these worker practices, which put our needs and desires first, and over time have have come to actually change their biology so that they're not as resilient as they perhaps once were. He also goes into lots of detail about various different kinds of experiments that have happened, such as using bees to detect certain chemicals and perhaps testing it through the honey. It's been some time since I've truly engaged with that work, so I would suggest redirecting you to that. What I can talk about more clearly is climate change as a factor.
Climate change is something that I really wanted to draw attention to in bees, because the climate crisis is one of those things that can feel very abstract and we can feel quite disconnected from. We know that lots of people are affected by it and they have been for many years, and we know that people are becoming more visibly affected by all over the globe.
Bees are one of those interesting species that we are starting to understand the effects of climate change on, but we're still working them out because it's still a developing phenomenon.
One of the main reasons, beyond the fact that they're affected by the adverse weather- a few years ago, we had a really hot February. It was boiling at something like 20 degrees in the UK, and obviously bees started to come out, and then they were they were harmed by the harsh weather which followed. So you have examples like that, and we know that that is a direct consequence of the climate crisis. But you also have this cracking of the phenolological relationship between plants and flowers and bee species. And it's not just honeybees, it's other species as well, where essentially bees are coming out at particular times, and the food sources that they need are linked to this change in weather patterns that were relatively stable, and are becoming increasingly unstable or shifting year by year. So that in itself is a massive problem.
Some research that I've seen more recently is talking about the fact that because of this steady change in temperature, bees are being pushed out of the places they live. I was listening to an audiobook today, revisiting one of the books that I found most inspirational in my life, ahead of this podcast. And it was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and she was talking about the maple tree, and she was talking about the fact that as this the land where the maple tree lives and become hotter, they are going to be pushed out of those spaces and become the equivalent of climate refugees. And I was thinking that bees are in that same position, and other insect species as well.
As the world shifts into different temperatures, [bees] will have to move as well and they'll have to move accordingly.
And they will also be what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls climate refugees, which we think of as a very human term, but we know we should extend that possibility to species beyond the human.
Kamea Chayne: One of the key messages I picked up from your work, which I hadn't really thought about before, is that due to the sensationalized narratives surrounding the decline of bee populations, the extinction of bees has become a preemptively mourned event. I'm still processing and thinking through what this means for us, that even though collectively bees are still very present in a lot of our landscapes, farms and gardens, their state of being has become culturally and narratively tied to extinction for many people.
What stood out to you most as you thought through the implications of this preemptive mourning and this idea that through imagining their extinction, we have a far greater chance of now resisting it.
Rosamund Portus:
These bees are really interesting in the fact that I feel like they're both absent and present at the same time, and it's their very presence which allows their absence to be so resisted against.
Because we're still seeing them, because we're still interacting with them, because they're still there, and yet, they're talked about as gone, they're talked about as lost, or we're losing the bees, we must do something to help the bees, that keeps reminding us of their potential absence. And we get embroiled into this, 'we need to save them, we need to save them', because they might potentially be gone. So I came to this idea of preemptive mourning because of the way I see that people attach themselves to this idea. And I think there is real grief, and I think that's a really valid grief, it is a valid emotion that we feel about bees. We are mourning them, but we're also holding onto them as well. And I think that's a very unusual situation to be in- we often think about mourning as coming after loss. Because of that, I think it's really interesting to study what can come out of that, what we can use it for. It's the same way that when we talk about anger, or we talk about anxiety. We say, well, how can that lead us to a sense of agency? How can it be a driver for action? And so I think the preemptive mourning of bees is technically incorrect to say that bees are gone because they're not. There's lots of species here which have gone or are endangered, but as a collective species, they haven't gone.
I don't think it's a bad thing to actually embrace that preemptive mourning and say, well, we already care that they may be gone, so what can we do about it now?
How can we respond to that? When I first came across this idea, when I first started thinking about this preemptive mourning, I did think, oh, it's bad, we should be focusing on things that are truly lost. But actually, I think the whole process of mourning is enhanced by our realizing that yes, we are all grieving for things that are truly gone, but that same feeling is already coming for the things that are still present, or a species that is still present. So how can we resist feeling that on a deep level in the future when we truly are to the point where we can't resist that that loss? It's interesting how the crisis aspect of bees threw them into that public space.
Let's just go back to the narrative of bees as this murder mystery narrative, this victim of this ecological whodunit was really interesting to me because it framed them as victim, but it framed them as victim of us. And I think we only came to realize that quite a long time into that narrative as well. And it made us stand up and think about, okay, what relationship do we want to be in with bees? Do we want to be the people that are perpetrating this victim? Do we want to be the bad person in this ecological whodunit narrative? And we didn't. And I think that has continued despite the fact that the mystery narrative around colony collapse disorder has lessened greatly because we've started to understand it more, we've started to understand the other factors. But it was that kind of shock crisis moment that pushed it into the public perception.
We talk a lot about the climate emergency in minutes. And I had a conversation today with somebody, and we were talking about the fact that there's this concern that emergency narrative will not have the power that it should have, because when it continues to be an emergency, we don't necessarily keep having that same struggle, that same fear. And I was thinking about the bees and I was thinking, well, actually that felt like this really shocking moment, but that care and that protection has continued. And it made me feel very hopeful that despite the fact that emergency feels like it should be a temporary thing, and that might lessen people's concern about it in the long term.
If we learn from what happened with the bees, we can be very hopeful about the fact that it will generate that kind of deep sense of care and wanting to respond—and taking that forward in what we do. Even if it's lessened in its sense of urgency, it carries on within us once we've experienced it as emergency, as an urgent crisis.
Kamea Chayne: The momentum can build, and certainly a lot of people have latched on to these stories surrounding bees. As an artist yourself, I know you've been interested in looking at the cultural and creative responses to the stories of bee decline. As you note, "Creative responses to extinction processes helps make these stories of loss visible and relevant, thus responding to the call of responsibility that human-driven extinction demands of us."
What are some ways that you've seen artists and creatives engaging with this slow violence experienced by bees in their work, and how do you think they collectively contribute to our broader cultural transformation?
Rosamund Portus: I had the real pleasure of essentially dedicating my Ph.D. thesis to understanding and exploring the work of so many different artists. Off the top of my head, I must have worked with about 20 for the thesis. When I first started my PhD, just to put this in context, I was very much looking at the idea of how do we imagine and represent and bee decline. And I started off by working with entomologists, I also did a beekeeping course, and I talked to a lot of beekeepers as well. And then I had this third angle of saying, well, what's happening in the creative sector? You know, I've got this personal interest in the creative arts, but I didn't really explore it as a possibility for the focus of my work. And then it was within that first six-month framework of your PhD where you don't really know what you're doing, you feel quite lost a lot of the time, and I started to find that the thing that I think I felt most intrigued by, the thing that I felt was most transformative in terms of what I was learning about was the work being done by this artist because it embodied so much of what I was trying to articulate through my own work about how people feel about bees and how people are wanting to respond to them.
At the same time, I also started to become more interested in environmental arts more broadly. I had a real interesting opportunity to go on a course directed at exploring the work of women who were artists and scientists within the environmental sector and giving us training. And that led me into this pathway thinking, how does this creative practice make a transformative change in how we understand environmental issues? So I decided to focus on that in my work, and I essentially started doing research on it and contacting brilliant artists. And I have to choose a few to tell you about because I can tell you about all of them, but that would take a long time.
The one that I'd really like to talk about is the work of Lily Hunter Green. She is an amazing artist, she's based in the UK, I think based in London. And she's been working with honeybees since about 2014, she started off doing a lot of beekeeping practices because she wanted to create a hive out of a piano. So she worked with the beekeeper to create a hive that was attached to the side of the piano, and then she made these amazing recordings of the different notes that bees are buzzing, and she started to learn all about the bees buzz in different notes. And those different notes apparently mean that they have certain moods, or they're doing some kind of particular job, so she was looking at the relationship between sound and bee culture, and led her into this term bee fever that's coming up. It sparked bee fever, and she created this amazing composition based on bees. As she explored her work further, she naturally came to thinking about decline and starting to think about what was happening in terms of the honeybees' vulnerabilities.
She's done quite a few works in bees now. The one I'm going to tell you about today is based on this initial work, and I can't remember the initial what was called, but the one that is based on it is called Silence and the Virus. So this project Silence and the Virus took this initial composition that Lily Hunter Green had made back in 2014 with the bees and that she'd used through various outlets, and took that into an installation space. When Lily got the public who came to see this installation, she got them to go into this room all wearing these bee suits, and they all had a piece of this music that she created, and it had violins in it as well, because she's a composer who plays the violin, and they each had that on a headphone attached to this bee suit. And they entered into the space together, and then the music started to slowly deteriorate in quality as they went near each other.
So there was one person who started this deterioration of quality as they moved towards other people, and this continued. And what she was trying to do, she was trying to draw attention Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, IAPV. And she was doing that through recreating the sense of being infected by this virus. This was done pre-pandemic originally, Lily does talk about that in different interviews and how that experience of being infected or being fearful from infection did come to resonate with people more strongly as the pandemic took over, and as that became something that we actually started to think about in our own lives. But prior to that, it was trying to draw attention to this experience in quite a novel way for most people. I think the way Lily does this reflects something that's urgent, it does reflect that sense of slow violence in lots of ways, because it's trying to draw attention to something which seems very cut off, or invisible from our own sense of urgency.
Things are happening within these hives that lots of people don't have a relationship to, and yet they're affected by.
But really, I think Lily's work is trying to help people embody that experience in a way that I don't think you get from learning about the facts. You don't have that emotional relationship in the same way- some people might be able to access that through words and through science, but a lot of people will be aided by that playfulness, that imaginative element that Lily seeks to achieve. And of course, for her, hope is really important as well. So people do have the chance to resist this breaking down of the music by learning to stay apart from each other, from essentially social distancing. And she talks about the fact that people need to have that sense of engaging with agency, and engaging with hope through experience in this particular installation experience.
Slow violence is really interesting. I think this is perhaps more explicitly explored in another work that I can tell you about, which is by a brilliant producer called Laura Rider, who produced a show around 2018. And she did a show all about two friends who one day find a wild bee, and they want to try and help save this bee, but they realize that the bee is in a park where there's no other flowers around, it's a kind of an ecological wasteland. And so they go through this process of discovering what it might be like to live in this world. They talk about living in a world where there's no food and what they would do, and they start to understand why they might want to care for this bee, so one of the friends helps the other friend to look after this bee with her, and they have experiences which are similar to the ones that bees are going through.
There's a scene where one of the characters gets her drink spiked at a party, and Laura told me that that's meant to reflect how bees are being essentially poisoned or certainly being infected in some way through digesting pesticides. So they go through this process of learning about the problems facing bees, and then at the end of it, again, they come to this narrative of hope by planting up an old roundabout in their hometown and they rewild it together. And they say, this is where we're going to make sure that bees have somewhere to come, and we're going to wild it just like we're going to go through the same process of discovering who we are and what we want to be, because they're meant to be two young characters in the show. I felt, when I talked to Laura, that she had been really inspired by this idea of slow violence because she was trying to draw attention to this long process of loss of habitat, as well as all these other factors.
Pesticide use, for example, had come to this point where a single bee could not find the flower that it needed, but actually that was a process that was happening over a long period of over a lifetime, because she represents her own lifetime through this play, over a lifetime of time, slowly that had been chipped away at and further and further. And she actually went on to do a play recently called All About Slow Violence, so she truly was a inspired to go on and explore that in in more ways through later works.
Separating the arts and the slow violence point, I do truly believe that bees are suffering through slow violence. There is a fantastic book by someone called Heather Swan, it's called Where Honeybees Thrive. And she was the one who drew my attention to the fact that we are seeing bees come to this urgent space, particularly honeybees, where we have this colony collapse disorder. But actually the processes were set in motion long ago, and people like [...], through their work on habitat loss, do really draw attention to that.
But also, people within the natural beekeeping community are saying, how have our beekeeping practices shifted to come to this point where this violence has become realized?
But actually, it's been stitched through all these myriad processes that have been ongoing for many years. Laura Rider's work does draw attention to the slow processes of violence that have come to a head, that have come to be realized in this particular time where we're starting to really treat many of these crises with a sense of urgency, because there's lots of species who go and whose losses go un-thought about, slip under the radar, every single day.
Kamea Chayne: We really appreciate these creative inspirations, because I think change really has to come at all levels and sometimes it's not enough to provide people with the facts and statistics, but we have to feel an embodied shift at a deeper level, and what really hits the chord for each person is going to be different. I really resonate with valuing the contributions of different artists in driving cultural and socio-ecological change. And on this note of also seeing other extinctions and species endangerment, one of the key questions you've raised as you explore the topic of the decline of bees is this question of, what renders a life and thus a death as seeming to matter, and why? The heart of most mainstream dialogues around the decline of bees has to do with honeybees, to be more specific. Even though as you share, they aren't necessarily as threatened as other native bees, solitary or sub-social bee species, but perhaps are better understood because they've been paid more attention to and more closely monitored.
How would you elaborate on what has elevated the cultural significance of honeybees, particularly to people in Europe and the United States and beyond? And what might we miss if we gloss over the peripheral stories of the numerous other species of bees and other pollinators that humans are unable to as intimately monitor, manage and relate to culturally?
Rosamund Portus: Honeybees are the only fully social bee insect, you have sub-social bees, such as some bumblebee species. The majority of bees are solitary species, including some other bumblebee species as well. So when I first came to bees, I came to them through honeybees. I talked about my anthropology dissertation for my undergraduate degree, and that was all about understanding how we perceived honeybee culture and how we made judgments about them based on this culture. And we named them through our human namings based on what we perceived about the way they interacted with each other, these terms such as queen bee and worker bee, for example, was what I was really interested in at that time. Really, the reason that we are so fascinated with them is because we have this level of interaction with them, which is debated into how much we've actually domesticated bees.
We have this level of interaction with them which is quite hard for us to comprehend. In some ways, we've tried to force our ideas of domestication on them, and at the same time, they retain this sense of wildness.
We're really fascinated by that. We're fascinated by the way in which they respond to us and the way in which we can share in that gift of honey, and at the same time, they're never truly species that are that we can command, and they retain that romanticism about them. They retain that capacity to swarm and to go up into the air, and to have these seemingly kind of magical, mystical processes to us of the queen bee becoming impregnated and being able to lay eggs for five years or so. And the way in which the worker bees respond to her and and dance with each other, all this stuff is is at the same time kind of fascinating to us.
We're in that really interesting space where because we've been able to have an interaction, that sort of sense of trying to domesticate with them. And because we have that quite commercial relationship with them through the production of honey and other substances, we are continuously entangled with them, and yet they retain that wildness. Normally you have that sense of an animal either being in domestic care, and being almost controlled, or attempted to be controlled by humans, or that they're completely wild. And honeybees bridge that gap, and because of that, we have these incredible stories and traditions around them. The tradition in European cultures of telling the bees about events that are really significant, and being scared that if we don't tell them when, for example, their beekeeper has died, that they'll fly away and they won't come back. So, yes, we've got that really imaginative possibility with bees at the same time as being able to work with them. And I think that's what's retained our particular intrigue with them.
To move on to your second point, that was about and what we miss if we're focusing on honeybees. It's interesting that you say that, because I think we do miss a lot by focusing on honeybees, and I do think that they do distract us. And that is partly because, again, of this very commercial relationship we have with them. But I also like to think of them as a bit of a gateway into thinking about other species. And once you have developed that interest in bees, which so many people do, which is so easy to develop, it slips you into going, what other species do they represent? You see these signs everywhere, which is saying, 'bee-friendly lawn', and you're going, oh great, it is a bee friendly lawn, but it's also friendly for loads of other species as well, and it's supporting that biodiversity, there's flowers, there's other insects.
For me, it feels like it could be that we are seeing a very limited view, and I do think that's true, but I do think it could be perceived positively as well in terms of what it allows people to explore further, particularly insect species are often seen as unloved, they're disregarded, they're very other to us. There's a fantastic quote about them giving a sickening crunch when we stamp on them, which probably resonates to a lot of people. And so I think bees being this kind of focus actually does allow us to go, oh, actually we don't want to stamp on insects because yes, they're different, but they're still very important to us like the bees are, and so it can be seen as positive as well. There are a lot of amazing people who are advocating that we understand much more about wild species. Bridget Strawbridge Howard is somebody who comes to mind, and she does a lot of work on how wonderful wild species are, and how the focus on honeybees means that we're prioritizing honeybee hives, and actually that's not good either. We need to make sure that we don't just save honeybees, or protect honeybees, and disregard of the other wild bee species that their presence might actually harm.
It is really important to recognize that, and I don't think a focus on honeybees singularly is good, but I do think it can be an interesting gateway into learning about insects and being inspired about insects.
I am going into a class of primary schoolchildren tomorrow, and I'm talking to them all about bees, and I'm going to start off with honeybees because they have that cultural intrigue. I'm going to move into thinking a little bit about bumblebees and other wild species, and we're going to finish off by thinking about all the other animals and all of the other species, flowers and plants and other insects that those bees protecting as bees actually allows us to protect as well. So you can see that kind of journey there from the exciting honeybees right through to, okay, what else is important? What else do bees represent when we talk about saving them? And what else do you want to save as part of that?
Saving [the bees] is obviously not something I advocate, because I don't think we save them, I think we just resist what we're already doing to them.
Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate this invitation to see honeybees as kind of a hook. And as you share this gateway into learning about everything else that is all entangled and a part of this collective planetary body that we all share. Well, a lot of this conversation and your work has looked at the role of storytelling in influencing our view and understanding of the more-than-human world. And one of the most outstanding conclusions that I picked up on is that you recognize extinction as a distinctly bio-cultural process, shaped as much by cultural values as it is by scientific fact.
I assume that speaks to the contributions of the arts and the humanities and the creative fields, but how would you expand on this invitation to see extinction as a bio-cultural process? And we've used that term bio-cultural across as various past episodes before, but what is that term referred to in this context?
Rosamund Portus: I understand bio-cultural to mean that mix of the very physical, the biological, and how that becomes entangled with the cultural. And when I think about cultural, I think about the human culture, but also in the context of bees, for example, how does it entangle with their culture?
How do we perceive that biological relationship between honeybees into culture, and how does that culture become entangled with our perception of them?
So it's a very messy term. I think bio and cultural probably could be expanded to social and political and physical as well, perhaps. But it encompasses that very entangled relationship between the biological processes and the messy entanglements of everything around that, that shapes how those biological processes are either supported or not supported. When I talk about it as a bio-cultural process, it is often within the context of art because in that thesis process, I was thinking through what art does in terms of engaging people with stories. As a first, that knowledge sharing process, but also going beyond that and going almost into a process of activity and action through showing people what they might do in terms of engaging through storytelling, that we develop that capacity to say, here's the knowledge, and here's somebody engaging with that knowledge through this story, or here's something happening to kind of shape that story.
Very often when we have a positive focus through that, I think that's really powerful for empowering people to say, actually, I can be part of that story and I can take that story into the real world and engage with it. When I talk about extinction as a bio-cultural process, what I'm seeing or what I'm talking about is the fact that there's lots of different species who are alive and who are working within a cultural entanglement which is shaping their capacity to either thrive or perhaps become endangered and go into decline.
There's some interesting work by Trey Barnett, who recently wrote a book in which he talks about the fact that people might remain alienated in the absence of practices which provide opportunities for people to engage with grief, particularly in the context of non-human species. So I see art as giving people a way to engage with that grief, and to engage with that emotional connection with the subject, but also to engage with a sense of agency over it.
There's also some really interesting work, its lead author is Kristen Mann, and the paper is called Transforming the Stories We Tell About Climate Change from Issue to Action. And they talk about the fact that it's through the stories we tell, through these kinds of fictional stories that we can show people taking action over the issue in alternative ways, beyond the typical ways, through consumer choice, for example, buying environmentally positive products, and actually gives them alternative ways so that they can follow a journey of positive and environmentally conscious behavior through their lives. And that once people engage with that one small action that seems environmentally positive, that will lead into this circle of satisfaction you get from it, it will lead to the cycle of them wanting to do more because they'll keep feeling positive about what they're doing, and so our choices and our values become shaped by our actions.
I see that art is a really important way into allowing people that choice—to start off with that little seed of, I'm going to take this step towards realizing my agency to create change and then follow that narrative through.
Coming back to extinction and coming back to the relationship between culture and creativity and extinction, that's where I see creativity is having that really strong influence on species' lives and the choices that we collectively make about how we're going to interact with the species, how we're going to see them, how we're going to respect them and care for them. That is shaped through the stories that we tell them, the stories that we tell about ourselves and about our own capacities as people.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Rosamund Portus: So I already mentioned this today in the podcast, and this was a super hard choice to make, but I would have to choose Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This book completely transformed how I saw the world. It's just opened my eyes to different knowledge systems and ways of understanding in a way that, despite the fact that I've studied anthropology for years, I hadn't really accessed before. And it taught me that my way of interacting with the world and seeing the world was channeled through particular frameworks of thinking that I'd been taught from a very young age. And I go back to this book time and time again when I am lost for inspiration, I don't know where I want to go with my writing, or I don't know where I can travel next in my thinking. I go back to Braiding Sweetgrass because everything she writes is, it's described on the front of the book as a 'hymn of love to the world'. And in a way, it's a hymn of love to everything that I find inspirational and I find fascinating, and I want to positively impact and contribute to through the writing and through the work that I do. It's just full of this this very sweet wisdom.
Kamea Chayne: What has been a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Rosamund Portus: I thought really hard about this and I'm going to be cheeky and say, I've got a motto and I've got a practice that I want to talk about. And just to carry on with Braiding Sweetgrass, just because I've already introduced it, one thing that really touched me about the book was the idea that all flourishing is mutual. Over the past two years particularly, I have come to really value my work as a teacher and as a lecturer, and I've got a lot of nourishment from that engagement with students. I felt that I've grown as a person from giving them that knowledge, but also that they have given me so much understanding about how we understand environmental crises and how we move forward in a positive way, and they've inspired me. And so when I was thinking about the motto that I take forward, it is the sense that when I flourish, my students flourish, but also when they flourish, I flourish as well. I feel that's really important, it's become really important to my work as a researcher as well.
And of course, it makes sense in terms of working with the nonhuman world and working with all these biological and cultural ongoings- it translates into everything we do. And all flourishing is mutual, and we cannot operate in isolation, and it's not sustainable to do so. I want to just mention the fact that in my practice, I have this this writing practice in this research, this academic practice, but I balance that out with my creative outlets. My painting is really important to me to calm my mind, but also I dance a lot as well. And I think having that creative outlet, that academic outlet and physical outlet married together in a way that really helps me feel that I can cope with anything, that I get through in my day-to-day challenges, it is a really beautiful balance for me. And that's how I keep grounded in the everyday.
Kamea Chayne: And finally, what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Rosamund Portus: I've already talked slightly about finding inspiration and my students, I think they actually are one of the biggest inspirations at the minute. There's so many wonderful people writing at the minute, people like Samantha Walton, who talks about beauty, Elin Kelsey in her book Hope Matters, and people like Britt Wray, who are drawing attention to these emotional experiences that we're having in these challenging spaces that we're going through. But actually, it's when I take these works and I say to students, have you heard about this work? And a student comes back to me, for example, the Elin Kelsey book Hope Matters, a student read that and she's just not stopped talking about it ever since. And it makes me go, actually, this is really worth paying attention to, we do need to pick up this work and we can take this really rich inspiration from it. So there is the research I do, and then it's when I take it out to these to students, and also to my colleagues as well, and you get that enthusiasm back, that's when I feel really inspired. And that's why I guess I said teaching has become so important to me over the last two years as a researcher.
Kamea Chayne: What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Rosamund Portus: A student asked me the other day how I stayed positive when I was talking about these really awful situations that are unfolding and that we're witnessing today. And I thought about this very carefully because, I was wondering, you know, how do I stay positive? And I realized that whenever I'm talking about something that brings this sense of despair, actually, I'm talking about people who have spoken up and who are going, actually, I don't want to give in to this despair, I want to rally against it. I want to do something about it, whether it's as a scientist, whether it's as an artist, whether it's as a writer. They want to talk about it and they want to stand up. That's what's the most powerful thing, standing up and talking about these things or creating some way of communicating about them.
This is why something like this podcast is so important, because it gives you the opportunity to reach out to those networks and to draw attention to them and to take positivity from each other and to kind of nourish each other through that process of doing so. And I realized that the reason I could stay positive, and I told this to the student, was because I had so much opportunity to feed off the positivity and the hope of others so that I could feel that there was pathways forward so I could feel that we are going to stand up in and challenge the unjust injustices that we are witnessing socially, ecologically, environmentally. So that's my concluding remark, is that we need to help each other and stay connected and be present in the sense of collective care. Thank you.
