interrelational ecology salon

Kyong Park

Speaker

Imagining Eurasia

kyong’s bio

Arlene Correa Valencia

Speaker

arlene’s bio

October 2023

THE INTERRELATIONAL ECOLOGY SALON CONDEMNS 75 YEARS OF SETTLER COLONIAL VIOLENCE, AND GENOCIDE AGAINST THE INDIGENOUS INHABITANTS OF PALESTINE. WE DEEPLY MOURN THE ONGOING LOSS OF LIFE AND FAMILIES IN GAZA.

Acknowledging the interrelation of all beings, we understand the centrality of Palestine - an active example of settler colonialism in the 21st century - as a necessary site of liberation for all oppressed peoples and interspecies habitats on our planet. We acknowledge human genocide and ecocide as often employed tools within present and historical processes of Euroamerican settler colonization. We center the connection of these processes of settler expansion in Israel and the United States with present day (illegal) US drilling in the artic and ongoing refusal to grant Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Alaskan or continental Native American sovereignty, and many more both within and beyond the reach of the United States of America.

We acknowledge the silencing and complicity of Western universities, cultural institutions and cultural workers in concert with corporate owned media and governments, historically and today, during this tragically unfolding act of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

We refuse the false discourse and imperial equations which claim that it should be the indigenous peoples of Palestine who pay the price for the European holocaust. We demand that all of the above institutions examine their own anti-brown and anti-jewish racism in equal measure. We acknowledge Palestine to be one of many nations and territories suffering from these experiences of silence and injustice today. We acknowledge Sudan, the Phillipines, Peruvian indigenous peoples fighting for their rainforests and many, many more as in need of our concern, attention, priviledge and voices.

As artists concerned with sustainability and environmental futures, we condemn 75 years of greenwashing and environmental harm by the military state of Israel. We condemn the ongoing proliferation of illegal Israeli settlements in the fertile agricultural lands of the West Bank and constant use of environmental terrorism against Palestinian farmers.

We urge international communities to continue to voice opposition to both the genocide and the daily ecocide occurring from Israel’s illegal apartheid wall (700 km/ 400 miles in length), understanding the wall’s devastation to pollinators and animal communities, long term separation of animal and human families, and mass destruction of indigenous Palestinian plant and tree life.

We urge international communities to acknowledge the harms of chemical weapons of war like white phosphorus, not only to people, but to soil and earth. We deeply mourn the victims of the nuclear bombs laid into Gaza - more than the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined - in less than three weeks in 2023.

We know that contextualizing the genocide, erasure and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples does not come easy to the beneficiaries of settler colonialism in colonies including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel; nor the decendants of the original colonizers in Western Europe.

Yet it remains deeply important to resist the normalization of settler colonialism and its far reaching effects against the earth. The rate of murder of indigenous environmental activists is the highest murder rate of all activists on planet earth. For the oppressed of every species, there is no “living in peace” under settler colonialism. So we refuse the criminalization of indigenous resistance. We imagine and insist on colonial reparations, indigenous right of return and responsibility taking for 500 years of European colonial harm to the planet. From here in Turtle Island, and the stolen lands of the Lenape people and their relations, we both mourn and rejoice in the environmental, abolitionist, anti-gentrification, anti-racist, and indigenous activists the world over, working together for a free Palestine.

________________

“With the arrival of slavery comes a repurposing of the land, chopping down of trees, disrupting water systems and other ecological systems that comes with supporting the effort to build a capitalist society and to provide resources for the privileged, using the bodies of black people to facilitate that.

The same thing in terms of the disruption and the stealing of indigenous land. There was a taking of land, not just for expansion, but to search for gold, to take down mountains and extract fossil fuels out of mountains. All of that is connected, and I don’t know how people don’t see the connection between the extraction and how black and indigenous people suffered as a result of that and continue to suffer, because all of those decisions were made along that historical continuum, all those decisions also came with Jim Crow. They came with literally doing everything necessary to control and squash black people from having any kind of power.

You need to understand the economics. If you understand that, then you know that climate change is the child of all that destruction, of all of that extraction, of all of those decisions that were made and how those ended up, not just in terms of our freedom and taking away freedom from black people, but hurting us along the way.”

Elizabeth Yeampierre, PBS News Hour
and 2020 speaker at Interrelational Ecology Salon

“Certainly in graduate school and beyond it was the culture of enterprise that mattered, what we were taught would determine our success in life.... No one mentioned black farmers at Stanford University in my classes. Everywhere I journeyed the world of environmental activism was characterized by racial and class apartheid. “

bell hooks,
Belonging: a culture of Place

Congratulations to our co-founder Terike Haapoja on her 2022 Guggenheim award! Wonderful work on animal labor and Marxism.

lecture series
spring/ fall 2020 ︎online:

we are pleased to announce our fall 2020 speakers!

please scroll below for more info.

12.12.2020

saturday, 1 pm Eastern Time
10 am, Pacific Time

to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com

Kyong will speak with us on re-imagining nation state borders within his research exhibition “Imagining Eurasia”.

Kyong’s new book Imagining Eurasia: Visualizing a Continential History (2020)

Dec 5, 2020

saturday, 1 pm Eastern Time
10 am, Pacific Time

Artist and activist Arleene Correa Valencia will discus the ethical, political and aesthetic
strategies she has adopted in her practice to expose the effects that our current socio-political and ecological climate have on undocumented and agricultural labor
communities in the Napa Valley.

to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com

Che Gosset

Speaker

Abolitionist Enchantment: Black Trans Art and the Afterlife of Slavery

Oct 3, 2020

saturday, 12 noon EST

to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com

This talk examines Black trans visual art and cinema and how Black trans artists trouble the politics of visibility. Taking Saidiya Hartman’s argument that the afterlife of slavery is an ‘aesthetic problem’ as their point of departure, Gossett suggests that Black trans artists and aesthetics demonstrate a disenchantment with an antiblack politics of representation and instead think abolition as an aesthetics of existence. Gossett further argues that these artists and aesthetics resist visibility—capture—through ‘critical fabulation’ and speculation. In resisting visibility, they also refuse to disappear.

to register please email
interrelationalecoloy
[at] gmail [dot] com

che’s bio

Sammy Kayed

Speaker

participatory approaches to socio-environmental issues,
Beirut, Lebanon

sammy’s bio

Sept 12, 2020

saturday, 12 noon EST

My talk will first introduce Lebanon’s sociopolitical climate, our spectrum of environmental threats, perpetuation of socio-environmental issues enabled by heavy reliance on a foreign aid model, seemingly inevitable privatization, and the public state of mind toward the environment. I will describe how I see Lebanon as a forerunner of what many communities will soon face and how the country can act as a ‘sandbox’ for alternative development models. I will discuss how we approach community led solution creation at AUB-NCC and the Environment Academy in this difficult context. This will be followed by discussion on the physical environmental impacts of the August 4th Blast, the heartwarming and disturbing faces of the ad-hoc response, the sense of helplessness that the Beirut Blast seemingly made official, the enabling environment for blame passing, and the mass exodus to rural areas that the blast exacerbated. I will end on how we can maybe harness crisis and organic drivers to create a renewed vision of what Lebanon can become with horizontal and participatory approaches toward making that vision come true.

to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com

Aug 20

We are thinking of our loved ones in the Bay area, California, sending our love and prayers for the end of these fires. As we reflect on the evacuation and displacement of those we love, we think of interspecies communities dispossed by settler colonialism and environmental racism over the ages, all over the world.

Reflecting also thousands of years of indigeous wisdom and fire tending forest practices: “Indigenous farmers always carried flints ... they burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entice greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

coyote in san franciso, march 2020

Aug 6

The Interrelational Ecology Salon would like to express our deepest sympathies and condolences to Beirut. We understand Tuesday's explosion to be the latest in a long series of injustices suffered by the Lebanese people. We call on imperial/ neoliberal powers, past and present, and their beneficiaries, to make reparations to the people of Lebanon, divorced from colonial constructs of “charity”.

We understand this catastrophe to have far reaching impact on the interspecies communities surrounding the port; the trees, land, sea, water, sea creatures, land creatures, air, climate and neighboring countries, the scale of these effects presently indeterminate.

If you can, please support relief efforts here.

May 2

Elizabeth Yeampierre

Speaker

what this time is demanding of us

A few weeks into quarantine, we were joined by attorney, internationally celebrated climate justice leader, indigenous and Puerto Rican intergenerational community organizer, and director of UPROSE for climate justice, Sunset Park Brooklyn. Of her upcoming talk she wrote:

"I would like to talk about what this moment means within the context of Climate Justice and a Just Transition.

What is expected of us and whether we really can go beyond our historical social conditioning to build the just relationships this time is demanding of us.”

Please see this brilliant letter by Elizabeth “#500not50 years of Earth Day”.

elizabeth’s bio

April 10

Nicolas Mirzoeff

Speaker

Palestine, whiteness and Jewishness within the frame of climate catastrophe

NYU professor of media and culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff will be discussing land, Palestine, whiteness and Jewishness within the frame of climate catastrophe.

nicholas’ bio

March 7th

Reading Group

Racial Capitalocene
by Françoise Vergès

text:

“Racial Capitalocene: is the anthropocene racial?”

from the book Futures of Black Marxism
edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson
and Alex Lubin
Verso, 2017

Françoise Verges bio

December 7

Terike Haapoja

Speaker

The Museum of NonHumanity

terike’s bio

Artist Terike Haapoja will discuss the project Museum of Nonhumanity by Gustafsson&Haapoja that investigates mechanics of animalization. Museum of Nonhumanity is a touring museum installation that approaches animalization as a nexus that connects xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, and the abuse of nature and other animals.
As an temporary, utopian institution Museum of Nonhumanity stands as a monument to the call to make animalization history.

INTERRELATIONAL ECOLOGICAL NEWS FEED

Energy Democracy and the Green New Deal

These Obscure Races May Decide the Future of Climate Change

Fracking: The Unexpected Issue That Could Determine the 2020 Election

INTERRELATIONAL
ECOLOGICAL
NEWS FEED