#9. Perhaps it's time for a collective slowdown
Cultural re-wiring in the time of pandemic - and an online community session on Food Not Lawns tomorrow!
I’m back!
I’m coming back to my letters at this time, when the situation is prompting the retreat into personal space and the restlessness that comes with less interaction.
After 2020, the world will look back at a time pre-covid, and post. And we’re now in the long year of during or meanwhile—when we learn how much we can change and how fast.
In the past 6-9 months, I feel like we’ve come to the edge of the black hole with climate-talk, and covid tipped us into the little gully that’s the event horizon - the point of no return.
It’s a distressing time of social upheaval. It feels like apocalypse, yet it’s not exactly what we thought it would look like (which makes it stranger). I’m sure we’re at the start of many more points of downturn, and we’ll have to find new rhythms within more segmented, inter-acting online video-conferencing solidarity and offline solitariness. Or offline too-much-family-to-handle.
Still, I find it very freeing to be able to pin down the source of uncomfortable emotions, locate them, and start to breathe around them. So maybe it’s time to bring #breathwork back.
While we’re thinking mostly about COVID-19 and anxieties of hand-washing, I’m trying to keep perspective about the other risks people face, and which are being exacerbated by this virus:
Farmworkers are facing an onslaught of risks, and the coronavirus only compounds that
Gig economy food system workers are now first responders—should they be receiving more insurance and support?
Domestic violence is rising around the world as people are locked into their “households”. This retreat into mostly heteronormative, familial spaces… is troublesome for many, but lethal for many more. And for women and carers who have to bear care, most of all.
And what about things that came before COVID-19: … the climate crisis and the Anthropocene? That hasn’t disappeared, surely? After a stock-taking-radio-silent couple of weeks, I’ve started hearing from friends and seeing familiar feeds popping up in my inbox again, so I’m glad to see that no, it hasn’t:
Grimes’ latest album, Miss Anthropocene, which I was listening to in the early phase of covid-19 (as it was crossing over to the US), is an ambient interlude that feels like a direct intervention from pop music into climate and environment, but brings the little devil into our self-serving hopes of purity and goodness. Also, her radio for babies is now airing (I’ll let you discover it yourself!).
Emily Atkin from HEATED interviews Bill McKibben on her new 6-episode podcast series, and Twitter on what oil companies are doing in the time of covid (from HEATED, which is great angry-reading)
Meanwhile, what can we learn about the food supply chain’s resilience from the COVID-19 situation? Fears of disruption, hoarding and strategies for the supply chain to reduce risk…? I feel a need to unpack what security means, used alongside other words bouncing around (in Singapore’s new pre-election budget packages)—like solidarity and resilience.
I’ve been at sea for the past 8-11 months about how I think about data, public research and collective knowledge production. I’ve been thinking about this post by Nadia Eghbal.
But I’ve also had some new updates in life, one of which will see me going back to research.
Mostly, I’ve felt overwhelmed by the amount of material coming out on food and farming, from all over, by all stakeholders including private and government groups. Agtech and agri-tech companies emerged from the woodwork—and carbon emissions kept rising. In Singapore, it felt like things were at a stalemate at least on climate.
But now, with the coronavirus hitting food systems (thank you Erin for the link!), open data, public research and intentional choices about the media we want to spread into our spheres of influence are more important than ever.
Open data
“When you don’t understand something, you panic. You have fear. When you gain an understanding, you don’t fear something as much — you know how it’s going to operate,” Mesecar said. “By sharing that information faster ... both research as well as what’s happening on the ground with individuals, I’m hoping that panic and that fear are going to go down.”
Writing in January, I’d felt as if there’s been a great deal of uncertainty, delays, slow going the past 9 months, in my personal life.
Of course, by end Jan it was clear that things in Wuhan were bad, and by mid Feb this feeling had reached Singapore: that things were not so simple.
Open data was really important at that time: and the pace of change with the Wuhan virus demonstrates that.
And yet, is all open data equal? Singapore is launching the TraceTogether app, and making this freely available to developers. What are the implications of technological platforms made with the resources of the state, for the public? An independent check suggests the state’s claims of project being open-source and usable by other developers can’t be verified, because the actual code isn’t publicly available.
(Erin Cook from Dari Mulut ke Mulut also has a great collection on this topic!)
What alternative ways of knowledge building and transmission do we have?
Collective narrative building
Through collective research and study, more and more groups are building open toolboxes for use by different communities.
Hong Kong land sovereignty research group Liber Research 本土研究; For Chinese readers, one of their researchers, Johnny Lau, has written about Hong Kong’s rice policy
COVID-times call for quick response and all hands on deck: including open access documents on changes to the food system, reporting globally, like this editable and edible document by Vanessa Garcia Polanco
A database of sustainable building materials (still in progress), but if you are an architect, you’d be interested to take their survey here
Alternative food system ideas, running Wednesday evenings, online, and the first tomorrow is with Vivian Lee, on “Food Not Lawns” — you can sign up here.
A collective note-taking about the coronavirus by Pirate Care, which others can join
Closer to home: Submissions to develop a polyphonic essay about life now - by Daryl Li
Citizens’ workgroups
And then there’re these. Are they part of the collective work too?
Citizens’ workgroup by the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources: to pick your brains on how best to make other locals eat locally-grown produce (me: by building connection!!)
As for what I’m doing… I’m wrapping up some work I have really enjoyed and been proud to do with VSStory, and taking a break. Over the next few weeks, I hope to share more about a fundraising launch for a magazine, a soil-building movement, and a zine mini-writings call — so keep a look out!
So, even though I’ve kept this letter quite small in reach till now, I’m ready for it to reach further. Please share this post with any others you know you’d be interested: the further it goes, the wider a group of people we gather.
Foreclosed futures—no longer
At some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed. When, in the 1970s, the Sex Pistols sang “There is no future,” there was at least a confrontational relish to it. Now there’s just dread.
~From an op-ed in the New York Times on 24th Jan — before things really changed.
Who was to know that in the next weeks, the world would live in 14 day cycles waiting with bating breath for symptoms? What was different and fearful to many, including being extra-careful with oneself and others in public transport—what was already daily life for others—became the norm. Finally able-bodied people had to see life from a different perspective.
So there’s more to be optimistic about. If we actually knew what it takes, and where we ought to go, would we feel the same amount of anxiety? Perhaps we’d start by planting trees, for instance, and knowing where:
Location also matters: Trees planted in Germany do not have the same carbon-fighting capacity as trees planted in the tropics, where they grow more rapidly and therefore capture more carbon. While new forests in high latitudes can cause the Earth’s surface to grow darker and absorb more heat, forests in the tropics are frequently covered by clouds that reflect sunlight and cool the planet.
What did you think about this week’s post? I’ve made this comment-able, so you can now leave comments here, or reply directly to me.