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1000 results for “art_pup”
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walnut colored eyes
quiet steps on soft brown pads
puppy seduction#dailyhaikuprompt - walnut
ART
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/dancing-daisies-green-and-blue-dog-paw-art-sharon-cummings.html#dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon #dogpaws #puppy #puppies #colorful #colorfulart #art #artwork #doglove #doglover #doglovers #puppylove #woof #cute #fun #animallovers #flower #flowers #floral #botanical #buyintoart #homedecor #daisy #daisies #blue
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Dancing Daisies Dog Paw! Woof! We adopted a new puppy dog recently...Feeling inspired!
ART
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/dancing-daisies-blue-and-pink-dog-paw-art-sharon-cummings.html#dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon #dogpaws #puppy #puppies #colorful #colorfulart #art #artwork #doglove #doglover #doglovers #puppylove #woof #cute #fun #animallovers #flower #flowers #floral #botanical #buyintoart #homedecor #daisy #daisies #blue
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Colorful Happy Dog!
ART
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/colorful-happy-dog-art-sharon-cummings.html#art #artwork #dog #dogs #dogart #dogartists #petportrait #dogmom #dogdad #doggies #pup #pups #puppy #puppies #puppylove #pitbulls #colorful #colorfulart #cute #fun #mastoart #fediart #SharonCummingsArt #
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Thank you to all for the birthday wishes
I painted a selfie of Uber ride to the Park with pups made on birthday. 11x14"(27.5x35cm) on canvas 2023
#paintedselfie #paintedselfportrait #paintedselfies #iggies #italiangreyhounds #carrides #greys #blues #abstracts #abstractedfigurative #abstractart #deruy -
Grotesque Trump Pumpkin Caricature: Satirical Timelapse Painting 🎨🎃 (Weird Cartoon Art Style)
Links: https://linktr.ee/officialericcrooks
ABOUT ERICA CROOKS:
Erica Crooks is a multi-talent independent artist. (puppetry, cartoons, indie film)
Intro to Erica Crooks video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2JBEjxSNuU#caricature #art #artist #satire #ericacrooks #characterdesign #cartoonart
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HEY! Do you know what day it is today? Funny cartoon animation by Erica Crooks
A wild 3-second short cartoon animation inspired by 1990s animation styles like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life.
For more weird animation, cartoon art and even satirical puppetry comedy from Erica Crooks, visit: https://linktr.ee/officialericcrooks ( socials, Patreon and store ).
#animation #cartoon #comedy #ericacrooks #animated #funny #humor #cartoons #funnycartoons #trippyanimation #weirdcore #weird
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Erin Watches: non-Marathon movie roundup
I’ve seen a range of movies recently-ish that were not part of the Sci-Fi Marathon. Gonna knock out a whole bunch of mini-reviews in one post.
Conclave
Political thriller about the election of a new Pope, based on a book published in 2016 when that was reasonably topical. (Pope Francis was elected in 2013.)
The book was better!
I read it a while ago (well, listened to the audiobook), so the details are fuzzy, but I remember getting a lot more depth and intrigue out of the main character’s POV in the narration than what we see on-screen. I also remember finding it believable/convincing which character gets voted in as Pope in the end, while in the movie it just felt like “he gave one super-generic inspirational speech and suddenly everyone changed their minds.”
The reason I read it in the first place was, it came up in a recs thread for “media with canon [identity] characters.” Happy to say it held up fine, even if you were pre-spoiled for that reveal.
Spellbound
CGI animated movie about a princess who goes on a quest to de-curse her parents.
The opening is really strong. Our heroine starts into what sounds like a typical, stock, Disney-princess I Want song, only to cut to “my parents are monsters, like, actual monsters, for real.”
There was some point in this movie, I don’t even remember what the specific moment was, just that I had the clear thought of “oh, this is a Story About Divorce,” Anything that didn’t really make sense in the context of this specific plot/characters/setup, it was because it was there to be A Lesson for the real kids in the audience dealing with divorced/divorcing parents.
Biggest example: there’s A Lesson about “kids, it’s okay to acknowledge that you have bad feelings, what matters is how you deal with them.” Halfway through the movie, our heroine sets herself up to learn this lesson, when she announces “oh, I don’t have any bad feelings.”
Except…she’s already expressed and recognized a bunch of bad feelings? In a pretty healthy, open way? She sings about being frustrated with her monster-parents’ behavior, and sad that she’s lost the happy, peaceful life they had before. The inciting incident of the quest is when she reaches out to some trusted adults, explains her situation, and asks for help! (The adults in question: two magic forest oracles, who are basically a couple of gay married Jewish grandpas.)
When the oracles come to visit, they’re even surprised to find the parents are literally monsters, and our heroine wasn’t just “being a dramatic teenager” when she said so. Really seems like this should be the setup for A Lesson about “kids, sometimes adults won’t acknowledge that you have legitimate bad feelings about real problems, here’s how to deal with that.” But no.
The movie’s cute, it just felt like was put together from scenes that were developed at different times for different visions of what the final product was supposed to be, and they didn’t mesh well enough.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Adult Lydia gets reunited with Beetlejuice at just the right time to disrupt her famous ghost-hunting TV show…but also to disrupt her impending marriage to a publicity-seeking creep, help rescue her exasperated teen daughter from an attempted ghost-kidnapping, and generally cause a bunch of fun chaos.
I got into Beetlejuice as a kid watching the early-nineties cartoon version, where Lydia is a cute weird goth kid and the title character is her wacky supernatural bestie…
…so the original movie was pretty off-putting to watch in comparison. Had a good time with this one, though? Not sure if the sequel was really more fun and less sleazy, or if my threshold for being bothered by sleaze is just higher these days.
I’m glad they made it. Some of the proposed BJ sequels over the years have just sounded like dumb gimmicks (apparently “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” was on the table at one point), but this story felt worth telling. And they kept the low-tech practical aesthetic of the original, lots of puppets and claymation rather than CGI, which was a good choice.
Inside Out 2
Riley hits puberty, which means she’s unlocked new emotions! Especially Anxiety. One of the emotional morals here is “planning for bad things is useful to a point, but trying to anticipate every possible bad thing will just give you anxiety attacks.”
The other emotional moral is “repressing the experiences you don’t want to think about will stop you from being your authentic self.” One of the new bonus figures we meet in the depths of Riley’s head is her Deep Dark Secret, which ducks back into the shadows rather than revealing itself. She spends most of the movie desperately trying to impress a Cool Older Girl, a high-school hockey star who happens to be extremely attractive.
I’m not surprised that Disney executives kept giving Pixar editorial notes about “this is coming off as too gay, fix it,” but I am disappointed. Cowards.
Belle
Very-loose anime adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Our heroine hasn’t been able to sing IRL since her mother’s death, but when she realizes she can handle singing through her VR avatar in a virtual online community, she accidentally becomes the biggest pop star in the metaverse. Also, makes friends with a monstrous VR avatar (who turns out to be a sad boy with an abusive parent IRL).
The soundtrack in this is amazing. Including the English-dubbed versions of the vocal tracks. Not long after watching, I went and legally purchased the OST, and have not regretted it.
The art is nice, especially in the lovely VR world. And the plot is…a perfectly serviceable excuse to deliver the soundtrack.
There’s a scene where Belle on her virtual stage encourages her audience to sing in chorus, and they do: characters who are spread out in separate physical places all around the world, coming together online. At least some of the production happened during COVID lockdowns, so it turns out the voice actors in that scene also had to record all their parts alone in separate physical places, and the sound editors brought them together. That must’ve felt so fulfilling.
Venom: The Last Dance
Everyone who said “the parts with Eddie and Venom having wacky road-trip adventures were fun, the rest of it was bad” was correct.
I had heard complaints about “the writers did Knull dirty, he’s such a good cool villain in the comics and they wasted him in this movie.” Didn’t have any attachment to the comics version, so I was prepared for Knull to be fine, just not the perfect-adaptation curb-stomping megaboss his fans were hoping for. And…nope! Judging solely by the contents of the film on its own merits, the writers did Knull dirty, he’s wasted in this movie.
Final note:
Other than Conclave, which involves an all-male religious order being sequestered away from the entire rest of the world, all these movies pass the Bechdel test! Most of them easily, you don’t even have to think about it! Venom was the only one that struggled (all the others have girls/women as main characters), and even there it managed to have multiple women as scientists, who exchanged some lines at work that weren’t about Venom/Eddie.
It was so refreshing to look back over the post and realize that.
#Beetlejuice #Conclave #Disney #InsideOut #Marvel #Spellbound #Venom
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A new handmade original watercolor doberman dog painting, about a precious moment between Aspen the mom, and Boston the puppy sleeping together. 🎨
Thank you dear Christina for your custom order, for asking me to paint about their special bond! ❤🐾 Dora
Find in my Dog Paintings Collection
https://dora-hathazimendes.pixels.com/collections/dog+paintings
:artpaw:
#MastoArt #watercolours #artist
#watercolor #dogart #artwork #handmade #dogpaintings
#art #petportrait #doberman #dobermanpinscher #dobermann #dobermanpuppy #dobermans -
[Art Fight 2025]
Sometimes when you play your favorite sandbox mining game, it's best not to question what you encounter in the mines...Characters by Puppybutch and Sam_Handwich.
#Art #ArtFight #AF2025 #TeamFossils #PanchamBroDraws #Minecraft #Creeper #SamHandwich #Puppybutch -
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Waigeo Cuscus Spilocuscus papuensis
Waigeo Cuscus Spilocuscus papuensis
Vulnerable
Extant
West Papua (Waigeo Island)
Cryptic and solitary marsupials, Waigeo Cuscuses cling to tree canopies on a Waigeo Island, West Papua. They are classified as vulnerable on IUCN Red List due to palm oil deforestation and mining on the tiny island where they live. Help them each time you shop and be #vegan, #Boycottpalmoil and #Boycott4Wildlife
Cryptic and solitary #marsupials, Waigeo #cuscus 🐒 cling to tree canopies on Waigeo Island #WestPapua, they are vulnerable from #palmoil 🌴🪔🩸💀⛔️ #deforestation. Help them and go #vegan and #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://palmoildetectives.com/2023/07/09/waigeo-cuscus-spilocuscus-papuensis/
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterPocket sized cuties 🧸😻🩷 Waigeo #Cuscus are #vulnerable due to #palmoil #deforestation on a tiny island in #WestPapua. Fight for their survival, go #vegan 🥦🍅 and #Boycottpalmoil 🌴🪔🔥🧐🏂🙈🚫 #Boycott4Wildlife each time you shop https://palmoildetectives.com/2023/07/09/waigeo-cuscus-spilocuscus-papuensis/ via @palmoildetect
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterBehaviour & Appearance
Waigeo Cuscus, also known as the Waigeou Spotted Cuscus are cryptic and solitary marsupials of the family Phalangeridae. Not much is known about their ecology and behaviour and more research is needed in this area.
Waigeo Cuscus like other cuscus species have a strong prehensile tail that allows them to swing and hang in tree canopies.
Different cuscus species have eyes of varying colours. Waigeo Cuscuses have amber or orange eyes with have vertical pupils, similar to a cats or reptiles. This allows cuscuses to have superior night time vision. Like other cuscus, Waigeo Cuscuses have long nails to help with grip on tree branches and for grooming.
Geographical range
They are restricted to a small islet off the coast of the West Papua province called Waigeo Island. They prefer to live in primary or secondary tropical forests.
Threats
Their isolated and small geographic location makes their existence fragile and threatened by increased palm oil deforestation and mining in Waigeo Island, which is now taking place. An increase in hunting, mining and palm oil deforestation on the island would have a disastrous impact on this species.
Waigeo Cuscuses are classified as Vulnerable on IUCN Red List as they face many human-related threats including:
- Palm oil deforestation: Concessions for palm oil have been sold which invade into the Waigeo Cuscus’ range. They are limited to the small island and so any reduction in georgraphic range for palm oil will have disastrous consequences for them.
- Hunting and human persecution: These cuscus are hunted for their meat and fur.
- Mining: Mining concessions on Waigeo Island have been sold and this limits the geographic range of the Waigeo Cuscus across the small island.
Support the conservation of this species
This animal has no protections in place. Read about other forgotten species here. Create art to support this forgotten animal or raise awareness about them by sharing this post and using the #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife hashtags on social media. Also you can boycott palm oil in the supermarket.
Further Information
Helgen, K., Aplin, K. & Dickman, C. 2016. Spilocuscus papuensis. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T20638A21949972. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-2.RLTS.T20638A21949972.en. Accessed on 16 November 2022.
How can I help the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Take Action in Five Ways
1. Join the #Boycott4Wildlife on social media and subscribe to stay in the loop: Share posts from this website to your own network on Twitter, Mastadon, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube using the hashtags #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
Join 3,172 other subscribers2. Contribute stories: Academics, conservationists, scientists, indigenous rights advocates and animal rights advocates working to expose the corruption of the palm oil industry or to save animals can contribute stories to the website.
Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Anthropologist and Author Dr Sophie Chao
Health Physician Dr Evan Allen
The World’s Most Loved Cup: A Social, Ethical & Environmental History of Coffee by Aviary Doert
How do we stop the world’s ecosystems from going into a death spiral? A #SteadyState Economy
3. Supermarket sleuthing: Next time you’re in the supermarket, take photos of products containing palm oil. Share these to social media along with the hashtags to call out the greenwashing and ecocide of the brands who use palm oil. You can also take photos of palm oil free products and congratulate brands when they go palm oil free.
https://twitter.com/CuriousApe4/status/1526136783557529600?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillDixon1/status/1749010345555788144?s=20
https://twitter.com/mugabe139/status/1678027567977078784?s=20
4. Take to the streets: Get in touch with Palm Oil Detectives to find out more.
5. Donate: Make a one-off or monthly donation to Palm Oil Detectives as a way of saying thank you and to help pay for ongoing running costs of the website and social media campaigns. Donate here
Pledge your support#Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #bushmeat #cuscus #cuscuses #deforestation #ForgottenAnimals #hunting #Indonesia #Mammal #Marsupial #marsupials #mining #PalmOil #palmOilDeforestation #palmoil #PapuaNewGuineaSpeciesEndangeredByPalmOilDeforestation #possum #possums #vegan #vulnerable #VulnerableSpecies #WaigeoCuscusSpilocuscusPapuensis #WestPapua #WestPapua
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Cop rescues hot dog, baby tree kangaroo and red panda, dog art show, and more.
https://cutetropolis.com/2024/07/22/links-hot-dog-stand-up-guy/
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Brazilian three-banded armadillo Tolypeutes tricinctus
Brazilian three-banded armadillo Tolypeutes tricinctus
Vulnerable
Extant (resident): Brazil: Minas Gerais, Bahia, Alagoas, Sergipe, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte, Goiás, Tocantins, Piauí, Paraíba, Ceará, Maranhão.
The Brazilian three-banded #armadillo Tolypeutes tricinctus, known as “tatu-bola” in Portuguese, is a rare and unique species native to #Brazil. With the ability to roll into a near-impenetrable ball, this endearing behaviour has made them an icon of conservation efforts. They are found in the dry forests and savannahs of Brazil, particularly in the #Cerrado and Caatinga biomes. These fascinating armoured creatures are Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List due to agricultural expansion for #palmoil, #soy and #meat. Fragmentation of their ecosystem is ongoing for infrastructure projects and #goldmining. With their population in sharp decline, efforts to protect their habitats are essential for their survival. Help them every time you shop and adopt a #vegan diet, and #BoycottPalmOil #BoycottGold #Boycott4Wildlife on social media!
Resilient Brazilian three-banded #armadillos are fascinating real-life #pokemon of #SouthAmerica. They’re vulnerable from #palmoil meat and soy #deforestation in #Brazil. Resist their #extinction! Be #vegan #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://wp.me/pcFhgU-8R9
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterBrazilian three-banded #armadillos are the adorable armoured tanks of #Brazil’s #Cerrado who can curl into an armoured ball. They are #vulnerable from #deforestation. Help them survive by being #vegan and #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://wp.me/pcFhgU-8R9
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterAppearance & Behaviour
- The word “armadillo” means “little armoured one” in Spanish.
- They are known as ‘kwaráu’ in the now extinct Huamoé language and ˈkʌ̨́ñíkį̀ in the Kambiwá language of Brazil.
- Brazilian three-banded armadillos have a good nose and can smell termites and ants through up to 20 cm of soil.
- Their loose armour creates a layer of air, helping them to regulate their temperature in harsh climates.
- They are one of only two armadillo species that can roll into a tight ball.
Brazilian three-banded armadillos are easily recognised by their distinctive armour, which is composed of bony plates known as scutes. These scutes, covered in keratinised skin, form a protective shell around the animal’s body, allowing them to roll into a tight ball when threatened. This unique defence mechanism makes them virtually immune to most natural predators in the wild – except for humans. Their compact body length of 22 to 27 cm and a weight of about 1 to 1.6 kg makes it easy for them to navigate in the forest.
Their distinctive sharp claws and elongated snouts are perfectly adapted for foraging for ants and termites. Although primarily solitary, they sometimes travel in small family groups. They keep their noses to the ground sniffing out insects and move in a deliberate cautious way. Unlike other burrowing armadillos they prefer to hide in bushes for shelter and camouflage.
Threats
Deforestation for palm oil, soy and meat agriculture
Forest and grassland destruction for soy, palm oil, sugar cane and meat plantations is a serious threat. This has drastically reduced the Brazilian three-banded armadillo’s range in the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes.
Human encroachment for infrastructure projects
The Brazilian three-banded armadillo is impervious to many natural threats in their environment. However, infrastructure projects, roads, housing have become a significant threat to their survival.
Illegal hunting
Brazilian three-banded armadillos are hunted for their skins and meat.
Conservation
Conservation efforts for the Brazilian three-banded armadillo are indirect and focused on habitat protection rather than direct intervention. Protected areas within the Cerrado and Caatinga offer some refuge for the species. Yet large portions of their habitat remains at risk for deforestation.
Habitat
Resilient and tough, this armadillo has adapted over millions of years to thrive in harsh landscapes of poor rainfall and poor soil. Brazilian three-banded armadillos are found primarily in the northeastern regions of Brazil, inhabiting the open savannahs of the Cerrado and the dry woodlands of the Caatinga.
Diet
Brazilian three-banded armadillos are primarily insectivores, relying heavily on ants and termites as their main food source. Sharp claws allow them to dig into insect nests, and they use their long, sticky tongues to collect the prey. Occasionally they supplement their diet with molluscs, worms, fruit, and carrion.
Mating and breeding
The breeding season occurs between October and January. After a gestation period of approximately 120 days, females give birth to a single pup. Newborns are born blind, and their armour remains soft and pliable in the first weeks of life. A young armadillo’s shell hardens by week four. By this time they will be capable of protective rolling into a ball and walking. They are weaned by 10 weeks of age and reach reproductive maturity between 9 and 12 months.
Support Brazilian Three-Banded Armadillos by going vegan and boycotting palm oil in the supermarket, it’s the #Boycott4Wildlife
Support the conservation of this species
This animal has no protections in place. Read about other forgotten species here. Create art to support this forgotten animal or raise awareness about them by sharing this post and using the #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife hashtags on social media. Also you can boycott palm oil in the supermarket.
Further Information
Miranda, F., Moraes-Barros, N., Superina, M., & Abba, A. M. (2014). Tolypeutes tricinctus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2014: e.T21975A47443455. https://doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2014-1.RLTS.T21975A47443455.en
Wikipedia Contributors. (n.d.). Brazilian three-banded armadillo. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved September 16, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_three-banded_armadillo
Animalia. (n.d.). Brazilian Three-Banded Armadillo. Retrieved from https://animalia.bio/brazilian-three-banded-armadillo
How can I help the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Take Action in Five Ways
1. Join the #Boycott4Wildlife on social media and subscribe to stay in the loop: Share posts from this website to your own network on Twitter, Mastadon, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube using the hashtags #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
Join 1,390 other subscribers2. Contribute stories: Academics, conservationists, scientists, indigenous rights advocates and animal rights advocates working to expose the corruption of the palm oil industry or to save animals can contribute stories to the website.
Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Anthropologist and Author Dr Sophie Chao
Health Physician Dr Evan Allen
The World’s Most Loved Cup: A Social, Ethical & Environmental History of Coffee by Aviary Doert
How do we stop the world’s ecosystems from going into a death spiral? A #SteadyState Economy
3. Supermarket sleuthing: Next time you’re in the supermarket, take photos of products containing palm oil. Share these to social media along with the hashtags to call out the greenwashing and ecocide of the brands who use palm oil. You can also take photos of palm oil free products and congratulate brands when they go palm oil free.
https://twitter.com/CuriousApe4/status/1526136783557529600?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillDixon1/status/1749010345555788144?s=20
https://twitter.com/mugabe139/status/1678027567977078784?s=20
4. Take to the streets: Get in touch with Palm Oil Detectives to find out more.
5. Donate: Make a one-off or monthly donation to Palm Oil Detectives as a way of saying thank you and to help pay for ongoing running costs of the website and social media campaigns. Donate here
Pledge your supportLearn about other animals endangered by palm oil and other agriculture
Global South America S.E. Asia India Africa West Papua & PNGBrazilian three-banded armadillo Tolypeutes tricinctus
Sumatran Tiger Panthera tigris sondaica
Bateleur Eagle Terathopius ecaudatus
Borneo Forest Dragon Gonocephalus bornensis
Orange-breasted Falcon Falco deiroleucus
Sunda Clouded Leopard Neofelis diardi
Learn about “sustainable” palm oil greenwashing
Read more about RSPO greenwashing
Lying Fake labels Indigenous Land-grabbing Human rights abuses Deforestation Human health hazardsA 2019 World Health Organisation (WHO) report into the palm oil industry and RSPO finds extensive greenwashing of palm oil deforestation and the murder of endangered animals (i.e. biodiversity loss)
Read more#animals #armadillo #armadillos #Bantrophyhunting #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottGold #BoycottPalmOil #Brazil #BrazilianThreeBandedArmadilloTolypeutesTricinctus #Cerrado #deforestation #extinction #ForgottenAnimals #goldMining #goldmining #hunting #meat #meatAgriculture #meatAndSoyDeforestationInBrazil #meatDeforestation_ #PalmOil #palmOilDeforestation #palmoil #poachers #poaching #pokemon #SouthAmericaSpeciesEndangeredByPalmOilDeforestation #SouthAmerica #soy #soyDeforestation #vegan #vulnerable #VulnerableSpecies
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Hi! I'm Amelia, or Blues Drive Amelia. I've been an active fediverse user for ~3 years now but I deleted all my accounts a few months back and now I'm starting over. Here's a short lil blob about me:
Cotton candy robot puppy. Magical girlfailure. Digital princess, existent only on the internet. The cutest girl to ever exist. Mentally ill. Hikikomori. Doomed by the narrative.
I also have a website where you can learn more about me but I'll recap the basics.
- I'm passionate about art. Anime in particular but also live-action TV shows, movies, video games, music, and a little manga. I like media with an emphasis on artistic direction. I value artistry a lot and try to engage with art deliberately. I like themes of philosophy, politics, and psychology. I also like writing with a lot of suffering. Especially cute girls suffering.
- My most favorite shit: FLCL, The World Ends With You, Pluto (Manga), Land of the Lustrous, and Legend of the Galactic Heroes. | Some of my favorite music artists: The Pillows, Jamie Paige, and The Weeknd | Creatives I like: Rie Matsumoto, Naoki Urasawa, Hirohiko Araki, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Masaaki Yuasa | My favorite media master list
- I enjoy writing. Mainly reviews, my thoughts on things, my life, all that. I don't have much motivation to do it these days so fedi tends to be my outlet when I'm in the mood to write my thoughts on something.
- I'm politically minded and a socialist.
- I love cute stuff! Kawaii, yume kawaii, magical girl, jirai kei... I also love just looking at cute anime girl art.
- I have a persona / self-insert OC, AM-BOT! I get commissions of her sometimes which I'll post here. I also occasionally stream on Twitch as a vtuber.
You can expect posts related to all the above, plenty of me being sad, a bit of me being horny, generally the full extent of the individual I am. Hope to build up some cool mutuals again :neobot_heart_cyan: #introductions #introduction #intros #robotgirl #robot #puppygirl #anime #weeb #otaku #kawaii #hikikomori -
The Rule of the Strap: the thread about the peculiar corporal punishment of Scottish education
On April 2nd 1982, Lothian Region Council implemented a ban on corporal punishment in its schools, making it the first Scottish authority to do so. Some other regions were less enlightened however and would hold on to the practice until a UK-wide ban came into force in 1987. In Scotland, corporal punishment in schools almost universally meant hitting the upturned palms of children with an official instrument that is variously called the belt, the strap, the tawse or the Lochgelly. So what is this device, why and how did it evolve, how did it meet its end? (and, importantly for this sites locale of interest, what part did Edinburgh have to play?)
The maker’s stamp of a Lochgelly tawse. Photo © SelfTawis or tawes is a Scots word going back to the 16th century and was a plural for a leather belt or strap. This word in turn came from the Middle English tawe, for leather tanned so as to keep it supple. A strap or belt across the palms or buttocks was long the favoured instrument of corporal punishment in Scottish education. In the mid-19th century illustration below we see the schoolmaster (Dominie) flicking his leather strap towards the upturned palms of his fearful-looking victim; the boy behind is rubbing his already leathered hands to try and soothe them.
“The Dominie Functions”, George Harvey, mid-19th c. © The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum via ArtUKIn 1848, George Mckarsie sued Archibald Dickson, schoolmaster of Auchtermuchty parish, for assaulting his son without provocation with a tawse “severely on the head, face and arms to the effusion of his blood and to the loss, injury and damage of the pursuer“. £200 in damages were sought and although the court found in the pursuer’s favour he was awarded only a shilling and had to pay all expenses of the defender! English education in contrast favoured birch rods or canes for classroom punishment and so where Scottish education was influenced by English practice (e.g. in Roman Catholic schools, or preparatory schools modelled after the English system) these devices could also be found in use in Scotland. They were also the form of judicial corporal punishment of minors in Scotland; the belt or strap was somewhat unique to the education setting.
A schoolmaster preparing to dispense classroom justice with his cane. 1870 engraving.In 1860 the master of a private boarding School in Eastbourne, Thomas Hopley, shocked the Victorian world when he beat a 15 year old pupil, Reginald Cancellor, to death with a skipping rope and walking stick as the boy “refused to learn“. Hopley administered the “severe corporal punishment” with the full permission of the boy’s father to try and force him to learn. Reginald had been written off as unteachable and an imbecile; he was quite probably suffering from hydrocephaly and undiagnosed learning difficulties. In the subsequent trial that was sensationalised by the press, Hopley was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison. In summing up however, Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn stated that parents or schoolmasters were legally authorised to administer “moderate and reasonable corporal punishment” for the purpose of “correcting what is evil in the child“. As a result, the death of Reginald Cancellor became a test case for defending the use of educational corporal punishment. It also also set the Victorian educational establishment thinking about how it could formalise and legitimise the practice, rather than leave it to the individual devices of potentially sociopathic teachers
Ne’er wield the tawse, when a gloom will dae the trick
Scottish proverb, from “The dominie : a profile of the Scottish headmaster ” by William F. HendrieNorth of the border, in 1872 the Education (Scotland) Act had made education mandatory for all between the ages of five and thirteen, putting it largely under the control of city, burgh and parish School Boards. These bodies could issue their own regulations on the use of corporal punishment and it was in the Fife town of Lochgelly where the ultimate instrument of Scottish school discipline would appear around the year 1884. Saddler Robert Philp made a pair of tawse to his own design for his son and daughter, pupil teachers1 at the East Public School in the parish. His creation was split into a pair of thongs at the “punishment end” and was both stiff enough to stand up straight but flexible enough to swoosh through the air and make a good contact with the target, ideally wrapping around the hand to cause maximum effect. He rounded off the edges of the leather and used no stitching in order that his instrument would leave no permanent scars.
A two-thonged Lochgelly-pattern Tawse. The punched hole was for hanging it on a wall (in full view of a class).It is hard to the modern mind to imagine, but this was genuinely felt by the establishment to be a more humane and progressive form of discipline than the rod or cane. But the tawse was no soft option; Albert Morris wrote in the Scotsman that it “stung like a serpent and bit like an adder“, literary historian David Daiches saying “I was astonished at the amount of real pain inflicted and the length of time it lasted“.
- Pupil Teachers were part of the Madras system of Education widely in use in Scotland at the time; older (teenage) students would stay on at school beyond 13 to assist the schoolmaster in educating their very large classes of mixed ages. They were allowed to inflict corporal punishment on their charges. ↩︎
When other teachers saw the custom tawse used by Catherine and David Philp, they soon wanted their own, and their father started taking orders. The leather for the Tawse came from Edinburgh, it was specially “dry tanned” to prevent cracking but remain both stiff and flexible. And so it was that 102 Main Street in Lochgelly became the birthplace of a profitable and unlikely Fife industry in the manufacture of devices with which to hurt children.
102 Main Street, LochgellyRobert’s son, Robert W., was apprenticed to his father and the firm became Robert Philp & Son. The latter would continue the business when his father died in 1926. There were imitators such as Brownlee of Bathgate or Campbell of Renfrewshire, but the Philp’s had much of the market and Lochgelly became a common name for all education tawse in Scotland. When Robert W. Philp died, the business was bought over by its senior journeyman leatherworker, James Heggie, who continued to trade under the established name. He kept a stock of 300 in the shop in Lochgelly of single, double and triple-thonged types in a variety of weights and lengths, suitable for both male and female teachers and for belting children of all ages with progressively stronger effects with age.
Tawse stamped with the mark of R. Philp & Son, Makers, Lochgelly.When Heggie retired in 1948 he sold the business to an established local saddlery and ironmongery firm, G. W. Dick & Son, who had been producing their own Lochgellies since 1942. George W. Dick (who was married to a cousin of Jimmy Shand) concentrated the tawse business at his shop at 150 Main Street, Lochgelly. His son, John J. Dick, in turn bought him out when he retired in 1950. The “miniature school straps” listed at the bottom of the page are something one of the Dicks had produced for a child as a toy for playing schools and which had caught on. Teachers bought them for their children as a plaything; one imagines they were meant to beat their teddies. They were also popular retirement trinkets for teachers, something to remember the good old days.
John J. Dick price list for Tawse from 1971By this time, Lochgelly was reckoned to account for probably 70% of all tawse production in Scotland. An exception to its dominance was in Glasgow, where the school authorities were particularly strict around its use and mandated the locally made, triple-thong Black Straps of lighter weight, thinner, black leather (which is softer than that used by the Lochgelly). Many teachers used the genuine item regardless of these regulations.
J. G. Stevenson manufacturer’s stamp on a Glasgow “black strap”.But regardless of where the strap was made or if it was black or brown, the tawse was “the dominie’s rod of office“, indeed the ubiquity of its use may well be the origin of the phrase “getting leathered“. The education system believed firmness of discipline equated to the quality of teaching. Wherever the Scottish education system influenced those of the colonies and dominions, orders would be sent back to Lochgelly for its tool of classroom discipline. The tawsemakers took out adverts in teaching journals and sent their salesmen to the education colleges to take orders. James Heggie would get orders of 20 or more at a time whenever a new school opened. Junior teachers were encouraged by their seniors to give children the belt as soon as they could so that the class knew they meant business and to earn the respect of both children and parents. Some new teachers didn’t want to be marked out as a rookie with a shiny new tawse and so wrote into the wanted section of the newspapers asking to buy a visibly well worn second hand one, as did R. McKinnon to the Sunday Post in September 1965
In use the tawse was held over the shoulder and rapidly flicked forwards. Teachers were encouraged to practice on a piece of chalk on the desk – a successful strike got a puff of white dust. This became a trick of many experienced hands to try and scare children into compliance. But while judicial corporal punishment was abolished in 1948 with the authorities recognising it just didn’t work as a deterrent, the educational establishment hung on doggedly to their legal right to apply it to children right down to the age of 4 as they saw fit. As a result, business remained good in Lochgelly, indeed in 1974 John J. Dick moved his premises to Cowdenbeath to concentrate on the tawse and updated the process by investing in a metric cutting press and a blocking machine with a heated stamp. When suitably heavyweight leather from cattle hides began to decline as a result of changing farm practices, Dicks started using Buffalo Butts instead to meet demand, which is actually horse leather.
Support for corporal punishment in education was publicly and officially high, but was certainly not universal. However, it was hard to speak up in an educational and political establishment that did not readily tolerate dissenting voices. But as early as 1931, Moderate councillor for George Square in Edinburgh, Charles Mackenzie, tried to have it banned by the city Education Committee. He said education “should not be thrashed in” and noted a school nicknamed “the butcher’s shop” on account of the strength of beatings. He was voted down 14-3 by the rest of the committee, with former teachers and a church minister who sat on it speaking up firmly in favour of the practice and to “uphold teachers’ rights“.
In 1959, the Edinburgh Education Committee issued restrictive rules for corporal punishment in children’s homes – it could only be inflicted by a matron, house-mother or house-father, men could not punish girls, there could be no more than 3 strokes to each hand and only by the tawse. By the 1960s, a new generation of post-war born, progressively-minded teachers was coming into the system with new ideas. Dissent slowly began to grow within the teaching establishment and there was a recognition that there were alternatives to trying to simply beat children into compliance or knowledge into them. But while the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS, the principal teachers’ union) accepted change was inevitable regarding corporal punishment in schools, it took something of a “circle the wagons” approach that it was up to the profession alone to regulate it and not the authorities.
In Edinburgh in 1970 it was reported some schools strapped any child who was late more than three times. Education Committee chairman Councillor Malcolm Knox fretted this might make children run across the road but his Progressive party colleague Councillor Cornelius Waugh defended the idea, otherwise it might “open the door to malingerers“. In February 1972, a relatively new member on the Committee, Councillor George Foulkes (that’s Baron Foulkes of Cumnock these days) tried to have a ban on corporal punishment instituted in primary and special schools – and severe restrictions put on its use in secondary schools – but was voted down. The local EIS branch was having none of this challenge; they “deplored the fact that the committee had adopted the anti-corporal punishment resolution without first consulting teachers“. Its position was steadfast that it was the teachers and teachers alone who “were the sole judges” of when conditions had been achieved for any forms of restriction. One parent wrote into the Scotsman in response with the astute observation that teachers had never consulted parents over their right to belt children.
“Edinburgh EIS want strap kept meantime”. Scotsman – Tuesday 14 March 1972The following month, Foulkes instead had the committee agree to explore options as to how to achieve the phasing-out of corporal punishment in the city’s schools. Bailie John Bateman (a senior Progressive councillor) criticised Foulkes and those in his party who motivated his position as “a few young hotheads with a bee on their bonnets“. But others on the Progressive side, including former committee chairman Malcolm Knox, supported him. By November 1972 the Corporation of Edinburgh was under control of a Labour administration for the first time and the Education Committee passed a vote by 16-9 which compelled headteachers to keep a log of all occasions on which children were belted in the city’s schools. The EIS – described in the Scotsman as “the body most vehemently opposed” to this idea – and four other teaching unions (the Association of Head Teachers, Scottish Schoolmasters Association, Diploma College Education Association and Scottish Secondary Teachers Association) sent unsuccessful deputations against it. A year later, November 1973, the Education Committee finally took a vote on abolition of corporal punishment. The EIS threatened to take legal action, stating that 98% of its membership supported it and that a ban would result in children attacking each other with broken bottles and stones in the playground. Eric Thompson, “a teacher of 20 years” wrote to the papers to state that such a ban would “result in anarchy in many of our schools“. Faced with such challenges, Foulkes replied “as long as I am receiving complaints from parents of terrorisation by teachers in the classroom I think this is an excellent reason for getting rid of corporal punishment“.
Despite the vocal nature of the official opposition, on November 19th, the Committee voted by the slim margin of 14-13 to progressively ban corporal punishment. From 1974 it was to be banned from Primary 1-4; in Primary 5-7 from 1975; in Secondary 4-6 in 1975-6 and Secondary 1-3 in 1976-77. But this ban never materialised. Why was that? Between 1974-75, the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 abolished the old Corporation of the City of Edinburgh and split its powers and functions between the new Lothian Regional Council and Edinburgh District Council. Education went to the much larger body of Lothian Regional Council, which also included what is now Mid, West and East Lothian, and Edinburgh’s recent unilateral ban fell by the wayside.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/peteredin/2426922759
But the ball against corporal punishment in schools had started to roll and despite this setback it began to gather pace. In 1976 Grace Campbell, whose son attended St. Matthew’s in Bishopbriggs and Jane Cosans, whose son attended Beath High in Fife, lodged an action in the European Court of Human Rights against the British government, objecting to its use on the grounds that it was against parental human rights to go against their wishes for their children not to receive corporal punishment. (Jeffrey Cosans had been told to receive punishment with the tawse for taking a short-cut home from school through a cemetery but with his parents’ approval had been told to refuse to accept it. The school excluded him on this basis and aged just 15, he never returned to education) Although this case however would not begin to progress within the ECHR until 1980 and would not start hearing until late 1981, it was followed closely and assumptions began to be made based on the likely outcome. Returning to 1977, George Foulkes – by now Chairman of Lothian Region’s Education Committee – was “flabbergasted” to find out the tawse was being used in the Region’s special schools. “I find this barbaric, abhorrent and amazing” he said and ordered the Region’s Director of Education to assure him it would cease henceforth. The response was that the Director did not know if he had the legal powers to prevent its use and so a 17-member working group was established to evaluate options.
The working group, supported (and in part, driven) by organisations such as the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties and STOPP (Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment), commissioned the first thorough survey on the use of the tawse in schools, based on the logging that had been instituted in Edinburgh way back in 1973. While it was found that some primary schools were not using it at all (around 10 in Lothian had informally given it up), it also reported that only 1 in 20 boys could expect to get through their schooling without receiving the tawse and that it was disproportionately used against boys as opposed to girls. But there was one, perhaps unlikely, secondary school which was bucking the trend – Craigroyston. This was a former junior secondary which the council had repeatedly threatened to close and whose pupils came from some of the most deprived housing schemes in the city. Under an enlightened, reformist headteacher, Hugh Mackenzie, the school had seen a 95% decline in the use of corporal punishment during the study period. Mackenzie was determined to steer his school away from authoritarianism and to an institution for simply maintaining discipline until children could be kicked out the door into one that would instead give hope and respect to children otherwise labelled by the system as failures.
Hugh Mackenzie, from his autobiography “Craigroyston Days, 1972-93”Mackenzie had relaxed policies on uniform, realising his students came from families who could ill afford it.He was careful tried to include and build consensus with both his staff and his students when it came to policy-making and literally “threw open the front door” to the latter; previously they had not been allowed to use it. In August 1980, he put it to the staff that they should withdraw the use of the tawse completely, for 1 session, on a trial basis. The staff debated the idea and supported their head. At the end of the trial, it was the staff themselves who raised the motion to ban it completely. And so it was in August 1981 that Craigroyston High formally voted to ban the use of Corporal Punishment within its walls, the first in Scotland to do so. It is notable that this ban came from within the teaching establishment itself, showing how much things had changed.
Craigroyston Community High School, 2009, prior to demolition of the old buildings. CC-by-SA 2.0 Denna JonesOver in the west of the country, Strathclyde Regional Council was being rather less enlightened. In 1980 it took Margaret Mcguire to court over as 13-year old son Danny had not been at school for 14 months since refusing to accept the Black Strap. The boy had been caught playing tig in a corridor and had been sent to the headmaster for punishment; when he refused to accept this he was sent home. His parents supported him in this refusal and asked the school to withdraw the punishment; when this in turn was refused, the school excluded him until such time as he would submit to the belting. The first court case fell apart when it was found that it was Danny’s father (and not mother) who had initially supported him in his act of defiance and therefore the wrong parent was in court. It then failed on appeal when Lord Emslie was ruled that it was the school which had excluded the boy, rather than his parents refusing to ensure he attended. This was something of a watershed as it effectively removed the unchallengeable right of the local authority to apply the corporal punishment against parental wishes.
On January 20th 1982, Lothian Regional Council took the bold step and voted to abolish corporal punishment in all its schools – the first local authority in Scotland or the UK to do so. The vote was put forward by Labour Councillor John Mulvey and went through despite opposition from the Conservative grouping and the EIS. Henry Philip, chairman of the regional branch, said “young people would roam the streets” if it was banned, that teachers would not accept it and that they would take the Region to court. The case of Campbell and Cosans vs. The United Kingdom at the ECHR in Strasbourg would make its landmark ruling 5 days later that it was against parental human rights for the authorities to apply corporal punishment to a child against their wishes. Lothian’s ban came into effect on April 2nd 1982. Strathclyde had voted in favour of a ban around the same time, but this did not come into effect until August. Conservative Councillor Leonard Turpie said the “decision would haunt the council for years to come.”
In anticipation of the ECHR judgement Scottish Secretary George Younger had issued advice (but not an order) that all Regions should consult on the phasing out corporal punishment in the 1983-4 teaching session. The previous year, Younger had rejected a move to ban corporal punishment on children with special needs when confronted with the example of an eleven year old boy with one hand who was to be given “six of the best” on each palm but instead received the whole punishment on his sole hand and that of an eight year old girl strapped on a hand that had suffered a recent finger amputation. In the face of Younger’s refusal to take a hard line on the issue, some of the Regional Councils set a course of defying the Scottish Secretary. In 1983, Grampian voted against banning corporal punishment in its schools. In January 1984, Borders did likewise, against the recommendations of its own Education Committee. David Steel MP, leader of the Liberal Party, wrote to Younger in February to ask him if he would overrule the hold-out authorities by introducing legislation. When he declined to do so, Tayside Regional Council sensed weakness and reversed their previous decision to ban the belt. Tom Daveney, Rector of Monifieth High, said “phasing-out corporal punishment without adequate safeguards could jeopardise freedom to teach and learn“, a prime example of the entrenched position of many in the teaching profession which equated education and physical discipline.
The demolition of Tayside House, Tayside Regional Council’s HQ, in 2013. CC-0 LaerolGrampian Region now joined the pile-on. Their Education Vice Convenor, Conservative Harry Sim, said he was “quite convinced that [corporal punishment is] the wish of the majority of the parents“. But his Region also let it be known they might consider changing their position if more money was made available to them; George Younger declined, unsurprisingly. The dominoes continued to tumble in the face Younger; Western Isles reversed their decision to ban the belt in secondary schools in June 1984 after representations from the EIS and retained a limited use policy instead. Faced with such defiance, in July Younger finally declared that a partial ban would be introduced, in line with what Borders, Tayside and Grampian wanted. By January 1985, all except those hold-out authorities and Western Isles had moved to introduce a voluntary phase-out. In September that year, the Labour grouping in Grampian attempted to force a ban through. At this time the belt was still in use in about half the secondary schools in the area, but the council voted by a resounding 26-6 vote against any change to the status quo.
Down in Westminster, in an attempt to comply with the letter but perhaps not the spirit of the ECHR judgement, the Conservative Government had moved to bring in a bill for a partial ban for all of UK state-sector education, but one complete with various opt-outs. Labour and the Liberal Alliance refused to support this, or anything other than a full ban. Despite the hold outs of some Scottish local authorities and parts of the teaching establishment, on July 1st 1986 the matter was resolved by Westminster – by a single vote – with the introduction of a complete ban in all (state) schools on corporal punishment. This came into effect in August 1987.
But that wasn’t quite the end of our story, or the tawse. These devices were still in demand for domestic use and in private schools (where corporal punishment was allowed until 1998 in England, 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in Northern Ireland). There was also a substantial adult market and kink magazines carried adverts such as this:
Advert for Lochgelly and Glasgow straps, “Wildfire Catalogue”.The tawse has also spawned a whole sub-genre of lascivious of fiction, including the fictionalised memoirs of a Miss Mary Mackenzie, “Mistress in a Scottish Girl’s Corrective Institution“.
“The Rule of the Strap by Mary Mackenzie”In 1986, a rather embarrassed cobbler on St. Stephen Street in Stockbridge – Wladyk Borak – admitted to the reporter of the Scotland on Sunday that the tawse he was making and selling in his shop had a dedicated following; “people use them privately, to chastise… each other“
Wladyk Borak’s tawse for sale, Scotland on Sunday – 10th November 1996In an odd finale to our story, in 2000 the daughter of the late John J. Dick, tawsemaker of Lochgelly, returned to the family craft of leatherworking and now once again makes Lochgelly tawse for sale in Fife. Again, for the appreciation of curious and consenting adults only…
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The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite
It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.
Childe Hassam – The Island GardenYet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.
We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.
Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.
II. The Portable Climate
Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.
Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.
This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.
The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.
There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.
And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.
III. The Geometry of the Plantation
If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.
The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.
Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.
But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.
The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.
Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.
IV. The World Interior of Capital
The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.
Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.
This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.
Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.
The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.
V. The Monoculture of the Sky
We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.
This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.
The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.
This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.
VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch
If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.
The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.
In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.
The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”
This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.
We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.
Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.
VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed
The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.
Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.
The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.
In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.
#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing
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The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite
It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.
Childe Hassam – The Island GardenYet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.
We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.
Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.
II. The Portable Climate
Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.
Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.
This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.
The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.
There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.
And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.
III. The Geometry of the Plantation
If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.
The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.
Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.
But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.
The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.
Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.
IV. The World Interior of Capital
The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.
Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.
This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.
Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.
The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.
V. The Monoculture of the Sky
We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.
This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.
The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.
This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.
VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch
If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.
The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.
In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.
The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”
This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.
We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.
Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.
VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed
The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.
Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.
The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.
In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.
#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing
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The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite
It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.
Childe Hassam – The Island GardenYet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.
We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.
Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.
II. The Portable Climate
Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.
Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.
This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.
The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.
There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.
And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.
III. The Geometry of the Plantation
If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.
The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.
Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.
But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.
The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.
Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.
IV. The World Interior of Capital
The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.
Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.
This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.
Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.
The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.
V. The Monoculture of the Sky
We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.
This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.
The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.
This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.
VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch
If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.
The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.
In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.
The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”
This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.
We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.
Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.
VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed
The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.
Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.
The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.
In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.
#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing
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The Kernel and the Ark
I. The Wall and the Infinite
It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.
Childe Hassam – The Island GardenYet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.
We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.
Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.
II. The Portable Climate
Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.
Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.
This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.
The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.
There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.
And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.
III. The Geometry of the Plantation
If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.
The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.
Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.
But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.
The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.
Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.
IV. The World Interior of Capital
The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.
Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.
This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.
Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.
The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.
V. The Monoculture of the Sky
We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.
This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.
The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.
This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.
VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch
If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.
The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.
In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.
The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”
This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.
We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.
Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.
VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed
The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.
Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.
The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.
In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.
#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing
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🚨 Breaking news: A library in Boston, full of dusty books and giant puppets, has managed to stay in the dark ages! Meanwhile, the cutting-edge tech team behind their website has mastered the art of displaying "403 Forbidden" with unparalleled efficiency. 🎭📚✨
https://binj.news/2026/05/06/the-boston-library-where-you-still-can-borrow-a-giant-puppet/ #BostonLibrary #DustyBooks #GiantPuppets #TechTeam #403Forbidden #HackerNews #ngated -
Abuela's Song of the Day (May 12)
AXN - ON MY WAY https://youtu.be/NaNswPWwKxg
cw: flashing, lens flares, water glareThe chaotic mess of art supplies all over feels so real. 😆 And aww, what a cute pupper!
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“Don’t waste our future”: Pupils and celebrity artist hit back at fly-tippers with bold mural in Neath Port Talbot
The striking new mural, splashed across a corrugated wall near Ysgol Melin, features piercing green eyes and a bilingual warning: “No fly tipping — don’t waste our future.” It’s bold, it’s angry, and it’s built from the ideas of Year 5 pupils who’ve had enough of rubbish dumped in their streets.
A Ysgol Melin pupil helps paint the mural during a hands‑on workshop led by Welsh portrait artist Nathan Wyburn.Nathan Wyburn begins transforming the wall with a bold green base coat before adding the mural’s dramatic portrait.Artist Nathan Wyburn talks pupils through the mural’s design, inspired by their own sketches and anti‑litter messages.Artist Nathan Wyburn adds finishing touches to the mural as dumped furniture highlights the impact of fly‑tipping.Nathan Wyburn, known for creating portraits out of Marmite, glitter and even burnt toast — and for appearing on Britain’s Got Talent — led the project after a hands-on workshop with the children and Neath Port Talbot Council. The kids didn’t just paint — they helped design the whole thing, from the message to the mood.
Discarded furniture and waste were piled in front of the mural during the unveiling, hammering home the point: this is what fly-tipping looks like, and this is what it does to communities.
Ysgol Melin pupils join artist Nathan Wyburn in front of their anti‑fly‑tipping mural, surrounded by dumped items collected from the area.Cllr Scott Jones, Cabinet Member for Streetscene, said:
“We’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made in Neath Port Talbot. This year alone we achieved a 26% reduction in fly-tipping incidents – one of the largest decreases across all Welsh local authorities.”
Benjamin Meredith-Davies from Fly-tipping Action Wales added:
The finished mural features piercing green eyes and a bilingual warning against fly‑tipping, created with ideas from Ysgol Melin pupils.“This mural is more than artwork — it’s a call to action. These kids care deeply about their community, and they’ve used art to spark real conversations about waste and respect.”
The mural is part of a wider push to clean up Wales and crack down on illegal dumping. But it’s also a reminder that the next generation isn’t waiting quietly — they’re picking up paint rollers and making noise.
More arts and community stories
Swansea-born artist named one of UK’s most inspiring small businesses
Local creative talent recognised on a national stage.Mumbles arts and crafts business expands with new premises
Popular creative shop grows after securing a micro-loan.Former JT Morgan store reborn as creative hub
Historic Swansea building transformed into a new space for makers and artists.Local children envision Port Talbot’s future in vivid new murals
#Art #CllrScottJones #FlyTippingActionWales #flytipping #mural #NathanWyburn #Neath #NeathPortTalbotCouncil #YsgolMelin
Young artists help brighten their community with bold, imaginative artwork. -
Pilvi Ojala, ‘Ghosts’, 2024
Etching
#art #puppets #weird
Via: https://www.instagram.com/pilvi.ojala/ -
Thinking about an old story this morning. Many years ago my mother Beryl Solla taught art at Barry University in Florida. The professor of puppets passed and there was a large funeral in their honor. The students changed their puppets to look sad and wear black and paraded in. The room was mostly silent and somber but my mom and another art professor found this incredibly funny and could not keep it together at all. #puppets #BarryUniversity
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“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”*…
Claude Monet, Caricature of Léon Manchon, 1858.… Still, there are bills to be paid. Mathilde Montpetit (and here) on how the young Claude Monet made bank…
At the age of fifteen, Claude Monet was, by his own account, one of the most successful artists in Le Havre. Crowds would gather in the Norman port city to gawk at the pictures he sold through a framing shop: not paintings of haystacks or of the sea or water lilies, but slightly cruel caricatures of local bigwigs and minor celebrities. He had already learned to commercialize, charging his customers 20 francs (around 200€ in today’s money). “If I had continued”, he claimed to an interviewer in Le Temps almost fifty years later, “I would have been a millionaire.”
Spurred by profits, the young Monet was productive, creating up to seven or eight of these caricatures a day; a small collection of them is now held at the Art Institute of Chicago, most donated by the former mayor Carter Harrison IV (1860–1953). The French art historian Rodolphe Walter has claimed that his caricatures constituted a “clandestine apprenticeship”, the first attempts by a son of Le Havre’s bourgeois shipbuilders to make his way in the art world.
The earliest are anonymous: the identities of The Man in the Small Hat or The Man with the Big Cigar are now lost, although the framing shop devotees may well have been able to name them. Some of the works are imitations, like the 1859 drawing of the French journalist August Vacquerie (1819–1895) that Monet seems to have copied from Nadar (1820–1910), probably the period’s most famous caricaturist.
Monet’s own 1858 caricature of Léon Manchon, the treasurer of Le Havre’s Société des amis des arts, captures his subject’s appearance but also, in the background, both his love of the arts and his work as a notary. Most fantastical is the 1858 caricature of Jules Didier (1831–1914), which shows the 1857 winner of the Prix de Rome as a “Butterfly Man” being led on a leash by a dog. Monet scholars remain divided as to the symbolic meaning of the iconography, though more obviously derisive is the drawing of a dejected fellow applicant to an 1858 Le Havre art subsidy, Henri Cassinelli. Monet has captioned it “Rufus Croutinelli”: a slightly forced pun on “croute”, meaning a daub of paint. Monet didn’t receive the subsidy either.
Sixty-year-old Monet’s claims about how he could have made his young fortune probably had more to do with his later difficulties in selling Impressionism than the actual fortunes to be made in portraits-charge, but it was the roughly 2,000 francs (20,000€) from selling these caricatures that allowed him to, against his father’s wishes, move to Paris and begin training as an artist. (He also received a pension from his wealthy aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, with whom he had been living since his mother’s death in 1857.)
Perhaps it helped him in other ways as well. In the Le Temps interview, Monet claimed that it was while admiring his admirers at the framing shop window that he first encountered the work of his mentor Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), whose paintings were also hung there. Boudin would later take him en plein air for the first time. Perhaps, too, there’s something in the quickness of the caricature that speaks to what Impressionism would become — a desire to capture not just the literal appearance of a thing, but its true essence…
“Doing Impressions: Monet’s Early Caricatures (ca. late 1850s)” from @mathildegm.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Re: the other end of Monet’s career, readers in (or visiting) the Bay Area might appreciate “Monet and Venice,” over a hundred works– mostly the fruits of Monet’s only visit to the City of Canals, but spiced with Venetian views from artists including Renoir, Sargent, and Canaletto– on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 26.
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we cherish cartoons, we might might send pointedly-insightful birthday greetings to Peter Fluck; he was born on this date in 1941. An artist, caricaturist, and puppeteer, he was half of the partnership known as Luck and Flaw (with Roger Law), creators of the epochal British satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image.
The show ran from 1984 through 1996. (It was revived, with a different crew, in 2020.) Here’s a BBC appreciation of the original…
https://youtu.be/w_ks5Pb12kg?si=9a4LqrVO_CSnw-GF
#art #caricature #ClaudeMonet #culture #history #Monet #PeterFluck #puppetry #puppets #RogerLaw #SpittingImage #television -
The Marionette Of The Ballerina
https://comms.centaurworks.art/
https://ko-fi.com/A8852D7
https://centaurworks.art/#linktreeCharacter (https://toyhou.se/2084378.cynthia-chuseio) © @CentaurWorks
Cynthia's greatest nightmare is losing control of her vampire side. The side that is a natural blood suckers, one can compare them to a monster of the night. To be a puppet of this inner instinct she has worked hard to control and manage within her lifetime. And yet, sometimes when she sleeps, she can feel the nightmare becoming more and more real. In the realm of dreams she can not escape the horror that may possibly come if she laxed control; and a fear of becoming far more worse than human.
This is sort of a remake of one of my old pieces but more it's own thing. I always had the idea of Cynthia being fearful of her vampire side, always thinking of it like it controls her even unintentionally. Leaning into that idea is her as a wodden puppet with no control over herself and her action. I wanted to do something like that but also add a shelved idea. There's a character called "Darkness" that was from an old group RP called "Echoes In The Rain" and she was more the evil villian and mirror to Cynthia. So I wanted her to be the puppet of Cynthia as if she's controlling her vampire side; luckly my friend Azura has an old WIP I was able to use. Add a bit of scratch brushes to the BG and I love how dark this image came out.
#MastoArt #vampire #ballerina #marionette #puppet #crying #blood #evilgrin #fear #nightmare #blue #pinkhair #redeyes #art #art2025 #digitalart #digitalartwork #artwork #CentaurWorks #OC #anime #animestyle #animeartstyle #originalcharacter #clipstudiospaint
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Good morning! Puppy Hearts is stopping by to say happy Friday. 🐶💕 Have a good one! 😊 https://1-lisas-baker.pixels.com/featured/puppy-hearts-lisa-s-baker.html
#GoodMorning #HappyFriday #FridayVibes #PuppyHearts #DogArt #WhimsicalArt #DogLovers #CavalierKingCharlesSpaniel #SpanielLove #ColorfulArt #HeartArt #PetArt #CuteDogs #ArtOfTheDay #FridayFeels #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon #painting #art #arte #artwork #buyintoart #creativetoots #mastoart #fediart #fediverse #hearts #love #cute #cuteanimals
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Dalmatialainen synnytti Seinäjoella kuusitoista pentua ja kuoli - Kotimaa | HS.fi
"Kuudelletoista dalmatialaisen pennulle löydettiin kolme keinoemoa." ♥️🥺🐾
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The Ultimate Leash Training Book Guide: 7 Secrets for Happy Walks
Leash Training Book for Dogs: Master the Art of Walking Your Furry Friend. Comprehensive guide with expert tips and techniques. Perfect for modern dog parents.
🐶🐟🐟🐟
#DogTraining #LeashTraining #CanineRevolution #DogBook #PetCare #DogOwner #DogLife #TrainingTips #DogLovers #PetLovers
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You know it's way too early when no Europeans answers your silly texts about whether it's too early for coffee
Ok, it's TOO early but here's my cup coming up