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November 23 2011
The Search for the “Real” Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is fake-for-real. While it’s true that there was a minor harvest feast in 1621, held by English immigrants and Wampanoag Indians, the event was never celebrated regularly, and largely dropped off the national radar for the next 200 years. It took the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln to formalize the holiday, a political move he hoped would promote national unity.
Even if the holiday is invented, at least the food is real, right? When Americans sit down to groaning tables on Thursday, it’s tempting to think we’re participating in a culinary tradition not that far removed from the time of the Pilgrims. Thanksgiving food is, after all, as authentic and naturally American as apples (Kazakhstan), potatoes (Peru), and green bean casserole (Campbell Soup Company). Maybe we can find some culinary authenticity hiding between the gravy boat and the cranberry sauce. Hope you’re hungry…
No Potatoes, No Pigs, No Fun
Most so-called “traditional” Thanksgiving dishes would have been alien to the Indians and Pilgrims in attendance at Plymouth, Massachusetts. They might not even have recognized mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce as edible food. Sweet corn, the kind that can be eaten fresh from the cob, may not even have existed at the time, let alone been grown in Massachusetts. Apples, so vital for pie, were also off the menu. The English settlers had to wait for their imported apple seeds to grow, and on top of that, their crops were measly until they carted European honey bees across the ocean to fertilize the orchards. Forget ham, pork, or sausage too; the settlers were not the pig-raising types. And as for drinks? Nothing but water.
Plenty of Eel to Go Around
Most Americans nowadays would be just as puzzled by historical Thanksgiving foods. Pumpkin and other squash were likely eaten on the menu, but only as part of savory dishes. Other foods that Wampanoag and English gobbled down have been completely relegated to history. Venison is one of the few certainties of the first Thanksgiving – the Wampanoag brought a gift of five deer for the meal – but venison, like all wild game, is a rare sight nowadays. Clams, mussels, oysters, eels, cod, and lobster were also in abundance in Plymouth, not to mention turtle. Seafood, so vital in 1621, would look as out-of-place in a modern Thanksgiving spread as a mapo tofu.
At Least They Ate Turkey?
Turkey is a likely candidate for the Thanksgiving food that’s managed to survive the centuries unscathed – maybe. Wild turkeys were abundant in 1621, and Indians and immigrants alike enjoyed the bird. That’s not to say that M. gallopavo was actually served at the feast. The Pilgrims would have been just as likely to eat wild ducks, or even swans. Cookbooks from early American history preserve an astonishing appetite for wood cock, partridge, snipe, pigeons, and song birds of all kinds. Literally anything with meat on its bones and feathers on its back was chucked into the stew pot. For a real authentic feel for your Thanksgiving dinner, you might want to set up a bird feeder and shoot the first thing that lands.
Gobble, Gobble, Wobble
But let’s not be so fast about the turkey. Is our own iteration of the bird really that authentic to the holiday? Snow-white, broad-breasted, and enormous, the modern turkey would have perplexed the Pilgrims. 99.99% of all turkeys sold in the United States come from a single breed of turkey, the aptly-named Broad Breasted White. The most popular breed of turkey for over three centuries was the Bronze, a cross between wild turkeys and European domestics. During standardization and science obsessed 1960s, Bronzes and other old breeds like Bourbon Red or Slate Black Spanish all but disappeared from American farms.
Bizarre and marvelous, Broad Breasted Whites lost their natural bronze coloration because white pin feathers make the plucked carcasses more attractive to consumers. They reach market weight up to 12 weeks before ‘heritage’ breeds, and weigh in at around 18 kilos per bird, compared to a measly 10 kilos for a wild turkey. True freaks of this breed can grow as large as 36 kilos. Great for producing breast meat, the Broad Breasted White is not that great at being it bird. They can’t fly, their legs get bowed and wobbly under their weight, and their giant breasts prevent them from reproducing as nature intended – thanks, artificial insemination!
A Faux Feast
There aren’t many “100% natural” foods, and there is no one “authentic” Thanksgiving. Culture largely decides what we accept as historical reality. In a hundred or two hundred years, future Americans may be astonished to learn to that the Wampanoag did not come bearing gifts of dinosaur meat, and the Pilgrims did not chow down on the most American vegetable of all, pizza.
Image via Zimbio.
October 08 2011
Occasionally Extinct and Virtually Alive
Japanese researchers are currently working on cloning a mammoth, and plan to produce a fluffy new prehistoric calf within four or five years. The bucardo, an extinct subspecies of the Spanish ibex, was resurrected for a few minutes in 2009 before the clone died. ‘Frozen zoos’ now keep the cryo-preserved tissues from dozens of endangered species to hedge their bets against future extinction.
Until we have the godlike knowledge to reconstruct a genome from the base pairs on up, our resurrected zoo will be limited to the animals that we have stored away for safe keeping. Sorry, no dinosaurs, but there are at least 500 stuffed and dried passenger pigeons, 731 thylacines, and one remaining dodo specimen with soft tissue remaining.
These numbers are misleading– so far, scientists have only been able to clone long-gone animals from frozen tissue. The pool of acceptable candidates for cloning for any extinct species is therefore vanishingly small. Except in the case of creatures that were lucky enough to make it into San Diego’s Frozen Zoo, scientists may be able to resurrect only one or two unique individuals from any species.
The meaning of ‘extinction’ will be radically redefined when, and if, an extinct species is successfully revived from preserved tissues. It’s likely that we may see a healthy cloned Pyrenean Ibex in the near future, but it would only ever be that one bucardo, repeated over and over again from the individual knocked out by a falling tree. When the clone dies, the species will go extinct again, and when it is cloned again, it will be resurrected again, periodically cycling through extinction and resurrection. Zoos and collectors might request their own bucardo, mammoth or lonely dodo to put on display – all the same individual.
The same species would exist in the shady realm between real and imaginative. The “species” for these one-off clones would no longer be a biological category, but a cultural one. It would be a product of human imagination and expectation, a virtual concept of “species” that is embodied briefly in one organism. If, for instance, parental care, social interaction, and ancestral memory of migration routes and mating grounds are necessary to say, make a mammoth an authentic mammoth, then a single clone would not qualify as anything more than a very convincing fake.
Image via Science Ray.
September 30 2011
A Rare Giant Crane in Manhattan
In this Petcha Kutcha presentation, Mike Dickison comes to a very funny conclusion: Although Big Bird might superficially resemble other ratites like the ostrich or emu, he is likely more closely related to a group of extinct, flightless cranes that once lived in Cuba and Bermuda. Birds tend to evolve towards flightlessness and gigantism when isolated on islands and, fittingly, Big Bird lives on the most famous island in the world.
Watch: What if Anything is Bird Big
September 20 2011
Holland Gets an Unnatural High
When the Dutch built the Netherlands, they forgot to add any mountains. The highest point in Holland is a measly 323 meters, compared to 2,962 meters for the highest mountain in Germany. Possibly inspired by architect Jacok Tigges’ proposal for Berlin, Dutch journalist Thijs Zonneveld recently suggested that the Netherlands deserves a fake mountain of its own. Unlike Tigges’ purely theoretical proposal, the people behind Die Berg Komt Er (The Mountain Is Coming) are taking their landscape-building mandate seriously. The mountain has turned into a movement.
Different designers have different visions for this god-like task. DHV situates their Bergen in Zee, an exact replica of Mount Fuji, in the ocean near the town of Bergen aan Zee. It would rise 2,000 meters, occupy an area the size of Disney World, and provide sustainable power for the mainland. Hoffers and Kruger place it in the land or the sea, and fill up their hollow structure with everything from aquariums to sport arenas to farms. Regardless of the particulars, the Nederlandse Berg would be the biggest and costliest manmade structure in history. If the mountain is actually realized, it will certainly prove one thing: The Dutch will let nothing stand in the way of a nice weekend of skiing.
Via Pruned.
September 04 2011
Next Nature Services
Intentionality separates culture from nature. A dog is intentional, a fox is not; a park is intentional, a forest is not. Since trash, ruined buildings, and automated computer programs are unintentional, they are also a type of nature. Nature provides human society with valuable ‘ecosystem services’ such as water purification or erosion control. Next nature provides ecosystem services of its own, although they might not be what we expect.
BY BAS HARING
2010 was the International Year of Biodiversity. The United Nations introduced the concept as a way to draw attention to the decline of nature. Advocating on nature’s behalf, a relatively new argument emerged, ‘ecosystem services’: useful things nature does, unbeknownst to us. Forests filter dust from the air, scrub prevents erosion, and insects pollinate our crops. Incidentally, nature provides us with services that would otherwise have cost a fortune. Leaving aside the question of where they could be purchased. Is it conceivable that one day there will be next nature services, delivered in passing and unintentionally by new, future ecologies?
A rainforest is nature, a park is not. Foxes are nature, dogs are not.
But what makes nature nature? What makes it so valuable and special? Perhaps seeing nature in exaggerated and simplified terms, I can start to think about its future. Is spontaneity not the essence of nature? Put differently, the absence of conscious planning is the essence of nature. A rainforest is nature, a park is not. Foxes are nature, dogs are not. And the ocean is nature, but an oceanarium is not. Parks, dogs and oceanariums have been thought up – we intentionally created and designed them. Nature, by contrast, is not a result of intention. Nature just is. At most it’s a consequence of a ‘natural process’. The very phrase ‘natural process’ illustrates the essence of nature: ‘that’s just the way it is‘ or ‘of itself’. The absence of this deliberation or intention is also the source of nature’s charm. Nature is surprising. It can be surprising, because no one has thought about it in advance. Nature humbles us in all her beauty. Beauty that we had no part in. Ferns, ibises and dragonflies are magnificent, but we didn’t create them or think them up.
The distinction I draw between the intended and unintended shows that there is still a place for ‘real’ nature in the manufactured nature of the park and the oceanarium. Grass stubbornly creeps between the paving stones in the park, and millions of unintended and uninvited plant and animal species live in the water at the oceanarium. Even sheepdogs, shining examples of obedience in the animal world, will occasionally, unintentionally go against their character by chasing after rabbits. Parks, oceanariums and dogs are less natural than forests, oceans and wolves, because they are deliberately designed rather than having simply evolved.
Incidentally, nature provides us with services that would otherwise have cost a fortune.
I wonder how to interpret the statement, ‘Meadow birds belong in the Netherlands’. Or other pronouncements about what nature is supposed to be like: ‘Lions belong in Africa’ and ‘Oranges belong on orange trees.’ I don’t think the sentence ‘Meadow birds belong in the Netherlands’ is a strange one. I might even think it’s true. But if I believe nature is a product of random circumstance, then what do I mean by that sentence? Can something belong somewhere without intent? I believe so. Even if everyone knows meadow birds are indigenous to the Netherlands – they are simply there – one can still believe they belong there. Despite the fact that oranges were not invented or intended (humans did not invent oranges to grow) to grow on orange trees, it’s not strange to argue that they belong there. Something that is intentional should be as it was intended to be. But something unintentional can evidently also belong somewhere. There is a difference between ‘belonging to’ and ‘belong’. An orange may belong on an orange tree, but that does not directly imply that the orange tree is supposed to be that way. But enough about the difference between intention and belonging. Let’s get back to nature.
Is nature green per se, made up only of organic molecules and living cells? I don’t believe it is. Mountains are nature too. They came into being through a natural, unplanned process. And mountains are not composed of organic molecules but of materials like silicon dioxide and limestone, as are streams and salt flats. These things are not green or made of organic material, and yet as far as I’m concerned, they’re part of nature.
Picture yourself in Iceland, walking on top of a volcano with a friend. Around you are bare rocks as far as the eye can see, and to your left is a mountain stream. At one point your friend says, ‘Isn’t nature spectacular?’ You probably won’t be surprised – ‘But this isn’t nature; nature’s made out of organic material!’ Instead, you will agree with your friend – ‘Yes, it’s spectacular’. Following this line of thought, it’s possible that nature can consist of other materials too. If lime and salt are okay, then why not plastic and electronics? As long as something is unintentional, it can be natural, or perhaps it is even natural by definition.
Near the Dutch city of Almere is an unfinished modern castle, it was originally intended as a luxury hotel, but it was never completed and will never be. Instead of a modern replica of a medieval castle, there is a rough castle-shaped block of building materials – nowhere near the original intention. This modern ruin in the middle of the forest is more natural than the surrounding woods. The trees were planted, intentionally; the castle’s current form is an accident. The unintentional, chaotic organization of large companies could perhaps also be understood as next nature – marketing departments redoing the work of communication departments; little groups of people who don’t know what the others are doing and may even be working against each other, unknowingly. And then there are the messages generated by Twitter bots, automatic tweet-generating programmes. No one creates these random tweets (if you don’t include the programmer) – another new kind of nature. In the future, maybe Twitter bots will have brief conversations with each other, without any human intervention: ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, thank you. How are you?’ These unintentional conversations can be considered a new kind of nature.
The world is becoming increasingly planned and thus increasingly unnatural. The more people there are, taking up more space, the more we think about that space. Unplanned, natural space turns into planned, unnatural space. But I believe the unintentional will keep creeping up in between all those intentions, like grass between the paving stones in the park. It may happen in odd places – inside computers, on building sites, in organizations – but the unintentional will stick around. Will this new nature potentially be of value? When it comes to value in nature, the following paradox applies: plants and animals hold value for us mainly in manufactured sense. The value of agricultural crops is obvious, but maize and grain fields are not nature. The most valuable trees grow in planted forests, not in ‘real’ nature. And the animals we eat are rarely wild, natural ones.
In one town, an old rubbish dump was transformed into an indoor piste, giving new value to something that once had none.
The term ‘value’ is a complicated one. There are ‘intrinsic value’, ‘aesthetic value’ and ‘economic value’, and probably many other kinds too, but to reduce the complexity somewhat, I will refer here mainly to economic value – not because I believe it is the only kind of value that matters but because it is the easiest to grasp and the least debatable. The plants and animals that possess the most value to us – maize, grain, vegetables, oak, pigs, grass, cows and chickens – no longer have value in nature. They are cultivated, planned and controlled, in fields, barns and planted forests. It is non-nature, lifted out of nature through intention that has obvious value.
But what about the value of genuine nature – the virgin forests of Siberia, the gulls in the Wadden Sea? Don’t they still hold value, even if it is unintended? And it is precisely here that we find the invisible ecosystem services: that nature provides. Worms, along with millions of species of bacteria and single-celled organisms, keep the soil fertile so that we have maize and grain to harvest; forests filter dust from the air; insects pollinate our crops. These are invisible, valuable services provided by nature – incidental services from unintentional nature. And they are much more exciting than the value of intentional animals and plants in parks, barns and oceanariums. Those are intended, here for a reason, and so, logically they have value. But the fact that unintentional nature has value too might come as a surprise.
Ecosystem services supply nature conservationists with a timely argument for their cause. And ecosystem services are one piece of evidence the U.N cites in its defense of nature. If nature contributes incidental value, then it would seem logical that unintended new nature can too. If the essence of nature is its lack of planning, if nature has various unintentional kinds of value, generated in passing, and if nature is not made of organic material per se but could also consist of plastic, buildings and software in the future, then this suggests that new nature will also have new kinds of value in the future.
Is this really conceivable? Is it possible that tweeting robots, chaotic organizations, modern ruins and other forms of new unintentional nature secretly have value, without it being intentional, and without us knowing it yet?
It just might be, and I have already seen the first indications. The Netherlands is a flat country and this is of value. It makes a big difference to the cost of agricultural labor. But a hill here and there can also be valuable, even if it’s just used for skiing. In one town, an old rubbish dump was transformed into an indoor piste, giving new value to something that once had none. It is true that the site was built intentionally and according to plan, but as a dump, not a ski slope. Its value as a hill only became apparent later. Shipwrecks and sunken drilling platforms are another example (can be warm or cold ocean, doesn’t matter to fish). Without intention, they lie rusting and rotting on the seabed. Yet they have turned out to be of great value.
As long as something is unintentional, it can be natural, or perhaps it is even natural by definition.
Fish and other forms of life gather around these wrecks. Divers swim there, and fishermen make extraordinary catches. These unplanned wrecks have unintentional value: a service is provided accidentally by a new, next nature. The fibers in wrecked cars from wiring insulation and upholstery are a final example. These fibers are a byproduct of modern car salvage. After the steel and other valuable materials have been removed, rubber and fibers remain. People found no use for these fibers until it was discovered that they could be used in water purification. Certain pollutants bind to them perfectly. Perhaps even the plastic island – the enormous accumulation of synthetic material floating near Hawaii that is larger than France – secretly has value, as an island that was not planned and is therefore nature. It is not inconceivable that this plastic mountain will turn out to have incidental value. In any case, we must continue to look at possible new natures with a fresh eye. Nature is spontaneous, and therefore it is also unexpected. Next nature could manifest itself in many unexpected ways, with many unexpected kinds of value.
Published in Next Nature book (forthcoming). Image Fish using shipwreck, Northwest Hawaiian Islands, photo via Photolib.nasa.gov.
August 18 2011
Inventing an Extinct Horse
Along with the Heck cattle and Scottish Highlanders, another reconstructed species roams the Dutch dunes. The sturdy Konik horse, also known as the Polish primitive, is the result of an attempt to ‘breed back’ the tarpan, an extinct subspecies of wild horse. A forest-dwelling horse with a distinctive silver-gray coat, tarpans once roamed Western Europe through Russia. The endangered Przewalski’s horse is the only surviving subspecies of the wild horse, Equus ferus, found only in zoos and in wild herds that have been reintroduced to places like Mongolia and Chernobyl.
The last wild tarpans were extirpated between the 1820s and 1890s, while the last captive tarpans died out somewhere between 1910 and 1920. Sources are unclear whether the final herds were true tarpans, tarpan mixes, or domestic horses that happened to look a lot like their wild relatives. It may be extinct, but the tarpan still clings to existence via cultural memory and scattered genes. The fact that many “primitive” breeds of domestic horse still graze the world’s meadows has tempted hopeful breeders to resurrect the tarpan on at least three occasions.
The Polish Konik is the oldest of the existing pseudo-tarpans, originating at least to the 1800s if not far earlier. In 1936, these groups of small, tarpan-like horses caught the attention of Tadeusz Vetulani, a professor at Poznan University. He gathered up the most suitable candidates to concentrate their primitive characteristics in an attempt to breed-back the tarpan. Around the same time period, the Heck brothers, of Heck cattle fame, mixed up their own version of a tarpan from koniks, Icelandic ponies, and Przewalski’s horses. The Hegardt horse may be the most fanciful of all the modern tarpans. In the 1950s, Harry Hegardt gathered up American mustangs with tarpan-like characteristics to create his own stable of Equus ferus ferus - never mind that mustangs are descended from Spanish riding horses that had been domesticated for centuries.
Confounding these attempts is the fact that no one particularly knows what the tarpan looked like. The subspecies was gray, with a dorsal stripe and zebra barring on the legs, but breeders seem to disagree on other basics. Did it have a floppy or an erect mane? Did it turn white in the winter? There is a single photograph and a single life drawing to document the subspecies’s appearance. The Moscow Zoo’s stallion (pictured above) likely had domestic horse blood in it, while Borisov’s engraving (a version of which is below) was of a juvenile. Cave paintings, those old standbys, are not much more help. Almost all prehistoric paintings held up as evidence of the tarpan either have a generic appearance, or more closely resemble the Przewalski’s horse.
The confusion has lead to an interesting oversight. The Sorraia horse, a rare breed found in isolated regions of Portugal, is so closely related to the tarpan it may actually be one. While there is disagreement and ungoing genetic analysis, some scientists suspect that the Sorraia may be a regional variation or relic of Equus ferus ferus. In other words, the tarpan may be slightly less extinct than suspected.
Call it a Konik, Heck or Hegardt, the modern tarpan is still, fundamentally, a fake. Like a plastic flower or concrete rock, it matches its inspiration on the outside, but remains a simulation on the inside. The bred-back breeds of tarpan can only approach the genetics or behavior of the true Equus ferus ferus. Praised as gentle and hard-working riding horses, studied as a scientific experiment, wrapped up in issues of national pride, or valued as nostalgic echoes of the unspoiled Pleistocene landscape, the poor tarpan is a case study of our schizophrenic attitudes towards nature. Animals in general, and domestic ones in particular, assume so many conflicting identities that the question of “real or fake” has become totally obscured.
Header photo via Gwendolen. Most information via The Extinction Website.
June 07 2011
Real women advertise RealDolls
At the 2011 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, a photograph of a flesh-and-blood woman advertises a RealDoll, the life-sized sex mannequin made for people with a fetish for the uncanny valley. This image is a strange mix of the next natural phenomena ‘people becoming products’ and ‘products becoming people.’ The woman in the advertisement has been photoshopped to perfection, valuable and desirable precisely because she is a product. The doll, in contrast, is valuable and desirable because she is a person, or at least a convincing simulacrum of one. Is the doll meant be like the woman, or is the woman meant to be like the doll? There’s certainly a metaphor being boomeranged here, but I’m stumped as to which direction it’s flying. Peculiar image of the week.
Image via 88 Miles West.
June 03 2011
American Hyperbodies
Lady Gaga is famous for fashion that exaggerates or obscures her body, but a few months ago, she made a foray into ‘actual’ body-modification. Gaga appeared on Jay Leno’s talk show wearing two pairs of pyramidal prosthetics on her face, along with cartoon-villain horns on her shoulders. Some sources speculate they were surgical implants, but it’s doubtful that Gaga would risk permanent scars on that million-dollar face; more likely the effect was the work of a clever makeup artist.
Body-mod enthusiasts like the artist Orlan or the Mexican ‘Vampire Woman’ Maria Cristerna may be practicing a form of beauty, but their beauty is predicated on shock. They are in opposition to the standard view of what is acceptable and attractive. In contrast, Gaga’s posthuman prosthetics may have more in common with the French hyperbodies in Erwin Olaf’s Le Dernier Cri.
In Olaf’s vision, extreme implants and surgeries have become the new normal. Le Dernier Cri echoes cultures where cranial deformation, neck elongation, or enormous lip plates are standard marks of status or beauty. Just because industrialized society practices more-or-less subtle interventions like liposuction and breast implants doesn’t mean we will never again favor modifications that completely invert the ‘natural’ human form.
Is Lady Gaga going for shock alone, or does she (along with her stylist) actively recognize that our posthuman society needs posthuman beauty standards? I’d argue that Gaga may be the first star of augmented reality: she is deformed, but temporarily; she is disabled, but temporarily. Anthropomorphobic audience members are reassured that beneath those Kermit frogs she is still young, white, thin and able-bodied. Gaga’s transformations may echo our desire for low-risk, low-investment novelty, rather than any societal trend towards unconventional hyperbeauty.
Top image via the Vancouver Sun. ’Paparazzi’ image via Uplift Magazine.
May 03 2011
Nintendo Portables Are Breeding Grounds For Sexy Fun
Sexuality and sensuality are phenomena which have been a nature for us as long as we humans exist. Not only humans experience these phenomena; also animals experience sexuality and, more or less, sensuality.
One of the things which make humans distinct from other animals when it comes to sex, is that humans make use of artificial artifacts to stimulate sexual feelings. Have you ever seen a lion which needed a vibrator to make things better?
Looking from natures perspective it is already quite noticeable that, apparently, old nature is not good enough for human beings. It seems like this ‘sexual fun’ becomes increasingly artificial. Where other animals like monkeys are happy with natural derivatives like a cucumber, over the past few years humans used technology to design several ‘girl touching’ games for different gaming platforms. Did you even expect yourself to be sexually stimulating yourself with a Gameboy in the future? Well, yes or no, the possibility is there now. So what do you think about this? Does the fact that more and more complex technology is used for sexual fun stimulate you? Or do you rather stick to the ‘good old’ cucumber?
February 16 2011
Fake plastic bags – made from real leather
Fakeness is traditionally associated with inferiority; cheap Rolexes that break in two weeks, plastic Christmas trees, leaking silicone breasts, imitation caviar… However, in a society in which everything is a copy of a copy, the ‘fake’ seems to gain a certain authenticity.
Can you imagine anything more classy and luxurious than these anonymous, brand less, recognizable ‘throw away’ bags re-created in durable, high quality leather by Femke de Vries? Better than the real thing!
Via Trendbeheer.
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