Welcome back to the cultures of energy podcast. I'm Dominic Boyer, Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research and the Human Sciences sends cultures of energy.org and welcome to my co-host, somebody. Oh, that's me. So what we're going to be sharing with you today as a podcast that I did with a very important scholar in anthropology and across the disciplines named Anna saying, and I'm sure many of you have read her work or have heard about it at least. And I think I guess I want to start with this important point, or at least it's an important point to me is that I actually have a folder on my laptop that's called Anna saying everything. That's a great title. Yes, it's very and I think it's very telling and descriptive. Now, what's contained in that folder is really the information about her visit and the itinerary and all of the various documents that go along with having someone as luminary and thoughtful as Anna saying is. But it's also indicative of the kinds of projects that she takes on and has taken on over the last few decades. Her book friction was incredibly influential across the social sciences and humanities when it came out. And her new book, which she speaks about in various ways in the podcasts that you'll be hearing in just a minute is also getting a lot of recognition and it's just recently been released. So Anna saying is, as I mentioned, an internationally recognized feminist and environmental scholar, she's a theoretician of the highest form. She's an ethnographer and she's been an incredibly innovative voice in her mode of writing across the disciplines. She's a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and she also is a Neils Bohr professor in the Department of culture and society at Aarhus University in Denmark. And sorry to our hosts if I totally butchering the Danish pronunciation. But they're at Aarhus University. She is also a co-director of the university research project on the Anthropocene. It's called aura a cool RA. So that's a little bit of her background. But for those of you who do not know her, please listen to the podcast and then go out and buy her wonderful new book, which is beautiful and heavy and worth every penny in terms of its intellectual stimulation. And the name of the book is released from a mushroom at the end of the world. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of mushroom research and anthropology now, but this is by far the best, right? This is the best mushroom book of several mushroom books seem to blend those does us who are into mushrooms? This is the one tissues the mushroom work to take. That's nice. And, and Ana is also an amazing scholar of globalization. But I think you know, her connection to environmental anthropology is really, is really fundamental. I mean, she bridges the sort of early second wave feminism, eco feminist, Marxist criticism of like the 70s and 80s to the really contemporary work people are doing on the Anthropocene. So she's, she's sort of been there, she's seen at all. She's, she's one of the, you know, the, the pillars of our sort of conversation in a way and so much so many people are sort of, I don't know, kind of follow in her footsteps, I guess at say yeah, she's in my opinion, she has been ahead of the curve for for quite some time. And so that's why she has so many literal follower is in a positive way. I think the other thing that's really sort of remarkable about her as a person and as a scholar is her apparently unending optimism. This is something I find really refreshing. And even when she's writing and thinking and talking about things like destruction of forests and an ending in Indonesia, or thinking about what she calls are damaged world, right? She seems to find these points have hope, and that's exactly what the monks who talk a book covers. And as is looking at how these, these spores can kinda sprout up and the most liminal and damaged and injured places on our planet. And in fact, they actually thrive in these injured ecological zones, right? She writes in the book she says, ruins, ruins are now our gardens. Degraded and blasted landscapes produce our livelihoods. So there's both a recognition of terrible damage, our degradation, and at the same time, the recognition that there is liveliness and livelihood coming out of this and through this. And that we need to keep looking towards these optimistic future. So I find that sort of inspiring in an intellectual way, maybe even a kind of spiritual way. So yeah, that's absolutely landscape. Landscapes don't begin and end with the human, which is something she's been talking about for a long time. Well, anyway, that was a great I think that what's the appetite? Shall we just move on to the move on to the interview? Yes. Let's hear from the woman herself. Okay. All right. Well, let's begin with the most massive question imaginable to pose to an anthropologist. And that is, why did you decide to make this life, your life's work? I had never heard of anthropology when I went to college. And when I discovered it, I thought it was the study of everything. And as a person who was pretty curious about a lot of things, I became an anthropology major because I thought, Oh good, I can study everything. Everything, anything. Yeah, it hasn't let me down. Yeah. And it kind of is in so many ways. I mean, that's what we talk about when we're teaching undergraduate students, that it's sort of everything human and now everything even beyond rats. It's got such incredible capacity. I wanted to ask you another question about the kind of conjunction of feminism and theorizing and more recent turns in our discipline shell. What we're seeing now in, in the academy more generally and an anthropologists that we have these amazing feminist theorists and thinkers like yourself, like Karen broad, like Donna Haraway, like Jane Bennett, like Katherine use off, like Vicki Kirby, who are both invested and environmental questions as well as questions of materiality and other than human life. And so I kinda had this experiment that I wanted to test out. And I'll just begin without explaining too much. But I have a short passage to read you from a text that I was looking at recently. And so this is how it begins. So for my purpose, to show that post humanism, insofar as it is true to its own essential dynamics, is an ontological spiritual revolution. Pointing beyond the idolatries of anthropocentric society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of other than humans implies universal becoming. So to me as I, as I kind of read this aloud, this sounds like a kind of delusion conversation or maybe a kind of reformed Heideggerian discussion. A multispecies position for sure, using the language of ontology, transcendence, become and so on. And then later on in this book we hear about emergences as well. But actually it's, it's none of these and it's not even a contemporary text. This is a kind of mash up that I put together, pulled from Mary Daly's first book. And of course, Mary Daly as a very famous second wave feminist philosopher and thinker and radical. So she wrote beyond the father. This is from beyond God, the Father toward a philosophy of women's liberation 1973, and then later very famously she did gynecology, the Meta ethics of radical feminism in 78. That I thought it was funny that I, I got this copy of gynecology from Amazon and I think I paid a penny for it. And it has a stamped into the front cover discard. So it had been a library book somewhere and then it got rejected and discarded. And so I was able to buy it for a penny. And yet as I went through the text, I, I replaced women's revolution with post humanism. I replaced sexist society with anthropocentric society. I replaced women with other than humans and was able to create this text that sounds so contemporary in terms of discussions that we're having today. So all of that is to lead up to another question. That is, what does this make you think about? What is a spark for you? This kind of recursive potential that we see here happening between earlier iterations of feminism and post humanist work that we're seeing now, I think is really interesting experiment that you tried. And it makes me think about how a lot of feminist scholars are going about our work without necessarily reflecting in our writing about where feminist legacies matter. And on the one hand, there's something right about that. The part of what we worked for was the ability to speak and write as women without it being marked as now we have to know that we should be able to be able to join scholarly threads in general without doing so as women. So that's the reason that it's okay, but there are times we need to go back and say, how does this feminist legacy effect our work? So you're starting that process and I think it's a smart, an interesting idea. And I think you're already pointing to one of the big themes that feminist scholars have worked on about body's materiality is, and becomings ahead. That's been a major theme when I was, I've been trying to think about some of the feminist legacies that are so important today. Certainly you would also look at difference and inequality and the kinds of heritage for thinking about intersectionality, race, class, gender, or post-colonial feminisms, that these are still very much alive and environmental work today I think. And I also about experimental genres and story-telling styles that a part of feminism that really is still very lively today. And finally, one that I'll talk about, I think in relation to some of the questions I know are coming up by kind of constitutive ambivalence about scientific forms of empiricism, that there's something interesting. So I need to check that he's going to come up again because I could just do it right now. You could do it now. Yeah, sure. I'll I'll talk about it, right. I think there's something specific about the kinds of feminist science studies that have been developed that makes a big difference as scholars who are addressing questions like the Anthropocene today. That there's, what I'm talking about is constitutive ambivalence is on the one hand, feminists had been at the forefront of criticizing ways that science has been involved in elite projects of subjugation, if you would. That's one part of it. On the other hand, the the need to recuperate what women scientists had been up to and to try and pay attention to the kinds of work have been submerged because they were unable to make their name. And some of the way that male scholars were, that that's kept feminist science studies interested in science, interested in contributing to those forms of knowing the world at the same time is critiquing them. So that's the ambivalence them. On the one hand, there's a critique of science going on and on the other hand, there's a recuperation and that's an interesting feature for work that's being done today on materiality, the environment, Anthropocene, and similar kinds of things. Because, uh, I, I think it's very distinctive where non feminist science studies was able to, without that ambivalence situate itself outside science and look at it as an exotic objects that needs to be unraveled to see how it works. There wasn't any need for the analysts to get inside of it. But what you see in feminist studies is often the desire to do both at the same time, to unravel the object and to contribute in some way. And so that's a piece of, of today's kinds of attempts to look at more than human kinds of phenomena that I consider to think is an exciting part of feminist slip legacies. Mm-hm, mm-hm, Mm-hm. And that deconstructive impulse to, I mean, I think we have to think even in lead tours earlier, science studies projects, what he was pulling together was clearly also drawing from something like positionality or examining the, the structural position of scientists and their modes of authority, right? So that's only sort of be recuperated out of that tradition too. But I think something really important happened in Bruno Latour legacy when he got interested in the Anthropocene a couple of years ago. Because that FOR HIM, science studies before really was figuring out what was going on in that black box science. And he did, he drew on a lot of feminists worked, but it wasn't the key to, in his own understanding what he was doing. Now that he's turned to the Anthropocene, he has stakes about climate change, about, you know, what I'm calling live ability. And he has had to name feminist science studies scholars in a whole different way since he's a, changed to a set of topics where he cares what's actually going on in the world rather than just seeing what scientists do. So for me, there's been a big transition inventory in science studies as he takes on feminist scholarship in a much more clearly articulated way. Taking it more seriously, I think so. I don't think so in naming it. Yeah. Is it kind of uncanny encounter at the last anthropology meetings, I was on a panel or a roundtable called Queer futures. And we were thinking about things like queer time and how that can be deconstructed and reconstructed and thinking about the trajectory of anthropological careers that start out looking at, at queer theory and queer studies and where they go from there. And Bruno Latour came to the discussion and asked a question. And so after that, that panel, he and I ended up having a very interesting conversation about queer reproductivity. Queer time add. I think that is something different that might not have happened. He wrote 10 years a guy that there's a space for him and others to kind of encounter those sorts of questions that are clearly coming out of queer theory and feminist theory and all that kind of thinking. So we're living in interesting times, right? Theoretically, intellectually. She's speaking of interesting things. What is it? Everyone wants to know, what is it about mushroomed. When I first started my study, much talky, I was looking for commodity chain. A hand, mushrooms. See, I was looking for commodity chain that showed a lot of cultural disjunctions in the links in the chain. And mushrooms at that point seemed possible way to take that project forward. But as I got involved in mushrooms, It's, the more I learned about mushrooms, the more fascinating they were to think with. And I couldn't help, but get into the ecological aspects of mushrooms. Where the mushroom I happened to pick is a symbiotic companion of trees that makes it possible for trees to grow where they couldn't grow otherwise. So it's a real materialization of why entanglement matters. The mushroom can't grow without the tree. The tree can't grow without the mushroom. And indeed, human activities are involved too, because at least in places like Japan, it's human disturbance of the woodlands that allows the pine trees to come in and the pine trees couldn't come in without the much TOC a and vice versa. So you get inside this question of entangled life forms that's proved to be really fascinating for me to trances. I mean, it's, it's such an interest in such an interesting entity to follow, right? That's commodity chain. Is there, is there any other biotic thing that you might have followed? If not to talk, I hadn't been there to be plucked impact. Well, when I was looking for commodity chain, It's not by attic, so I'm not sure it'll answer your question. Okay. I had thought that a really great project would be to study mineral prospecting and fake mineral prospecting in Morocco. Oh, because I was looking for those cultural disjuncture. And it seemed to me another opportunity until you can see what it has in common with much stuck it mushrooms. It's kind of odd corner of a very commercialized world, but not one that fits our standard ideas of what counts as the commodity. To make that project really work. I think you really would have to get inside language and I would have needed not just French, but Arabic and Berber. And it's still a great project in my opinion, but I don't have the training to do it at this moment. Well, that sounds like a good opening for someone looking for a PhD project. I think you're all set. That's fantastic. So one of the other things I wanted to come to us, thinking about motivating forces and factors and places and spaces in terms of our thinking and doing ethnographic work and conceptualizing projects. And I've been teaching Donna Haraway's book this, the semester when species mate. And in the very beginning of the book, and I probably don't need to show this to you because I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about because it's beautiful, vivid, brilliant image of what Donna Haraway calls Jim Clifford stock. And so of course, this dog is actually a burned out Redwood stomp that's covered in this verdant green moss. And from the angle that the image is shy, you can see it looks precisely like a canine, probably a Golden Retriever, if I would even have to name the breed, right? So in a kind of non-orthogonal way, this, this trunk does become Jim Clifford's dog. It is his dog. And so looking at that image, I, I felt myself stopping when I was first reading the book because I just was sort of transfixed by the image. And I think part of the reason I was transfixed is because I grew up in this part of the world in Santa Cruz and spent a lot of time hiking and walking through the redwood forest behind the campus. Precisely where, where you see this, this dog. And it just reminded me of the kinds of smells that you have in the forest, the kind of the sound of the redwood litter under your feet. The kind of maritime feeling that is everywhere in Santa Cruz because of the way the fog sort of floats up the ocean, up into the Redwoods. And so it's a unique place in a way, but there are many other unique, spectacular places as well. But it just got me thinking about what we do with place and how place kind of flex our thinking. And if there's a way in which you know that the, the place where you're living now has made an impact on the kind of research that you followed and ideas that you've come up with. Well, couple of things to say. One is that the picture itself is there in part because I've done a airways interest in art, science activisms. And I think as usual she's really hit the nail on the head. Or the more I get into that thinking about more than human anthropology, the more important science projects are to helping us conceptualize things that we might not be able to think of without these projects. So that's one thing that speaks to. And now to get to your real question which was about place. A few things to say. One is that mushrooms are very special way to get to know places because they're often not there. That unlike going to a place where you know, something is, you go to a place where something isn't. Haha, and it's a really amazing way, in my opinion to get to know places. Because the angle of light, the smells, the sounds, the, all the other stuffs that there is a part of what makes that place memorable, what makes that place stand out. And with Mike Reiss, well, mushrooms in particular, you go back to the same places even when they're not there. So you don't start a new, you start in the places where you know, the spice rums are going to be and they're still often not there. But that sense of the memory print of the places is part of why mushroom picking is really fun. But now to get to the kind of bigger conceptual issue you're asking about place and why it matters. I've been working on a concept that I'm calling live ability right now, which has to do with the entanglements across different ways of being human and non-human. So that rather than seeing just one relationship at a time, it's this juxtaposition of relationships, some of which are completely kind of orthogonal to the main thing that you're looking at. And that juxtaposition itself is part of what creates the ability to survive collectively. And that, that's high quality of places. That it's not something that we're even just tracing relationships or networks part of it. But some things are just, they're side-by-side juxtaposed and they make all the difference in the world. And that's where place really comes into its own. That live ability is an effect of places. I think. So. Place really matters. Mm-hm, Mm-hm. And it's where we are. And I love that the terms that you use in your new book on collaboration and contamination and, and this sort of relationship between those two kind of operating at the same time, all the time, always. And it's such a neat way of thinking about all these, these interactions and interrelationships that we have with minerals and forces and, and everything in the world. So it's, it's really fantastic. I wanted to ask you a question about the book, actually on the very first page of the book, in the section that's entitled enabling entanglements. You, you draw out three particular things and I'll just mention them here. This is regarding a kind of undermining of the division of labor is the way you set it up. So first of all, you say that all the Taemin, a mouse strain that has made such a mess is, it is unclear whether life on Earth can continue. That's number one. Number two, you said a interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and others. And you focus on the showing the inner play between these things. And finally is the third that you make here, and this is the one I wanted to focus on. You write quote, women and men from around the world have clamor to be included in the status once given to man with a capital M. You say, our riotous presences undermine, undermines the moral intentionality of man's Christian masculinity, which separated man from nature and again, capital and capital. And I think we need to point that out since we're in an audio form. So I wanted to unravel this last point a little bit further in terms of social theory, in terms of anthropology, humanistic sciences. And that is that now that women and men of color have found legitimacy in a place that was formerly reserved for. Man with a capital M. How is that now working out and, or social theory? And I think I've wondered now for some time and I've been chewing on us. As more at least women and people outside of the global north are speaking for themselves. Skye altruists be evac would say, is there way, a way in which man, which I think we're reading hair as a sort of white, heterosexual privileged man of the global north has been displaced from their former objects of study. And that would be others with a capital O. And thus have moved towards subjects to study like things, like objects, like materials and stuff, and even non-human animals. That is, things and creatures that cat yet officially humanly speak for themselves. So I wanted to, to see your thinking about this conjunction between interests and topics such as the Anthropocene and things and objects and materials. And the clamor that you talk about and how this might be playing out in our thinking and anthropology and are related disciplines where there's a whole locked in that quest. Good. In fact, it's hard to take it as just one question, so there's a lot different pieces of it and maybe I'll try and address them backwards from the one that you just said that I think you were saying in a rather sly way there that couldn't science studies and the new materialism be a kind of displacement from the sort of the white male in ability to study ethnic others. I mean, I kind of laughed when you said that because I think it might have been sort of true in the 990s with the beginning of science studies. That there was, it was kind of a displaced white studies in a way because of a certain kind of at this, these were off limits. So you were onto something. I think it's changed as lots more people of color have come into science studies. And there's just been an explosion of new interest in many kinds of sciences. And again, breaking up that capital M, man, I am just a small plug for. She has lots of cars, new book, God, nature and translation, which takes on that translation border between Japanese ways of understanding nature and Canadian ways of understanding nature that, that kind of work has, is now moving into the center. I think, of concerns of about science and materiality. And there is a kind of a useful above it. So that's my first answer. The second one still within this question about the displacement of man's attention, that there's a useful synergy there in terms of the thinking about non-humans and about marginalized people. And that to me is about bringing back history. That if before they're, anthropologists had a task to bring history to the people without history. That part of what's exciting right now is bringing history to non-humans that were seen as off-limits of history. And now we can see them as makers of history along with humans of various kinds. Mm, mm. But that's can take me back to the first part of your question about capital a man and, and his displacement. I've been thinking recently that as anthropologists turn their attention to the Anthropocene, one of the challenging and almost necessary moves that we should make is to think about capital MM, that, that is the guy who's in the Anthropocene. That for all the criticisms that started, what humanists and social scientists brought to the Anthropocene. We were very worried about that word, Anthropocene and what it brought in it, and part of what it brought in it is that capital M, man, absolutely. So I think we should be paying attention to capital M man and the work that he does both historically and in the present and in its, as. So many scholars before us have argued it's gendered, raced it as a religion. It has all kinds of theories of property and of the self head. We need to take all that into our studies of Anthropocene. That capital and man is really relevant to knowing what is this thing Anthropocene and both to see the kinds of questions about the universal and the prejudices that brings, but also the kinds of civilizational aspirations of modernization and their relationship to capital. That these are all things that the Critique of capital M, man and the study of capital and man can help us with. And in particular, as we think he met Anthropocene, it seems important to not confuse capital M, man and the whole world as was done so much in the past. I, I heard a interesting lecture by Amit above a scar a couple months ago in which she did a history of some of the times of calls for environmental urgency and India in particular, and for example, that the forests were being destroyed or that cities were becoming dumps. And she shows how calls for the urgency of reform are often just cover-ups for displacing poor and marginalized people. And so one of the reasons to pay attention to capital M man, again, in relation to that, that the women and men of color who have come to, to discuss that capital and man is to avoid the repetition of just those kinds of moves of displacement and stealing the resources of people. Writing like that, rain, rain. I mean, it's been determine the concept Anthropocene has raised so many issues and conversations about that particular designation. Because on the one hand, it ratifies man again and all of its universality and WHO has sort of hegemonic, unquestioned power and power grabs like you just describe. And on the other hand, it almost draws attention to the fact that not all anthropos have contaminated equally. If I made it, there's many ways to sort of take that conversation. And I'm glad that we're having a conversation and anthropology, because it seems to me that we actually, given the etymology disciplines name is, is it a kind of opportunity for us to sort of pick this up and move it out of the question of whether the geologists believe this is an actual epoch or not, Right? And think about it and precisely the terms that you're talking about, which is to relate, peel apart some of the layers of what we mean by anthropos and who is, who is included in that resignation, right? So, right. So I I've tried it in a little talk. That's going to be in Cambridge anthropology. That's just my first attempt to come back to capital a man. And what is he doing in the Anthropocene? And what should, how should we be reading that? Great. So that's going to come out soon. Great, fantastic. So I also, again in your book you that we have an appearance by someone who I was really happy to see show up here, but maybe a little bit surprised. And that is Ursula Le Guan. And, uh, she appears in an epigraph in one of your chapters and then later in the discussion. And then she's also provided preys on the famous back cover, right? And so I think many of us know that Ursula Le Guin's the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, the very famous anthropologists and also a very renowned feminist science fiction and other sorts of poetry and fiction writer in her own right, at least since the 1960s. And I remember reading her book, the left hand of darkness, which is I think 68, 69. It's just an amazing sort of gender bending sci-fi story. So I was curious about why Ursula Le Guan, what your relationship is to her or to her work or why is she, why is she making an appearance? Why this feminist science fiction writer? Well, I think like when has had anthropological concerns and also feminism at the center of her work. Yeah, and so it's always a pleasure to read her to, to have some of the kinds of thoughts the anthropologists have pushed even farther by a science fiction writer. I think of what cultural anthropology and science fiction in general have in common is that this critique of common sense that rather than being willing to take the world as it is for granted, the idea that things could be really radically different is at the heart of both concerns, hand or slug. When does an amazing job of that, pushing us to think farther or through imaginative exercises. I've also been interested in her attention to writing and to storytelling in particular. We are again, I think her exposure to cultures in which oral traditions were really important makes a difference in her writing and in her thinking about writing. She's written a book about writing, for example, called Steering the Craft. And I love that book and thinking about storytelling. It's got a sense of what word sound like and the kinds of rhythms of words, as opposed to merely what the content of the words. So she's a person who helps me think about writing as well as about the imagination. That's great. The kind of, the feeling of sensuality of words as they're, as they're being spoken. And yeah. Think she's a fantastic person to be thinking about. And I'm really, I'm glad you brought her into the book to remind to remind people about her. If, if they've forgotten or to introduce maybe some new people. Feminism in general has always needed these creative writers to push our imaginations for it. I mean, if you think about others that might stand with like Octavia Butler are Gloria Anzaldua. These are people who push our imaginations forward by giving us other ways to think. And they get to do it in such a fun, fantastical way and the science fiction realm That's just such a lot of freedom there. I wanted to also ask you a bit about another concept that appears in your new book in your work, you speak about capitalist ruins and in fact, that's part of the subtitle of the book. And this reminds me of a parallel that we've been reading about pretty recently. And Akhil Gupta as work and thinking about infrastructure. Where he describes that infrastructure is always an already construction, constructing what he calls a future in ruins. And so this is a very broad question, but I wanted to see what you're thinking about for our future. What is the future? And maybe most specifically, what is the, what can we see after the ruin of capitalism if that wherever to transpire? Well, the first thing is that ruins are happening all the time. That we don't have to wait for some future date line for ruin. That, and that part of how I see ruin is that since the forms of capitalism we know are about investment to get a particular asset going. And then that place, I mean, back to the importance of place it runs out of that asset. And so what's left behind and the point of investment capitalist go somewhere else and look for it somewhere else. And what it leaves behind is a ruin. And even if it's a lively place that's useful for something place it's been abandoned. And so we're seeing that kind of process of rumination all the time as an essential part of capitalism. So we don't have to wait for the end of capitalism to look for ruin. It's, it's, it's part of the process of making capitalism to cause these ruins. And so the challenge is what I think of as living in ruins, that sense of trying to muddle through as best we can and the ruins that we've got that for better or for worse. Um, and I think thinking of infrastructure in processes of ruminations very interesting. And infrastructure is indeed often ruins in the making, even without ruining it. My research group in Denmark has this abandoned brown coal mine as our collective research site. And so the infrastructure is a hole in the ground. That's where you use to get the brand call that. And it's also the ruin that comes into being when ever you abandon that mind. And that is that kind of process of capitalists investment and abandonment through which so many landscapes that we live in now our landscapes of ruin had been thoroughly chewed over by capital investment. And so it's almost as though where capitalism has already ruined us or who are living in that. And now that's, I think it's a very important point because it is not just a future trajectory that's part of the condition that we're surviving. Now. Another, another thing that you describe in the book and also in friction, your previous book, our discussions about what you call weedy patch works and anthropogenic forests. I mean, among many other things, but I kind of focused on these weedy patch works. And right now as I've been reading your new book, I'm also reading parallel to it. Elizabeth Colbert's the sixth extinction, which is a New York Times bestseller and it's a real page turner but fascinating information in there. So she describes in the book that there's an important research article that's panned by a couple of natural scientists who describe human beings as quote, a weedy species. And she kinda takes up that term and starts, you know, reusing it again and again in the book. And I thought this was a very interesting concept. So I wanted to hear what you have to think about this idea of a weedy species, whether that's a good designation for us humans. And if we are indeed a weedy species, what should we as weeds? Next? I, I'm fine with colleague human screens. And I think it speaks to one of the biggest challenges for anthropologists today, which is that we've been very devoted humanness and our own ways that we've stuck by the human through thick and thin, through whatever forms that humans want to take. We're with them there. And cam, we displace the human to allow coast species accommodations, to allow livable landscapes. That it seems to me that we are in the dilemma of stout now sticking by the human is not going to be good enough that we're foreclosing are on futures to that. Extent that we just stick by whatever humans do as good. So seeing humans is a weedy species has a good first step that like other species, some species are in their particular histories playing well with others more than others. And we're not doing a very good job of that, you know, are. So H2O. So I think it's a big challenge for us to take this into account and what do we need to do next? I, I thought of a joke that I made in a recent paper that I was writing on domestication. And because it starts with explaining the idea that there were a series of revolutions from the Neolithic revolution through the Industrial Revolution, including the urban revolution, that's V. Gordon child, an archaeologist, came up with this idea at the beginning of the 20th century. And so because I started the paper with the Neolithic Revolution and the idea of these revolutions, I decide to end it with the coast species accommodation Revolution, which is the idea that may be a few patches of live ability at least could be saved within these ruins of capitalism, in which species other than humans could be part of the mix. What could create liability? Law? Fantastic, really, really, really nice. So eight a, as our last question, I wanted to just see what you're up to now and what projects you're into, what topics you're following, what's, what you're reading, what, what's happening in your world in terms of, of research and thinking and, and everything. Well, one of the projects that I'm just getting started on is a project that involves other people once it comes into being. And I'm calling it Pharaoh atlas right now, so it fits in with what we're just talking about, about we do this and human leading us and other kinds of leading us to. It's a, it's a digital humanities project to try and both investigate and showcase cases where unintentional effects of industrial processes or of settler colonialism that how have they created these kinds of ecologies that weren't part of the plan but have had huge effects on the world. And so I want to figure out a way to collect a bunch of cases in a way that allows a viewer to ask some serious questions. Like, in what ways does an industrial assemblage change the kinds of pests and pathogens around that. That would be a kind of a question the viewer could go in and look at cases that ranged from human diseases to something that was infecting plants and animals. That. So on the one hand, it would showcase the particular cases and also allow the viewer to go back and forth to ask new questions that the site itself hadn't necessarily post. So it's a big challenge, just getting started. And Hopefully we'll pull in some of the kinds of topics that we were just talking about. That sounds great. Well, it sounds like a massive, an exciting project and a lot of technical elements and visual elements. And if people have ideas, should they drop you an e-mail or Sure, that's fine. I would bring great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and talking with us today. It was a true pleasure. So thank you. Hopefully will continue the conversation after this, but yes, thank you again.