Telling Stories with Others: Holding Open Space & Time for Another

By Victoria L. Williams

"The task, on the contrary, is to recognise that the seeds of a community ethic- and, indeed, of benevolence - still exist. It is to join up the remnants of local culture that survive and give it the chance to get its confidence back. We now need to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy senses of the story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where you are, and who is there with you..." 1-David Flemming, Surviving the Future

Introduction

Refugium: 'An area in which a population of organisms can survive through a period of unfavourable conditions, especially glaciation.2' Can stories act as a kind of refugium for humans and non-humans alike? My making and research circles about multi-species stories, myth, folklore and earthly phenomena with a particular focus on animals and the various realms they inhabit. I am interested in how we see and interact with the other, looking into the unique ways images and language is used to interpret lifeforms and how these may alter the perception of the individual perceiving that, which is other. Since beginning the course in MA Authorial Illustration, I have been exploring stories concerning multi-species survival, existences and the various on-goings of earthly presences such as water bodies, landscapes and animals. I have been looking into how, and who is telling stories in relation to ongoing earthly survival whilst living with, and upon a damaged planet. I am interested in the different ways in how one can approach this sensitive area, observing how various individuals go about putting themselves into a space where there exists, other lifeforms, taking notice of the way they enter into this exchange, how they gather information, and how they deliver their findings. Involving others into practices is not an area to be taken lightly. The messages we convey about them should be carefully considered.

It has been a fascinating journey throughout the MA into discovering many people across a variety of fields such as the sciences and arts combining their skills and knowledge in constructing and telling stories, with a means for ongoing earthly survival between various species.

"The world is feeling, knowing, thinking itself through the beings that compose it"3

We are all looped in and around one another's lives, a metaphor for describing this could perhaps be water. All bioenergy life forms contain a certain amount of fluid, the fluid migrates around the body. When dying, this fluid leaves the body. Therefore, I see it as we are watery bodies migrating through existence over and over again, transient lamina forms. When we eat we absorb nutrients, into our microbiome, when we die these nutrients are passed on elsewhere. It is a cycle of webbed ecologies living and dying together, what remains are our stories, these stories migrate through air, through time, this swirling force between earth and sky. Stories have a life of their own, growing and retracting, sometimes lying dormant, and sometimes going extinct. Some stories are potentially harmful to others, and other stories have the ability to illuminate spaces, beings, events overlooked, or the less known.

From my research for this essay I have discovered that some stories are told for the purpose of ongoing-ness, that there are stories that have the intent in allowing one another to hold open space and time for others in suffering, or in trouble. As animals dissipate from the world around us, a time titled by biologists as the Holocene or the sixth mass extinction. My work looks to take on an imaginative response to the stories I encounter, news articles, documentary and first-hand experiences. So, what does it mean when referring to holding open time and space for another? This was a phrase I first encountered in Donna J. Haraway's book 'Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene'. In Staying with the Trouble, there is a chapter titled 'Sympoiesis: and the lively arts of staying with the trouble', Haraway features and discusses various artists, scientists and researchers who tell stories through their work about various entities that are vulnerable due to human implications. Two of these animals are coral reefs and the other is the ring-tailed lemurs of the Madagascan forests. This is of interest to me as my own practice investigates into animals and other life forms in trouble. Haraway, a biologist, contemporary speaker and thinker proposes a new collaboration between the arts and sciences based on hers and other scientist's theories and findings to enable a flourishing amongst life forms, finding new innovative ways to tell stories in order to overcome the ongoing loss of biodiverse ecosystems. Haraway proposes to make works and stories about past and present lives and to imagine entanglement of future lives, a method Haraway calls SF theory, SF stands for many things in Haraway's book, but I will refer to the one linking towards storytelling using arts and science collaborations as mentioned above, for this SF, it is 'speculative fabulation'. Haraway discusses the illustrated book titled 'Tik-Tik the Ring-tailed Lemur', a collaborative work by lemur behaviourist and author Alison Jolly, lemur biologist Hantanirina Rasamimanana and illustrator Deborah Ross.4 Combining their talents together the team produced a book for the people of Madagascar who had little to none familiarity with the lemurs that they shared their homeland with, this was due to many generations of the Madagascan people being taught from an older French curriculum that featured wildlife not native to Madagascar. The book was assembled in hope that this story opens up an awareness and holds time and space for this lemur species along with the other one hundred plus lemur species and ecosystems they share with other native wildlife existing in areas heavily under threat by logging. 

Chapter 1. Leaving Impressions Perceptual Data: When creatures meet 

One such story with intent to hold open time and space for others is told by the late environmentalist Farley Mowat. Mowat's documentary film titled 'Sea of Slaughter'5 can be applied to ongoing present-day Holocene occurrences. The philosopher, Vinciane Despret calls this method 'creative involution'6, rolling inwards, not to go back to the past, but to create a new future with some adage from the past. 

The story takes place during a time when conservation practices had not yet been conceived by the many peoples harvesting along the Northeastern seaboard, Within Mowat's film he narrates to the viewer, starting at of the beginning with the un-stoppable rising race of the Capitalocene, telling the tale of the devastating effects over the last five hundred years upon the Northeastern seaboard from the United States to Canada. Along the way Mowat relays the impact of the contributing activities eventually leading to the areas great ecological demise, he examines the attitudes of the past societies which unleashed a great extinction upon the many species existing upon these shores. 

Mowat illustrates through narrative and unveils past and present film footage of how the animal body and the surrounding phenomena was perceived by those interacting with it. Mowat explains that we often equate vast open reaches of vacant land to wilderness, going on to say that this sometimes inaccurate, where these vast empty coastal land expanses exist in 'Sea of Slaughter' is solely down to whole ecosystems having been obliterated due to a lack of any sort of bioregional consciousness, the rush of demand for animal turned object consumer commodities drained the landscape, and eventually 5 the animals that lived and died there. Mowat tells us this story, his message is not to upset, but unite us in thought, to bring our awareness into being truly present. 

'The task of the speaker of the dead is to bring the dead into the present, so as to make more response-able living and dying possible in times yet to come.' 7Donna Haraway 

Connecting story strings of the past and ongoing entangled lives is worthwhile in order to make us re-examine the ongoing situation of loss of species biodiversity. If we do not tell stories about creatures, overtime with each generation their story is in danger of perhaps becoming erased, therefore it is important to remember animals, effects of normalizing loss of biodiversity would be unfair to the countless future generations of human kind, as well as of course, multi- species kind. Although it does seem apparent that such realisations and warnings of such significant great losses are hard to confront by many of us, myself included. Perhaps the reason for this being so is as Paul R. Ehrlich puts forward in Edward O. Wilson's book 'Biodiversity': 

'Earth's habitats are being nickeled and dimed to death, and human beings have great difficulty perceiving and reacting to changes that occur on a scale of decades. Our nervous systems evolved to respond to short-term crisis - the potential loss of a mate to a rival, the sudden appearance of a bear in the mouth of a cave. For most of human evolutionary history, there was no reason for natural selection to tune us to recognize easily more gradual trends since there was little or nothing one could do about them.'8 

One nearly forgotten animal story is of that of a large flightless seabird called the great auk. A now extinct bird that lived on the north Atlantic shores, this bird can be seen depicted9 in Charles Kingsley's illustrated storybook 'The Water-Babies'. In this early children's story book the great auk is featured as an anthropomorphized character, who warns the young protagonist of extinction. An early lesson preempting a possible future for various loss of biodiversity. 

There is not much in written accounts of being in the presence of these large birds that were sacred to the North American Tribespeople who had been living and dying with this species for over millennia. Remains of shared burials discovered, therefore the animal was a figurehead that had intertwined story strings with the many peoples inhabiting this landscape, a part of their storytelling culture. One of only a few remaining written accounts informs us that the great auk was a prolific and powerful swimmer, moving like a penguin throughout the waters surrounding the landscape it inhabited.10 There exists, stories of human cultures studying the various movements or scriptures of birds amongst other animals, those who interpreted these behaviours were 6 known as the 'augurs', those who translated the meanings of certain animals and phenomena within their existing societies. 

'The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient 'augurs', who could read therein the course of the future' 11- David Abram 

As I watch the house martins soar above Falmouth, they add to my lifeworld experience, a great aerial performance, I feel as though it is a magical thing that I am witnessing, and I feel extremely lucky to behold such a sight. Once these birds along with swallows disperse and migrate from our shores, I know that a new time is drawing in. Bats also tell us of this planetary shift, as they are no longer visible with the naked eye alone flapping quickly and silently against the backdrop of a pink and red sky. They become much harder to see with the human eye alone, what we don't always see we can forget. Some kinds of forgetting can be dangerous12 Robert MacFarlane explains in an interview on his and Jackie Morris's book 'The Lost Words', in the same interview MacFarlane says: 

'Before we lose its language, we lose it itself, we lose the creatures and the plants themselves, but I also think forgetting is a very easy way to lose things, with each generation becomes more at ease with less nature we forget what it is that we have lost, and that seems to me like a dangerous kind of forgetting.' 

For a while after their departure the coastal forts and castles seem too quiet, stuck on pause without the illustrative acrobatics of the swallows, their script full of loops, if there was ever to be any trace of their movements left within the air, I would imagine in to be similar to that of a calligrapher's round hand script flourishes. 

We still read these arrivals and departures of wildlife today as seasonal signs, yet these creatures exist within a different time than ours as what once was. Once much would have depended on many of these scripts and signs of other animals comings and goings, but as our separation from their world grows longer, as our modern human animal lives are fast paced, we don't always have the chance to encounter them, therefore perhaps we are more likely to forget them, yet when the names of these other beings are 7 spoken, we remember them as they enter our minds eye, MacFarlane calls us name callers by nature, going on to describe the power of this: 'You speak the other into being, you allow it to enter into your life and into your mouth, and your stories.'13 

Chapter 2. Thinking with Animals

In Ursula K Le Guin's book, 'Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences' a collection of short animal and human related themed stories, Le Guin does not use illustration but detailed descriptions, in one titled: 'Announcement of an Expedition', Le Guin writes her own visual perception of an animal presence, the penguin. Le Guin writes that animals are the poetical authors of their own script. This is along similar lines to that when remembering the position of the augur's. The penguin, Le Quin briefly describes is unlike the birds of the sky, the penguin instead flies through the water, and that observations of this script were unknown until means of recording underwater by aquatic film apparatus.14 From observing slowed down recordings of animal presences, animal's speculative translations are theorized by researchers, such recordings of various animal's sea or non-sea literatures, are examined so to map a greater understanding of their ecologies, their world, allowing the animal to tell us what is important for them for their ongoing survival. Although overlaying our scripts onto theirs, as with some nature documentaries has been considered as harmful, a sort of taking the animal inwards into our own ego for an outcome of our own making. Perhaps this draws an even further distancing between the animal and human animal, when we presume to know what an animal needs we may be 8 shutting off our own senses and our own sensitivities towards them. Perhaps, this is what has enabled us to reject the animal as augury. Un-familiarities perpetuated by some types of scientific announcements or studies, assuming that the animal's needs, and requirements are much less and unlike our own. Professor Susan Squier writes: 

'Augury is a type of knowledge-making about present and future that is in danger of disappearing in the 21st century: the knowledge gained by intimate relations with animals. Accepting animals farmed for their meat and eggs in a process of rationalised scientific management, we have lost the ability to see what they augur for our collective future.'15 

If we approach the animal differently, meeting on a level of mutuality the kind of space between the animal and the human animal shifts. What is to be found there once opened? Could it be all the differences between one another? Abram describes what we lose by not opening up to the otherness around us. 

'When we uncritically allude to material nature as a set of inert objects, or even as a clutch of determinate, mechanical processes, we block out the perceptual interplay between ourselves and our surroundings.'16 

Human beings are feeling and sensitive creatures by nature, if we only permit ourselves a predetermined attitude towards other phenomena whilst upon entering into spaces with, perhaps we disengage most of what is our own sensuous animal bodies, allowing only a part of ourselves to the encounter, unable to fully immerse ourselves, along with making ourselves unavailable to imagine other perspectives. When we do allow ourselves this sort of encounter, is it a 'becoming with'? 

Donna Haraway speaks of 'becoming with', and 'thinking with' imaginative fabulations, that instead we must be transformative and in staying present we must stay with the trouble in order to embark towards a way of thinking that Haraway refers to as 'tentacular thinking.'17 Tentacular coming from the Latin word tentaculum, meaning 'feeler,' and tentare, meaning 'to feel' and 'to try'.18 

I would like to adopt this kind of tentacular thinking towards my own projects, proceeding on from my first and second project where I have continued to research into folktales, stories and ecological matters that I find fascinating. I enjoy uncovering stories and investigating narratives that link to otherworldly entities and animals. My texts aim to reflect my thoughts on animals I have researched that are often weaved 9 into folklore and human histories. How we interpret meaning from these events and cycles and what they inform about the human condition. In my ongoing project 'Animal Islands' I focus upon animals that have shared in long term partnerships with humans. A kind of symbiosis of sorts. Animals wander into our imaginations, and into our dreams, some animals seem to me in a way their own metaphorical versions of islands, mysterious, there and then not there, the animal is able to tell as much about the places we live, even our own bodies, the health of particular regions, or even more widely planetary health. Some animal's bodies float away from view, never to be seen again. Islands emerge and fall caused by volcanic eruptions underwater, an island in the distance, sometimes lost and forgotten, along with their stories. 

In my project I try to imagine these animal islands with the other neighbouring animal islands, wondering how stories amongst them will play out. Will they form a symbiosis for their ongoing survival? Ones we do not wish to enter into a space with yet still slip in and out of the human world with their stories. How do we interpret their stories? If their stories are ones of trouble, how can we become responsive and responsible, and what will we find when we encounter these forgotten islands that our ancestors left off the map. We can illuminate them, so we are not going into the future without their stories. 

Of course, not all animals are disappearing, some like the boar are in fact of the opposite, multiplying at an alarming rate and removing landscapes and wildlife as an invasive species, only arriving in various locations by means of human error.19 They are fast to adapt, and fiercely persecuted by landowners. An animal refugee with story strings interwoven with the early settlers who brought them over in ships as they sailed towards the Americas. Domestic pigs are also like islands, as science and intensive farming practices has altered their bodies and reproductive abilities so drastically, they are isolated from their own animal world, and fully within our own world. Every aspect of their existence is governed and decided by the farmers who keep them.20 In my project I try to imagine and draw on new scientific theories, discoveries about how animals impact human lives and vice versa. I try to imagine how some displaced animals would imaginatively determine their ongoing survival by interacting with the hazards within their vicinity, this includes the countless animals who are successfully adapting to a majority of urban environments. It is interesting to speculate what worlds would they build around themselves in order to survive. 

Another animal refugee is the bat species the flying fox, bats are heavily intertwined into human storytelling cultures. I relay their ongoing survival story in my practice, where they forced to clump together like the seeds within the body of the fruit they consume, within this fruit they drift across the oceans, awaiting good soil for them to continue what bats do, bats would normally expel the seeds in flight, enabling new trees to grow. 

I discovered whilst researching this species that when flying fox abundance is low, due to deforestation and disturbance, interactions become less of an occurrence, and the bats are more likely to remain in one tree, only dropping seeds beneath their host tree. When the animals are in abundance, the colonies of fruiting trees repel newcomers, who may successfully snatch fruits to eat elsewhere thus dispersing the seeds and super seeding diverse forests of tree species. This creative act performed by the bats is known as making a seed shadow amongst bat researchers.21 Stories of bats perpetuated throughout ancient cultures, perhaps a few maya were paying attention to the scrip seed shadow forming worlds of these flying mammals, in Mayan culture, the bat was seen as symbolic for transformation and rebirth.22 11 

Within my practice I have been forming poems and texts. As I often feel that both work well together and both feed into each other. The animal is often found within poetry, MacFarlane states that poetry is exactly the medium for expression, for wonder. describing poetry, magic and nature as wound together. And explains poetry as a way of negotiating with the wild: 'I think it's partly in oral culture trying to work out how to account for the, this wilderness that surrounds it.'23 

The invention of the underwater camera enabled filming of creatures which changed the tides of how we approach such aquatic animal bodies. Painlevé, an early filmmaker and early pioneer of animal documentary. His avante-garde film making practices led him to dip in and out of various rising groups and movements of the age, people such as humanitarians, animal activists, animal photographers and the surrealist artists movement.24 The surrealist imagery of the time fed into Painlevé's own works, Painlevé introduced scientist spectators to the first onscreen animal documentaries at Académie des sciences in 1928, his works aimed to share his enthusiasm and knowledge for the more than human world, unfortunately the audience was not interested in Painlevé's early work and remarked that 'cinema is not to be taken seriously!'25, therefore Painlevé was met with negativity and harsh criticism. To make matters worse for Painlevé he gained unwanted interest from naval forces in regards to his underwater apparatus, but not for reasons involving the same interests as the film maker. Painlevé's involvement with the surrealists had interesting results on his works, his later illustrations of recordings blur the realms between surreal art and documentary, especially his film introducing the seahorse. Painlevé ultimately made his debut when he 12 showed the film footage of a male seahorse birthing its young, something that shook and surprised the society of the time. Painlevé's short film about the sea urchin gives us the body of a tentacular creature. A feeling creature. The sea urchin is heavily intertwined with human histories, stories and folkloric beliefs, various Bronze age burial sites unearthed across Britain have shown, much like that of the great auks, human corpses buried alongside the remains of sea urchins.26 An unusual animal whose animal body becomes something radically different when passing, taking up a whole new life of its own. The sea urchin when deceased becomes much like an empty vessel, where stories and beliefs are poured inside. So mysterious were these creatures to early humans that they deemed them as otherworldly and were discovered in graves buried ceremoniously by the hundreds alongside the dead, doctor Paul D Taylor, from the Natural History Museum, theorises that perhaps this was done so as means of being of the belief that they possessed of some sort of use in the afterlife. Other urchin bodies had the story attached that they had been cast into our earthly realm by weather controlling gods, giving them the title of the thunderstone. In other folkloric beliefs, in Suffolk, UK they were titled as fairy loaves, the belief was that they would help bread to rise and were believed to be protective charms when kept within the home.27 

The human imagination was poured inside these empty vessels, translating this animal's remains into a many storytelling and belief filled device, its tentacular feet traversing through watery human storytelling imagination, echinoids have also been found cast into the walls of religious buildings, to ward off the evil eye. An animal body marking the boundary between the Christian religion and the earlier Celtic folklore. 13 The animal body is one susceptible to change, along with the beliefs and the societies that go along with it. Mythologies and folklore have often equated the animal to a daemonic existence,28 then a later shift after interjections from religious societies as sometimes animals representing a demonic presence, again later out of religion and into the sciences likened to being much more mechanistic.29 James Hillman and Margot Mclean's text and imagery in 'Dream Animals'30 embody the idea similar to that of David Abrams own musings in his poetical book 'The Spell of the Sensuous' in so much as in thinking about the entities we meet in our everyday lives as a means to open our senses, by acknowledging those entities as individuals that enter our dreams, and waking lives creating an imaginative space in which to inform one another. Allowing the presence of the animal to emerge has not always been so, much has been put onto the animal in terms of self-gratification, symbolism, omens, searching for meanings about ourselves, taking from the animal, as opposed to looking, in a way of peering into and outwards from the animal, imaginatively constructing the animal around ourselves and to imagine the world from the perspective of the animal.

Chapter 3. The World Building Animal, The Stories that Animals Tell

In a talk titled 'Poieses of Worlding' by Vinciane Despret, Despret says that she makes stories in the hope of making us more sensitive, more creative, more porous. How the animal connects to its world, Despret remarks that, 'animals are good to think with', and 'animals are good to make stories with.' Jakob Von Uexküll's Umwelt theory. Uexküll's belief was that biologists had fatigued all means of acquiring any transformative knowledge for means of human and animal relationships flourishing together long-term, Uexküll concluded at the time that research methods had gone stagnant, deeming the continuation of such practices as unethical and unhelpful, animals placed in an isolation to be studied proved nothing, research labs disconnected animals and people even further, Uexküll proposed a resurgence towards animal studies, and offered scientists a new transformative way of thinking about animals, giving rise to Uexküll's thought practices, enabling researchers towards understanding multispecies relationships, imagining the worlds of animals and the other presences that made up their world. this new mode of thinking proposed an 14 entirely new strategy involving a reimagining of the animal body, what it encounters, feels and thinks. Uexküll's propositioned theories claimed to be void of any dominative spectatorship, or pre-empted expectations, but encouraged imaginings ununified with landscapes, beings, allowing partnerships and presences to emerge, entering each other's spaces independently, web-like unfolding, meeting eye to eye, without objectification, unlike the research practices before which were only translatable to the conductor. At the time Darwinist theory had reduced the animal down to the mere conclusion that evolution of species and survival of the fittest was the pinnacle goal of most earthly life forms.

'In majority of sensed-worlds, animals and plants have become nothing but assemblages of atoms without plan. The same process has also seized on the human being in sensed-worlds, where even the subject's own body is just an assemblage of matter, and all its manifestations have become reduced to physical processes.'31

This was a fast trending throughout society, this caused Uexküll to remark towards this declaration saying that such conclusions could be potentially harmful and dangerous way of thinking, reducing animals down to the scientific belief that animals were operating at a mere level comparable to that of a machine, passing down genetic sequences and information, and that ongoing survival was competitive, unconscious and uncomplicated, generated by hormones and occurring without much thought, competing for survival against one another and concluding that nothing much more was to learn from one another's behaviours within the world.This perspective put onto animals by the human animal has done much damage. It has reduced much, whilst enforcing a colonialist view on the world, a false assumption that we can do it better than Gaia. David Abram's book 'Becoming Animal' is largely concerned with these ideas, a chapter titled 'Reciprocity' Abram states that:

'If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us - we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attention, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.'32 15 

Conclusion

We live in an age where we are witnessing a great many ongoing movements between peoples and animals, many largely becoming refugees from ongoing political and environmental breakdowns. Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret's both quote Levi Strauss's saying that, 'Animals are good to think with' 33, drawing on this statement I believe the ability of the imaginations to connect across species including the human animal should be used, in an essay in John Berger's book 'Why Look at Animals?' Berger's essay titled 'Ape Theatre' Berger reflects upon zoo visit where he observed the apes, watching the attentive interactions shared between adult and infant, acknowledging that this is to be found across species lives if we take the time to acknowledge each other's needs for a flourishing coexistence. Drawing on the similarities allows this likeness to unfold an empathic response, taking the time to observe and find the likeness that which is found in each other. Berger writes: 'Birth begins the process of learning to be separate. The separation is hard to believe or accept. Yet, as we accept it, our imagination grows - imagination which is the capacity to reconnect, to bring together, that which is separate. Metaphor finds the traces which indicate that all is one. Acts of solidarity, compassion, self-sacrifice, generosity are attempts to re-establish - or at least a refusal to forget - a once-known unity. Death is the hardest test of accepting the separation which life has incurred.'34

Imagining what the animal perceives in its world and thinking what is important to the animal, this can help us make us think like the animal, feel like that animal, be inside an animal's head or be inside its heart. Connecting meanings. Sticky strings, relatability. Inciting empathy through thought, feeling by imagining. The changing perceptions of the animal, and the human gaze upon the animal, the reconfiguring of how we think and bring animals into our awareness. Living and dying together. My aim is to carry these thought practices into my ongoing work as well as day to day living practices. 16 

Bibliography Abram, David, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2011) Abram, David, The Spell Of The Sensuous, 1996, Berger, John, Why Look At Animals? (London: Penguin, 2009) Despret, Vinciane, POIESIS OF WORLDING, 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QcRnKxOsg> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Despret, Vinciane, Vinciane Despret: Lecture, 2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QcRnKxOsg> [Accessed 5 July 2018] "Donna Haraway Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene", E-Flux, 2016 <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Despret, Vinciane, "Ethology Between Empathy, Standpoint And Perspectivism: The Case Of The Arabian Babblers", Http://Www.Vincianedespret.Be/, 2010 <http://www.vincianedespret.be/2010/04/ethology-between-empathy-standpoint-and-perspectivism-the-case-of-the-arabian-babblers/#more-30> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin In The Chthulucene(Duke University Press, 2016), Haraway, Donna, and Anna Tsing, Tunneling In The Chthulucene, 2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkZSh8Wb-t8> [Accessed 5 July 2018] "Folklore Of Fossil Echinoderms", Deposits Magazine, 2018 <https://depositsmag.com/2017/04/04/folklore-of-fossil-echinoderms/> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Center, National, "Invasive Species: Animals - Wild Boar (Sus Scrofa)", Invasivespeciesinfo.Gov, 2018 <https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/animals/wildboar.shtml> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Ehrlich, Paul R., Biodiversity (Washington D.C: National Academy Press, 1988), p. 25 Fleming, David, and Shaun Chamberlin, Surviving The Future Fuller, Errol, The Great Auk (Hawkhurst: Bunker Hill, 2003) Hillman, James, and Margot McLean, Dream Animals (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997) 17 

Le Guin, Ursula K., Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences (A Plume Book, 1987), pp. 169-173 MacFarlane, Robert, Robert Macfarlane: The Waterstones Interview (Waterstones, 2017) Macfarlane, Robert, and Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (UK: Hamish Hamilton, 2017) Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Mowat, Farley, Sea Of Slaughter, 1989 Nicholls, Angus, Goethe's Concept Of The Daemonic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 236-237 Onto-Ethologies (State Univ of New York Pr, 2009), pp. 1-20 Oleksy, Ryszard, Luca Giuggioli, Thomas J. McKetterick, Paul A. Racey, and Gareth Jones, "Flying Foxes Create Extensive Seed Shadows And Enhance Germination Success Of Pioneer Plant Species In Deforested Madagascan Landscapes", PLOS ONE, 12 (2017), e0184023 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184023> Masaki, Andy, Marina McDougall, and Brigitte Berg, Science Is Fiction: The Films Of Jean Painlevé (The Mit Press, 2000), Extract From Jean Painlevé The Sea Urchin, 1928 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rkMpkpy5Qg> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Squier, Susan M., "Chicken Auguries", Configurations, 14 (2008), 69-86 <https://doi.org/10.1353/con.0.0011> "Susan Merrill Squier", Susan Merrill Squier, 2018 <https://www.susanmerrillsquier.com/> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Myakka Reserve, and Ako Materials, "The Ako Conservation Education Project - The Lemur Conservation Foundation", The Lemur Conservation Foundation, 2017 <http://www.lemurreserve.org/about-lcf/the-ako-project-2/> [Accessed 5 July 2018] Tsing, Anna, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - A Feminist Approach To The Anthropocene: Earth Stalked By Man (New York City, New York: Barnard Center for Research on Women, 2015) Werness, Hope B, The Continuum Encyclopedia Of Animal Symbolism In Art (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 31 McNamara, Kenneth J., "Shepherds' Crowns, Fairy Loaves And Thunderstones: The Mythology Of Fossil Echinoids In England", Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 273 (2007), 279-294 <https://doi.org/10.1144/gsl.sp.2007.273.01.22>