Thesis excerpt

Climate is everywhere, it everything;

we exist on this planet as the ecologies in surrounding facilitate us to do so, Mother nature drives our ability to be able to live, quite literally. Western society teaches this early on in school; Our trees provide Oxygen and we dispense Carbon Dioxide. The fundamental act of existing and being as a human is encompassed within our climate and ecological systems. Climate provides life in this complex ecosystem and weaves between cities to consider humans. But it feels as though we (humans) are more concerned with hierarchical practices of consumption as climate has become a strained and tainted relationship to which we have become far removed.

‘Keep the climate at arms length,'

Its a disheartening realisation as climate catastrophe is close; or already here. The Earth can only go silenced for so long, rising temperatures, flukes in seasons, threats of species and spaces; a result of accumulations of human dominated lived years on the planet. In the summer of 2022, London experienced heat waves where temperatures reached 40°C, causing fires in the suburbs of the city, electrical cuts and widespread uneasiness (Keane, 2022). This was something quite new to experience in a 'developed' city; the same type of place whom host global conferences to boast empty promises (Rannard, 2021). The wrath of climate emergency has creped into unfamiliar cityscapes while the familiar others in Global South face worse consequences; flooding in Pakistan (UNICEF,2022) and the need for new categories of aid such as land "erosion relief" in Bangladesh¹.

The Earth’s extinction is imminent. Its a shame that passivity and rooted detachment has overshadowed our kinships to our nonhuman species and cobeings. It feels as though no one is listening.

Maybe, some of the issues lie in the already establish systems we were taught (like western schooling). Lucy Jones (2021), the author of Losing Eden touches on how " In North America by the time you're eighteen years old, you've spent 12,000 hours in the classroom. That's 12,000 hours in a rectangular room separated from nature and that's kind of what it takes, I think, to create an industrial society". Attesting to how climate is perceived as an adjacent entity instead of a companion which should be interwoven in our lives but perhaps that's difficult to do when our cobeings are not seen as other beings, see Fig.[ēk biyōg]for the erasure of trees from our mappings.

"One way to stop seeing river and hills only as natural resources is to class them as fellow beings” (Le Guin, 2014)

As Le Guin suggests, at some point humans started to regard nature as resource which served to supply and be extracted. These past notions have resulted in gaps at the forefront of our considerations and it's projected onto our cityscape;It has possibly disabled us humans the experience of trying to know our fellow nonhuman species, being intimate and to consider all living beings as a kin. Because;

'You can’t feel something you never knew’

The thesis will tread to explore the landscape of tender ecologies and how intimate practices of auricular tools in different forms and can be used asa practice for calling for agency, we will wander through different scales and notions of listening; from actual sounds, ecospecies embodied translation, multilingual mimicry, nonenglish dialogue and embedded memories which can evoke emotions in our anatomies. Emotion which is encompassed in us as humans who are encompassed in the complex ecologies of nature. see Fig. -১ [ēk] . In some consequence, this is a start to begin healing our relationship to our cobeings. It doesn't only attribute to numbers, statistics and specialised language of 'sustainable LEED buildings'instead it challenges to unlearn our attached notions and sits within unfamiliarity to uncover what's on the ground and give value to others. As T.J Demos (2022) demonstrates:

“This can’t be a fight about carbon in the atmosphere alone its also about powers on the ground because limiting climate emergency to de-carbonisation will leave systems of interlinking oppression intact”. Therefore, it's a call to unhear: past taught notions can carry perceptions of erasure and forgo importance of kinship with our cobeing:

the cells, minerals, soil, roots, plants, animals, living beings

The continuation of this chapter will go onto uncover instances in time where these ideas came to be, definitions, format, the practice, the platform of EcologyTalks.com and a guide of use in how to get closer to the unknown of our ecologies.

'I think its getting louder’

This paper comprises of three different sections; the introduction, setting out of theoretical framework with its blueprint of use, the body which uncovers the practice and its method, this is interlinked with the accommodating portfolio and the concluding chapter which covers reflections of practice, applications in the city and conversations of complexity in scale.