Mangroves

Mangroves launched its Pilot Fellowship with the theme "the Common and the Commonable." The notion of the common might at first recall something mundane, resourceable, exploitable - public. The commonable: rocky grass fields or animals grazing with bent necks on sharable land. Both are oft reduced to some objectified commons. Our path was to egress from this legacy and ask: What might the common and commonable signify when freed from such contexts?

Our fearless cohort unwound these terms by imagining the common as a webbing of encounters: dealings of any kind between forms or processes, worldviews and ideologies, and stories and methodologies. Here the common is as manifest in the gut biome of a cow as it is in the heat of political negotiation, in caves, around creek and the rock, as it is in spirit - none of which need be a common for us. So, we faced our first quandary: where the common ends and the uncommon begins.

David Liu

It then became necessary to sniff out where the common has faced erasure due to hierarchical assignations, particularly those pitting knowledges and worldings against each other in such a way that the uncommon emerges a violent force. There, the common can also emerge a force of erasure, mushing difference into a purée of the "universal."

We looked to Arturo Escobar's weaving of the "pluriverse" as an alternative framing of knowledge to the tyrannical centrifuge of global development. Going on from Escobar's own flight from the universal, we began to seek not only the cohabitation of multiform truths and lifeways, but also how they can dance with each other - and allow traversal between them. We read origin stories from around the world, asking what is common and uncommon in and between them, and how those dis/junctions are born of the biomic commons such stories poke out of.

Keeping taut the tension between the common and commonable, the cohort swung through disciplines and scales, feeling shared ideas morph and lose their (re)cognizability. We looked to American cities and the work of Jane Jacobs, to the uncommon in our own spirits through Gloria Anzaldua's writing, to biodiversity and human positions in it, and to life- and spiritways, art, and ideas of the good life. Without reaching explicit ends or points of production, the Fellowship steadily became a practice of making a common of itself. Fellows, each with peculiar perspectives shaped by history, legacy, place, and self, met the others in uncommon commonness, practicing the art of mutual creation, agreement, disagreement, and listening. This became a touchstone to imagining other uncommon commons - even beyond human worldings.

In the second half of our meetings, we were lucky to welcome guest discussants on community fisheries (C Klein), migration (R Bendezú), bioconservation (S Pimm), Islamicate Cosmopolitanism (B Lawrence), arcology (L McCullough), and to honor the specific skills brought by Fellows through the co-creation of our curriculum and the release of central leadership. This led us to points inconceivable at the start of the year, including collective musical improv held over Zoom, musings over broken rules and physics, multilinguistic exercises, and ever emergent and unexpected writing. Gradually, focus shifted to the question of how Fellows might seed the co-generation and cultivation of commoning practices tailored to local contexts, where the players also extend beyond humans. In the end, we both hoped to keep exploring such a process beyond our year together, and to see the year's work continue in future cohorts and projects with the inklings that keep blinking.

Having plumbed "the common" against the anthropocentric grain in our inaugural Fellowship, we stepped into the maze-forest of "growth" with these curvatures: the pluriverse, the "transverse," and the "perverse" [PURR-verse]. What, you say? While preglobal worldings have projected universes of their own, a scientized neo-empire has imposed its universe on all others under the guise of objective, not just conventional, reality. The pluriverse ensures the continuance of distinct, even resistant, worldings. The partial connections between them permit give-and-take, yet the power dynamics also forbid fair play or real delinkage (Mignolo). The transverse is our way to slide between them and take up, not an othering of worldings, but an othering of one's own enough to negotiate "otherly" realities. Still, even this transversal can reify, detemporalize, indeed underpower each common lifing - or "co-lifing" over transoms. Enter the perverse. Rather than reducing to a Deist minimum (Cherbury) for a new universal, we proposed a perversal platform where the evolving interactions of the pluriverse and its transversal can also spawn multilaterally translated, sharable commons allowing at once evolving diverging and convergence. We mean this beyond a human focus. With this macromicro differentiality and "posthumanist" imaginary, we could now begin to think "growth" in its myriad embodiments - even inversions, eversions, reversions...

Stage set, we slid into V Smil's survey of "growth." As a universalist account under scientific scope, it deployed a metron for all material reality: from the cell to megacities under one lens, with patterned vertical climbs: linear, logarithmic, exponential. Rimming scientific consensus, Smil warns of peaks and limits of growth. But what of incommensurate ways of describing, living the world? Can a non-lizard do the sentipensar for a lizard? In his monoscoping, Smil owes much to the breathtaking correlations of A von Humboldt across the continents he traversed, but also assumes the All that Humboldt globalized of Hegel's (imperializing) Hellenic universal. We asked: Can difference in kind be corralled numerically without requalification or translation? Leaving such a platform of "growth," we plied our own translinguistic query. With over two dozen tongues among us, we uncovered abundant construals of "growth": lengthening, enlarging, stretching, opening, greening, unfurling, blowing up... Of the last, we also correlated the Greek physis to R Williams' relook at "nature," derived as it was from that Greek term but denatured by modern science.

David Liu

Retaking an ampler sense of growth, we turned to the striking insights of Laozi, Nagarjuna, and Qohelet, who articulated processes in terms of radical contingency, emergence, and metabolic recursion. We saw the latter (with B Lawrence's help) in Ibn Khaldun's dynastic phases where, within each phase of growth, there was also degrowth or attrition, atrophy. The Chinese painting "Up the River at Qingming" pictorialized this complex irony: At the peak of prosperity was already decline, decadence - peril. But growth is not only socioeconomic, as we gleaned from the Rhenish Hildegard, Kimmerer's Potawatomi plains, and sex pots of the pre-Columbian Moche elite. It is also spiritual, ecological, social - in sum, relational. A Escobar and M Osterweil reminded us (in person) of the abyssal import of that awareness, as did mycopunkerie, Kropotkin's (and Wu-Tang Clan's) mutual aid, along with Illich's conviviality - a sort of mutual growth like ubuntu. Others pointed at useless or noxious growth (Marx, Graeber, Bregman). The relationality of growth became sobering as we considered "operational land" (cum air and sea), where cities subsist on their far-reaching command-control, and D Richter's plurimodal critical zone science. Such vantages gave us caveats to thinking through current plights of housing and dwelling, as well as a wide lens from which to approach D da Cunha's protean concept of ubiquitous wetness and A Tamburrino's Carless Rome project, an attempt to transmobilize - thus recondition - Rome.

Having tinkered with "growth" in both theoretic and pragmatic terms, we now find ourselves in a new clearing, a "nir-vana" of no forest. We searched in all directions for "growth," and, in pushing through the thicket of its vertiginous vectors, reached its point of useless fruition. This mirrors the useful blurring that characterized our earlier toil on "the common," and points a way out of the chokehold of relentless (economic) growth and "progress." Maybe with this release, growth could now be renatured if not rewilded, allowed to go its thousand woven ways.