Category Archives: necro-economies

Economies of Exchange: Fish vs. Gold

Posted on July 24, 2012 by | 1 comment

Thank you for the Artemia blog welcome. In previous posts topics have included whale music, flesh-eating beetles, the animal rendering facility in east Vancouver, aliens, tattoos, commodities, etc.  Sticking with the animal theme, this post is about fish.  Southwest of Williams Lake in British Columbia’s interior Teztan Biny or Fish Lake has received important media coverage over the last few years because of the (re)proposed Prosperity gold-copper mine.  The Tsilhqot’in Nation has expressed continued concern with the proposed mine, including opposition associated with the initial, rejected environmental impact assessment.

This initial rejected proposal included a plan to drain Fish Lake, which involved the mining company’s congruent plan to relocate the fish from the Lake.  Though in 2010 the federal environmental review did not deem the mine environmentally sound, the company continues to pursue the project and has submitted a ‘new’ environmental impact assessment.  The Tsilhqot’in Nation expresses continued concerns over the proposed mine, including inadequate consultation efforts.

Getting back to the blog themes, Artemia is in some ways about the economies of life, like the lives of the fish in Fish Lake that managed to avoid relocation through the initial federal environmental review process.  Artemia’s theme of the economies of life, however, seems equally about the economies of death.  Not to be morbid here, but previous blog references to the movie Alien and flesh eating beetles could be read as the economies of a lack of existence/life as opposed to the economies of life/existence.  In other words, one of the Artemia’s themes (the economies of life) extends beyond ‘life’ and is also about threats to life.  To the economies of life, encounters that question the life/death, existence/non-existence dichotomy are central.  Are the economies of life as much about lives avoiding death? Like the relocation of fish, and the threat to aqua livelihoods in Fish Lake?

In relation to the proposed gold-copper mine, the fish in Fish Lake have avoided relocation, but have not avoided being referred to as a moveable living subject directly related to the economies of gold exchange.  This proposed exchange was based on the insignificance of the fish in Fish Lake relative to the potential ‘prosperity’ that could be attained through gold-copper extraction.  These moments and economies of exchange could be read as the economies of life, economies of avoiding death or perhaps the very economies of existence.

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Posted in animals, necro-economies, resources, wildlife

Life m/eats death in a flesh-eating beetle colony

Posted on June 5, 2012 by | Leave a comment

While visiting the University of Wisconsin – Madison, two days ago

UW’s Zoological Museum curator handed me a large box and disappeared behind a hobbit-like door leading into the side of a grassy hill leading up to one of the campus’s buildings. I peered into the box: a mangle of delicate swan bones covered in dried pinky-red flesh. I might have dropped it if it wasn’t so feather-light. We – a group of grad students, artists, poets, and professors gathered for the Taking Animals Apart conference – had just spent an hour checking out the museum’s collection of specimens: articulated and disarticulated skeletons, shelves lined with jars of preserved animals, and taxidermied mounts and full animal bodies. Noteworthy specimens: a giant beaver skull (like below) found just a few miles from the university campus in a peat bog, and a drawer full of stuffed passenger pigeons lying tidily side by side on a large pillow.

How long do you think before Harper makes this "old" beaver Canada's new amped up national symbol?

 

When the curator returned we followed her into the dimly lit, narrow, low ceilinged corridor. The air became increasingly steamy and hot, the walls dripping with condensation, as we snaked out way underground. With a flourish the curator opened a second door and we entered a small cavern thick with steam: the university’s private dermestid beetle colony. Or, flesh-eating beetles.

Cutaway view of the "Old Met Lab" from 1877 – home to the flesh eating beetle colony since 1950

Spotting two hefty scurrying bugs I exclaimed: “they’ve escaped!” Thankfully only the nearest person to me heard, and corrected me: “uh, those are cockroaches”. Oops (thanks, rural upbringing!). The beetles are much smaller than cockroaches, and filled several raised stainless steel tanks the size of large trunks. Lifting the lid, the curator placed the swan bones in one container and misted the container with water. Within a few days, she explained, the bones would be picked spotlessly clean by the beetles so that only minor prep is needed before the bones can be catalogued into the museum’s research collections.

Ring-tailed lemur being prepared at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna

Dermestid colonies are still used extensively by museum like the UW’s (and by taxidermists). It was hard to reconcile the clinical, sterile, and meticulously organized collection of unblemished, labeled organisms in the museum’s collection with the dank, feral world of the underground flesh-eating beetle colony. A lot of work goes into maintaining the beetles as a living colony that transforms messy remains of death into bones stripped clean and ready to be placed into taxonomically categorized drawers. Both of these worlds – the underground beetle colony and the floors of cabinets full of specimens – gave whole new meaning to Roland Barthes’s comment that “all classifications are oppressive.” I was reminded also of how “taking animals apart” often occurs in a largely hidden space using messy practices, like butchering meat or milking dairy cows. The end product is clean, largely divested of the blood, feces, sweat and bugs that formed it. Our general collective ignorance of these processes is in some ways a classic form of commodity fetishism, wherein the commodity is treated like “it has a life of its own” (as Marx famously remarked) rather than as a social product created through multiple  (and usually highly unequal) relations and processes. But animals that are taken apart do or did have lives of their own, bringing a whole new set of ethical and political questions to the fore, and reminding us that life, too, can be doubly erased by the end product of taking animals apart.

 

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Posted in animals, classification, necro-economies

“Rendering is recycling”

Posted on May 28, 2012 by | Leave a comment

As the weather warms I’m reminded of one of the defining olfactory features of parts of summertime Vancouver. My first whiff of it was after moving into an apartment in Hastings-Sunrise, on a new bus route. It was July, in the thick of a stretch of unusually hot summer weather that descended on Vancouver like a heavy thermal blanket. The first couple rank bus rides I assumed garbage had been left out, eaten by a raccoon, and then rejected onto the pavement half-digested to rot in the sun. Visually, my new bus route showcased some of Vancouver’s busiest industrial zones, strung along the Burrard inlet, but around Commercial Drive and Powell Street bus riders’ faces disappeared behind sleeves, or in t-shirts. The smell was unbearable.

Google knew what it was: boiled animal by-products.

West Coast Reduction is one of North America’s largest animal rendering facilities.

I had moved in 100 meters from one of North America’s largest animal rendering facilities. Across Canada, renderers recycle approximately two hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of animal by-products each year. Each week, West Coast Reduction renders more than 10,000 tonnes of beef, pork, poultry and fish by-products, the volume of which is enough to fill 1,000 trucks each week. Their protein meals are shipped worldwide. Fats and oils produced at West Coast Reduction’s other plants arrive via insulated rail tankers at its bulk storage terminal in Vancouver, where they are pumped through underground lines to designated storage tanks before loading and shipping. West Coast Reduction also operates a commercial tank farm with a storage capacity of over 83,000 metric tonnes.

I don’t know what a protein meal is but it sure sounds delicious.

On the very bus rides through air laden with rogue particles of boiled animal remains, I was reading a book called Animal Capital, in which Nicole Shukin mobilises the double-entendre of ‘rendering’: to copy, mimic, or create a representation; and to boil down animal remains. She finds that rendering’s two meanings are an apt lens through which to approach historical and contemporary complicity between what she calls “the arts” and “industry”, the literal and the figurative, meaning and matter, culture and economy, and discourses and technology, in the realm of animal capital. The economic and the symbolic capital of animals, she writes, can no longer be approached as distinct. Even more critically, the material violence of rendering – both meme and matter – is born most heavily by animal lives.

I stayed a year in the apartment. When the wind was just right, the warm, rendered air would waft in through the patio doors and open windows and fill the apartment with its sweet necro-economic stench. Kick back with a beer, put another protein meal on the stove, and you’ve got yourself a pretty nice little Friday evening.

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Posted in animals, necro-economies, vancouver