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Prize Essay Announcement
Writers are invited to submit an essay on the following theme: Why it might be wrong to sell plants and animals.
Essays may be posted as comments to this message or signaled by a link or a searchable phrase in a comment posted to this message. Essays must be posted/signaled by the Winter Solstice, 7:22 PM EST, Thursday, December 21. Fort Kant will award a prize to the writer of the essay judged to be best.
By Carl | December 18, 2006 | Permalink
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Is the sale of land that has plant-life growing upon it the sale of 'plant-life'?
Given that virtually everything is a place of residence for bacteria, even while it is not (always/often) the express intention of vendor to sell the bacteria ('animal-life'), is such a sale one that is a sale of 'animal-life'?
Perhaps switching the title of the essay (@ this early stage) is a good idea..
Certainly the sale of a field of corn or a piece of forestry is not just the sale of 'land'/'real-estate' (while being that too), & the sale of 'blue-cheese' is the sale, as much as anything else, of some form of 'animal-life'...
Yes, I am a 'real pain'... but I honestly cannot see how one can write an essay on such a topic & not think about these points..
K
Posted by: Kevin Zzz | Dec 19, 2006 10:32:31 AM
[This is Part I of my entry, called "Bushy: Escape from Freedom."]
Once upon a time, there was a small bush named, umm, Bushy. All his life he dreamed of being free. He would see the sun and reach for it high above his, stay with me here, head. He had many arms, each with many leafy fingers. But no matter how hard he strained for heaven, he felt himself tied down, as if some invisible force had grabbed hold of his legs and locked them in a vice like grip, almost as if he had been buried alive. He did not know what malevolent force had brought about this condition, for it was all he had ever known.
Each winter he would wrap some of his arms around himself to form a cocoon and then he would use some of his smaller arms to write pleading letters. Each spring, he wrapped each letter in a berry - he must have made over a hundred! - and would hold those berry-wrapped letters on his furthest outstretched arms, hoping against hope that one of the birds would read his letter, and organize a rescue.
But no rescue ever seemed to come.
Bushy was very sad.
Then one day, a tall bipedal creature came" a man who called himself The Man. In his hand he held the most frightening device Bushy had ever seen. It was a long wooden pole, the dead flesh of Bush's possible cousins, coiled tightly to provide a rounded torso for a hideous metal beast, a beast that kept his head low to the ground and appeared to eat dirt.
The Man strode closer, a maniacal grin on his face, as he lifted the dreaded metal beast and than slammed its hungry face into the ground near Bushy. It bit into the sweet flesh of the soil, ripping it bit from bit. The Man and his Beast circled around Bushy, who shook violently as the fear gripped him, his berry-wrapped letters falling and cracking tragically against the ground. He could feel the Beast now, underground, coming for him, coming to devour him. He could feel himself lifted, lifted above the soil as the violent maw of the Beast opened once more...
And suddenly, Bushy realized, he was free. The Man and his Beast were not there to eat him, Bushy realized, but to rescue him! Perhaps one of the birds had told him, perhaps this was the daring rescue for which he had hoped all those years.
Bushy could feel the warmth of the sun all over his body, his legs swinging free for the first time in memory. The Man extended his hand to Bushy, who took it, and the two began to walk - yes, walk - back to his truck, where the Man had created a special spot, big and comfy, right in the back, next to the an assortment of other wood and metal creatures. Bushy was placed inside, the man got in the front seat, and the truck drove away.
The wind felt so magnificent, and Bushy so free, that he forgot to hold on to his berries, which were picked up by the wind and lifted away. That's alright, thought Bushy, I'm already free - I guess I won't need to write those letters anymore.
[Part II will come later.]
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Dec 19, 2006 11:13:31 AM
But, it's obviously not wrong.
Posted by: D | Dec 20, 2006 2:08:22 PM
I don't know if it is wrong, being as it is not obvious what that would mean, but it certainly seems to be unhealthy. It creates a relationship with life mediated by money. As money is more and more abstracted from labour it is more and more abstracted from life. Money is the walking dead - golem among us. In this way we seem to lose touch with the ground, everything solid melts into air, abstracted from the earth. This has lead to a very unhealthy way of living and I suspect we'll all be paying the price soon enough.
Posted by: Anthony Paul Smith | Dec 21, 2006 7:42:22 AM
[Part II, as promised.]
After a few hours passed, the truck carrying Bushy pulled into a large, flat, dirt lot, and came to a full stop adjacent to some other trucks.
The Man came out and took Bushy by the hand again - this time a bit more roughly - and hoisted him out of the truck. Bushy loved the feel of his legs dangling free, and was so wrapped up in the sensation that he didn't even notice the Man's grimace when he saw how Bushy had lost most of his berries. Rolling his eyes, the Man carried Bushy along.
Bushy, of course, was excited as could be, as he was seeing more of the world than he ever thought possible. He saw people of all shapes and sizes, wearing all sorts of colors, alongside all types of other liberated plants. This must be the great plant liberation front that Bushy had always dreamed about.
Bushy could tell he was starting to get overwhelmed by all this newness, all this excitement. He was excited, but despite all his glee, he felt himself getting sleepy, as if he was worn down or low on nutrients. How could this be, he thought, that I'm too tired to even enjoy my freedom? He cast any other thoughts about his increasing fatigue aside and concentrated instead on his environment.
The Man took Bushy to a small wooden stand, and plopped Bushy down on a wooden table. He wrote something on a piece of paper and placed it near Bushy, but The Man must have been tired, too, thought Bushy, because he placed it facing the wrong direction, and Bushy couldn't see it. Not that Bushy could read - he is a plant, after all, but still, courtesy is courtesy.
Bushy decided to just sit back and relax, to the extent that he could sit, as people would come by to look at him and the paper in front of him. People would talk to The Man quite a bit, sometimes in what seemed like an argument, but Bushy figured they were just fellow revolutionaries pontificating on the need for greater plant freedom.
The day moved on, and as time passed, less and less people came. Eventually night came, and The Man started to pick up his things and take them to the truck. Bushy found this curious, as The Man seemed to be ignoring him. The Man climbed in his truck and drove away.
Well, dear readers, we know what happened next. Deprived of his soil, Bushy's roots could consume no nutrients and disperse no water. He starved to death on that wooden cart, discarded because he was not worthy of being sold. He had been transformed into a commodity, and with the loss of his berries, his commodity status - his exchange value - had plummeted, and his use-value along with it. In the end, as he lay shriveled and alone, his last leafy fingers falling from his body like skin off a leper, Bushy realized his fate and resolved ever thus, in his last thought, for all of man, animal, and plant-kind: no plant (or animal) should ever be sold as a source of profit to The Man.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Dec 21, 2006 8:33:34 AM
KZ: You are right: if it were forbidden to sell plants and animals—or if plants and animals were just not the sort of thing that it makes sense to say can be sold—many things would follow.
D: It does seem obviously wrong—today I bought a pear, and it didn’t occur to me to ask whether what I thought was doing might be logically impossible—but I’m not sure that anything about ownership (or its transfer) is obvious, once you start to think about it. “I own this rock.” I want to say: nonsense!
APS: The proposed topic was going to be “Why it is wrong to sell plants and animals, but why it is alright to kill them.” The concept “abstraction” might have a place in articulating this thesis. But I disagree with your suggestion that if it were wrong to sell plants and animals, this would be because we were thereby wronging ourselves, and not because because we would be wronging the living things we sell.
KR: I think the image you begin with—a tree reaching for the light—suggests something important: trees have projects; they’re working on something, and that fact alone is prima facie a reason for letting them be. (I suppose a tree-title could change hands without any biologically relevant effect on the tree (like if one of your Cambridge properties changed somewhere far off, so what).) I think an argument could be made that lower life forms “aspire” to the freedoms that characterize higher forms—humans, at least, often wish to suspend transcendental/constitutive factors that are conditions of our form of life. Please contact me about claiming your prize.
Carl
Posted by: Carl | Dec 21, 2006 11:31:54 PM
"But I disagree with your suggestion that if it were wrong to sell plants and animals, this would be because we were thereby wronging ourselves, and not because because we would be wronging the living things we sell."
I suggested, or did not mean to suggest any, such thing. Though I am very hostile to the ascetic arguments of many Green conscious people, I try not to be anthropocentric. For me it is about truly ecological relationships (this constitutes flows of life and death) that form beings, not reified relationships between man and animal or man and plant. I'm also really hostile to these kind of moral arguments. Why is it wrong if not for reasons of health (broadly construed)?
Posted by: Anthony Paul Smith | Dec 22, 2006 6:34:15 AM
So who won? What's the award? Woot!
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Dec 22, 2006 8:29:58 AM
Kenneth: if you are comfortable trusting me with your mailing address, please e-mail it to: fortkant [curly "at" symbol] yahoo [etc.]
Anthony: Thank you for the clarification. More about life later; right now I must drive to Maine.
Posted by: Carl | Dec 22, 2006 3:01:32 PM
You can always reach me at "ken.rufo@gmail.com," and I'm a big fan of reading long theory args, so send em my way :)
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Dec 23, 2006 6:47:50 AM
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