Kathryn Nuernberger on Mutualism, Climate, and Finding Family at the End of the World

Poet and essayist Kathryn Nuernberger joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about her new collection of lyric essays, Held: Essays in Belonging, which is about symbiotic mutualisms, and grief and joy in an era of worsening climate change. She discusses COP30, the United Nations climate gathering currently underway in Brazil, and considers the global failure to keep warming below 1.5 °C. She reflects on the nature of symbiotic relationships and offers several examples, noting that over several cycles even parasitic relationships might achieve the balance of mutualism. Nuernberger places her work in the larger tradition of climate and nature writing, which previously tended to celebration and in recent years has turned more elegiac, and also talks about writing personal grief in relation to societal grief. She explains new vocabulary developed to address emerging climate concerns and emotions and identifies several concepts that need new words. She reads an excerpt from Held.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Graham Ballard, Courtenay Kantanka, Katelyn Koenig, and Bayleigh Williams.

Kathryn Nuernberger

Held: Essays in Belonging • The Witch of Eye • Rue • Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past • The End of Pink • Rag & Bone

Others:

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality • Cop30 Coverage | The Guardian • The Aquarium by Phillip Henry Gosse • John Hickel • Raphel Lemkin • Annie Dillard • Barry Lopez • The End of Nature by Bill McKibben • Edward Abbey

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN NUERNBERGER

Whitney Terrell: What it felt like you were doing in this book by focusing on mutualism, its specific examples, and how it works, is pointing out how much of our way of thinking in terms of language—which is your territory and mine—determines how we physically act in the world. You point out how little of our language, in terms of the way that we think about science or even with the way we think about the natural world, considers mutualism. You’re trying to suggest that there’s another language; there’s another way of thinking about these problems that we’re not  addressing. I felt like you were constantly trying to push back against ways we accept of thinking about language and science. Science is good for liberals. We all love science now. We want everything to be science. And you say “Let’s think about how this language works. Is it really what you think it is, what you think it right?” So I appreciated that effort to rethink the way that we’re thinking about the ecology and the environment in general, and the language that we’re applying to it.

Kathryn Nuernberger: As I was reading and researching and trying to understand relationships in the natural world, a lot of indigenous science, indigenous scientists, and indigenous teachings seemed deeply resonant with me. The centering of relationships and the phrase “all my relations” being at the center of all of these epistemological systems seemed really beautiful. I was also really aware, as I was writing, that as a settler colonialist, that’s not my tradition. I didn’t want to appropriate other people’s language and cultural heritages. I didn’t want to be a 19th century anthropologist in the way I wrote about the natural world, either.

When I look at the systems that I have inherited, I’ve inherited this Age of Reason way of relating to science. Where ecology starts to emerge at the end of the 1800s as a as a branch of biology, where they start thinking about systems as interconnected instead of creatures in isolation, when we break away from Hegel’s illustrations, the taxonomies, and the obsession with speciations and “what’s the ideal shape of this species,” when they break away from that and start thinking about relationships, that’s an aspect of the scientific tradition, which is the way of knowing that I’ve been steeped in, where I feel like it thinks about relationships in a way that might be beautiful and might be leading us towards abundance and restoration and repair. Symbiotic mutualism emerges out of ecological thinking, out of that systems thinking, instead of classification thinking, which is a more flawed model.

V.V Ganeshananthan: So you have an essay called “Archives at the End of the World.” To follow up on Whitney’s comment about language, in that essay, which is probably one of my favorites, you mentioned that climate change is so new yet, so ever-present that there’s this emerging vocabulary, and also this set of feelings that don’t have vocabulary yet. I wonder if you can talk about the importance of defining those feelings or ideas in an age where we’re experiencing the direct consequences of climate change, and maybe tell us about a few of the words needed in that essay?

KN: I was inspired by these two artists, Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott, who created this website/performance art project called “The Bureau of Linguistical Reality.” They proposed some words for what it is like to live in an age of climate change, and then also invited people to both submit words and to submit definitions in need of words. As I was writing this essay, I was meditating on the fact that until we have a word for something, it’s very hard to make it real and to talk about it. We have words for grieving each other, right? Other humans and creatures who are very close to us. We grieve pets. But I think to grieve the loss of whole species, to grieve the loss of ecosystems that once sustained us and sustained our families, I feel like we don’t have words for that. Somehow, it feels off when we try to apply these other words for grief to those experiences.

In the absence of language for what we’re losing, we just carry on as if it doesn’t matter. Whitney, you’re from Missouri too, right? We used to have a lot of really cool mussels, freshwater mussels and they’re almost all gone, right? And I have a list in the book of all of their names. Pearly sheepnose mussel is gone now. And I was thinking about if we let ourselves feel as sad as it is, that might be a good start for not killing more stuff, not watching more stuff die while we wring our hands.

It’s relevant to say like Quante and Escott’s project, when they write about it, their example of a word that was needed that was only recently invented is “genocide,” which was coined by Raphael Lemke in response to the Holocaust. That is a relatively new word we have come to need. “Solastalgia” is a word that they put in their original project, which is a form of homesickness one has at home when the environment has been altered to the point of unfamiliarity by climate change. Every time I go home to Missouri and see those—I can’t recall their name, they look almost like Dr Seuss trees, they’ve got those pink tufts at the top of them—anyway, they’re migrating up from the southeast. I used to see them when I lived in Louisiana. And now they’re all over the foothills of the Ozarks where my in-laws live, and it’s so strange to see. Or, armadillos are up there. And it feels like going to a much deeper south than it used to feel like to me. So solastalgia is one.

NonnaPaura: the simultaneous sensation of a strong urge to have children or grandchildren mixed with an equally strong urge to protect these yet unborn children from a future filled with suffering.

Word needed: from the silent depths of winter, a fear you’ve already heard the last bird song of your life. Every February comes around, where it’s very quiet. I’m like, “Are there going to be birds again?” And this year was so quiet, not totally quiet, but so much I could tell. I sometimes doubt myself and my perceptions, like, “Oh, it’s just a different kind of year,” but this year was so quiet.

A word needed when elders tell of moth blizzards, butterfly swarms, a cacophony of peat frogs so loud you couldn’t talk to each other across the porch, and you think their memories must be dementia, instead of the time that was. I have this tender memory of my grandma. We were pushing her in a wheelchair through a butterfly house. And she was saying this was like when she was a little girl in the fields. At the time, I thought, “Oh, she’s going blind. She doesn’t realize how many butterflies are here.”

But then I read some more about moth blizzards and how many winged insects there used to be in the fields, and I realized in hindsight that was probably a totally real and legitimate memory she was having. And it was unfathomable to me when she was talking about it, that there could have ever been so much. Someday, my kid will say that about me and fireflies. I go on ad nauseam about how many fireflies there used to be, and I barely see them now. We need a word for that one too, right?

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy.