After watching the lecture on the physics of sand by Prof Casey Bester. It became clear that sand is a very interesting example that can be used to challenge our understanding of the world. Where, collectively, it does not behave like a solid nor a liquid. This is useful as the readings require us to do something similar by changing the way we identify and place boundaries between groups of objects (or even within those groups). Scott Gilbert’s idea of the holobiont expands on this. Where he wants organisms to be treated as ecosystems as they host microbes and other symbiotic relationships, bringing the idea of scale. Donna Harawa emphasizes the importance of different species relationships with one another. As their relationships entangle them with each other, rejecting human exceptionalism.
This relationship is really important to understanding the Columbia River and the Bering Strait, where they’ve been shaped by not only changes in climate, but human and more-than-human histories. Expanding the idea to not just animals, opening the door to how microbes, minerals, and even glaciers can be active participants in that shared world. John McPhee’s account of the wildfires shows the danger in ignoring these relationships. The mountains don’t care about human logic, they’ll change in ways that people can’t control. What we may see as destruction may be reallocation for the mountains. Similarly, Mark Carey’s research on the third pole shows the broader scale of how ignoring these relationships can affect seemingly unrelated human communities.
Putting them together, the physics of sand gives a concrete example of how something can be two things but neither thing at once. Sand reminds us that the world isn’t perfect, it has weird oscillating units instead of fixed isolated ones. The world consists of differing connections which can change based on how you define barriers. But defining these barriers can be difficult, as moring away from human exceptionalism and embracing more-than-human frameworks we can learn to think with systems that are messy. As these messy systems make up our world in it’s reality.