I'm going to ask all of our speakers to come and join me on the stage. I think it would be unreasonable not to open it up straight to the audience for some questions. We have a limited time on the break. Thanks very much. What a great line up, but I'm really interested in this attempt to understand and grasp what we might mean and how we might operate the idea of distraction. But I can't help but thinking about accumulation and dissipation,
rather than the idea of moving things from one location to another across a boundary. What we've heard a lot and experienced a lot are stories about the accumulation and dissipation of resources in terms of capital, in terms of energy, in terms of nitrogen, trophic resources of fish moving down through niches. And so I'm very interested in this idea that we've heard from many people about niches, and whether we have sufficient understanding of the scale, the size of these niches, and the dynamic as we move between niches, exhaust one, and then develop and accumulate the skills and the capital, the nows,
to start moving to a different niche. And so the direction of movement between these niches seems to me to be quite relevant. So I suppose the question, and I don't mind who pitches in with this really, is about should we look to our understanding of scale of these niches? I'd like to respond to that. I'm not going to dream of this at all. Scale is a very critical issue, isn't it? The whole nation of renewable energy is positive on the continual existence of the sun, but that isn't actually the case, I'm afraid. Ultimately, the scale we have to operate with is a human one. That's often a different
scale to most of the planet, which is operating very slow. The nature of human civilization is to accelerate constantly, but unfortunately the rate of sedimentation has been quite constant. So, say for carbon deposition, our ability, the whole green movement is positive on the idea of decelerating to match natural processes. So that would be a time dimension for any niche. In terms of the actual resource space, it would be quite interesting to model exactly where the whole process of science is effective in an endeavour to understand where are niches can be made most available through the production of materials, where can we navigate from these
conceptual places we're stripping to somewhere where there's a more reliable source for energy, on. That's what I can say. I think the interesting thing about the human is that we don't have a niche in the same sense as any other living creature. We have an extravagantly exploratory niche. The kind of structures that you're showing us from this kind of crazy extent to which we find absurd ways of exploiting the most unwanted issues. And nothing else can survive anymore. Any other questions?
I feel that... I couldn't answer Esna's question. I'll leave it. There's something else. I was interested in the, you've been talking about different forms of extraction and perhaps the first speaker and maybe Esther as well referred to labour, which I think is interesting thing because on one hand it is a subject or it is used as a form of extracting but also it is being extracted. And I guess I was wondering what your thoughts are in reference to that, because obviously most of the examples that you discussed require some form of labour in order to extract.
And I guess what Ian mentioned about the sharing of knowledge or sharing of understanding of the labour was also quite interesting. So that's another one. Many robberies are the most essential part of the whole thing. It's humans that need this, obviously, and it's obviously humans that have to extract it. As I said in my talk, there has been an exaggeration among many writers and many thinkers, very popular, that they are always the down problem and the exploiter. And of course, as I speak on the way, in place like Pottersy, another ancient civilisation
slave labour resumed. But that wasn't always the case. And it's very early realised, even among early civilisations, that the best workers were not slave workers, the people who were motivated and incentivised. And this has always been the case. And certainly, writers in the in the 16th century, most of them of course are middle class, well to do, wealthy people, were often surprised that miners liked to go mining, they preferred mining, despite their poverty. Thomas Beard in 1586 wrote that although they're the poorest in society, people owned them because of their charity toward each other, because of the way they looked after and because it was a life they enjoyed.
Also, writers about bound maintenance in the 20th century, a famously exploited group, apparently, mostly because of the writings of middle class, well-educated people who visited mines and saw this, or misunderstood it, didn't realise that these women were independent, free thinking, strong women. And interviews even with quite young girls who were working on mines as barmen, showed that they preferred doing that job to easier, better paid work. So labour is an interesting thing to look at. And every bit of original research you do in the modern industry shows this to be the case.
It's full of surprises about the status and the enumeration of workers. I feel I have to make a brief reading of apologies out of it as well, because certainly in adopting the Gothic tone of Beckford in my introduction, I didn't mean to minimize the level of self-determination and creativity of the miners. I think the interesting question is, at what point does that self-determination suddenly change, or did it suddenly change? Or what were the relations between the increasing capital needed to go deeper and to bring out more?
and this kind of community which had developed over the years and centuries. Yes? I'd like to comment on that. It changed at the end of the medical period, really. When alluvial workings began to dry up, the independent tin oil obviously couldn't work. his own cash is never enough. Mining is very expensive. And once the gentry, the merchants, the wealthy got involved and started investing mining, which is necessary because of the sophistication of the machinery, the cost of operating the mining generally, the status of the tinner
actually did gradually drop until they had become weight units. So although they weren't quite as poorly off as it's often said, Nevertheless, their status did change dramatically. And that was one of the big changes. Another thing about investment in mines, all of you who live in Cornwall remember the operation of Will Jane. How many remember Will Jane? Two or three hands have gone off. Must be somebody living in Cornwall still. In the 1960s, Will Jane was opened with massive investment from consolidated gold. a Canadian company. They put millions into it, they paid millions in wages, they put
millions into the local economy and didn't make a penny. They closed having lost what they put in. The mine remained closed and it's already never arrived. They put millions into it, employed up to a thousand people at one time, put millions, tens of millions into the local economy and they passed it on to the management and the management buyout and they didn't make a penny. But the people who did make money for those operations were the miners, because they were highly paid and they did very well. When they came to South Crofty, we were close to New Jersey and South Crofty obviously, which had been going for 350 years, and they arrived at South Crofty among us, we called them Wen-eyes. You know why we called them Wen-eyes?
Because every sentence began with the words When I was at Wilhelm, and so even now, in Cambon, and I think Wilhelm came in property, I never know where I was. Just thought I'd tell you that. I'd like to say something about this question of labor. Well, I guess once we address the question of labor, one also has to simultaneously address the question of automation. The think production units on the American landscape are run by remote control, by computer. I saw one single worker in literally weeks of documenting them.
And there is, I hope to see an impertinence to interplay with dynamics of unemployment and unlabor, which has impertinence in Cornwall, I think. I can't really summarize it, but I just like to insert it into the discussion. Another thing which occurred to me in respect to this question is the fact that there's a certain kind of enjoyment, and this is what Alan was suggesting, I think, that minors enjoyed their work. And it reminds me of the philosopher Neotard's book in 1968, The Biddle and Economy, where addressing his leftist Marxist peers, and specifically speaking about the English mine workers
and the workers in the textile factories. He says, well, hold tight and spit on me, people. But they loved it. They enjoyed it. There's a certain type of enjoyment, and that's what fascinates me in a way about this, the beginnings of this artificialisation of human life and of culture is that, yes, it was embraced with abandon, and we shouldn't forget that. Esther, do you want to say something about that? Yes, I don't see a kind of opposition in a sense. you know all of the yeah over the tops of the description of the terribleness of
labor I mean but in in some industries that was very true we saw the you know parts sometimes produced just simply out of ignorance on all parts like the cancer of the jaw and the luminous watch industries and so on sometimes it's much more deliberate than that. In the German context, people pushed through for better conditions, even in those fairly monstrous factories around the Rhine and so on that were producing colour and they pushed through for various social welfare and the like. And I suppose if we go down a kind of, ooh, capitalism is evil and everything it does is evil,
then we're very quickly going to run away from the facts or just end up in a kind of moral categories, I suppose. I mean, as I see it, you know, humans like to produce and make and home and favour, you know, humans are sort of laboring beings and they you know sometimes it's under poorer sometimes under better conditions and and i'm so and it seems to me obvious out of that that both the people who labor are the people who are going to make the innovations within labor sometimes they're not allowed to push those things through other times they are and other people who oversee even see the benefits of letting them have some autonomy and develop their processes.
It's like, you know, radical change, camaraderie within Labour also doesn't strike me as surprising or a sort of counter-argument to understanding this as all taking place within a matrix of capitalism that produces certain social relations. I mean, exploitation is an economic category rather than a moral category. I suppose that was just what I wanted to say. Do you want to say anything? Yeah. Reflecting on the Perth's day of our extraction, I've seen two things. Firstly, that capitalism presents itself as an internal logic,
and logic is internal to nature. So it's very hard to say, from the position I invite myself in now, it's very hard to say, capitalism is something that's been put upon nature. It's often felt that capitalism is actually revealing the process which was in nature at the beginning. The Darwinian struggle is often a metaphor which is clumsily brought forward to justify some rapacious financial practices. and that's one avenue of thought that I can't realise any further than that the other one is that maybe we could view community as to use Robin's model that he introduced of extraction of the void the quarry and the dead maybe when we move into a human
sphere humans have to collaborate to actually extract anything from their environment whether that's bison flesh, seafood or mineral matter And so perhaps the community is actually a surplus product of an extraction. So maybe human communities are in some way deads that's a surplus of acquired matter. I think humans are certainly the deads of the exploitation of oil in the 20th century when you look at the arc of nitrogen use. Could I add something? Yes. Thank you. Wonderful session. Thank you. Just yesterday, I was thinking about the fact that, just following up on what you said,
the specificity of the target of the quarry. The size of the shoals was such a different village, right? So the communities of that is constituted in the same fishing by the, by what they were after. And of course the labor was not hidden in that sense. I mean, in many ways it's very much male stories we're talking about. But of course, behind every hunter on the water, there's often many women doing the work, salting and preserving, but also gathering in ways that were much more interesting to me than what happened earlier this morning as people waited for the Coca-Cola. Yeah, I'd like to hear more about the labor process on the shoreline there.
And that made me think about, again, the specificity of the fact that coal seems to favor Karl Marx. But if you go to Carrara, for example, Carrara is a religion that if you travel down Italy, you see the glorious coruscating quarry at Carrara. If you go to Carrara, they're all anarchists. Coal gives you Marx and marble gives you Marx. Actually, just to put those on that, talking to Michael at the pen at this fantastic story of the disaster at the head right he didn't know that that the LIFA institution was the was the example
that Prince Kropotkin the great elucidator of the geology of Asia born into the court of the Tsar and his experience tending then to the father of of the patriarch of anarchism, the anarchist formerly known as Prince. In his entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica on Anarchism, I think he mentions the Lightburn Institution as the model for self-organized activity on the shoreline. And then just a last... Before we get into the Labyrinth again, we have another question. We're very limited to time. Ah, yes, it's the Sun, by will. Exactly. Robin, is that me? I've got my question, thank you. These have been really fascinating this morning and this afternoon. I'd like to pick up on this homo fabio, this notion that we make things and we delight in stuff as species, it seems.
how do we reconcile that to our apparent outrage at the destruction or the exploitation or however we want to cause it to natural resources but also where does that sit within our continuing romantic exploration of the landscape or seascape in terms of how we view things we still look for the sublime thing that overwhelms us or we look for those those clues the images we use still reference that. So I suppose it's slightly two parts. We are implicated in this process of extraction because we like stuff. And, you know, we've got how many mobile phones are in the room, for instance. Who's talked about Coltan? Nobody yet. So I think there's somehow or other, you know, I get a bit worried we're going to get on the moral high ground about extraction is terrible.
and yet we have the value of people who work and their inventiveness and their pride in their work. And then we have a change in the landscape and we create the landscape. It's not natural. I think, if I could say something briefly. I'm very glad you addressed the point because I wanted to address also Esther's lecture. Is this on? Yes. Okay. Sorry, I'll say it again. I'm very glad you referenced it. I'm not going to answer it comprehensively. But I also wanted to refer to Esther's lecture. And I think, you know, the blossoming of modernity, the technicolor blossoming of modernity from the void of coal, and then it's almost returned into the void to be replaced by the blossoming of the LCD panel
and the seduction of nature transposed onto the LCD panel. I think there's an answer to your question in that dynamic, which, again, will return to blackness and to the void and to whatever apocalypse we have left, essentially. But, you know, the seduction of the landscape on the television screen is a kind of soma for the people in the face of an extraordinary loss of biodiversity. in the 20th century, it was 50% lost, apparently. But we are yet sort of seduced night by night of incredible seductions, glorious technical seductions of the landscape through panels. And I think somehow, subliminally, we believe them to exist.
And we don't really address the landscape in any realistic sense. We are continually absolutely seduced by our iPads. and it's a dynamic which I don't I think Esther might be able to answer where it might lead us to Does your work do you see your work as countering this by in some way kind of exacerbating it or I have to completely reassess my work after Esther's lecture but I mean I use the virtual to speak about the virtual states of existence so I think it is a simultaneous engagement with that subject But certainly I'm aware that these seductions of these panels, in the same way as I think Esther's book and Esther's lecture is incredibly valuable, because I have not really acknowledged modernity through the prism of coal and colour.
But I think to acknowledge post-modernity through the prism of extractions of earth minerals becoming LCD panels is something else I need to work through. Yes, strangely enough, partly through, I don't know if John knows this, but partly through a critique of his work that I started to develop, my latest work, which is on liquid crystals and the seductive beauty of the liquid crystallised landscape. And for me, there's a whole thing about how the very operating of the liquid crystal is the fluid and the frozen liquid
and the crystal and how this marries. Also for example with things like the day after tomorrow film, this continuing effort to reconstruct nature as anima and then de-anima through through these liquid crystal forms which give us mobility and stillness and play and work those through in various ways. So I think there are very strong connections there that I've been thinking about. And then, I mean, there is this memorial aspect, isn't there? You know, Frozen Planet is given to us as an end point, you know. We put all these resources in in order to capture this nature that will never be seen again. But what's brought back to us, of course,
is this highly constructed, artificialised version, but that's the access that we have to it. But I don't think, I don't perceive just a kind of outrage at a destruction, because what is more seductive is also the beauty of the devastation. And isn't that, I mean, And this for me goes back to the romantics as well, the culture, the landscape, the, you know, why the remains of industry or the industry that's been sort of melancholically eaten over or reclaimed back by nature. or the earth seen through as polluted form
also exudes incredible aesthetic beauty too. That's sublimity, isn't it? Sublimism does the natural. I was quite moved by the growing finish units and how they had actually transposed a nitrogen cycle into an entirely imaginary realm, powered by silicon extractor, well, rare metal extraction in China. And I thought that was excellent. And what I was particularly moved by was that the idea that the logic of extraction, pursuant with human excellence, will take us to other planets totally exhausted of resources. And really, that means that we have to transform ourselves into some sort of science fiction
locus and spread out across the galaxy in this year fresh fresh meat and what better way of sustaining ourselves on journeys the virtual world thanks very much Thank you.