James Schirmer

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times by the Dark Mountain Project The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer by Laurent Dubois What the Eyes Don't See by Mona Hanna-Attisha Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies by William T. Vollmann

Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project

When my daughter was born I felt a love and connection I’d never felt before: a surge of tenderness harrowing in its intensity. And when I think of the future she’s doomed to live out, the future we’ve created, I’m filled with rage and sorrow. Seeing the world afresh through my daughter’s eyes fills me with delight, but every new discovery is haunted by death. When I sing along with Elizabeth Mitchell’s version of “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” I can’t help feeling like I’m betraying my daughter by filling her brain with fantastic images of a magical nonhuman world, when the actual nonhuman world has been exploited and despoiled.

I want to try and talk about the Flint water crisis in a way that addresses the framing question of today’s conference. And all the boards did shrink Nor any drop to drink There are many common refrains in the Flint water crisis, and I think these lines from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner are among them. I’d argue that “day after day, day after day, we stuck” is more appropriate, given that not even 1% of city pipes have been replaced, given that city residents still can’t drink city water without a filter, given that there’s a bacterial outbreak because some have so little faith in the water coming from their faucets that they don’t wash their hands. However, I do know that the level I seek through writing calls the following into question: that a flood of email signals transparency, that a sip of water signals empathy, that a concession of the Flint water crisis as Michigan’s “Katrina” signals acceptance of responsibility.