This post is part of our series of blog entries based on our RMA students’ engagements with the Lutkemeerpolder. For a more general introduction to the series, click here.
Author: Sarah
On one visit to the polder, we had a leisurely walk around the surroundings, exploring roads and walking paths. The following is a reflection on a creature that we encountered on our walk.
I was tapping at the screen of my iPhone as I tried to take a close-up of a slug. Crouched on the edge of the sidewalk, I zoomed in and out and moved my phone around the animal to find an angle that would allow my AI identification app to tell me what species of slug I was looking at. I was curious. Slugs are mysterious creatures, and I wanted to know more about them. Some theorists think that curiosity is a vital element of our ethical and affective involvement with more-than-human worlds. Thom van Dooren, in conversation with the work of Donna Haraway, remarks that “love and care require these acts of curious critique.”
But I’m not sure that I agree. Curiosity might be part of how we think about producing new knowledge, but does curiosity, on its own, make us better carers? I may try to justify my intrusive photo by saying that I am supporting citizen science, uploading data that can eventually influence research, policy, and land management, an indirect kind of care. But even if all this is intended to support present and future slug-kind, the moment that it occurs to me to ask if my actions are those of a good neighbor, I start to change my mind. I imagine how I would feel if I were the slug. What if that were me, going about my business when a random passerby comes and sticks a camera in my face?
It would be nice to know the scientific name of the slug, sure. But how I acquire that information sets the tone for the kind of relationship that can be formed out of that knowledge. I am starting to think that respecting the mysteriousness and opacity of the more-than-human world might generate more respectful relationships than acting from unchecked curiosity. As Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows writes: “Anishinaabe practitioners…realize that their own views of the earth are partial. The natural world is simply too vast, beautiful, precarious, and mysterious to capture in human terms. Thus, they must find ways to concede, cooperate, conciliate, and negotiate with those in the natural world whom they cannot fully understand.”
Maybe the challenge is to know as much as possible about all the beings that inhabit the planet, but to accept my lack of knowledge and act from a place of humility instead of mastery. The slug’s vulnerability is visible from his gooey, shiny skin. The name in Dutch is naked slug, naaktslak, baring its exposure to everything from my camera lens to the sunlight to passing birds. The slug inches away from me, towards the shade of long leaves of grass.
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