projects by Perdita Phillips

Posts Tagged ‘shore 6: ecosystemic thinking’

Bruno Latour: “May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics”

The Neal Wheeler Watson Lecture 2010, given by Professor Bruno Latour: “May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics”.  The Lecture is given every spring at the Nobel Museum by an international scholar of excellence.

Location: Nobel Museum, Svenska Akademiens Börssal, May 11 2010.

Your comments please: long, hard to decipher and convoluted; but what do you think?


the possibility that half our rainfall will go

Released yesterday by the Minister for Climate Change and Water, the Hon. Penny Wong, the report forecast reductions in runoff in South West Western Australia up to 49% over the next 20 years.


Julie Mehretu’s complexity and immanence

Julie Mehretu Immanence


apocalyptus avoided?

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

This is a film called Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip by Leo Murray. Does it explain or hinder? Does it paralyse or promote action? Rhetoric or persuasion? I liked the poor man carrying the fat man with the tv set — exactly whose carrot is it as they go over the cliff?

The film hints that it is more than individual consumption that needs changing but other than this does not go out to propose overly specific solutions (but see the tiny people at the end, though).


What is the shape of ecosystem(s)?

parasitic dodder

Taken at sunrise at Lake Hayward it represents to me the complexity of ecosystems which I wish to convey in the final work.


greenwash and blackwash?

Wash and Spin Cycle Threats to Tropical Biodiversity by Lian Pin Koh, Jaboury Ghazoul, Rhett A. Butler, William F. Laurance, Navjot S. Sodhi, Javier Mateo-Vega, and Corey J. A. Bradshaw

An article arguing that both sides of the environmental debate can put out gloss, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about tropical deforestation.  Greenwash is corporate, but exaggerated claims by green groups are blackwash: “We as scientists have a particular responsibility to evaluate critically and objectively the claims made by both parties, while being mindful of our own personal biases.”

I wish it were that simple.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122681415/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Biotropica Volume 42 Issue 1, Pages 67 – 71 Published Online: 10 Nov 2009


Hydrobotanics Symposium 17 November

November 17, 2009
9:00 amto6:00 pm

A symposium hosted by ICLL and Createc on the twin subjects of water and plant life in Western Australia.
For its end-of-year symposium, the International Centre for Landscape and Language (ICLL) at ECU’s Mount Lawley Campus is pleased to present a distinguished array of biologists, geographers, writers, artists, and other creative and scientific people.

The symposium will showcase innovative, interdisciplinary, and arts-based environmental research being done by staff, alumnae, and postgraduate researchers at ECU. Presenters include Rod Giblett, Hugo Bekle, Nandi Chinna, Mary-Louise McDermott, Holly Story, Annamaria Weldon, Perdita Phillips, Nien Schwarz, and Gregory Pryor. We are also pleased to announce two distinguished keynote speakers.

November 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Patrick Armstrong, a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, will present ‘Charles Darwin’s Other Islands: The Voyage of the Beagle, Other Than the Galapagos’. The voyage that Charles Darwin made on His Majesty’s Surveying Sloop Beagle, 1831-1836, provided the basis of much of his later scientific work.  This talk will concentrate on the importance of the 40 or so islands that he visited – in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans – and his approach to the observations he made on them, in an attempt to show how they influenced his later intellectual development.

Patrick has made a special study of Darwin’s life, work and influence, using both archival methods and fieldwork at some of the sites visited by the great Victorian naturalist.  His most recent books include All Things Darwin (2008) and Darwin’s Luck (2009).

Our second keynote speaker, Barbara York Main, author of Between Wodjil and Tor (1967), will present ‘Interactions of Water, Plants, and Ground-Dwelling Fauna’. Barbara grew up in the Western Australian wheatbelt. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Western Australia in 1957. She is Adjunct Professor with the School of Animal Biology at the University of Western Australia.

For a full schedule of speakers, please visit the ICLL website: http://www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/symposium_nov09.html
Students, staff, and the general public are welcome to join. The full-day symposium will be held in Building 10, Room 307 from 9.30am-5pm on Tuesday 17th November.


geometric form

I took this photo on Sunday at Lake Pollard and showed the photo as part of my presentation at the Hydrobotanics Symposium yesterday.

small seedling with 4 opposed leaves of geometric perfection