The New Empire is a personal journey through wild landscapes looking for rare and endangered plants, botanical gardens, research facilities and a meeting with people who try to understand and protect the Biosphere.
Ioana Cîrlig started this work in 2017 with the intention of healing her own relationship with nature and getting closer to Earth. She was born in a big city and she inherited the rupture from our natural environment. Nature was something that she visited on vacation with her parents, it was dream-like and not really part of everyday life, food came from the store, water came from a wall. With time, this work went through a series of phases, along with her feelings.
From a fascination with the forest, the stones, the flowers and the water,
through a meditation on our relationship with garbage and the way plastic has created new landforms and strange hybrid biotopes,
imagining a future where environmental decay results in an uninhabitable and unbreathable Earth leading to human life transfer to space colonies,
and currently, an observation of a small piece of land that she hopes to call it Home.
“We are of the Earth, in our diversity. The Earth gives us citizenship. Our first identity is as Earth citizens, an Earth family (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam), sharing the planet with other species. We didn’t impose on ourselves the burden of Anthropocentrism, of separation from and superiority over other species.
The “empire” was based on the illusion of the superiority of one species, one race, one religion, one gender. It was also an empire over what were declared to be “lesser creatures”, to be exploited and exterminated. The monoculture of the mind is the basis of empire. Separation is the basis of empire.
There has been a continuous war against our biodiversity in nature and culture diversity by past and present empires. The extractive economy of the 1% is based on the Monoculture of the Mind and it creates monocultures.
The biodiversity of our forests and farms has been replaced by monocultures of commercial timber and commodity crops. The forest is reduced to a mine for timber and pulp.”
Dr. Vandana Shiva, Growing Gardens of Diversity
“Our essence as a species binds us to explore and affiliate with all life. We are lovers who can add up glucose, amino acids, water, fragrant oils, pigments, and other tissue and call it both a flower and a mystical gesture. We can also decimate pollinators with an unloving tonnage of pesticides, precipitating the extinction of entire populations of those mystical gestures, once and forever.(…) Lives without access to sensation are lives that edge out the earth’s raw, pervasive sweetness, that deeply biophilic connection to all life.”
Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
“The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings.”
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
“Ever since the enlightenment, Western philosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature.
Several things have happened to undermine this division of labor. First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists, who show how life requires the interplay of many kinds of beings. Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others. Third, women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man. Our riotous presence undermines the moral intentionality of Man’s Christian masculinity, which separated Man from Nature.”
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
“The fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new “entity,” the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”-those who are holding rights at the time.
I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called “natural objects” in the environment-indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.
It is not inevitable, nor is it wise, that natural objects should have no rights to seek redress in their own behalf. It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, muncipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them, as they customarily do for the ordinary citizen with legal problems.”
Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?- Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects
“The slate has never been clean, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no “fresh” to start. All there is, while things perpetually fall apart, is the possibility of acting from where we are. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is not a preracial state we could access, erasing histories of slavery, forced labor on railroads, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements.”
Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity, Living Ethically in Compromised Times
“Nothing in science can account for the way people feel about orchids. Orchids seem to drive people crazy. Those who love them love them madly. Orchids arouse passion more than romance. They are the sexiest flowers on earth. The name “orchid” derives from the Latin orchis, which means testicle. This refers not only to the testicle-shaped tubers of the plant but to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. The British Herbal Guide of 1653 advised that orchids be used with discretion. They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly.
Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief
Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.
I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.
To survive the next 100 years, let alone 1000, it is imperative we voyage out into the blackness of space, to colonize new worlds across the cosmos.
We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system.”
Stephen Hawking
The “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies”is the foundation of international space law for signatory nations (108 in 2019). The treaty presents principles for space exploration and operation:
SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk wants to make life multiplanetary.
“Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. It’s atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.“
Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, Degrees of Freedom
