Ecology of Bad Ideas

There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and its characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.
       Gregory Bateson, Pathologies of Epistemology, 1971

The ecology of bad ideas is the product of the propagation of epistemological error. Akin to the meme, as defined by Dawkins, the ecology of bad ideas is manifest in the transmission and integration of idea into environment and, subsequently, the rearrangement of ecological conditions in its aftermath. Contrasting the hubris of the Anthropocene—and its lingering tones of “Man’s” rational progress and dominance over “Nature” writ on a planetary scale—the ecology of bad ideas unfolds in the mess of the cumulative mental, social, and environmental assemblage of inherited ideas: oblivious, opportunist, oversimplified, corrupt, fraudulent, stubbornly inflexible, and pathologically upheld out of narrow and shortsighted self-interest.

This issue of Drain presents artists, researchers, theorists, cultural producers, commentators, and multimodal makers, thinkers, and doers that examine and engage the dispersion, proliferation, mutation, and normalization of bad ideas and bad ecologies. These contributors analyze and participate in complex ecological entanglements within, beyond, and against ecologies of bad ideas. Essays included in this issue examine—within Art (SPURSE), Humanism (Kauffman), and Race/ Nationalism (Feshami)—the persistence, as well as ramifications, of Western epistemology’s impulse to carve the world into dualities: human and non-human, culture and nature, subjective and objective, self and other, us and them, pure and impure. Thought Experiments, Interviews, and Art Projects in this issue address a broad range of anthropogenic and ideational modifications to Earthly matter through multiform engagements with systems—and nodes within systems—of biology, ecology, economy, agronomy, extraction, human settlements, technology, waste, governance, and more.

Underpinning many, if not all, contributions to this issue of Drain lies a utopian impulse to question the inherited ideas and forms with which we shape and are, in turn, shaped by and ask: What forms of salvage or alterity might be employed within the kludge of bad ideas that constitute our present bio-socio-ecological conditions and to what effect?

 

IN THIS ISSUE

Essays
After Art – SPURSE
Learning How to Die, Finally: Revisiting Thought in the Age of Extinction – Emma Kauffman
A Mighty Forest Is Our Race: Race, Nature, and Environmentalism in White Nationalist Thought – Kevan A. Feshami

Thought Experiments
Why Say “Weed” in the Capitalocene? – Ellie Irons
biPolar Bioart: USDA APHIS FDA BRS notification request – Adam Zaretsky
Roots and Stems: grassland political ecologies, past and future – Sarah Kanouse
A Great Green Desert: Into The Pit – Ryan Griffis
Symptom: Network – Ken Ehrlich
they didn’t bring enough water – Lindsey French and Willy Smart

Interviews
EAT (y)OUR SIDEWALK: an interview with SPURSE – Alex Young
Indexing the Unwanted: a conversation with Colin Kippen – Courtney Kemp

Art Projects
Epicurean Endocrinology: an advertisement – Liz Flyntz and Byron Rich
How To A Thick Surface – Charles G. Miller
Terroir (formally Lubbock City Eternal)Caleb Lightfoot and J. Eric Simpson

This issue was led and edited by Alex Young

Thanks to Paul Lloyd Sargent and Avantika Bawa for editorial support and Emily Igawa for web administration. Additional thanks to MOCA Tucson for serving as an alternate host for many of the ideas presented this issue—and projects from several contributors herein—in the exhibition GROPING in the DARK from April through September, 2019.

Icon image – Adam Zaretsky, Errorarias: Concert for Bipolar Flowers, 2014. Permission of the Artist.
Ecology of Bad Ideas – Vol. 16:1, 2020