Philosophy as a Way of Life: Julia Gibson

I.

Dr. Julia D. Gibson lives and works on & from the family farm, the history of which stretches back to 1795 and the colonial dislocation of Indigenous peoples.  From out of that ambivalent origin of slow American violence has emerged, many generations later, Gibson, a philosopher-farmer. Gibson’s lifelong passion for “interspecies politics” and more recent focus on decolonization has led to asking how to bring the farm that was her childhood cosmos further into relation with its history.

Welcome to the sprawling Ryder Farm, with its family nested around the hills of lower eastern New York State, its annual shareholder meeting held in great solemnity by Roberts Rules of Order, and even recently a residency program hosted by an arts organization from Brooklyn, NY, offering stay-aways for parents to have time to write with meals provided by the farm.

A graduate of Michigan State University’s PhD program in Philosophy and having worked with, among others, Kyle Powys Whyte, Gibson is affiliated with Queens University in Canada, especially the APPLE (Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Laws, and Ethics) consortium, “thanks largely to Will Kymlicka’s generosity and flexibility.” As Gibson entered into this COVID-year, their/her work visa expired, and “so returning to the Farm was a bit of both necessity and providence.”

Gibson choses to self-describe as “an environmental philosopher and ethicist” for whom “interspecies politics … frame[s] what I do.” In our interview, Julia continued,

There’s also an implied ‘feminist’ in there, since I tend to think that neither environmental nor animal ethics/politics are worth much if they’re not approached intersectionally. But it’s 2020 and implicit feminism probably won’t cut it!

I am a settler scholar living and working on the farm where eight generations of my family have made our home on stolen land within the traditional territories of the Wappinger and Munsee Lenape peoples. I am also a queer, nonbinary philosopher as well as the companion to a cat and two rats, nursemaid to twelve baby sycamore trees, and assistant caretaker for a rambunctious herd of cows.

Neither strictly personal nor strictly academic, Gibson’s self-understanding attests to a complex social ecology that layers pasts, presents & futures.  I met Gibson in the context of Gibson’s work on “Climate Justice for the Dead and the Dying” at the 2019 International Society for Environmental Ethics annual meeting located in H.J. Andrews Research Station. Earlier this Fall, I wondered, what is Julia up to now?

I’ve been thinking a lot since I moved back to the Farm about  what I may be able to accomplish being here that I wouldn’t in a normal academic year where I don’t have much choice about where I physically do the work. The transient, unrooted quality of academic life has never really sat well with me, especially with regards to environmental philosophy.

For this year, and for hopefully many more to come, I am not limited to thinking about the Farm from afar. Instead, I am fully here in the mud, often quite literally. What becomes clearer every day is how much more is needed to do philosophy than a good idea or a good argument. Good arguments really only take you so far when the bulk of your philosophical practice requires you to maintain familial, neighborly, and ecological relationships with your interlocutors and partners.

Gibson has a project that has emerged out of time back home. It asks:

(1) How can interspecies and decolonial justice work together towards transformative ends? Where do these projects converge and conflict? (2) And how can doing philosophy on the land where my heart is most vulnerable shed unique light on these questions, especially for settlers?

The goal is to explore these questions [in ongoing public writing] before letting my reflections coalesce into a book. But, as those familiar with farm life can attest, during the warm months most of my time and energy has been spent brush-hogging, schlepping hay, wrangling cows, and dealing with stakeholder conflicts. And, so, the writing has been slower than I’d like. I’m hoping the cold months offer me more time for writing and reflection, as well as for practice and growth.

How does Gibson approach such personally & intellectually difficult work as building settler culture to be able to accept & support decolonization?

Farm and family tend to focus on the good work we do on the land rather than what it might mean to do right by it. And, so, the lived dimensions of my work most clearly manifest through my efforts on the Farm to get my family to wrestle with what it means for us to have this land. In practice, this looks like me serving on the board of the Farm, as agricultural liaison and liaison to our resident non-profit, on numerous committees, and as part-time groundskeeper. These collaborations have produced tangible outcomes like the new animal policy and, as of just this month, a formal position of solidarity and associated action plan for the Farm.  But I’d say that much of my time and energy go to building and maintaining all the many relationships it takes to get any of this work done.

I believe that settlers can learn a lot about decolonization by starting at home, through conversation (and conflict) with loved ones.  This process often feels painstakingly slow and its outcomes like too little too late.  But neither Farm nor family will be able to grapple the demands of land repatriation and nonhuman personhood without these institutional, ideological, and interpersonal foundations. Relatedly, working towards decolonial and interspecies justice on the Farm involves growing our individual and collective capacities for good communication, emotional intelligence, and dealing with conflict head-on.

II.

Having studied climate justice, Gibson knows that we have no right to give up on what we mustn’t be in denial about.  We all have a moral responsibility to come to terms with climate change.

Here on the Farm I just experienced a summer hotter and dryer than any in my childhood. That the land feels so different now than it does in my memories helps make climate change real for me. Growing up, we ran screaming through thunderstorms most afternoons that faded into evenings spent chasing after fireflies on bare feet through the wet grass. Now the yard is patchwork of green, brown, and dust patches and pasture that should have replenished itself in two weeks takes more than a month to grow back. When it does rain, it’s often in a deluge that takes down branches and sets off blooms of mold. Our beloved sycamores have had to go through two or three leafings to overcome opportunistic fungi. 

How does Julia going to come to terms with these changes?

I’ve always loved writing, at least once I get started. Making myself sit down to write is often a struggle for me, as I imagine it is for many of us who spend so much time at it. The joy I feel at finding the words that feel right—to write and to read—to express what’s going on ethically and affectively is also the challenge that can make the whole endeavor feel daunting.

When I can’t find the right words as a philosopher, I often turn to fiction. It was Indigenous, Afrofuturist, and feminist science fiction fantasy with their holistic intergenerational ethics and nonlinear temporalities that got me excited about environmental philosophy again. I wasn’t finding what I was looking for in the mainstream environmental literature, fictional and nonfictional alike. But these texts—both their ideas and how they expressed them through narrative—inspired my work on climate justice for the dead and dying.

There’s a brilliant passage from the prologue of N.K. Jemisin’s (2015-17) Broken Earth Trilogy that frequently gets quoted:

Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things…  But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.

I love running into this quote in the many contexts where it serves to underscore how endings threatened or promised by climate change are just the most recent manifestations of intersecting oppressive structures (e.g., racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, etc.). I love it all the more for how the trilogy’s final lines of dialogue serve as a refrain, resolution, and call to action all at once:

Hoa: What do you want?

Essun: I want the world to be better.

Hoa: Then let’s go make it better.

Essun: Just like that?

Hoa: It might take some time.

Essun: I don’t think I’m very patient.

Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins. 

Hoa: Neither am I… So let’s get to it.

If Black and Indigenous communities are still fighting for a different future, I don’t feel that I have a right to give up.

III.

There’s an attachment that is so clearly manifest in Gibson’s relationship to the land on which they/she lives.  What did Julia learn growing up? 

After a long pause, Julia replied: “The joy & the seriousness of being in relation to this place.”  A childhood memory of being led by a cousin, Belle, to find wild raspberries:

My [other] cousins and I would walk behind [Belle] impatiently with the intention of helping to fill the dented metal pots gleaned from the well room with wild raspberries for Belle’s jam. But what usually happened was that we wound up contentedly sprawled amidst the brambles in the grass, sticky and stained, pots empty but stomachs full.

The memory that sticks out most is the time that Belle calmly informed us—as she methodically continued to fill her own pail—that we were in fact sitting in a patch of poison ivy. I don’t think I’ve ever run as fast as I did back up the hill that day to scrub down in the old clawfoot bathtub!

More than once, Gibson spoke of the annual shareholder meetings for the farm where family members come & solemnly regulate the farm’s economy, conducting their business by Robert’s Rules of Order.

Meetings were always held on the 4^th of July before the family reunion officially kicked off in the afternoon (boy, have I spent time mulling over the colonial politics of this tradition). An army of tired, mismatched chairs were assembled for the adults. Us kids usually crowded onto the window seat, on laps, or in doorways. The board presided over the meeting from a semicircle of the most storied chairs at the room’s front.

Roll call – the first order of business and the mechanism by which it was determined if we had a quorum – was mandatory for even the most fidgety of youngsters. When I got old enough to sit through the full 2-3 hours, I learned the simple joys of seconding a motion, though it would take many years before I felt bold enough to introduce one of my own. During the lengthy, sometimes heated discussion of predetermined agenda items, you could distract yourself by peeking through the doorway into the dining room where a potluck feast was being assembled by those smart or unlucky enough to have landed kitchen duty.

As interminable as these meetings seemed at the time, they taught me, piece by piece, the contours not only of my sprawling family tree but of the Farm itself.

The fam like the farm is more than human.  “I first got into philosophy because of my relationships with animals and to my family farm.” 

As idyllic as my childhood Farm stories can sound, farm life doesn’t give you a lot of room to ignore the mortal dimensions of living with animals. Thanks to Charlottes’ Web I had a strong affinity for the rats living in the barn (whom I referred to as Templetons), but I’d seen the traps waiting in the shadows and knew it was my family who laid them. I have a vivid memory of cracking open an egg I’d gathered from the coop only to discover a deceased fetal duck inside. And the devastating morning after I forgot to properly latch the gate to the enclosure where the juvenile chickens were kept is one I’ll never forget.

Of course, there are lots of lovely life-affirming, interspecies memories as well, but the stakes were made very clear to me from a young age. And while I certainly don’t think that interspecies politics ought to be at the heart of every intersectional analysis, it is a framework of central importance for the Farm and one that, in large part, has grown from this land alongside me.

IV.

One of the things Julia talked about when we spoke was the process of creating an animal policy with provisions for slaughter on the farm.

The negotiation of a new animal policy for the Farm was [not so much] a principled debate at board meetings (although surely some of that did occur).  [Instead, it was] more about sitting down and talking one-on-one with those who would be tasked with making the policy work day to day.  [I had to] gather their insights and craft a document that could accommodate robust pluralism.

When I first drafted the policy, it had no provisions for slaughter. In the modern history of the Farm, we had not been in the business of raising animals for meat. Someone might have kept a turkey or two for the holidays, but it wasn’t how the Farm made its money. We grew vegetables and flowers.

When I brought the draft to the board for discussion, however, it came to light that there were plans underway to introduce beef cattle to the Farm. I didn’t have the votes to approve the new policy unless it allowed for raising animals for slaughter. I had to choose between being a part of the conversation for how this could be managed or letting someone else take charge of writing the provisions.

The choice was a simple one, though my feelings about it definitely were not simple. I decided that my feelings mattered less than those of the animals in question, who would be living (and dying) on the Farm regardless.

So, I sat down with my cousin and learned more about her plans for raising cattle. I conducted extensive research on the slaughtering practices of farm animals and the ins and outs of the butchering industry, something which wasn’t pleasant for me as a vegan. I consulted with my colleagues in agricultural ethics (many thanks to Paul Thompson!).

The end result was a series of guidelines and restrictions—e.g., animals who outlive their commercial usefulness would not be sold for slaughter; no animal would be sold at auction; animals would only be slaughtered for onsite consumption or direct local sale—that I felt I and, much more importantly, the animals could live with.

V.

Growing up, I learned a lot about both the joy and the seriousness of being in relation to this place. Both how to wonder at the living beings around me and how to sit with the responsibility that comes with caring for or sharing a home with them. I’m still learning about those things.

What stands out to me most about what I’m learning this year is that when it comes to decolonial justice and the Farm, we’re still at the very beginning stages of this work. Competing settler interests and colonial conceptions of property still dictate so much of the conversation here. As Kyle Whyte reminded me in a recent conversation (during which he also provided me with a step by step guide to poison ivy remediation), settler claims to land are inherently unstable even under settler colonialism.

The Farm is currently in the process of trying to reimagine the relationship with our resident nonprofit, but there’s only so much growth that can occur within the strictures of a landlord/tenant agreement or, more broadly, when what it means to have power on the Farm is interpreted as having power over, power as dominance. Mutual empowerment of the sort that comes from caring for land together as partners still seems far away.

And neither Farm nor family are ready, collectively, to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities (a crucial step, I believe, for determining what decolonization here on the Farm should look like) or even to seriously entertain futures that don’t center the Ryder family and thereby settler futurities. And that’s tremendously disappointing. But it’s also essential for me to understand that. I’m not sure I would have had I not been living here this year.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.