...the production of commons requires first a profound transformation in our everyday life, in order to recombine what the social division of labor in capitalism has separated. For the distancing of production from reproduction and consumption leads us to ignore the conditions under which what we eat, wear, or work with have been produced, their social and environmental cost, and the fate of the population on whom the waste we produce is unloaded (Mies 1999). In other words, we need to overcome the state of irresponsibility concerning the consequences of our actions that results from the destructive ways in which the social division of labor is organized in capitalism; short of that, the production of our life inevitably becomes a production of death for others. As Mies points out, globalization has worsened this crisis, widening the distances between what is produced and what is consumed, thereby intensifying, despite the appearance of an increased global interconnectedness, our blindness to the blood in the food we eat, the petroleum we use, the clothes we wear, and the computers we communicate with. [1] 

i would sing you the shape of the world between us. turn my body into drum to let you know. slam my skin onto the surface of the ocean to tell you.
i am here. wherever you are.  

if it’s dream you are listening for. i’ll dream you. if it’s poetry in the morning. whatever. the radio. just test me. there is nowhere i cannot be. there is no sound i cannot travel through. there is no you i don’t surround. 

you can look or not look. you can fill your days with running or the shoes of other people. you can suffocate the minutes. i have time. i do not leave you. you can muffle every moment with your fear. it doesn’t matter. i’m still here. and i am here. and i am here. [2]

...we are Radio Alhara from Palestine and Jordan now. I guess in these situations, Palestine is just like everywhere else. What we did was something more global and open to everyone. We directly received messages from people in South Africa, Canada, Japan, and from Europe and the Arab world. The internet kind of takes away from that locality; but at the same time, we are here. [3]

Compelled and confounded by the distance between speaker and receiver in early telephonic communication, an anonymous reporter of the popular science magazine Scientific American called it ‘an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else’… [going on] to describe with poetic clarity the strange conditions of speaking over the phone lines: ‘Between us two there is an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else – Helloland I should call it’ (Engh 1994). 

Helloland imagines a place of the vast space of nowhere: an invisible landscape contoured by travelling voices. To call this distance between speaker and listener ‘a land’ is to think in terms of defining a site, mapping somewhere within nowhere to play host to the event of voice. The land called ‘hello’ holds a specific purpose, too, as voices reach to fetch a receiver, so that routes can be drawn in the air between two bodies. [4]

Home is where the heart is, goes the saying. If so, a large and growing number of people in many countries, including Britain, are feeling homeless, even if they have somewhere to live or sleep at any particular moment. The commons and the idea of home are intimately linked. A core claim of the Charter of the Forest was that everybody had a right to a home, and for many people the commons was where that right was ensured. Yet, the idea of home has a double meaning, implying both a place to live and a place to which one has a strong attachment and sustainable sense of belonging…Many feel that they are not ‘at home’ anywhere. [5]

The rewilding of theory proceeds from an understanding that first encounters with wildness are intimate and bewilder all sovereign expectations of autonomous selfhood. To be wild in this sense is to be beside oneself, to be internally incoherent, to be driven by forces seen and unseen, to hear in voices, and to speak in tongues. By abandoning the security of coherence, we enter a dark ecology, where, to quote Michel Foucault (1994:302) from The Order of Things, “nature can no longer be good.” But even as wildness is internal in a psychic sense, we also sense it as an extrahuman, suprahuman force, what Timothy Morton (2013) dubs a “hyperobject” and what might be received as a message from nature to humans reminding us that there could be and probably will be life without “us.” As Nina Simone reminds us, “wild is the wind,” and the wildness of the weather, internally and externally, implies a pathetic fallacy that tethers the undoing of the human to the rage of new storms blowing in across the Caribbean. Wildness is where the environment speaks back, where communication bows to intensity, where worlds collide, cultures clash, and things fall apart. [6]

How do we cope with, deal with, let alone attend to, subjects we cannot hold in hand, we can neither see nor hear? Or subjects that appear as such? Subjects that shape-shift, change scale and frequency, medium and channel? [7]

I see coral as another narrating life-form, similar in some ways to the life-forms that tell themselves a story about being human, but with crucial revisions to that story. Coral, like us, build on a massive scale. Coral reefs become the size of cities in the ocean; they are the only other organisms that build on such a large scale. And their dead stay with them; they live atop the skeletons of their ancestors. Or their skeletons are their ancestors? And this is part of the poetic importance of coral, and their connection to the possibility of a new science of the word. Scientists can’t seem to describe coral. The collectivity of coral (corals) exceeds the language. Is there such a thing as one coral? Aren’t coral inherently collective? Would we think of them as multiple animals with one stomach? Or one animal with many many many many mouths? And what about us, living on the same matter, with multiple hungers and resources that we pretend are not shared, so many of us making cities that we pretend are not always built on the dead—is there such a thing as one person? [8]