Biodiversity: an introduction

Right. I've been having trouble writing any actual blog content without feeling like there ought to be something here that's kind of... introductory. (I need to find out how other bloggers started their blogs, i guess.) So i'm now going to attempt to write an introduction to the concept of "biodiversity", and how i see that as relating to disability and the other stuff i'm interested in. Please forgive me for the clunky writing and tendency to waver between the painfully tentative and the pompously would-be-messianic in this post... it's become obvious while writing it that my writing style needs some serious work, which this blog will hopefully provide...

A year or so ago, i was thinking about how strange and disparate my various (online and offline) interests are: disability (including both impairments and social aspects of disability), anarchism, (trans)gender and sexuality issues, ecology, animals/wildlife/zoology, music, literature (each of the latter categories itself subdividing into several different and arguably very disparate subcategories), new social movements, forteana/unexplained phenomena, etc... in an attempt at self-analysis, i pondered how and whether these things were all connected, and whether there was in fact a single, potentially cohesive identity* that i could bring out of all of them.

After pondering this question "What am I?", or perhaps more accurately "What would someone add my various online and offline "identities" up to?", the phrase came to me "I am a lover of biodiversity in all its forms" - that the thread that tied together most, if not quite all, of my interests/obsessions/perseverations was some fundamental love of the diversity of life - both human and nonhuman - a desire for life to be diverse, and to be accepted as such - a love of the unlimited possible forms and processes of life. This concept stayed brewing in the back of my head for quite some time, gradually forming a framework to tentatively hang other thoughts on, until i eventually had it formulated enough to bring up in a conversation with another disability rights activist, not long after i had managed to finally come into contact with other people within that movement.

Until then i had pretty much thought of the "biodiversity as overarching concept" idea as just one of my wild flights of fancy, something on a level with my little personal hybrid theologies/mythologies that in geeky, and often stoned or drunken, conversations with friends more knowledgeable than myself i had made up out of existing belief systems - but his very positive reaction to the concept made me realise that i might actually be on to something here...

The context in which biodiversity is usually understood is a biological and ecological one. Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1985 and defined as "variation of life at all levels of biological organization"; of course, this is generally applied to the non-human world. My use of "biodiversity" as an umbrella concept, which could potentially cover just about all equality and identity issues, is in taking that and applying it to the human world (which parallels my personal desire to apply concepts and methods of activism and social movement organisation learned from the environmentalist movement to the disability movement): bringing together biology and ecology with sociology. Disability, gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, etc can all be seen as elements of the biodiversity of the human species...

One of the key claims of social ecology is that the same systems and ideologies which lead to the domination, exploitation and oppression of humans by other humans also lead to the domination, exploitation and degradation by humans of nature. Ecofeminism, the product of feminists bringing social ecology together with feminism, is based on the idea that the oppression of women is linked to the domination of nature by linguistic and cultural equation of women with non-human nature: this is also true of the historical and current treatment of disabled people, sexually diverse people, people of minority ethnicities and all other groups of people who are seen to differ from a culturally defined "fully human" norm. The same systems of domination - the triple alliance of capitalist monopoly, statist centralisation and patriarchal social segregation - that threaten ecosystems and natural biodiversity through monoculture farming, exploitation of non-renewable resources and unsustainable economic growth also threaten human biodiversity by oppressing, exploiting, discriminating against and attempting, by methods ranging from enforced proletarianisation of peasant cultures to institutionalisation and eugenic abortion or sterilisation of disabled people in developed countries, to eliminate "abnormal" human beings.

The ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear etc movements, the feminist movement, the various anarchist or libertarian socialist movements (including co-operatives, social centres, etc), the postcolonial liberation movements and the rights/freedom movements of disabled people, queer people, trans people, and any other minorities, can thus be seen as (although it has to be said they don't all necessarily see themselves or each other as) part of an overall movement in defence of biodiversity (in all its contextually overlapping definitions) against monoculture (in all its contextually overlapping definitions). In this blog, my aim is to draw together and make connections between all these movements, and in doing so demonstrate, in my own small way (as all the people i link to here do in their own large or small ways) biodiverse resistance...

(*I understand that many people will strongly dispute that one's interests either are the source of, or add up to produce, one's identity. The concept of "identity" for me is a complex one, and there are ways in which i believe that, for me (and possibly other autistic people) it actually is significantly different than for most people - that it's possible i/we actually lack some kind of "core" identity that many/most other people have, and thus need to piece together a (no less "real", just differently constructed) "identity" from other things. I'm probably going to blog about this at some point in more detail...)

New blog

so... this is my new blog. i tried to keep a blog before, but it didn't quite work... however, in my fairly long recent period of absence from the internet, i've had time to pre-plan in my head what i actually want this blog to be like, rather than it just being a load of random stuff, so hopefully this one will be more... focused than the last attempt was...

stuff i aim to blog about: disability in general and autism in particular, gender, feminism, sexuality and related issues, libertarianism/anarchism, speculative fiction, ecology, zoology and my various other perseverations... i'm probably going to have a secondary blog for music reviews, cos i think they're a bit of a separate category of my writing and might make this blog less cohesive. biodiversity, human and non-human, is the "high concept" that, imo, ties all my passions and interests together...

proper posts coming soon...