THE TIME OF EVENTS

Roberto Palomino Arias

ES

1

In a world where time cannot be measured, there are no clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time. A house is begun when stone and lumber arrive at the building site. The stone quarry delivers stone when the quarryman needs money … Trains leave the station … when the cars are filled with passengers. … Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and  

variation in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness. 

-Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams[1] 

The movement usually begins with an invitation to meet the other, the unknown, what is untamed by civilization, what has yet to find a niche in the rigid and narrow structures of meaning that shape my experience. And coexisting in me are a fascination for this encounter with naked life and a horror of the annihilation I risk in accepting it. 

It is a movement both internal and external, if such a division makes any sense. I have sought encounters with the animals of the forest in different places and in doing so have experienced many times the fear of becoming their prey. I have traveled to remote places where living examples can still be found of the few remaining descendants of the great herds that centuries ago inhabited the Earth. I have sought encounters with bears, pumas, deer, South Andean deer, wolves, foxes, and sharks in places with little human presence and have walked through solitary places in the mountains, following in the footsteps of a bear, with the joy and fascination of a child familiar with the creature only as a stuffed companion, or in stories and illustrations in children's books. And I have spent entire nights on guard inside a tent, alert and terrified as a child, anticipating the ursid's imminent and deadly attack.   

This mixture of fascination and fear of annihilation by a predator or by powerful natural forces has a correlation in the inner world. Perhaps what terrifies me most is this movement toward the unknown, toward the untamed regions of my inner universe that organically emerges when I distance myself for a while from cities and places shaped by human beings, when I expose myself to the fabric of life and the power of the elements. This search for the wild animal outside is perhaps a way of searching for the wild animal within, for that untamed part of me that heeds the visceral call to enter the forest and, once there, exposes me to fear, my own and those I inherited, to the smallness of my certainties and explanations. This is a kind of death, a part of me desires it, a part of me is horrified by it.

On the threshold of the forest there is usually a sound that engulfs everything, an internal dialogue that configures countless unimaginable faces of fear. This voice is the first obstacle to the encounter. It generates a curtain of noise that obscures the sounds of the forest. This voice emanates from an internal place that has been constructed as an enclosed territory, a transcendent sphere in which an spectator-narrator lives, experiencing life as a spectacle that occurs in another sphere, different in nature from that of the spectator-narrator. This insurmountable (and imaginary) distance is the main obstacle on the way to the encounter. Upon crossing this threshold and setting off down the path, a slow process begins, eroding the boundaries of this internal territory. 

Walking for a few hours in unknown territory has the effect of gradually silencing inner voices. The prominence of the discursive mind and the over-identification with egoic traits (characteristic of our form of survival in the city and life in community) gradually give way to a broader experience. This place of the transcendent and sovereign observer becomes a tiny aspect of a much more complex and rich field of experience. We gradually access this field in the process of recognizing our embodied nature, thanks to exhaustion and exposure to the elements. Little by little, silence emerges, the original container of every voice, of every sound. Inner silence gives way to listening. Identity (identification) yields, gradually fades away. The separation between the one who listens and what is being listened to disappears. We are no longer a person listening to something; we are the sound and the silence that contains it. The territory of the transcendent spectator surrenders to the experience of immanence. And it is here where the encounter becomes possible. 

It is as if the encounter becomes possible thanks to the collapse of an inner wall that sustains the illusion of an impassable distance between the observer and nature, as if the quieting of the discursive mind allows access to a field of experience in which separation is recognized as an illusion. Subject and object are nothing more than aspects of life itself, which in the conditions of the forest registers clearly in me as a body, as consciousness, a whole. It is this small death of the ego that allows me to recognize that we are all manifestations of the same life, manifested as bear, deer, snake, tree, puma, or human. The encounter becomes a kind of communion with other forms of life, thanks to the contact with the life in me and the death of an old identity. 

On the asphalt I found another type of death.
I saw more mammals in ditches and on the roads near the forests than along the trails. These beings died a different death, the result of a gaping separation at the heart of the forest in the form of a straight asphalt line. The road crosses the forest and separates the organic tissue that configures it. This disruption is far from trivial. It is a scar. Different conditions govern this asphalt strip and the edges of the forest. There is a different regime of light, an aural atmosphere modified in part by the acoustics of the open space and in part by the appearance of vehicles. The road creates an interruption.

Roads affect ecosystems in multiple ways, such as habitat fragmentation, niche degradation, and vehicle emissions. They play an important role in the contamination of bodies of water, as rainwater typically contains traces of gasoline, motor oil, heavy metals, nickel, copper, zinc, cadmium, and lead[2]. These pollutants have an indirect effect on the entire trophic chain due to their bioaccumulation[3] in primary consumers and their effects on wildlife are very diverse. Roads become filters or barriers to the movement of animals. They restrict access to places where resources are obtained during specific seasons. Roads divide animal populations into smaller subgroups, thus reducing their genetic diversity and increasing the tendency to inbreeding.

Spaces at the intersection of road and forest are governed by very different rhythms. Roads are the result of a culture that honors speed, the accelerated rhythm of human life, and that has increasingly less time for life. This asphalt strip introduces a time regime that is foreign to the environment in which it appears. The materiality of asphalt introduces extended degradation times of synthetic materials, creating the first of many conflicts with forest time. Each vehicle that travels the road embodies, in turn, a reminder of the vertiginous acceleration that governs this strip conquered by civilization. The rhythm of forest beings matches their biological, circadian, daily, and seasonal cycles. Each roadkill is a sign of the conflicting rhythms of our society and the forest. 

I have always been alarmed by the number of dead animals I have spotted on highways. A 2015 study by the Brazilian Center for Studies in Highway Ecology estimates that 1.3 million animals are killed on roads every day in Brazil.[4] In 2013, U.S. insurance statistics reported two million roadkills annually.[5] That year, as Suanúa, my companion, and I contemplated the dead body of a wolf on the highway, we came up with the idea of creating an wildlife atlas of road killed fauna.

I had been recording the deaths of animals in different contexts for several years. First, at the amphitheater of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, where I was struck by the coldness of the gesture of dissecting horses and cows, and the role played by the objectification of the animal in training processes used with veterinary students. The fragmentation of the body, the memorization of the name and function of each of the animal's anatomical structures, seemed to replace the gross data of its presence as a living being. The interruption of the body's natural process of decomposition through impregnation with formaldehyde inscribes it in a suspended time foreign to the body's vital history. The dissected horse does not remind us of the live horse. It seems more an artifact, oblivious to life and death. 

The beautiful bodies lying on the asphalt, however, have only just died. Seeing them, it was clear that parts of the organic life that coexisted in their bodies as an habitat was still alive. In their movements suspended in dramatic gestures I find a clear reminder of the life that has just died out, and of their attempts to preserve it. Each of these beings is a reminder of the fragility of life, of the thin line between life and death, of the irreparable nature of each of these deaths. It also reminds me of the violence implicit in our way of being in nature and the effect of our cult of speed on the way we approach and consider the other.

2

In 2013, in Davis (California), I began working on and experimenting with the relationship between humans and places. There I participated in a practice-as-research project led by Diedre Morris in which a group of people created the Death Star Migration performance. For five weeks we used our bodies to reflect on the effect that fences and roads have on the migration of the pronghorn (American antilocapra). This species is the last survivor of the Antilocapridae family, a close relative of the giraffes and the okapi, with whom it shares its strange appearance. The pronghorn is endemic to western North America and, like the bison, was brutally hunted during the so-called western conquest. Of the 35 million estimated to have existed in 1800, only about 700,000 remain. 

There is almost no documentation regarding the slaughter of the pronghorns, although studies have been done on the communal hunting practices that took place in the region over a period of approximately 4500 years.[6] In the nineteenth century, they suffered a fate parallel to that of the bison, relentlessly hunted by the colonizers of western North America as part of a campaign to force the native communities inhabiting the territory into submission and relocation. Bison were a fundamental source of food and raw material for these communities. General Sheridan is credited with the idea of creating medallions with the image of a dead buffalo on one side and that of a demoralized Indian on the other, to be awarded to hunters. “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”[7] Hunters shot bison from the windows of moving trains. “Records showed 120 buffalo killed in 40 minutes and 2,000 a month. The average buffalo hunter killed one hundred a day. One hundred thousand buffalo were killed each year, until they were on the verge of extinction”;[8] their carcasses were skinned and left to rot. Later, the bones were collected and used to make fertilizer. Pelts and bones alike traveled to the East Coast in train cars. “Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”[9] A judge described the scene: "the country out here used to look like a charnel house with so many skulls staring at a man, and so many bones that newcomers felt nervous and, in some cases, could hardly plow the land." (Isenberg, 2000, p. 159). 

The bison were nearly exterminated from the plains in a period of fifteen years and the indigenous communities were diminished and relocated in reserves. The slaughter of bison was possible thanks to the confluence of government policies and various technologies characteristic of modernity: repeating weapons, railroads, and barbed wire. These three technologies will become the protagonists in several episodes in which the civilizing spirit of modernity will unleash its most destructive facet. Each in its own way embodies the impulse to accelerate the rhythm of life that characterizes modernity.

Of these technologies, it is barbed wire perhaps that has received the least attention.[10] Silent and aesthetically eloquent, it was invented and patented by Joseph Glidden in 1874 in a town in Illinois near the scene of the slaughter of so many bison and pronghorns. It was originally conceived as a deterrent to the passage of animals from one place to another.[11] Since then, it has conquered the land to the point of becoming almost omnipresent. Its power lies in its ability to control our movements notwithstanding its invisibility. Like cows, we are conditioned by its presence, without even noticing it. It has been with us whenever we needed to separate men, in Treblinka, the Gulags, the concentration camps of those kidnapped in the jungle, and it safeguards local and national borders.

Barbed wire was perhaps the technology that produced the deepest transformation in the American plains, and in the way of life of many of the species that inhabited them, including humans. From the time of its mass commercialization, the pace of migration and settlement in the plains began to accelerate. The number of family and large-scale farms in this region increased considerably, since they could now be protected from the stampeding herds of animals that had migrated and grazed throughout this open territory for millennia. It also changed the dynamics of land use and generated conflicts with those who practiced open-range grazing of livestock and suddenly saw their grazing areas fragmented. Cowboys began cutting the wire they found in their path and farmers turned to the nascent institutions, who in turn created the laws and sanctions for those who persisted in this practice.

In January 1885, a deadly frost spread across the Great Plains. Cattle began moving south, driven by ice, snow, and strong winds. Their migration encountered an insurmountable obstacle in the newly established fences that stopped their progress. The cows began to pile up in large quantities against the barbed wire to protect themselves from the cold. Thousands failed to withstand the arctic temperatures and froze to death. The same tragedy was repeated the following year.[12]

This fragmentation of territory is another example of how the modern civilization process is inserted violently in territories of conquest originally inhabited by other peoples, modifying the dynamics that previously sustained life. The pronghorn has suffered the consequences of this reconfiguration of its ancestral territory and remains an endangered species.[13] Fences and highways constitute its main threat and have created insurmountable obstacles across its traditional migration routes. On March 11, 2019, the Colorado Department of Wildlife and Parks reported the death of 47 pronghorns (many of them gestating their young) in a single motor vehicle accident.[14] 

Work with the Death Star Migration group began with an invitation to explore the way humans relate to places. From what position do we relate to the places we visit and where we settle? What kind of hierarchical relationships are established between humans and places? How does one belong to a place? What is our physical perspective on the landscape? How do our configuration, altitude, and point of view determine our relationship with places? 

The work also revolved around the pronghorn, the configuration of its body, its ability to run for long periods, and the fact that it is the fastest mammal on the American continent. It also addressed the question regarding the type of relationship an animal has with places and space in its long migrations, and how it experiences the increasing fragmentation of its living space. 

Based on this initial data, we began an investigation that bypassed linguistic communication regarding the problem and quickly focused on an exploration through movement and corporal possibilities. Little by little, over a period of weeks, other forms of relating to space began to emerge. We became quadrupeds, we explored with prostheses that extended the length of our legs and arms. The amplified dimensions of our body displaced our centers of gravity. From this new configuration we inhabited the space in another way. We acquired a new perspective on places and landscapes. And this experience of estrangement from one's perspective allowed us to recognize by contrast our customary way of relating to space. In the exploratory game of incarnating another being from this new configuration of the body, identity structures began to erode again, opening us to the possibility of recognizing other ways of being in the world. Not only was it a game of reflections in which by positioning myself as the other I was able to see myself and my atavisms, but also, that by becoming another, I recognized the possibility of that other. Without becoming a pronghorn, this embodied experience informs me, in a different way from that of language, about the possibility of its existence as something beyond the mirage that I can access through my senses. And this kind of experience sows a seed of slow, underground maturation. There is a geological, telluric dimension to this form of learning. It is an immediate somatic data that requires slow digestion and triggers changes that mature slowly in the subsoil.

Migration began at twilight. We ran as a herd through the fragmented and unrecognizable territory,  while passers-by gazed at us with frightened eyes.

3

The roadkill atlas project aims to be, simultaneously, an effort to celebrate the diversity of life forms that inhabit this planet and a reflection on the tragically convergent speeds and dissonant rhythms of industrial society and life in its various manifestations. The times of the industrial system clash brutally with biospheric times. 

Jorge Reichmann presents as proof of this the fact that “it took 300 million years for the atmospheric carbon deposited in fossil fuels such as coal, oil, or natural gas to be captured, while industrial societies take a mere 300 years to return it to the atmosphere, burning fossil fuels for energy.”[15] Another facet of this collision is the encounter between wildlife and vehicles on the roads.

Byung-Chul Han calls our society a "society of tiredness". In one of his essays, Claudio Naranjo defines our civilization as hubris (a Greek word usually translated as "arrogance" or "excessive pride") (Civilization as Hubris, p. 82). He maintains that our culture remains collectively fixed on something similar to an adolescent attitude of conquest and aggrandizement. This collective expression of hubris has led us to believe we are the owners of the planet. “How tragic, however, is this collective expression of hubris!”  The prideful and triumphant trampling of nature that largely defines the culture we reproduce. The atlas also aims to reveal a form of this violence disguised behind the discourse of progress, growth, and efficiency. 

There is something very destructive about our view of life, of one's own and the phenomenon of life itself. Working with my body in experiences of integrated reflection or prolonged contact with environments untouched by man has served as an antidote to the violence intrinsic in the civilization to which I belong. I believe that this work can be a valuable tool for pedagogical encounters with communities and actors that play a role in the problem of roadkill. 

In addressing this issue it is essential to open a discussion about how we understand the concepts of progress, development, and well-being in our culture, concepts that tend to guide our community projects. Our interpretation of them seems to legitimize the instrumentalization of other life forms that coexist on the planet. This discussion would allow us to clarify and mitigate our unrestricted adherence to notions of progress or development that fail to take into account their impact on other life forms and would serve to question the meaning of the constantly increasing pace of life that characterizes our culture.

Over the past few years, a new field of study called road ecology has been developed to study the impact and interactions between highway infrastructure and the ecosystems it crosses.[16]

In Colombia, factors explaining wildlife roadkill have been found to include proximity of roads to rivers and herbaceous vegetation and forests, as well as the number of lanes on highways.[17] Insufficient signage to protect wildlife and ensure vehicular flow has also been identified as a determining factor.[18] Colombian highways cut through the midst of landscapes vital to the movements and migrations of wild animals. Roadkill often occurs in areas of circulation between forested areas separated by roads and deforested areas, and in areas where roads separate forests from rivers and wetlands.[19] Species with the greatest number of victims include the black bear, the anteater and the giant anteater, the possum, the crab-eating fox, the squirrel, the raccoon, the owl and the little owl, the snake, and the lizard.[20] 

With regard to infrastructure design, it is important for engineers to continue and expand their work with biologists, ecologists, and specialists in environmental engineering and road ecology. Engineering in Colombia must learn from successful damage mitigation experiences in other countries, such as the construction of underground passages and wildlife corridors, take measures to mitigate in areas where animal vulnerability is noticeably greater, and improve signage announcing the presence of wildlife in road sectors. 

Another important aspect of this work is the active participation of communities in processes of deliberation and socialization of animal situations. By working to raise awareness of the problem (hopefully addressing the underlying problem linked to the concepts of progress, development and welfare) a culture of active wildlife care and self-regulation of highway speeds can be promoted. 

4

The original inhabitants of the American plains were decimated and confined in order to bring civilization to the regions they inhabited. A similar story took place in Patagonia in the so-called Conquest of the Desert. On Colombia’s eastern plains the original inhabitants were hunted indiscriminately from the early 19th century until just fifty years ago.[21]

Our history is plagued with examples of the brutal conquering of “uncivilized” territories and peoples by cultures who see themselves as the standard bearers of civilization. The barbarity they pretend to destroy is a reflection of their own hidden barbarity, projected on the image they create of the other, who, thanks to this act of disguising, appears to deserve to be destroyed. This violence then becomes justified, virtuous, and necessary. And so, the standard bearers of civilization legitimize giving free reign to their own destructive impulses.

Today, in large urban centers we continue to discuss policies and projects to take progress into isolated regions (isolated, of course, from the perspective of the inhabitants of the urban center from which these policies emanate). In many of Colombia’s current environmental conflicts I hear the echo of that ancient logic of civilization. Progressive policies designed by technocrats in urban centers are inserted into territories as yet unpenetrated by the dynamics of the industrialized society and capitalism responsible for the planetary environmental crisis. These territorial interventions modify irreparably the traditions and dynamics of life in the communities that have managed to preserve a more balanced relationship with their natural surroundings.

Among the arguments used to justify the creation of a deep-water port on Colombia’s Pacific coast (in Tribuga) I can hear that ancient logic of civilization. The argument is made that progress must be taken into this traditionally abandoned and “underdeveloped” region, without considering the local communities’ position on the project or the disastrous consequences it would have on the other forms of life that coexist in these territories (the project would affect some 1,500 hectares of mangroves, the migratory routes and essential reproduction spaces of whales, and the coral and other very fragile ecosystems that characterize the region’s extraordinary biodiversity).

The Ituango Hydroelectric Project is another example of the imposition of a model of development that irreparably affects the ways of life of inhabitants in the flooded territory and the traditional actors who have maintained dynamics of sustainable interaction such as artisanal fishing and small-scale agriculture all along the banks of the Cauca River.  And countless examples of this type of violence exist.

Defenders of this discourse, who attempt to legitimize the development of these regions through mining, logging, palm and sugar cane monocultures, industrialized fishing, and the creation of highways and ports, have pointed reiteratively to local communities as obstacles. The inhabitants of these territories, barbarians, are not deemed worthy interlocutors since it is assumed that their opposition to the perceived progress can only be the fruit of ignorance, of their underage condition as uncivilized beings. In fact, what we have here is a conflict between different ways of conceiving development and well-being. Any intervention that fails to consider this reality is a form of injury.