While scholars, philosophers and activists have resolved the illusion of the human/nature binary, translating this knowledge beyond the abstract remains challenging. For me, it was one of my (at the time) daily ocean swims that made my status as part of ecologies clear to me; made it clear that every day I was swimming into the feast.
To swim, to surf, to paddle into the waves is to relinquish control of apex predator status and to make a choice to participate in the feast. This is not only in terms of other-than-human encounters with waves, depths, and animals, but also through our immersion in the consequences of human waste and consumption; swallowing it into my guts, absorbing in into my microbiome.
In this early line of thinking-with Plumwood, Haraway, Tsing, and Pignarre and Stengers, I’ll explore how sport is about more than performance or health and wellbeing, but can act as an everyday, ideological counterspell (Pignarre & Stengers, 2011) to enduring capitalist approaches to how we live with the world.