Originally Published in Print, April 2022
Art by Linde Vergeylen
“String figures are like stories; they propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth… In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus suffering in companion species knottings, I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble. ”
Green&Blue is a sustainable design firm that began in a garden shed on the coast of Cornwall. It was founded by Kate and Gavin Christman, a married couple, who, in 2005, left their jobs at an electronic company in order to devote their time entirely to designing habitations and feeders for wildlife. They began with the Birdball, a ceramic birdhouse designed to keep out predators, but have since developed feeders, baths, bat roosts, and “bee bricks”; a type of construction brick that replicates the cavities of a solitary bee’s natural nest, providing the insects with dwellings in urban areas that lack alternative roosting sites.
Earlier this month, the city of Brighton and Hove passed a planning law that requires all new buildings over five metres tall to include these bee bricks, alongside nesting boxes suitable for swifts. The law comes as part of a broader movement to encourage biodiversity. Brighton’s council aims to twine human spaces with those of animals and critters, currently developing an eco-friendly housing estate that will feature a ground source heat pump system, solar panels, bee bricks, bird boxes, and a communal wildflower garden. These initiatives reflect a growing but inconsistent trend in architectural practices across the globe. In Ireland, for example, sustainable architecture has recently turned its focus to the process of “adaptive reuse”, where buildings in a state of dereliction and disuse are re-purposed and returned to functionality. Irish firms such as Ecocem and Cygnum work towards efficient and sustainable material usage, producing low-carbon alternatives to cement, with Cygnum winning the famous RIBA Stirling Prize in 2019. Despite this, last year, the Built Environment Summit deemed architects across the globe to be “enablers of business as usual” through their complicity in the maintenance of environmentally damaging practices.
In light of this, the bee brick signals a small but important development. Whilst bees are generally able to nest in the crumbling mortar and brickwork of older constructions, the precision of modern building is such that all cavities are blocked. The new brick is important both for its ability to counter this loss through its replication of the bees’ natural habitats, and for its conscious attempt to provide dwelling sites in urbanised landscapes. Nevertheless, the design is not without criticism. Concerns have arisen over the possibility that mites could colonize the spaces and spread diseases, that the brick does not do enough for the environment in isolation, and that the product risks being used as “greenwash” by architects and developers; an environmental “quick fix” promoted at the expense of more impactful and sustainable changes.
Donna Haraway is a scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose work spans the realms of feminism, philosophy, and ecocriticism. Her seminal book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene advocates for multispecies collaboration and cohabitation, working against anthropocentric ideas about individualism to highlight the plant-animal-human entwinements and co-dependencies that make living possible. Importantly, Haraway dedicates herself to actuality, preferring to address the issues of the present as opposed to projecting ahead to environmental futures. She advocates for art-science activisms that creatively address ecological issues and emphasizes both the beauty and importance of the more modest and partial forms of recuperation.
These ideas vindicate the bee brick. Despite its criticisms and the continued need to implement a wider variety of sustainable construction practices, Haraway’s thinking suggests that the design signals a small but important step towards planetary recuperation; a station on the path to multispecies resurgence. Scientific opinions have already emerged that reflect Haraway’s line. Francis Gilbert, an ecology professor at the University of Nottingham, believes that some microbes in the bricks’ cavities would rather be beneficial to the bees’ habitat, whilst Lars Chittka, a professor at Queen Mary University, claims that the insects themselves would allay any disease-related issues, counterbalancing the risks that come with the bee brick. The brick’s ecosystem embodies a complexity inherent within the world at large. It constitutes processes of dwelling and non-dwelling, disease and rejuvenation, decline and survival.
Haraway’s ideas can be taken further. Her discussions of ecological processes, actuality, and species entanglement emulate the language of David Bohm, a philosophical physicist whose ideas, though uncommonly taught, are crucial to an understanding of existence. Aiming to unite classical with quantum physics, Bohm discovered a new physical order. He called this “the implicate order” and described it as a level of reality that both lies beneath and gives rise to “the explicate order” of the life and society that we know and perceive. Most simply, the implicate order presupposes absolute holism. It is the locus of connection between every aspect of existence and forms part of a continuous, flowing process of undivided wholeness. Because of this order, Bohm believed that we are fundamentally inseparable from every aspect of the environment; entangled not only with other species, but with the trees, grasses, and flowers, etc. To illustrate this, he cited the movement of breath wherein oxygen produced by plants enters the human body and leaves as CO2 which is again absorbed by the plants in a reciprocal process. Like Haraway, Bohm believed in the necessity of focusing on planetary actuality, of working carefully to offer solutions and suggestions to the problems of the present day.
The point about the bee brick then is that it is generative. It is a chance to look at the world anew with small initiatives that will generate positive potential. Its usage will allow for human-bee cohabitation and the reintroduction of the insects into urban areas. These changes will combine to embody the possibility of modest environmental recuperation. The bee brick will necessarily have to work alongside other developments of both a small and larger scale. These might include the planting of nearby wildflower gardens, a reduction in the use of pesticides, the development of sustainable building materials, and an increase in the practice of adaptive reuse. According to Haraway, we will never achieve planetary recovery – just a situation that might be considerably better than the one we are in. We both live, and will continue to live, in a time of environmental precarity. It is crucial to address actuality, to acknowledge our entanglements and co-dependencies with nature, and to counter the fact that every construction has its foundations in dispossession; if not human, then animal, vegetational, or biospherical.
