oola


oola is a research and reading group that began in 2016 in Los Angeles. The group collaboratively chooses texts that are centered around environmental imagination, histories and trends. We aim to better understand the making of anthropocentricism, and its friend called nature.



mingling-with in company, performance by oola, Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA, 2017

reading list:

  • Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, Nick Estes, 2019
  • This Land is Our Land: the Struggle for a New Commonwealth, Jedediah Purdy, 2019
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013
  • On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability, The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, 2015
  • The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, from Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis, 1998
  • The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, from Uncommon Ground, William Cronon, 1996
  • Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, Jane Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, 1996
  • “The Tragedy of the Commons” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2018
  • The Wilderness Act, Public Law 88-577 (16 U.S. C. 1131-1136), 88th Congress of the United States of America, 1964
  • "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", Richard Brautigan, page 41 of The Whole Earth Catalog, 1967
  • First Morning”, from Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey, 1968
  • Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer, 2014
  • “Learning how to Die in the Anthropocene”, New York Times Op Ed, by Roy Scranton , 2013
  • Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin , 1994
  • The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin, 2016
  • “..Poetically Man Dwells..." from Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger, 1971
  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann, 2005
  • Nature Poem, Tommy Pico, 2017
  • Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Mark Rifkin, 2017
  • Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, 2016
  • The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula LeGuin, 1988
  • Storied-places in a Multispecies City, Thom van Dooren & Deborah Bird Rose , 2012
  • Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, Thom Van Dooren, 2014
  • Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of 200 Years of Hindsight, Jurgen Habermas, 1997
  • The Influencing Machine, Christopher Turner, Cabinet, Issue 14, Summer 2004
  • The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, Ursula LeGuin, 1974
  • Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton, 2009
  • Dawn, Octavia E. Butler, 1987
  • Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett, 2010
  • A Taxonomy of Nature Writing, T. Lyon, 2001
  • The Serpent, from In Search of Nature, E. O. Wilson, 1996
  • Photography and the Art of Chance, Robin Kelsey,  2015
  • Carriers of Meaning, a foray into the worlds of animals and humans, from *A Theory of Meaning,* Jacob von Uexkull, 1934
  • A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds, Jacob von Uexkull, 1934
  • Landscape and Film, Martin Lefebvre, 2006
  • Aethestic Theory, Theodor Adorno, 1970
  • The Animal that Therefore I am, Jacques Derrida , 2002
  • Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation, Robert Morris, October, Vol. 12, 1980
  • Sculpture in the House, Edmond Goose
  • Sky Mound: Monument of Perpetual Possibility, Matthew Coolidge , from Nancy Holt: Sightlines, Alena J. Williams, 2015
  • Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, Roger Caillois, October, Vol. 31, 1984
  • A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Manuel DeLanda, 1997
  • The Road to Objects, Graham Harman , continent, Issue 1.3, 2011
  • The Open, Giorgio Agamben, 2002
  • Savage Dreams, Rebecca Solnit, 1994
  • Part One, Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 2012
  • Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case, Boris Groys, 2015
  • Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, e-flux journal #75, 2016
  • The Call of Cthulhu,  H.P. Lovecraft, 1926
  • I am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied, Henry David Thoreau, 1841
  • The Eolian Harp, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795
  • Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman , 1881
  • The Other Tiger, from Dream Tigers, Jorge Luis Borges, 1960



Field trip, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, San Pedro, CA, July 30, 2017



Film and video:
  • If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, dir. Marshall Curry, 2011
  • National Parks: America's Best Idea, TV mini series, dir. Ken Burns, 2009
  • From Cyborgs to Companion Species: Dogs, People, and Technoculture, presented by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, Donna Haraway, 2003
  • Timothy Morton in Conversation with Verso books,  2017




oola contributed to the recipe book, In, From & With: Exploring Collaborative Survival, edited by Grace Denis and published by Circadian, Summer 2021.
 https://circadian.co/product/in-from-with-exploring-collaborative-survival/


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