Wednesday July 8, 2020

Sarah looks into how we might remove bats from beneath a section of our attic. They’re endangered and they’re cool to have around, in the sense that they eat thousands of insects per day; but their poop isn’t something we want collecting next to our house. Perhaps we can arrange for them a small bat house. Build them into a workable permaculture. Jonathon Engels is one of many who recommend that we “utilize wildlife.” Create good habitats for frogs, lizards, birds, rabbits, deer, bees, butterflies. Add fertility, spread seeds, create compost. Bats are skillful pest eliminators — pests that could otherwise endanger crops like corn, tomatoes, and beans. Bat guano can then be recycled back into the land as fertilizer. Bats are also pollinators. So let us build or buy a bat box. Mount it on a post in a sunny spot in the yard. The box should perch about thirteen to sixteen feet off the ground. Let us do our best to provide all creatures with homes. Scale up the ladders of the allegory; apply the principle more broadly. In all cases, it means overcoming fear of otherness. Build a culture that uses narrative to occasion imaginative identification with all of nature as kith and kin, while also responding lovingly to difference. Think of this as an alternative to the relationship to Otherness proposed and imagined by Thomas Nagel in his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”