In this lecture, Thom Van Dooren focuses on a small population of roughly 30 house crows in the town of Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands, likely all descendants of two birds that arrived by ship in the mid 1990s. In 2014, after 20 years of peaceful co-existence, the government of the province of South Holland began the process of eradicating this population, worried that they may one day become a pest or threat to biodiversity. Just across the water from Hoek van Holland is the Port of Rotterdam – Europe’s largest port – and an ‘engine’ for the global patterns of production, trade and consumption that are today remaking our world, ushering in what many are calling the ‘Anthropocene.’
Telling the story of this little group of birds in a way that holds this port and its impacts in the frame, Thom Van Dooren askshow we might be required to rethink our responses to, to learn to live with, others in this difficult time.
