The Grocer, the Hunting Dog, and the Solar Park: “This Web Radiating Out from Every Object”

Abstract

In this essay I meet an elderly grocer and a caged dog, and visit a solar park. In telling the story of these particular encounters I hope to use the genre of creative non-fiction to offer the reader some glimpse of the complex eco-social web on the Aegean islands of Halki and Symi, where the memory of the sponge industry is a powerful image of wealth and devastation, where the island ecosystems are catastrophically depleted and their non-human beings abused, and where for all this there is yet some hope of renewal.

Keywords:

• sponge industry
• Aegean
• Halki
• Symi
• climate change
• sustainability
• GrEco islands
• interconnectedness

Notes

1 After hearing the story from Petros, I found it again in Panos’s house, in Vangelis Eliadis’s lyrical text that accompanies photographs of the island by Emmanuels Talianis in Chalki Island. In this version, Mario Mousi appears in Algiers, and we are told very specifically that she was smuggled aboard “the sponge-fishing of Kapetan-Skoutas, which had been sent by the wealthy Diakolios of Chalki to Beghazi for sponges” (Eliadis 2003, 14).

2 Roberto Calasso comments on the trope of young girls abducted by the gods, often when they are picking flowers: “Again and again such scenes were to prove irresistible to the gods” (1993, 3).

3 Herodotus, Historiae, I, 4, 2. This is quoted in Calasso (1993, 8).

4 For “an extremely incomplete list of climate victories”, see the chapter with this title in Not Too Late (Solnit and Young Lutunatabua 2023).