Donna Harraway has a way to stay with uncertainty which is uncanny. She suggests that as an environmentalist there is a temptation to go to solutions for the future, an urge that stems from the fear of ending in apocalyptic chaos. By doing so aren’t we just trying to control the future? Another way, Harraway suggests is to slow down and really perceive where we are at in the present, and act on what is here with us, connected to us.
When it comes to Baking Lab, it is looking at all the low hanging fruits that are already present inside the environment of the bakery. Whether we talk about wasted bread, about the potential of people, about pulp, the flour bags that are used as linen for bread proofing, the recycling of the oven smell in the street, the leftover heat of the ovens that allows us to dehydrate and toast old bread. It’s about all these little, significant changes. They help us think differently, they help us “stay with the trouble”.
“Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”