(lecture notes from isea2012)
His reading tip: Tending the Wild, by Kat Anderson; early Westerners thought they entered a kind of lazy easygoing landscape, but it was very highly tended, with ritualised seasonal foraging, burning etc. The domesticated and the wild were not opposites to some of the native peoples of the West Coast of North America.
Fritz proposes the word Nature should be gotten rid off, whenever you need to use it, check why you need it. The fact that we have a word for nature signifies that we make a separation, it signifies a problem.
These are not commercial or advocacy projects, they just look like them if they need to. At the core humour functions as a release to avoid becoming: we're all screwed - let's party on / if we only do this, we can save the world.
Our make up as a species is about getting away from predators and maximising calories, we need quite the opposite right now.
There are some animals we love to live with, but some others we don't, why? This is the starting idea for animal estates.
50% of wildlife lives in and on dead trees, in cities they are removed right away.
Our cities are to cleaned up.
Our buildings are to closed up.
For his first work on animal estates he researched which animals lived at that spot in New York when it was still a forest, and remade their habitats as we make estates for humans.