Refugees read wildlife knowledge differently than tourists who consume it

Evidence

However, those other foreigners, thrust into the “whole country of animals” by history’s convulsions, seek to survive risk and trespass by laboring to remain invisible in the historical present, by passing through the elephant grass undetected (by game wardens, border police, lions), by moving “like animals among the animals, away from the roads, away from the white people’s camps.” If the Kruger Park is pitched to tourists as an opportunity to “get close” to wildlife, for the refugees human-animal intimacy depends on a deeper kind of interspecies recognition. The girl and her fellow travelers, in their transnational trespass, have also crossed over into the border zone of the human animal—where knowledge gleaned from other species can offer lifesaving pointers to where water and food are and how to achieve a deeper camouflage, a safer invisibility. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 556

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ecologies of looking idea from the earlier safari chapters: who looks at nature and to what end.
• ADDENDUM: Extends ‘Grafting & Growth’ type land/place web of relations to interspecies survival knowledge in a forced-displacement context.