On narrative, affect and threatened ecologies of tidal landscapes

This is a story about tides, about tides in Bristol, about two characters that were found in the mud of the Severn Estuary-Peri and Proxi. It is also a story about telling stories as a method for the creative accounting of eco-social histories, presents and futures, and material and non-material entanglements of such through space-time. And it is a story about loss: of ecologies, of ecocide, of getting lost, and of finding a way through stories. As so much of life is, this is an experimental mixing. Tides mix things-fresh and salt water, land and sea. In unsettling boundaries and definitions, they invite a focus on inter-relationships, and on flux and change. Intertidal landscapes are in constant motion, change and cycles, denying fixity and stasis. As such, they unsettle both linear thinking and linear understanding that, in spite of movements to break away from them, continue to shape historical and geographical accounts in many areas of thinking. This chapter is tidal in its approach-ecological. It tells stories of stories through the tides, an ebbing and waning, from solid to fluid and back again with all that comes in between. It embraces the constant motion of life and understanding, and attempts to bring this into a textual representation. In short, it is a story of an ecological approach to eco-social storytelling