Flight ways into the deep past and future

These are the flight ways into the deep past and future that are contained within the emergent becoming of a species. Generations stretching before and after, beyond the horizon of our temporal comprehension. It is all their work and their possibilities that are at stake in the living and dying albatross bodies that populate this blue planet at any given "now". And so it is under the shadow of all these generations, of a flight way taken – however impossibly – in its entirety, that we must feel the weight of an ethical claim to hold open space for the continuity of this ancient and evolving form of life.

 

Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 39