The things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network – a "biospheric web" wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others – has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty's late description of sesnuous reality, "the Flesh," as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

It is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sustains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our various languages. The enigmatic nature of language echoes and "prolongs unto the invisible" the wild, interpenetrating, interdependent nature of the sensible landscape itself.

Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. "Language is a life, is our life and the life of the things..." It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 85

it is not human language that is primary

Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage Books, 1997) p. 84

Livets ande bor ännu i de döda tingen

Om döda ting älska, om jord och vatten skilja vänner från fiender, ville jag gärna äga deras kärlek. jag ville, att den gröna jorden inte kände mina steg som en tung börda. Jag ville, att hon gärna förläte, att hon för min skull såras med plog och harv, och att hon villigt öppnade sig för min döda kropp. Och jag ville, att vågen, vars blanka spegel sönderslås av mina åror, hade samma tålamod med mig, som en mor har med ett ivrigt barn, när det klättrar upp i hennes knä utan att akta högtidsdräktens oskrynklade siden. Med den klara luften, som dallrar över de blåa bergen, ville jag vara vän och med den blänkande solen och de vackra stjärnorna. Ty det synes mig ofta, som om de döda tingen skulle känna och lida med de levande. Inte är skrankan mellan dem och oss så stor, som människor tro. Vilken del av jordens stoft är det, som inte har varit inne i livets kretsgång? Har inte vägens kringdrivande stoft smekts som mjukt hår, älskats som goda, välgörande händer? Har inte vattnet i hjulspåret fordom strömmat som blod genom klappande hjärtan?

Livets ande bor ännu i de döda tingen. Vad förnimmer han, där han slumrar i drömlös sömn?

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p.328

Sustainability and diversity are ecologically linked

Sustainability and diversity are ecologically linked because diversity offers the multiplicity of interactions which can heal ecological disturbance to any part of the system.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p.147

Maximising of one-dimensional output is an economic imperative

The low productivity of diverse, multi-dimensional systems and the high productivity of uniform, one-dimensional systems of agriculture, forestry and livestock is therefore not a neutral, scientific measure but is biased towards the commercial interests for whom maximising of one-dimensional output is an economic imperative.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p.140

Biodiversity cannot be conserved unless production itself is based on a policy of preserving diversity.

Biodiversity conservation here is seen only in terms of setting aside reserves in undisturbed ecosystems for the purpose of conservation. This schizophrenic approach to biodiversity, which adopts a policy of destruction in production processes and a policy of preservation in 'set-asides', cannot be effective in the conservation of species diversity. Biodiversity cannot be conserved unless production itself is based on a policy of preserving diversity.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) pp. 86-87

The reductionism of scientific forestry

'Scientific forestry' was the false universalization of a local tradition of forestry which emerged from the narrow commercial interests whcih viewed the forest only in terms of commercially valuable wood. It first reduced the value of diversity of life in the forest to the value of a few commercially valuable species, and further reduced the value of these species to the value of their dead product – wood. The reductionism of the scientific forestry paradigm created by commercial industrial interests violates both the integrity of the forests and the integrity of forest cultures who need the forests in its diversity to satisfy their needs for food, fibre and shelter.

Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind (Zed Books Ltd., 1993) p. 18

An exceptional state where there is no host/guest power structure

What renders 'ecological hospitality' impossible is not the human host's abandonment of his ownership and control […] but primarily the animal guest's complete indifference to the host. […]

No animal, indeed, has the concept of and respect for the hospitable human's property and protection. What underlies this animality is antiphusis, as aforementioned, with nature as dark, violent, rotten, hostile, which appears negative in the anthropocentric frame, but which fundamentally implies neutrality for the human. […]

In other words, pure hospitality that is always impossible when offered by the human to the animal might be possible when we rethink it the other way around. […]

Genuine hospitality is, then, that which can be only recognized, retroactively, by the visitor and not the inviter, in an exceptional state where there is actually no host/guest power structure. Derrida also suggests a 'hospitality of visitation rather than invitation', adding that the visit might actually be very dangerous, but 'a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other' could not be true hospitality. This true hospitality is again almost impossible to realize, whereas its significance may lie in that it serves as the conceptual idea of actual tolerance, if not perfect, still needed in reality […]. Yet we can go further than this conceptual justification of pure hospitality or gift on the human's side if we posit the visitor not as the host but as the guest of animal hospitality in a zone of indeterminacy between subject and object. Visitation would thus be viewed as an ethical adventure of abandoning one's subjectivity as a host, becoming a volunteer homo sacer who can be killed without being sacrificed in anti-nature, and finding oneself to be in an unprepared and unexpected hospitality without any symmetrical exchange or companionship with the other. Does this not suggest an ethics that is not responsible for the other as a vulnerable sufferer but responsive to the other as a pure gift? A truly ethical act might be to accept the other's being in itself as a gift to me in the realization that it is I who is vulnerable and thus virtually accepted by the very other, gifted its unintended hospitality.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 97-98

unexpected events

Unexpected events, such as the sudden appearance of a stump across our path – when we manage to notice it – or Maxi's peccary sudddenly reviving can disrupt our assumptions of how the world is. And it is this very disruption, the breakdown of old habits and the rebuilding of new ones, that constitutes our feeling of being alive and in the world. The world is revealed to us, not by the fact that we come to have habits, but in the moments when, forced to abandon our old habits, we come to take up new ones. This is where we can catch glimpses – however mediated – of the emergent real to which we also contribute. 

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) pp. 65-66

We are permeable

How can we be so poor as to define ourselves as an ego tied in a sack of skin, or worse, as lumbering automatons pressed into service by gangsterish genes? We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable – physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially – to our surroundings. I am the bluebirds and nuthatches that nest here each spring, and they, too, are me. Not metaphorically, but in all physical truth. I am no more than the bond between us. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004) pp. 126-127

We require toy political forms

Intellect is indeed an organ of extinction and that is not great. You can't snicker triumphantly about that. Like all autoimmune systems, intellectuality-depression reinforces itself. How does one sub-vert a self-reinforcing loop? To cast intellect away would be the absurd anti-intellectualism that is part of the problem, trying to return to some state of Nature defined by stripping "civilization" of its symbionts: intellect, plastic, cancer; and, beyond this, stripping the very loop form that provides the structure for beings. This is absurd because "civilization" is already agrilogistic scorched earth and retreat with the nonhumans airbrushed out. Stripping the human realm of its symbionts is... agrilogistics.

[...]

An ecological politics based on guilt underlies "return to Nature" tactics. Basing politics on horror necessitates some kind of resignation tinged with Schadenfreude, wide-eyed and screaming while Rome burns. What mainly impedes ecognosis is the deadly seriousness; we require toy political forms that don't take themselves quite as seriously. A lifeform, an engineering solution, a social policy, another lifeform – they join together and become another type of toy, in a sort of ecological Lego. Not as models for some future serious form. Why? Because of interdependence, there's always a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. There can never be The Toy, one toy to rule them all. Attempts to impose one system top down ahve consistently failed to feed as many people as a variety of smaller scale approaches.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 140-141

Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter

A rigid and thin concept of Life is what dark ecology rejects. That concept can only mean one thing: all three axioms of agrilogistics are in play. Life is the ultimate noncontradictory Easy Think Substance that we must have more and more of, for no reason. A future society in which being ecological became a mode of violence still more horrifying than the neoliberalism that now dominates Earth would consist of a vigorous insistence on Life and related categories such as health.  It would make the current control society (as Foucault calls it) look like an anarchist picnic. If that is what future coexistnce means, beam me up Scotty. The widescreen view of dark ecology sees lifeforms as specters in a charnel ground in which Life is a narrow metaphysical concrete pipe. Death is the fact that ecological thought must encounter to stay soft, to stay weird.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 137-138

Reason reveals itself a little bit nonhuman

The basic mode of ecological awareness is anxiety, the feeling that things have lost their seemingly original significance, the feeling that something creepy is happening, close to home. Through anxiety reason itself begins to glimpse what indigenous – that is, preagricultural – societies have known all along: that humans coexist with a host of nonhumans. For reason itself reveals itself to be at least a little bit nonhuman. In turn, reason discovers global warming, the miasma for which humans are responsible. Through reason we find ourselves not floating blissfully in outer space, but caught like Jonah in the whale of a gigantic object, the biosphere. Such an object is not reducible to its members, not its members to it; it is a set whose members are not strictly coterminous with itself.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.130

To exist is to coexist

Depression is the inner footprint of coexistence, a highly sensitive attunement to other beings, a feeling of being sensitized to a plenitude of things. De-pressed by them. So we don't want to reject the logical structure of consumerism. Enjoy a thing just for the taste of it. By listening to it rather than sadistically treating it as silent plastic. Ecognosis means: letting become more susceptible.

Melancholy is irreducible because it's ecological; there is no way out of abjection because of symbiosis and interdependence. To exist is to coexist. Yet this coexistence is suffused with pleasure, pleasure that appears perverse from the standpoint of the subject under the illusion that it has stripped the abjection from itself. Down below abjection, ecological awareness is deeply about pleasure.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.129

To be a thing is to be nonsensical

Awareness of ourselves as another "nonhuman" entity has to do with our knowledge, now including logical proofs, that even our thoughts and logical systems evade us. Despite our intentions, they have a life of their own, which means, despite our fantasies that they are totally coherent, they are in fact fragile, like lifeforms. To be a logical system is to be able to speak nonsense because to be a thing is to be nonsensical. Ecognosis has to do with allowing for this nonsensical, pestiferous dimension of things. A thought, a lizard, a spoon veer from themselves. To be a thing is to be a deviation. A thing, a thought, a sentence are per-ver-se. An en-vir-onment is not a closed circle but a veering loop. A thing is in a loop with itself: a thing and a thing-pattern, asymmetrical, which is why there can be patterns at all – which is why there can be replication. Which is why there can be organic chemicals, lifeforms, and sentences about patterns.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.96

Sense must coexist with nonsense

Sense must coexist with nonsense, its shadow. A thing is shadowed by another thing because it's shadowed by itself. Recursion points to coexistence in a nonholistic, not-all (which is to say ecological) possibility space. Metalanguages try to escape this possibility space, to reduce the paradox of coexisting: we entail one another and are not one another. Plants, specters, and hallucinations return more vividly when you try to prune them. To distinguish thought from nonsense is like taking a lifeform out of its habitat.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.91

A human is a heap of things that aren't humans

Since a human is a heap of things that aren't humans, just as a meadow is a heap of things that aren't meadows, such as grasses and birds, either ecological and biological beings don't really exist or there's a malfunction in the logic we have rather uncritically inherited from Aristotle. A malfunction, moreover, that is beginning to distort political decisions at scales appropriate for thinking global warming. If we relax our grip, we can allow for sets of things that don't sum to a whole, and this just is what we have when we think geological temporality as a series of nested sets of catastrophes.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.75

You are already living on more than one timescale

You are already living on more than one timescale. Ecological awareness is disorienting precisely because of these multiple scales. We sense that there are monsters even if we can't see them directly.

There's a monster in the dark mirror, and you are a cone in one of its eyes. When you are sufficiently creeped out by the human species, you see something even bigger than the Anthropocene looming in the background, hiding in plain sight in the prose of Thomas Hardy, the piles of fruit in the supermarket, the gigantic parking lots, the suicide rate.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 41-42

Space has collapsed and placed has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension

We have been telling ourselves that homogenous empty "space" has conquered localized, particular "place". We are either the kind of person who thinks that the category of place is a quaint antique or we are the kind of person who thinks that the category is worth preserving because it is antique. In a certain way, we are the same kind of person.

Many have pronounced the death of place since the 1970s. In literary studies the announcement has gone hand in hand with the language of textuality versus speech. Our habitual talk pits speech (presence, villages, the organic, slow time, traditions) against textuality (dissolution, speed, modern, and postmodern technocultures). Yet the coordinates are terribly out of date. In a twist no one saw coming (because we weren't looking outside the human), space has by no means conquered place. That postmodern meme was simply a late symptom of the modern myth of transcending one's material conditions.

Exactly the opposite has occurred. From the standpoint of the genuinely post-modern ecological era, what has collapsed is (the fantasy of empty, smooth) space. "Space" has revealed itself as the convenient fiction of white Western imperialist humans, just as relativity theory revealed Euclidean geometry to be a small human-flavored region of a much more liquid Gaussian spacetime. The Euclidean concept that space is a container with straight lines is good enough to be getting on with if you want to voyage around the coast of Africa to reach the Spice Islands. Space in this sense has collapsed, and place has emerged in its truly moonstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its nonhuman dimension. How? Now that the globalization dust has settled and the global warming data is in, we humans find ourselves on a very specific planet with a specific biosphere. It's not Mars. It is planet Earth. Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale: dinner table, house, street, neighborhood, Earth, biosphere, ecosystem, city, bioregion, country, tectonic plate. Moreover and perhaps more significantly: bird's nest, beaver's dam, spider web, whale migration pathway, wolf territory, bacterial microbiome. And these places, as in the concept of spacetime, are inextricably bound up with different kinds of timescale: dinner party, family generation, evolution, climate (human) "world history", DNA, lifetime, vacation, geology; and again the time of wolves, the time of whales, the time of bacteria.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 9-10

Rewilding efforts meet a human desire

Rewilding efforts meet a human desire to see more nature on a larger scale than we have been used to. But if such efforts are to become something other than a large zoo or a theme park for scientists, if they are to be nature 'red in tooth and claw', open to evolutionary change and able to contribute to genuine ecological revival, then we have to let go and let nature take its course, however novel, however divorced from what we night like to think of as pristine nature.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 249