💬 Quotes

• “Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare's run, the hawk's high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise that live by voices inaudible to you.”

  – Robert Macfarlane, in The Wild Places

• “All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.”

  ― Ed Yong, in I Contain Multitudes

• “In terms of environmental messages and how to communicate them, it would be wise to look well beyond the current movement. We need a new set of ‘articulators’ to communicate a fresh, broad view of human relationships and actions toward the natural world. We need charismatic visionaries to spark new social change groups, even a new movement. The struggle over what environment means, the values it holds for all of us, and how we speak and act toward it, is being lost…We need to bring the environment home. The environment needs to be reconnected to our everyday lives, in work and leisure, in words and actions.”

  – Julia Corbett, in Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages (2006, p. 310).

• “Caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning.”

  —Donna Haraway, in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p 36).

• “The core of apocalyptic thinking is nihilism: this world is too despoiled to continue. The seduction of such stories is how certain they make the teller feel. An apocalyptic narrative is like looking at a horizon with no clouds or hills: the way forward is terribly assured. To walk it, there is no need to mind the lives of others, rendered invisible by the power of imagining they are already gone.”

  – Bathsheba Demuth, environmental historian at Brown University, in her essay, Reindeer at the End of the World

• “To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin, quoted in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.

• “I have learned many words for ‘island’: isle, atoll, eyot, skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and I have always understood them by their relation to water. The English word “island,” after all, comes from the German “aue,” from the Latin “aqua,” meaning “water.” An island is a world afloat; an archipelago is a place pelagic. The Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilization grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better metaphor: 島 dao (“island,” pronounced “to” in Taiwanese) is built from the relationship between earth and sky. The character contains the idea that a bird 鳥 (niao) can rest on a lone mountain 山 (shan).”

  – Jessica J. Lee, in Two Trees Make a Forest.

• "Earth hasn't evolved to host storytelling animals who forever try to run from it, to deny physical reality, to live outside life's many beautifully and delicately spun cycles of participation. Relationships are the primary reality. That is the baseline that the old story cannot erode, try as it might. Abundance for our own kind is within reach, but only when we forsake the compulsion to step outside the living world. True abundance is within reach only inside this Earth."

  - Martin Lee Mueller, in Being Salmon, Being Human.

• “Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the movies and television shows we watch—these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most powerful tool to inspire the social change these times demand…We need our storytellers—a mighty force—to help us shift our mythology and imagine a future where together we thrive with nature. That is a power we must harness, if we are to find our way out of the climate crisis. We must build a cultural strategy for the climate movement.”

  – Favianna Rodriguez, an interdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and social justice activist. From her chapter, Harnessing Cultural Power, in the book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.

• “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

  ― Barry Lopez, environmental writer and storyteller. From an interview in Poets and Writers, 22:2. March/April 1994.

• “…In order to awaken the latent plant in you, you will need to get interested in the things that plants care about. Though plants don’t have eyes, ears, noses or mouths, don’t be fooled — they can see, hear, smell, taste and feel. Let their planty sensitivities inflect your own. Tune into the different ways they do time, learn to follow their tempos and rhythms…”

  — Natasha Myers, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. In How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene

• “Climate change was manufactured in a crucible of inequality, for it is a product of the industrial and the fossil-fuel eras, historical forces powered by exploitation, colonialism, and nearly limitless instrumental use of ‘nature’”

  — Chirs. J Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia

• A lot of people perceive the climate fight as: The timeline is terrifying. But I think we should see it as, This timeline is hastening our move towards justice. 

  – Varshini Prakash, Co-founder and Exec. Director of the Sunrise Movement

• “It’s Thanksgiving Day 2030. The US has reduced carbon emissions by more than 50% in a decade. Public land is returning to Indigenous stewardship. Our neighborhoods are healing from centuries of racial marginalization and violence. We are in the middle of a Just Transition. Imagine where you might be on this day, what you’re doing, who you’re with. What are you most thankful for?”

  – Eric Holthaus,  Let's imagine a Just Transition

• “Last week, one of the Axios newsletters described me as an “advocacy journalist” and frankly, it ticked me off. The term “advocacy journalist” is mostly used to discredit the journalist in question. It implies bias, an agenda, perhaps some sort of formal attachment to a campaign, cause, or organization. …It’s annoying to me that the label gets thrown at journalists who write about some topics—climate, race, the justice system—and not, say, business reporters who advocate various theories about capitalism and markets. It plays out in who gets quoted in the media too, with most reporters seeing CEOs as, somehow, neutral, while advocates are biased.”

  — Amy Westervelt, co-author of the newsletter Hot Takes and creator of Drilled, a podcast investigating fossil fuel propaganda.

• “we need to look at what kind of hope a society encourages rather than simply whether it gives people hope or not.”

  — Ghassan Hage, Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The quote below is cited from an essay entitled, The last snail: Loss, hope and care for the future, by Thom Van Dooren (2016).

• “Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the movies and television shows we watch—these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most powerful tool to inspire the social change these times demand…We need our storytellers—a mighty force—to help us shift our mythology and imagine a future where together we thrive with nature. That is a power we must harness, if we are to find our way out of the climate crisis. We must build a cultural strategy for the climate movement.”

  — Favianna Rodriguez, interdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and social justice activist. Below is an excerpt from her chapter, Harnessing Cultural Power, in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, a new anthology of writing from women at the forefront of the climate movement, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.

• Kate Raworth, a Senior Research Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and author of the book Doughnut Economics, tweeted this earlier this year, about the using term ‘environment’ in her work:

• “Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans.... Fairy tales are children's stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.”

  — Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (cited in climate fiction writer Catherine Bush’s website)

• “Any writer who wants to engage poetry with more-than-human life, has no choice but to resist simply, and instrumentally, stepping over language.”

  – Jonathan Skinner, ecopoet and Reader in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick where he teaches ecopoetics and ecocriticism.

• “We don’t want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question…” (p.226)

  – Shevek, the utopian physicist hero of Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed. Cited in Daniel C. Remein, Decorate.

• “So, if you’re going to tell a story, and you want it to be an authentic story, it seems to me it’s got to do two things: First of all, it’s got to help, the story has to help. And the second thing is, it’s got to be about us [not just about me]. The listener or the reader does not want to be in the position of being lectured to or being treated as somebody who’s not capable of knowing, or treated like an outsider, and that’s a very valuable lesson for me as a writer…I want everything that I write to end with this note: Here’s what I saw, what do you think? Instead of saying “here’s what I saw, and here’s what you should believe. Despite my own failings, as a writer and as a human being, the driving thing behind, is if you’re going to tell a story, tell a story that helps…and to find common cause with people whose desire is to help — not to direct the show, or tell people what to think — but to help. Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

  ― Barry Lopez, from an interview in Poets and Writers, 22:2. March/April 1994.

• “The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.”

  – Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust: A History of Walking

• “Lurking in the background of [James Lovelock’s] cybernetic techno-fantasy is a naturalisation of the bloodletting that has occurred throughout human history, and which threatens to accelerate in a not so distant future shaped by the climate crisis. Lovelock seems to accept the violence of climate change and of the policies we use to manage our relationship with Earth as part of an inexorably unfolding natural process. Framing history in this way renders events inevitable and removes the possibility (and burden) of considering the suffering that a relatively small proportion of humanity has inflicted on the planet and on the rest of us. This framing leaves no room for justice. You can ignore politics and power because, hey, it’s nature.”

  – Meehan Crist, on Lovelock’s framing of history in her review of ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’ by James Lovelock (2020), in the London Review of Books.

• “…an environmental point of view must wrestle with the vital questions that ecocentrism raises. The more I learned about radical environmentalists the more I understood them as serious thinkers, engaged in conversations that held great relevance for the broad environmental movement and for the way that anyone might think about climate change and the Anthropocene. Their ideas were sometimes deeply wrongheaded, but their conversations were often thoughtful and even urgent. And their false turns came from confronting issues that were and are complicated, distressing, and maybe even irreconcilable.”

  – Keith Makoto Woodhouse, in The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism.

• “Communication, to an extent, always involves communion. That is, communicating with others entails some measure of what Haraway (2008) calls “becoming with” these others.”

  – Eduardo Kohn, in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond The Human

• “The shortest distance between two people is not a straight line, but a comedic line. The power to engage people is something that I’m working on harnessing in my research in an effort to get people to see the world in different ways—humor being one of them.”

  – Geo Takach, Associate Professor of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University

• “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

  – Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr

• “To elucidate how dissonant portrayals of animals are produced, I focus on the work of language, such as uses of concepts and grammar, sentence construction, modes of description, logic of explanation, qualifying devices, and rhetorical strategies. The divergent uses of language of behavioral texts may be likened to maps with which the reader navigates through landscapes of animal life. Though the focus of my analysis is on language use, in spirit this work does not side with the so-called linguistic turn, or with the notion that "everything is text." The guiding interest is always in the places that the reader is taken with animal behavioral writings. For this reason, my emphasis throughout is on seeing, on how language is a medium of travel for the reader to look upon animal life.”

  – Eileen Crist, in her introduction on the language of behavioral science in Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (1999, p. 3).

• “In all ethical problems, we must consider the rules for community formation, but in environmental disputes, we must additionally understand how the disputants construct their views of the natural or nonhuman worlds. One group will view nature as a warehouse of resources for human use, while an opposing group will view human beings as an untidy disturbance of natural history, a glitch in the earth's otherwise efficient ecosystem. Between such extremes, there are any number of conventional or idiosyncratic constructions of the person-planet relation.”

  – Killingsworth, M. J., & Palmer, J. S. (1992). Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. SIU Press. p. 4

• “A strip [mining] job is more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer a mountain and started thinking like the mountain itself.”

  – Erik Reece, in the conclusion to his essay, Death of a Mountain: Radical strip mining and the leveling of Appalachia, Harper’s Magazine (2005).

• “Geologists have begun to call our time the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geological forces. As I write, the term is still new—and still full of promising contradictions. Thus, although some interpreters see the name as implying the triumph of humans, the opposite seems more accurate: without planning or intention, humans have made a mess of our planet. Furthermore, despite the prefix “anthropo-,” that is, human, the mess is not a result of our species biology. The most convincing Anthropocene time line begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies. This time line, however, makes the “anthropo-” even more of a problem. Imagining the human since the rise of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into resources” (p.19).

  – Anna Tsing, In The Mushroom at the End of the World

• “Sea World's experiences are manufactured by a relatively small number of people working for a very large organization; they are disseminated from a narrow point of origin for wide reception and consumption. In this sense, the theme park is industrially produced popular culture. Viewed this way, from its landscaping to its performing whales to its television commercials, Sea World is more than just another example of a universal human tendency to enjoy nature. Rather, the theme park's oceanscapes are an example of the private production of visions of nature and ideas about animals, images and ideas that spread out into the larger culture. To unpack the meanings of places like Sea World, it is useful to speak of theme parked nature as an industrial product and to look closely at the industry that produces it.”

  – Susan G. Davis, From the introduction of “Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience” (1997, University of California Press)

• “Our darkest fiction is full of Orwellian dystopias, shadowy cabals, and mind-controlling supervillains. But it turns out that the brainless, microscopic, single-celled organisms that live inside us have been pulling on our strings all along.”

  ― Ed Yong, in I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

• “How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so…

  “…What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these.”

  – Eduardo Kohn, in How Forests Think, University of California Press, 2013

• “Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?”

  – Jason Hickel, in ‘Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.’

• “…if our identities are cultural and social, we also need to understand them as always ecological. That doesn't mean how environmentalist are we, or how green are we. It means that, even if we're none of those things at all and quite the opposite, those are ecological identities too. There are destructive ones, and there are ecological ones. They're having an impact, and they are less or more in relationship with understanding that we're ecological. But they're always having an impact, because we're always acting in relationship.”

  – Tema Milstein, associate professor of environmental communication at UNSW Sydney, on the idea ‘ecocultural identity.’ In conversation with Rhiannon Newton.