p. 44 “something about the vagueness of kinda sorta finding yourself in the Anthropocene, which is the reason why the Sixth Mass Extinction event on planet Earth is now ongoing, something about that vagueness is in fact essential and intrinsic to the fact of being in such an age. This is like saying that jet lag tells you something rue about how things are…. Heidigger’s word … is vorhanden, which means present-at-hand. Normally things kind of disappear as you concentrate on your tasks. The light switch is just part of your daily routine… Things kind of disappear – they are merely there; they don’t stick out … less weird, less oppressively obvious versions of themselves. [jetlag] when you wake up, everything is back to normal, and that’s how things actually are; they are, as Heidegger says, zuhanden, ready-to-hand or handy. You have a grip on them.”
p. 66 agriculture “the inner logic of the smoothly functioning system – right up until the moment at which it wasn’t smoothly functioning, aka now – consists of logical axioms that have to do with survival no matter what. Existence no matter what. Existing overriding any quality of existing – human existing that is, and to hell with the lifeforms that aren’t our cattle (a term from which we get chattels, as in women in many forms of patriarchy, and the root of the word capital.) Existence above and beyond qualities. This supremacy of existing is a default ontology and a default utilitarianism, and before any of it was philosophically formalized, was built into social space, which now means pretty much the entire surface of the Earth. You can see it in the gigantic fields where automated farm equipment spins in its lonely efficient way. You can feel it in the field analogs such as huge meanihngless lawns, massive parking lots, supersized meals. You can sense it in the general feeling of numbness of shock that greets the fact of mass extinction. Quite a while ago humans severed their social, philosophical and psychic ties with nonhumans. We confront a blank-seeming wall in every dimension of our experience – social space, psychic space, philosophy space. Uncannily we begin to realise that we are somewhere. Not nowhere.. this feeling of openness, this uncanny sensation of finding ourselves somewhere and not recognising it, is exactly a glimpse of living less definitively, in a world comprised almost entirely not of ourselves.”
p. 96 “what’s wrong with most human-built space in what is called ‘civilisat8ion’, that it doesn’t accommodate the beings who are already here, walking around as strays or bursting through the cracks in the concrete. These nonhumans are like uninvited guests. With human uninvited guests, we follow rules of hospitality… but with nonhumans, what is the etiquette? Well, we are perhaps reaching the point where we might want to revisit our customs, our rules, and modify them to include at least some nonhumans.”
p. 98 “The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the whole is less than the sum of its parts … a much easier way of thinking. And it’s a much nicer way of thinking – nicer to the parts, which in our case, the ecological one, means nicer to polar bears and coral. .. we have simply been passing on the normal form of holism without thinking too much .. we can .. concentrate on just the super-being, the network that the things create, we can ignore extinction.”
p. 154 “Death is comfy, as Freud observed: the tension between a ting and the beings that veer around it is lowered to zero. A cell wall is ruptured and the cell’s inside’s spill out into its surroundings. A glass shatters and the difference between itself and the space around it collapses. It’s life that is disturbing and uncanny, all those energies flowing around, exchanges happening between the inside and the outside of an organism, exchanges between organisms, in every possible physical and metaphorical (and metaphysical) sense.”
p/ 155 “Bitter is a taste that infants have, without cultural training – they can all make the wincing face of tasting bitterness from birth. Bitter is a sign of poison … but if you avoid them altogether, you also get sick. Perhaps you choose to eat burgers because you don’t like that bitter taste. So you die more quickly of a heart attack or a stroke. Life is a balance between completely avoiding stuff and dosing yourself with stuff over and over again. … washing our hands with soap all the time, and nowadays with antibacterial soap – is precisely what brings on death in various ecological forms (such as upgraded superbugs).”
p. 186 “Plastic care, stripped down and efficient, is highly toxic, especially when you scale it up to Earth magnitude and operate like that for 12,500 years. What is required instead is playful care. This doesn’t mean care that is cynical … we need … a playful seriousness. This mode would have a slight smile on its face, knowing that all solutions are flawed in some way. Expanded care, care with the care/less halo, is more likely to include more lifeforms under its umbrella, because it is less focused on sheer survival.”
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