Things That Are: Essays
But trusting the metaphor extends beyond writing to trusting the signs we are given about how to live our lives. If I can’t stop laughing every time I get to gallop an Icelandic horse across a meadow, this means I should ride Icelandic horses absolutely as much as possible. If I feel small and shamed every time I get together with a particular frie... See more
Pam Houston Tells Us
One botanist who studies how sagebrush send distress signals to each other has found that individual plants appear to have different risk tolerance — a metric of personality, the very notion of which in an organism without a brain-based mind challenges our central assumptions about consciousness.
Maria Popova • The New Science of Plant Intelligence and the Mystery of What Makes a Mind
In The Overstory, Richard Powers summed up the holistic realization of ecology: ‘There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby
... See moreJames Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
I need a greater facility with multispecies languages. I am engaging in a conversation across cultural divides with other multitudes, whose languages and modes of perception we have only just begun to explore.