Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
When we open ourselves to the voices of the more-than-human world, this is always the result: a breaching and collapsing of the established borders of thought and feeling.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
We are accustomed, largely by scientific practice, to taking things apart, separating them into their component attributes, fixing them for study, and piece by piece reducing their collective agency until they have none at all.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
Ecology is not merely the study of where we find ourselves, but of everything which surrounds us and allows us to live.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
A world in which the environment itself was dominant, an ecological world, is of much longer duration and, despite the thoughtless exercise of our power, has never gone away. Indeed, the tumult in which we find ourselves today might be considered its violent reassertion.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
For most of history, time has been governed by our relationship to the more-than-human world: the rising of the sun and the turning of the seasons. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, time was separated from the earth, and suborned by industry for its own ends.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
Climate change is no longer something we can reverse, but something we have to adapt to, cope with and mitigate as much as possible.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
Intelligence, then, is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
This is one ecological lesson we can take from technology: we exist, not alone at the top of the tree, but as one of many flowers which bloom in an endlessly proliferating, entangled and cross-fertilizing thicket.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
To be unknowing means to acknowledge that – like Socrates before the Oracle – neither we nor anybody else knows exactly what is going on; and to be humbled and at peace with that understanding and thereby with everything else. Technologies of control and domination become instead technologies of cooperation, mutual empowerment and liberation.