Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

we will be encountering plenty of examples of ‘high’ technology that might seem daunting at the outset – but every one of them has been thought, learned and done by someone who sleeps at night and shits in the morning. We can learn to do them too.

‘Technology’, she wrote, ‘is the active human interface with the material world.’

Much of this book will be concerned with this particular ecological thought: that what matters resides in relationships rather than things – between us, rather than within us.

Ecological thought, once unleashed, permeates everything.

Ecology is the study of these interrelationships: those unbreakable cords which tie everything to everything else.

‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’

Ecology is not merely the study of where we find ourselves, but of everything which surrounds us and allows us to live.

we must discover an ecology of technology.

This idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligences is the central theme of this book.