hazel mae
@hazelmae
hazel mae
Ancient boundaries within landscapes were subtle and were not always marked in ways that can be identified by archaeology – even with its modern, sophisticated geophysical techniques. Certain trees, for example, could have been marked for special attention; piles of brushwood and bonfires could have been lit at certain times of the year. Such bound
... See moreFrancis Pryor • Scenes From Prehistoric Life
forgetting and landscape
The climate crisis and the Anthropocene have made it clear that our old stories – often fixated on human heroes conquering nature or extracting resources – are inadequate. We need narratives that foreground entanglement: the interdependence of humans, non-human creatures, and the Earth itself.
Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-nee
... See moreJeff VanderMeer • Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)
No wonder a civilization steeped in the polarization of Good versus Evil wreaks such havoc on the rest of nature. No wonder so many creatures are dwindling and disappearing, their homes ravaged with toxins, their forests transformed to stumps
David Abram • Becoming Animal
This is one of the most important insights that paleoclimate archives provide: They show us how the real world breaks. How resilience folds into catastrophic failure. They show us the edges and asymmetries of the climate system: the thresholds of tolerance in ecological networks; the slow steady slog of diversification and the quick ax of extinctio... See more
Summer Praetorius • The Great Forgetting
We adjust to changes without measuring them; we forget how much the culture changed.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Is there a “Rosebud” object in your past? A long-vanished thing that lingers in your memory—whether you want it to or not? As much as we may treasure the stuff we own, perhaps just as significant are the objects we have, in one way or another, lost. What is it about these bygone objects? Why do they continue to haunt us long after they’ve vanished
... See moreRob Walker • Lost Objects: 50 Stories About the Things We Miss and Why They Matter
As humans reshape the landscape, we forget what was there before. Ecologists call this forgetting the “shifting baseline syndrome.” Our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality. Admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements often entails forgetting many others. Forgetting, in itself, remakes landscapes, as we privilege so
... See morelandscape and
What’s so annoying about these cultures is that they blatantly position the individual at the center of everything without being able to understand the need for care and various networks that would have to go into maintaining something over thousands of years. What infrastructures do you need in place, what kinds of labor, what kinds of storytellin... See more