hazel mae
@hazelmae
hazel mae
"the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
- edsger dijkstra
As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only unskilled hands doing scientific work, cogs in a whole their minds are quite incapable of embracing.
Simone Weil • Oppression and Liberty
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
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)
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
I think the alienation from material, means of production, skilled labor, and generational knowledge correlates to the rise of “brown people couldn’t have made that it was definitely the grays” sort of thinking.
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
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
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.