Sarah Owen

Nature and natural are words with particular weights that are perhaps not relevant now. We are part of a biosphere that sustains us. Half the DNA in your body is not human DNA, you are a biome like a swamp, with a particular balance or ecology that is hard to keep going – and indeed it will only go for a while after which it falls apart and you... See more

“In actual fact, [BeReal] is trapping us in an endless, 24-hour cycle – one in which every user knows that everyone else is carefully curating their casualness”

Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And... See more

"According to the Outdoor Foundation, Americans went on 1 billion fewer outings in nature in 2018 compared with 2008."

This coercion to extend every adventure as long as possible — the nostalgia continuum — is the connective tissue fastening past experiences to the logic of the “feed,” which cuts the flow of experience down into atomized parts that are readable to tech platforms, enshrines chapters in life to make them rankable, interactable, and presentable to you... See more

The longer view is coming into human consciousness in part because of the radical danger of the immediate moment – which is that humanity might create a mass extinction event and wreck Earth’s biosphere for all the generations of humans to come, plus of course the many species that would be driven to extinction.