# 14
Learning to unsee and see more
Today’s hurricanes, droughts, floods, record snowfalls, and escalating temperatures create a different feeling—a constant unease as unusual weather becomes the new normal. That unease chimes with the uncanny feeling produced by the new global city, digital networks, and drones. In order to have lived in a month where the world was not warming month by month, you need to have been born in 1985 or earlier. If you were born after 1985, you have never known what the pre-climate-changed world was like. Your body knows nonetheless that the drought, the floods, and the rising seas are out of joint with past experience. It just feels wrong. So, we have to imagine that past, “unsee” [...] how it has taught us to see the world, and begin to imagine a different way to be with what we used to call nature. That will be seeing the Anthropocene.
The city has become the habitat for the majority and we have naturalized it in art, photography, and film. We can learn to look again at these works to see how humans have changed the world, and then we could develop ways of seeing the planet that might be part of the solution. To do so, however, we have to “unsee” the ways in which we have come to see this change as beauty.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to see the world, 2016Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What if everything is entangled
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Open air is the “breath” of the green earth. There is no opposition between the ethereal and the material, no sky above us toward which to ascend, but rather a we that is always already within a sky that is nothing other than living earth.
That is to say, a sky built by the metabolic activity of l …
# 27
There is no sky other than the breath of the earth
Open air is the “breath” of the green earth. There is no opposition between the ethereal and the material, no sky above us toward which to ascend, but rather a we that is always already within a sky that is nothing other than living earth.
That is to say, a sky built by the metabolic activity of living beings, capable of creating the conditions that make our life possible.
Living in the open air is not the same as being in nature and far from civilization, because—shopping malls aside—nature is everywhere; it does not mean being outside; it means being everywhere at home within those living territories on which our subsistence is founded, and where every living being inhabits the entanglement of other living beings.
However, being in the open air requires a certain commitment: a life that is exclusively urban, disconnected from the circuits that channel biomass toward us, disconnected from the elements and from other forms of life, makes access to the open air decidedly difficult. In the heart of cities, the latter comes through tracking migratory birds or through the geopolitical practice of permaculture gardens on balconies.
Baptiste Morizot, On the animal trail, 2020Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What if everything is entangled
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The word “Abfall” in German means “refuse” or “waste” (garbage, rubbish), or, literally, “that which has fallen down.”
Does everything that touches the ground automatically become unwanted and turn into waste?
The semiotics of waste seem to be deeply rooted in a dynamic of verticality—in the down …
