Daily Ecocriticism Quotes

Training stunt rats

“Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along. Between, under, and amid all these things wound this entity that was older than I was, older than Cupertino. It represented a kind of primordial movement, even if its course had been altered by engineering in the nineteenth century. Long before cars drove from Whole Foods to the Apple campus, the creek moved water from Table Mountain to the San Francisco Bay. It continues to do this just as it always has, and whether I or any other humans care to notice. But when we do notice, like all things we give our sustained attention to, the creek begins to reveal its significance. Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it is not there to be productive; it is not there as an amenity. It is witness to a watershed that precedes us. In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.”

“On a crowded, overheating planet, in a world in which desires have been stoked to hyper-consumptive intensities, there is a temptation to turn to new strictures, tighter cyclings, tempered passions. Bataille’s wager on glorious expenditure, we should recall, was a negotiation with earthly limits rather than their disavowal. Exuberant and gratuitous gestures are a way of living within limits, and it is important to remember that his hope for a non-explosive futurity lay, above all, in a multitude of small, intimate acts of generosity: warmth and light gifted between bodies.”

“Coal, the first of the major hydrocarbon sources to be widely exploited, is the buried, heated, pressurised remains of ligneous or woody plants. Like its kindred fossil fuels—oil mostly derived from algae, and natural gas from both algae and plants—coal is ultimately photosynthetic, cosmic fertility converted into green fire. The major coal seams were laid down by the early, now mostly extinct, macro-organismic photosynthesisers of the Carboniferous. It has been proposed that the great bulk of these deposits exist because of a time lag between plants evolving lignin and fungi learning how to decompose woody tissue. Those of us privileged to partake of this exceptional bounty of mass organic fossilisation, it might be added, have also enjoyed a window of opportunity. Fortuitously positioned in the interval between the opening up of the fossil-fuel frontier and the closing down that will be impelled by climate change, it might be said, we owe our brief flourishing to that earlier interlude in which the heliotropic yearnings of ancient plants took them one step ahead of fungal decomposition.”

New study suggests wildlife may be answer to phosphorus crisis

"In the past, animals such as whales, sea birds, fish and bears played a key role in returning phosphorus from ocean depths back onto land," Abraham said. "In doing so, they collectively retained this nutrient in the biosphere, supporting a more fertile planet. Today, however, species extinctions, diminished population abundances and the erection of fences and dams have reduced this nutrient transport service by more than 90 percent."

“Scientists studying air pollutants from both urban and rural environments found that there are up to 70% fewer pollinators, up to 90% less flower visits, and an overall 31% in pollination reduction in test plants when there were several common ground-level air pollutants present – including diesel exhaust pollutants and ozone.”

The ‘punk’ element in solarpunk refers to the movement’s unapologetically optimistic take on the future despite our growing pessimism and even apathy, and passionately calls for radical societal change and abandoning current capitalist markets and infrastructure. Or as Rhys Williams, research fellow at the University of Glasgow and leading voice of the solarpunk movement describes it, solarpunks are “against a shitty future.”