I have thrown away my lantern, and I can see the dark. –WENDELL BERRY, A NATIVE HILL1 — *location: 3260* ^ref-15508 --- Nothing is harder to do than nothing. — *location: 44* ^ref-21916 --- And, after all, we only go around once. Seneca, in “On the Shortness of Life,” describes the horror of looking back to see that life has slipped between our fingers. It sounds all too much like someone waking from the stupor of an hour on Facebook: Look back in memory and consider…how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!3 — *location: 53* ^ref-17081 --- A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. — *location: 75* ^ref-46236 --- The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. — *location: 90* ^ref-28693 --- But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live. — *location: 99* ^ref-14342 --- What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes? — *location: 122* ^ref-45467 --- To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual. — *location: 160* ^ref-30982 --- In an environment completely geared toward capitalist appropriation of even our smallest thoughts, doing this isn’t any less uncomfortable than wearing the wrong outfit to a place with a dress code. As I’ll show in various examples of past refusals-in-place, to remain in this state takes commitment, discipline, and will. Doing nothing is hard. — *location: 165* ^ref-63804 --- The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here). — *location: 185* ^ref-65349 --- Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. — *location: 198* ^ref-56172 --- Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places. — *location: 246* ^ref-39563 --- In short, it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me—and the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility. — *location: 257* ^ref-57467 --- In my capacity as an artist, I have always thought about attention, but it’s only now that I fully understand where a life of sustained attention leads. In short, it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me—and the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility. — *location: 256* ^ref-16444 --- I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here. — *location: 267* ^ref-5047 --- In each, the artist creates a structure—whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area (or even a lowly set of shelves!)—that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it. — *location: 329* ^ref-37452 >"Attention holding architecture". Holding space for awareness. --- When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the eight-hour movement, gave an address titled “What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.”12 And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “eight hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, the most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it. — *location: 440* ^ref-1106 --- those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides. — *location: 461* ^ref-58656 >the problem is not that it cant be valued but that the value doesnt accrue in a way that is corruptible --- Our required reading, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution, by the creators of ROWE, seemed well intended, as the authors attempted to describe a merciful slackening of the “be in your chair from nine to five” model. But I was nonetheless troubled by how the work and non-work selves are completely conflated throughout the text. They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?18 To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. — *location: 510* ^ref-10623 >Galts law. The metric degrades. --- Berardi, contrasting modern-day Italy with the political agitations of the 1970s, says the regime he inhabits “is not founded on the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous.” Instances of censorship, he says, “are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.”19 — *location: 524* ^ref-23111 >This. --- I soon discovered that Crow and Crowson preferred it when I threw peanuts off the balcony so they could do fancy dives off the telephone line. They’d do twists, barrel rolls, and loops, which I made slow-motion videos of with the obsessiveness of a proud parent. — *location: 560* ^ref-63941 >What an amazin discovery! These are the rewards of attention well spent. --- As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” — *location: 605* ^ref-65529 --- Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline. — *location: 608* ^ref-33840 --- As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize. Berardi suggests a link between our senses and our ability to make sense, asking us to “hypothesize the connection between the expansion of the infosphere…and the crumbling of the sensory membrane that allows human beings to understand that which cannot be verbalized, that which cannot be reduced to codified signs.”24 — *location: 626* ^ref-44699 --- In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way. — *location: 635* ^ref-8116 --- Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” — *location: 697* ^ref-55527 --- I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real. — *location: 705* ^ref-29421 --- Articulating a form of happiness called ataraxia (loosely, “absence of trouble”), Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear. What he proposed in their absence was simple: relaxed contemplation in a community that was turned away from the city at large. “Live in anonymity,” Epicurus enjoined his students, who rather than engage in civic affairs, grew their own food within The Garden, chatting and theorizing among the lettuces. — *location: 800* ^ref-6449 --- Quite contrary to the modern-day meaning of the word epicurean—often associated with decadent and plentiful food—what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires. — *location: 807* ^ref-27247 --- In The Republic, the philosopher-king applies the ideas as the craftsman applies his rules and standards; he “makes” his City as the sculptor makes a statue; and in the final Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws which need only be executed.39 — *location: 1038* ^ref-45367 >Silo is a dystopia in the same vein --- It’s this ineradicable plurality of real people that spells the downfall of the Platonic city. — *location: 1081* ^ref-62417 --- It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. — *location: 1219* ^ref-61709 --- The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world (unless you’re Peter Thiel, in which case there’s always outer space). The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how. — *location: 1235* ^ref-56743 --- To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. — *location: 1245* ^ref-64811 --- Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails. — *location: 1248* ^ref-52662 --- But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it. — *location: 1256* ^ref-13358 --- For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives. — *location: 1336* ^ref-47265 --- [Diogenes] opted for remaining in the world for the express purpose of challenging its customs and practices, its laws and conventions, by his worlds and, more so, by his action. Practicing his extreme brand of Cynicism, then, he stood as a veritable refutation of the world and, as the Gospel would say of Saint John the Baptist, as “a voice crying in the wilderness” (Matt. 3:3).16 — *location: 1353* ^ref-47452 --- “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor. — *location: 1358* ^ref-57419 --- Explaining his need to live sparely in a cabin away from the customs and comforts of society, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.28 — *location: 1454* ^ref-19065 --- In his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker describes a “new contract” that formed between companies and employees in the absence of regulation from the government in the 1970s and ’80s: The essence of the new contract was the idea that workers should be constantly pitted against what economists call the “spot market” for labor—the amount that they could command at a particular moment given particular skills and the particular contours of the economy at that time.48 — *location: 1641* ^ref-37585 --- This “new contract,” alongside other missing forms of government protection, closes the margin for refusal and leads to a life lived in economic fear. — *location: 1651* ^ref-48334 --- In Kids These Days, Harris is well aware of the implications of precarity for any kind of organizing among Millennials: “If we’re built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers—and we are—then we’re hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.”60 — *location: 1723* ^ref-40346 --- In sharp contrast to the modern meaning of the word cynicism, the Greek Cynics were earnestly invested in waking up the populace from a general stupor. They imagined this stupor as something called typhos, a word that also connotes fog, smoke, and storms—as in the word typhoon or tai fung in Cantonese, meaning “a great wind.”63 — *location: 1758* ^ref-22419 --- What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. — *location: 1774* ^ref-65269 --- This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should. — *location: 1800* ^ref-50138 --- ANYONE WHO HAS experienced this unmooring knows that it can be equally exhilarating and disorienting. There is more than a touch of delirium in William Blake’s description when he invites us “[to] see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” This way of looking, in which we are Alice and everything is a potential rabbit hole, is potentially immobilizing; at the very least, it brings us out of step with the everyday. — *location: 1950* ^ref-12494 --- Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known. — *location: 1961* ^ref-48799 --- It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it. — *location: 2033* ^ref-10242 --- When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world. — *location: 2243* ^ref-22631 --- We’re all here together, AND WE DON’T KNOW WHY. — *location: 2347* ^ref-3633 --- When something goes from being an idea to a reality, you can’t easily force your perception back into the narrow container it came from. — *location: 2450* ^ref-35743 >For me this happened when i learned to distinguish plants --- And if we’re able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are each a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me. For a person invested in a stable and bounded ego, this kind of acknowledgment would be a death wish. But personally, having given up on the idea of an atomic self, I find it to be the surest indicator that I’m alive. — *location: 2481* ^ref-35679 --- By contrast, at its most successful, an algorithmic “honing in” would seem to incrementally entomb me as an ever-more stable image of what I like and why. — *location: 2485* ^ref-36998 --- I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction. — *location: 2489* ^ref-28123 >In a recent Search Engine podcast, PJ Voight said twitter was a place where pdople "think what they say" --- After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down. — *location: 2494* ^ref-56072 --- In Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing, Chris J. Cuomo critiques the animal rights stance that proceeds solely from the logic that some animals are sentient and can feel pain, because it privileges sentience in an ecology that relies on both sentient and non-sentient beings. This privileging, she writes, “comes out of the assumption that human beings are paradigmatic ethical objects, and that other life-forms are valuable only in so far as they are seen as similar to humans.”16 — *location: 2648* ^ref-48056 --- The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to. — *location: 2666* ^ref-43557 --- Resisting definition like headwaters resist pinpointing, we emerge from moment to moment, just as our relationships do, our communities do, our politics do. Reality is blobby. It refuses to be systematized. Things like the American obsession with individualism, customized filter bubbles, and personal branding—anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching—does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed. — *location: 2712* ^ref-35828 --- A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support—nor to notice that all the non-“productive” life-forms have fled. Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover. — *location: 2735* ^ref-37294 --- I would venture that the newer tenants, though they were troubled by the conditions, ran up against the wall of individualism. Once they understood that something was not just their problem but a collective problem, requiring collective action and identification with a community to be solved, it was preferable to them to just drop it. That is, even rats and dark hallways were not too high a price to pay for the ability to keep the doors of the self shut to outsiders, to change, and to the possibility of a new kind of identity. — *location: 2748* ^ref-51766 --- When we take an instrumental or even algorithmic view of friendship and recognition, or fortify the imagined bastion of the self against change, or even just fail to see that we affect and are affected by others (even and especially those we do not see)—then we unnaturally corral our attention to others and to the places we inhabit together. It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics. — *location: 2754* ^ref-2239 --- For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally. — *location: 2806* ^ref-8546 --- When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn’t immediately present itself. You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons. The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a noncommercial and non-“productive” space so often under threat of closure, allows for browsing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information—provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it’s even about—are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment. Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it’s me who’s being researched. — *location: 3094* ^ref-49481 --- Only the most nihilist and coldhearted of us feels that there is nothing to be done. The overwhelming anxiety that I feel in the face of the attention economy doesn’t just have to do with its mechanics and effects, but also with a recognition of, and anguish over, the very real social and environmental injustice that provides the material for that same economy. But I feel my sense of responsibility frustrated. It’s a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight. — *location: 3155* ^ref-12447 --- For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework. — *location: 3160* ^ref-62189 --- DEVELOPING A SENSE of place both enables attention and requires it. That is, if we want to relearn how to care about each other, we will also have to relearn how to care about place. — *location: 3172* ^ref-10639 --- It’s a vital reminder that as a human, I am heir to this complexity—that I was born, not engineered. That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity—about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths. — *location: 3226* ^ref-59693 --- If I had to give you an image of how I feel about the attention economy now, as opposed to in 2017, I’d ask you to imagine a tech conference. Like so many conferences, it would be in another city, perhaps another state. The subject of this conference would be persuasive design, with talks by the likes of the Time Well Spent people, about how horrible the attention economy is and how we can design our way around it and optimize our lives for something better. Initially I’d find these talks very interesting, and I would learn a lot about how I’m being manipulated by Facebook and Twitter. I would be shocked and angry. I would spend all day thinking about it. But then, maybe on the second or third day, you would see me get up and go outside to get some fresh air. Then I’d wander a little bit farther, to the nearest park. Then—and I know this because it happens to me often—I’d hear a bird and go looking for it. If I found it, I would want to know what it was, and in order to look that up later I’d need to know not only what it looks like, but what it was doing, how it sounded, what it looked like when it flew…I’d have to look at the tree it was in. I’d look at all the trees, at all the plants, trying to notice patterns. I would look at who was in the park and who wasn’t. I would want to be able to explain these patterns. I would wonder who first lived in what is now this city, and who lived here afterward before they got pushed out too. I would ask what this park almost got turned into and who stopped that from happening, who I have to thank. I would try to get a sense of the shape of the land—where am I in relation to the hills and the bodies of water? Really, these are all forms of the same question. They are ways of asking: Where and when am I, and how do I know that? Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my “time well spent”—no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky. Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth. In moments like this, even the question itself of the attention economy fades away. If you asked me to answer it, I might say—without lifting my eyes from the things growing and creeping along the ground—“I would prefer not to.” — *location: 3236* ^ref-23674 --- In “The Round River: A Parable,” the conservationist Aldo Leopold writes: One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.2 — *location: 3263* ^ref-18602 --- In a time when monoculture threatens not only biological ecosystems, but neighborhoods, culture, and discourse, the historian, too, is in a position to see “the marks of death in a community.” — *location: 3273* ^ref-4089 --- Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g., of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g., of dams). Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction. — *location: 3355* ^ref-34401 --- Fukuoka sums up the epiphany as the ultimate expression of humility, echoing Zhuang Zhou when he writes: “‘Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.’” — *location: 3400* ^ref-16104 --- It was only through this humility that Fukuoka was able to arrive at a new kind of ingenuity. Do-nothing farming recognized that there was a natural intelligence at work in the land, and therefore the most intelligent thing for the farmer to do was to interfere as little as possible. Of course, that didn’t mean not interfering at all. Fukuoka recalls the time he tried to let some orchard trees grow without pruning: the trees’ branches became intertwined and the orchard was attacked by insects. “This is abandonment, not ‘natural farming,’” he writes. Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to. — *location: 3402* ^ref-2363 --- The idea of an aimless aim, or a project with no goal, might sound familiar. Indeed, it sounds a bit like our old friend, the useless tree—who “achieves” nothing but witness, shelter, and unlikely endurance. — *location: 3502* ^ref-15577 --- Beyond the vague cyclicality of what Purdy calls “going on living,” can there be teleology without a telos? For an answer, I’ll return to Feminism and Ecological Communities, where earlier Chris Cuomo questioned movements that posit humans as “paradigmatic ethical objects.” Alongside an argument for ecological models of identity, community, and ethics, she suggests a potential abandonment of teleology. But to me, it sounds less like Masanobu Fukuoka’s “abandoned” orchard defeated by insects, and more like his unruly and functioning farm: Moral agents can decide to how to negotiate the world without hopes of reaching a predetermined, necessary state of harmony or static equilibrium, or any ultimate state. Indeed, the abandonment of such a teleology also entails abandoning hopes that our decisions and actions will result in perfect harmony or order, and such non-teleological ethics can’t be motivated by a desire to actualize a pre-established end or enact given roles. We can, however, value the somewhat ordered/somewhat chaotic universe in which we inevitably dwell, and we can also decide that it is good and worthwhile to prevent significant destruction to other valuable members of the universe through the agency and choice that also seem inevitable.20 This is something like a goal without telos, a view toward the future that doesn’t resolve in a point but rather circles back toward itself in a constant renegotiation. — *location: 3490* ^ref-24154 --- The migrating birds return each year, for now anyway, and I have not yet been reduced to an algorithm. — *location: 3518* ^ref-46057 --- Standing perpendicular to the earth, not pitching forward, not falling back, I asked how I could possibly express my gratitude for the unlikely spectacle of the pelicans. The answer was nothing. Just watch. — *location: 3562* ^ref-53278 ---