by Jenny Odell
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YOU MIGHT BE surprised to find me emphasizing the importance of other people in a book that started out with my solitary retreat to a rose garden. Recall that in “Solitude and Leadership,” William Deresiewicz warns that one needs to remove herself in order to be able to think critically. But in the part that I quoted earlier—where he warns against “marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom”—Deresiewicz is talking about “Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times.” In the very same essay, he mentions the importance of having a close friend to have real and substantive conversations with. If critical distance is what we’re after, I think there is an important distinction to make between isolating oneself versus removing oneself from the clamor and undue influence of public opinion.
After all, it is public opinion that social media exploits, and public opinion that has no patience for ambiguity, context, or breaks with tradition. Public opinion is not looking to change or to be challenged; it is what wants a band to keep making songs exactly like the hit they once had. Conversations, whether with oneself or with others, are different. The book you are reading—as I would guess is the case with most books—is the result of many conversations I’ve had over the course of many years, in my case with both humans and nonhumans. Many of them happened while I was writing this, and all of them changed my mind. Now, as you read it, this book forms a conversation with you as well.
Even when I go to the Rose Garden, I’m not really alone. Although I generally keep to myself, the park, whose visitors are diverse in pretty much every way, is where I’ve had by far the most conversations with strangers. And those are just the humans. I’ve always found the phrase “alone in nature” to be a humorous oxymoron, an utter impossibility. When the garden is empty of people, I still consider it a social place where I spend time with jays, ravens, dark-eyed juncos, hawks, turkeys, dragonflies, and butterflies, not to mention the oaks, the redwoods, the buckeyes, and the roses themselves. I will often look up from a book and let my attention wander over to a foraging towhee, settling into its scale of perception, lingering in the minute bug universe under a rosebush. Over the years I’ve noticed that, on hearing birds that are out of sight, I’ve gone from asking “What’s there?” to “Who’s there?” Every day, and indeed every thought, is different depending on who’s there.
When I try to think about thinking, for instance retracing where an idea of mine came from, the limitations of English force me to say that “I” “produced” an “idea.” But none of these things are stable entities, and this grammatical relationship among them is misleading. The “idea” isn’t a finished product with identifiable boundaries that one moment sprung into being—one of the reasons artists so hate the interview question, “So what was your inspiration for this?” Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t occur somehow inside of me, but between what I perceive as me and not-me. Cognitive scientists Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch back up this intuition with fascinating scientific studies in The Embodied Mind, a book that draws comparisons between modern cognitive science and ancient Buddhist principles. Using examples like the coevolution of vision with certain colors that occur in nature, they fundamentally complicate the idea that perception merely gives information about what’s “out there.” As they put it, “Cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind”10
When we recognize the ecological nature not only of biotic communities but of culture, selfhood, and even thought—that indeed, consciousness itself arises from the intersection between what’s “inside” and “outside” (troubling the distinction thereof)—it’s not just the boundary between self and other that falls away. We’re in a position to see past another supposedly insurmountable barrier: the one between the human and the nonhuman.
This thought visited me one day in the Rose Garden, as the intersection of a book I was reading and the arrival of a bird. The book was Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an ecological scientist who is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The bird was a song sparrow. As the sparrow inched along and pecked at the ground in its customary way, I read for the first time about “species loneliness,” the melancholy alienation of humans from other life-forms. Kimmerer writes,
I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you. Given who I am and what I do, I can’t know what that’s like, but I think it would be a little scary and disorienting—like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs.11
She adds that “[a]s our human dominance has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”
I looked over at my neighbor, the song sparrow, and thought about how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have even seen it at all. How lonely that world seemed in comparison to this one! But the sparrow and I were no longer strangers. It was no stretch of the imagination, nor even of science, to think that we were related. We were both from the same place (Earth), made of the same stuff. And most important, we were both alive.
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EARLIER THIS YEAR, I went to a wedding in Palm Springs that was being held at the Ace Hotel. Ironically, given that each city’s Ace Hotel has a very distinct theme, I felt like I was at every other Ace I have ever been in—an aesthetic simulacrum. I sat by the pool, where media influencers took artful selfies, and where I was privately tortured by the allure of the San Jacinto Mountains. In fact, I found it hard to look at anything else, as though we should all drop what we were doing and behold this unimaginable body of rock. I kept asking myself, “How can that be?” Unlike the fuzzy blue Santa Cruz Mountains I grew up seeing, these mountains rose straight up, austere, rocky, and purple at sunset. I wanted nothing more than to look at them all day, more closely if possible. But although they didn’t seem that far away, there was no way to walk to them, and I hadn’t rented a car.
After a few days of this, I took a cab out to Murray Canyon, a trail maintained by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians on their reservation. For the first time since I’d arrived, I was able to look seriously at where I was. As I made my way through the canyon, a seam in those Martian-looking mountains where things managed not only to live but to thrive, I clumsily relied on iNaturalist to learn their names: brittlebush, chuparosa, sacred thorn apple, fan palms (first time I’d seen them in their natural habitat). There was desert lavender, in the form of shrubs that seemed to speak unintelligible words when the wind went through them. I saw a phainopepla, looking like a svelte all-black version of our Steller’s jay but of a completely different family of birds altogether, and a common chuckwalla (nothing common about it to me, as it was larger than a pet iguana) tucked into the crevice of a giant red boulder.
Once, when I was giving a talk on my research for this book at a Stanford urban studies working group, somebody asked whether using iNaturalist wasn’t alienating me from the landscape, since it represented an itemizing, scientific view. I answered that while I had to admit it looked that way, the app was a necessary step in the remediation of my ignorance, a temporary crutch. Learning the names of things was my first step in perceiving not just “land” or “greenery,” but living bodies instead. And, at least at home, it wasn’t as though I stopped paying attention once I learned their names. Instead I remained observant over the seasons, learning not just their names but what they did, or rather, who they were. And at some point, this led to something in excess of disinterested observation—not just with Crow and Crowson or the local night herons, but with everything, the plants and the rocks and the fungus. Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to.
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br /> Kimmerer, as both an Anishinaabe woman and a classically trained scientist, allows in Braiding Sweetgrass that the right kind of scientific gaze can be part of rebuilding the relationships with land that we lost, or rather pushed out, beginning in the eighteenth century. Describing ecologists trying to bring the salmon back to a restored watershed in the Pacific Northwest, she writes that “[s]cience can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.” But it must be animated by something more than pure analysis. In one of my favorite images from her book, Kimmerer tells us that in the Anishinaabe creation story, Nanabozho, the first man, is placed on earth with the instruction to absorb the wisdom of other inhabitants and to learn their names. Kimmerer imagines a friendly rapport between Anishinaabe and Carl Linnaeus, the father of the modern taxonomic system. Walking together and observing the local flora and fauna, the two observers complement each other: “Linnaeus lends Nanabozho his magnifying glass so he can see the tiny floral parts. Nanabozho gives Linnaeus a song so he can see their spirits. And neither of them are lonely.”12
It’s in the combination of the special capacities of Nanabozho and Linnaeus that I can begin to understand the nascent feelings I have toward the different forms of life I observe. This version of the observational eros doesn’t just recognize or appreciate the inhabitants of a place, but is willing to perceive the special agency of those beings and receive their attention in turn. Overcoming species loneliness is impossible if our subjects appear inert and lifeless to us, be they hummingbirds or rocks. In Becoming Animal, David Abram writes about what is lost when we speak and think about the rest of the world as less than animate:
If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us—we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.13
This is of course a relatively recent problem of language; the communities who lived here for thousands of years had no problem conceiving of the nonhuman actors they lived with. In the introduction to Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America, Gloria Bird writes about the way her grandmother talks about a mountain:
In the long process of colonization, what has survived in spite of the disruption of native language is a particular way of perceiving the world. For example, my aunt once, when we were looking at what was left of Mount St. Helens, commented in English, “Poor thing.” Later, I realized that she spoke of the mountain as a person. In our stories about the mountain range that runs from the Olympic Peninsula to the border between southern Oregon and northern California our relationship to the mountains as characters in the stories is one of human-to-human. What was contained in her simple comment on Mount St. Helens, Loowit, was sympathy and concern for the well-being of another human being—none of which she had to explain.14
Reading this, I began to see that my reaction to the San Jacinto Mountains was something that Western culture and language gave me no way to conceptualize. It was a deep and hopeful suspicion that these forms were something more than rock, that they embodied something, that someone was there.
Even though I know I am often getting an insufficient English (and written) version of them, I have long appreciated the way that indigenous stories animate the world. They are not only repositories of observations and analyses made over millennia, but also models of gratitude and stewardship. As it turns out, these stories kept their nonhuman actors alive not only in the human imagination, but literally in physical reality. Kimmerer writes about overseeing a study by her graduate student on the decline of sweetgrass, a plant traditionally harvested by Kimmerer’s ancestors and which figures in the Anishinaabe creation story. The study revealed that the sweetgrass was suffering not from over-harvesting but from under-harvesting. The species had co-evolved with specific indigenous harvesting practices, which in turn had specifically evolved to increase the success of the plant. A specific type of human attention, use, and stewardship had become environmental factors on which the plants depended on, and without these things, they’ve begun to disappear.15
The sweetgrass study suggests that the plants were dying from none other than a lack of attention. And in a world where our survival is absolutely bound up with the survival of the ecologies in which we are embedded, it becomes clear that reciprocal attention is what ensures our survival as well. While this kind of attention to the living world certainly involves reverence, it’s something very different from fawning over cuteness or beauty or appreciating nonhuman entities as intelligent or even sentient. (What’s less cute or sentient than intestinal bacteria? And yet we rely on it.) 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
The implication is that the actual paradigmatic ethical object, if there is one, is the ecosystem itself. This echoes the conservationist Aldo Leopold’s observation that “you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.”17 Even if you cared only about human survival, you’d still have to acknowledge that this survival is beholden not to efficient exploitation but to the maintenance of a delicate web of relationships. Beyond the life of individual beings, there is the life of a place, and it depends on more than what we can see, more than just the charismatic animals or the iconic trees. While we may have fooled ourselves into thinking we can live cut off from that life, to do so is physically unsustainable, not to mention impoverished in still other ways. If what I’ve said about the ecology of the self is true, then it may only be among the most elaborate web of the nonhuman that we can most fully experience our own humanity.
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ALL OF THAT said, the reason I suggest the bioregion as a meeting grounds for our attention is not simply because it would address species loneliness, or because it enriches the human experience, or even because I believe our physical survival may depend on it. I value bioregionalism for the even more basic reason that, just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference point. At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality. 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.
In a time when meaningful action will require us to form new alliances and recognize differences at the same time, bioregionalism is also useful as a model of difference without boundary, a way of understanding place and identity that avoids essentialism and reification. As a scientific fact and simple matter of observation, there is no disputing that bioregions exist. If you go to the bioregion known as Cascadia (aka the Pacific Northwest), you are going to see Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, whereas if you go to the Southwest, you will not. But it’s impossible to draw a hard line around a bioregion. That’s because bioregions aren’t anything more than loose conglomerations of species that grow well together in certain conditions that necessarily vary geographically—a similar pattern to human language and culture.
The borders of bioregions are not only impossible to define; they are permeable. I learned this most of all last March, when I idly noticed an article on the front page of a local newspaper about an “atmospheric river” that would be arriving from the Philippines. I had never heard the term, and when I looked it up, I learned
that atmospheric rivers are temporary narrow regions in the atmosphere that transport moisture from the tropics, in this case to the West Coast (the most well-known being the Pineapple Express). As the river makes landfall, its water vapor cools and falls in the form of rain. Atmospheric rivers are hundreds of miles wide and can carry many times the amount of water as the Mississippi River. I was surprised to find that California gets 30–50 percent of its rainfall from atmospheric river events.
This was all very interesting, but it pointed toward something even more obvious that I hadn’t been paying attention to. I had never really thought about where rain comes from, other than the sky. Or more precisely, where my rain comes from. I suppose if you had asked me, and I’d considered it for a moment, I could have told you that rain comes from somewhere else, but I wouldn’t have been able to say where precisely, how, and in what shape. Reading the article, I couldn’t put out of my mind the idea that the coming rain had just been in a country where half my family was from, a place I had never been. Wanting to see it more closely, I put out a large jar in the alley behind my apartment building. (And I learned something else: it takes a really long time to collect even a small amount of rainwater, even when it seems to be raining really hard.) I used some of the water with drugstore watercolors to paint a picture of a sampaguita, the national flower of the Philippines, and gave it to my mom. The rest sits on my desk in a small jar: water from another place.