by Jenny Odell
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had approached this very same society of water from the other side earlier that year. In the course of researching bioregionalism, I had just learned that Oakland’s drinking water comes from the Mokelumne River, and wanted to see it “in person”—which meant visiting the river in a handful of different locations, as it proceeded from the towering and forested Sierras to dry, ghost-pine-filled chaparral. (This was the trip during which I stayed in the reception-less cabin I mentioned in Chapter 2.) There wasn’t much on my agenda other than finding points of access; at each place, I would stop to simply look and listen to this water that I nonchalantly put in my body every day. I found myself amazed at how it never stopped moving: the river was always coming from somewhere and always going somewhere too. There was nothing stable about this “body” of water.
Not only that, it was still impossible to say where my drinking water came from. In every watershed there are headwaters, the closest thing to the origin of a creek. On Google Maps, I traced the North Fork Mokelumne River up the mountains to a place called Highland Lakes. But along its course, the river is also fed by creeks coming in from different locations. And even if I had gone to the headwaters of Mokelumne Creek, I would have searched in vain for its point of origin, or even a bounded area. Like bioregions at large, headwaters defy delineation, since every creek starts as the dispersed accumulation of snow or rain, trickling underground into streams that join larger streams that later emerge as springs—a gradual collecting of pathways that looks like a delta in reverse. So where did the water come from? It arrived from somewhere else. In the Sierra Nevada, much of the snowfall comes from atmospheric rivers. Sometimes, those atmospheric rivers come from the Philippines.
I find something comfortingly anti-essentialist in the way ecology works. As someone who is both Asian and white, I am an anomaly or a nonentity from an essentialist point of view. It’s not possible for me to be “native” to anywhere in any obvious sense. But things like the atmospheric river, or even the sight of Western tanagers (a favorite bird) migrating through Oakland in the spring, gives me an image of how to be from two places at once. I remember that the sampaguita, while it’s the national flower of the Philippines, actually originated in the Himalayas before being imported in the seventeenth century. I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind.
An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things”—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that—while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a “cloud.”
By now, this might sound familiar. Indeed, it’s a similar framework to the one I described regarding the self, a slippery thing at the intersection of phenomena inside and outside of the imagined “bag of skin.” 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.
We should refuse such dams first and foremost within ourselves. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Audre Lorde describes the pain of definitions that block natural flows within the self:
As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.18
This description could suit a group as well as an individual, and indeed, Lorde advocates for a similar freedom of flow within a community. In a speech at a feminist conference where she is one of only two black speakers, she vents exasperation with the prevailing reaction to difference, which is either one of fearful tolerance or total blindness. “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic,” she says. “Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.”19 Difference is strength, a prerequisite for creativity that allows individual growth and communal political innovation. Lorde’s words are especially resonant now, when our politics play out on platforms ill designed for difference, plurality, and encounter.
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TODAY, WHEN WE are threatened not only with biological desertification but cultural desertification, we have so much to learn from the basics of ecology. 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. When I read Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind, I picture the difference between a permaculture farm and a commercial corn farm that could be devastated by a single parasite:
Mixed neighborhoods create public simultaneous thinking, many perspectives converging on the same moment at the same time, in front of each other. Many languages, many cultures, many racial and class experiences take place on the same block, in the same buildings. Homogenous neighborhoods erase this dynamic, and are much more vulnerable to enforcement of conformity. 20
I’m struck by a detail that Schulman recounts about her building, where she finds that “the ‘old’ tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways.” Despite entreaties from the older tenants, “the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest” Schulman struggles to account for this “weird passivity that accompanies gentrification.”21 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.
Unlike the dams that interrupt a river’s flow, these barriers are not concrete: they are mental structures, and they can be dismantled through practices of attention. 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.
Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries. As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonders that they are. Most of all, we can open ourselves to those new and previously unimaginable ideas that may arise from our combination, like the lightning that happens between an evanescent cloud and the ever-shifting ground.
Chapter 6
Restoring the Grounds for Thought
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid to waste.
–HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “WALKING”1
So far, I’ve argued that practices of close attention can help us see into nuanced ecologies of being and identity. This kind of understanding has a few important requirements. First, it asks us to loosen our grip on the idea of discrete entities, simple origin stories, and neat A-to-B causalities. It also requires humility and openness, because to seek context is already to acknowledge that you don’t have the whole story. And perhaps most important, an ecological understanding takes time. Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.
Here’s an example: I obviously like birds. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, I used The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. The book has a checklist in the back where you mark the different species you’ve seen. That many birding books have such a list tells you a lot about how people tend to approach this activity; in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. But this was somewhat inevitable for me as a beginner, learning to pick out discrete, individual birds. After all, when you learn a new language, you start with the nouns.
Over the years, my continued attention began to dissolve the edges of the checklist approach. I noticed that certain birds were only in my neighborhood during part of the year, like cedar waxwings and white-crowned sparrows. In the winter, my crows came by less often. (Perhaps they were joining up with the huge swarms of crows in the sycamore trees downtown, an annual gathering I refer to as “Crow Burning Man.”) Even if they stay in the same place, birds can look different not only throughout their life but during different seasons, so much so that many pages of the Sibley guide have to show different ages, as well as breeding and non-breeding versions, of the same bird. So, there were not only birds, but there was bird time.
Then there was bird space. Magpies abounded near my parents’ house an hour south, but never here. There were mockingbirds in West Oakland but not in Grand Lake. Song sparrows had different songs in different places. The blue of scrub jays got duller as you went inland. Crows sounded different in Minneapolis. The dark-eyed juncos I saw at Stanford had brown bodies and black heads (the Oregon subgroup), but had I traveled east, I would have seen slate-colored, pink-sided, white-winged, or gray-headed and red-backed variations.
Inevitably, my recognition of certain species became bound up with the environments where I knew I would find them. Ravens perched high up in redwoods and pines; towhees liked to scurry under parked cars. If I saw a bare tree half submerged in a pond, I looked for night herons. Wrentits were so consistently in brambly shrubs that their high-pitched buzzing came to seem like the voice of the shrub itself. There was no wrentit, only wrentit-shrub. I started paying more attention to the berries that cedar waxwings love (and sometimes get drunk on!) and even came to appreciate bugs, since the gnats I constantly swatted away on the local trails now looked to me like bird food.
At some point, the impossibility of paying attention to the discrete category “birds” became apparent. There were simply too many relationships determining what I was seeing—verb conjugations instead of nouns. Birds, trees, bugs, and everything else were impossible to extricate from one another not only physically but conceptually. Sometimes I would learn about a relationship that involved many different kinds of organisms that I would never think were associated. For example, a 2016 study showed that woodpeckers and wood-decaying fungi may have a symbiotic relationship that also benefits other animals. It appeared that the woodpeckers’ holes helped disperse multiple fungi throughout the trees, which in turn softened the wood and made it easier for other birds, squirrels, insects, snakes, and amphibians to find homes within the trees.2
This context, of course, also included me. I remember going for a walk near my parents’ house once and hearing a scrub jay shrieking in a valley oak tree. It was such a good example of a scrub jay shriek that I was about to get out my phone and record it, when I realized that it was shrieking at me (to go away). As Pauline Oliveros writes in Deep Listening “When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!”3
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IT’S PRETTY INTUITIVE that truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds was spatial and temporal; the relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. 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.
For example, let’s take a look at my Twitter feed right now, as I’m sitting inside my studio in Oakland in the summer of 2018. Pressed up against each other in neat rectangles, I see the following:
An article on Al Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed at school by ISIL
An article about the Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year
An announcement that @dasharezøne (a joke account) is selling new T-shirts
Someone arguing for congestion pricing in Santa Monica, California
Someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson
A video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate onstage
Photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dumped in a forest
A job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University
An article on protests as the Pope visits Dublin
A photo of a yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains
Someone’s data visualization of his daughter’s sleeping habits during her first year
A plug for someone’s upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago
An Apple ad for Music Lab, starring Florence Welch
Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we’re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can’t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.
This new lack of context can be felt most acutely in the waves of hating, shaming, and vindictive public opinion that roll unchecked through platforms like Face
book and Twitter. Though I believe the problem is built into the platforms themselves, and people throughout the political spectrum are implicated, it’s a favorite tool of far-right propagandists like Mike Cernovich (who helped propagate the #pizzagate conspiracy theory) to dig through someone’s old tweets and re-present the ones that look the most offensive out of context. Lately, journalists and other public figures have been a favorite target. What I find most upsetting about this is not how conniving Cernovich and others are, but how quickly and dutifully everyone else has piled on. If the alt-right is betting on inattention and a knee-jerk reaction that spreads like wildfire, they’ve won that bet several times. Even when victims of this tactic try to lay out the missing context in idiot-proof language, it’s often too little too late.
Vox and other outlets have been quick to identify these experiences as examples of what technology and social-media scholar danah boyd would call “context collapse.” A 2011 study that boyd conducted with Alice E. Marwick found that Twitter users who had built the most successful personal brands did so by recognizing the fact that they no longer really knew who their audience was. To tweet was to throw a message into a void that could include close friends, family, potential employers, and (as recent events have shown us) sworn enemies. Marwick and boyd describe how context collapse creates a “lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.”4
When the alt-right weaponizes context (or lack thereof) in this way, not only is actual context ignored, but the targeted figures’ names can become triggers in themselves. Something like this happened with Sarah Jeong, a left-leaning feminist tech journalist whose old, off-color tweets were collected and disseminated out of context by some alt-right trolls shortly after she was hired by The New York Times in 2018. While the Times stood by their decision to hire her, the alt-right’s creation of so much online noise without context was successful in its own way: for a while afterward, it seemed like merely mentioning her name shut down any meaningful conversation online, making it difficult even for someone who wanted to gather context to find it. Not that there would be time to do it. People read a tweet or a headline, react, and click a button—thousands and millions of times over in a matter of days. I can’t help but liken the angry collective tweet storms to watching a flood erode a landscape with no ground-cover plants to slow it down. The natural processes of context and attention are lost. But from the point of view of Twitter’s financial model, the storm is nothing but a bounteous uptick in engagement.