In the wake of Seth’s presentation, we couldn’t help wondering:  Is the speed of change in the material realities of life on the planet outpacing our ways of knowing?  Everything we humans think we know about living on Earth, and everything we thought was useful for life here, was invented by ancestors who lived during times when the hockey stick graphs were relatively “flat.”  But, as Seth put it, we’re now living at right angles with that (former) world.  We’re now living on a qualitatively different planet.  While that doesn’t necessarily mean that human knowledge needs to start over, it does mean we need to rethink, reconfigure, and reinvent “what we know” from an entirely different angle (the vertical, accelerating rise).  And we need to do that quickly.

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“There are more species in New York City than in Yellowstone,” [Bill Ulfelder] says. “New York City has humpback whales and sharks, peregrine falcon, and sturgeon. There’s stuff worth conserving here.”

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Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature by Rachel Armstrong for Next Nature.

Ecologist Fern Wickson argues that humans are intertwined in a complex web of biological systems and cannot be included within a definition of nature where “an atom bomb becomes as ‘natural’ as an anthill” and wonders whether there is a better definition of nature.

Garbage explains how we can be connected to nature – but not in an unlimited way. We subjectively distinguish ourselves from the natural world by ‘editing’ our networks through the process of making garbage. We choose what is important to us by applying cultural, rather than material criteria, which does not lend itself to empirical measurement.

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Growth Assembly – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Sascha Pohflepp from Sascha Pohflepp on Vimeo.

via Hyperallergic

(RMB is China’s currency.)

– Rebecca Solnit, interview with Astra Taylor, BOMB Magazine

Lover 9th Ward, from the New Orleans Suite, 2006. Photo by Lewis Watts.