Jenny Odell

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sweetgrass study suggests that the plants were dying from none other than a lack of attention.

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.”