A Year in Reading: On Paying Attention
December 12, 2024 at 01:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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I’ve been wondering about what it means to see the natural world. My daughter, now 6, is blossoming into an explorer. It’s a joy to see her interact with the environment, whether we’re tidepooling on the Pacific Coast or walking through old-growth redwoods in Northern California. She sees the details. She observes with wonder. I, on the other hand, am constantly adjusting my lens. Or not looking at all.
Among a handful of nature reads I recommended in 2024, one encouraging thought emerged during yet another year of climate disasters: that it’s possible to interrogate, and ultimately shift, my own thinking and understanding of the natural world, despite decades of learning and being in a human-centric world. Raising a young daughter, I’m pushed to see situations each day through her eyes, so parenting had already primed me for experiencing a jolt in perspective. Some of my favorite stories this year have made me more open to new outlooks and solutions for restoring and supporting the earth. They challenge me to pay more attention to the natural world, and to remember that we’re all connected, even to the tiniest and simplest forms of life.
So many stories about the environment are #SadReads. These are important and necessary. But this year, I responded more positively to writing I found uplifting and hopeful. Dialogues between ecologists, scientists, and science writers have been especially illuminating.
In a recent Orion conversation, “Gift Thinking,” Jenny Odell and Robin Wall Kimmerer talk about a gift economy, in which humans cultivate reciprocal relationships and take their cues from Earth’s biodiverse ecosystems. This is in stark contrast to society’s dominant systems that extract and destroy, as if the planet is one massive warehouse stocked with infinite resources. Odell recounts a time she observed people filling jugs at a local spring and realized she’d never had that sort of relationship with water. She asks: “Are there ways we might begin to rehabilitate our ability to see things as the gifts they are?” It’s a wise question that I haven’t stopped contemplating. To think this way requires “a muscle,” replies Kimmerer, one “that atrophies without exercise.”
In another conversation, “From Silicon to Slime,” Willa Köerner and Claire L. Evans discuss the growing overlap between biology and computing. I’ll read anything and everything by Evans; so many light bulbs go off when reading her interdisciplinary writing and forward-thinking takes on the future. In this interview in Köerner’s newsletter, Dark Properties—which I’d discovered in Sentiers, Patrick Tanguay’s excellent newsletter—Evans challenges outdated notions and definitions of computation. “I’m fascinated by the fact that every living thing processes information, or computes, in a sense,” she says. How are we limiting ourselves when we only think of laptops and iPhones as “computers”? What about ant colonies, the root systems of trees, and slime molds? Evans argues that if we can “align our interests with what living organisms and systems naturally do,” we could build far more innovative and sustainable solutions, and maintain the types of cooperative relationships that Odell and Kimmerer discuss.
Speaking of slime molds, one of Ferris Jabr’s New York Times Magazine stories, The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet,” pushed me to consider seemingly simple life forms in a new way. These microbes, far down in the earth’s crust, have survived cataclysmic events over billions of years and may have helped to form the continents. Jabr writes that these subterranean microbes are “engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth,” which is a beautiful phrase I’ve returned to throughout the year, and one that mirrors Kimmerer’s and Evans’s ideas. All living things—human and nonhuman, massive and miniscule—are part of Earth, creating and coevolving over time. In fact, writes Jabr, “We are Earth.”
While we’re on the topic of the planet’s smaller living things, Benji Jones’s Vox story on the people in New York City who rehabilitate injured and abandoned creatures like rats, baby opossums, and stray birds was an unexpected yet delightful read. “As I spent time with rehabbers,” writes Jones, “I began to see their perspective. They view these species not as pests but as part of nature—as part of the New York City ecosystem. As part of their home.” I’ve always been a squirrel enthusiast, but after reading Jones’s piece, I realized I’d never considered them in the same category as cats and dogs. Why not? We can’t implement some of the systems that ecologists and thinkers envision on a bigger scale if we’re unable to recognize a rat or a pigeon as worthy of life.
Jones’s look at wildlife rehabbers, who model how we could live alongside critters in our urban environments, made me question my own definition of coexistence. What does it mean to coexist with other life on the planet? Better yet, what does it look like to be in harmony with them? In “My Harmony and the Heron,” an essay at Atmos, Jarod K. Anderson describes how he rediscovered the magic of nature during a time of depression. “Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize,” he writes. After years of being disconnected from wildlife for so long, he goes for a walk in the Ohio woods and sees a majestic great blue heron at the edge of a pool—and she also sees him. “It’s still here,” he writes of the heron, the water, the wilderness. “I had just stopped noticing.” Like Odell and Kimmerer, Anderson acknowledges that many of us no longer pay attention and fail to see the gifts in front of us. Ultimately, he considers a more positive pathway and way of thinking—one that looks to nature for light, especially in times of darkness.
As Kimmerer notes, paying attention is the ultimate act of resistance. I hope these reads stimulate that muscle within you—the one we must constantly exercise, the one that makes us more open to positive change. —CLR
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