Borges' Library

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Way of the Octopus and Talking to Animals

 

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The Sun Gallery 朱雀 Vermillion Phoenix

My essays:

An Inter-Species Crowd: How To Talk To Animals And Space Aliens

Do Octopuses Have Souls?

 

Bay Area Thinkers:

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene 3rd ed. Edition

Both by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan

 

Other New Movement Philosophers

Dark Mountain Movement

Hyperobjects, by Timothy Morton

Also by Morton: Dark Ecology for a Logic of Future Coexistence

and Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth

 

Inter-Species Crowd

When Animals Speak by Eva Meijir

Timothy Morton's Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
by Christof Koch

Apocalypse

Leaning to Die in the Anthropocene

By Roy Scranton

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell

How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times
by Pablo Servigne, Raphael Stevens

Southern Reach Trilogy: 

Weird Ecology: On The Southern Reach Trilogy
By David Tompkins

Human Contamination: The Infectious Border Crossings of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X
By Sophia Booth Magnone

Bill Benson's fantastic essay at 3QD

Terror and Terroir: Porous Bodies and Environmental
Dangers
Brian Onishi

The New Yorker:

The Weird Thoreau, By Joshua Rothman

The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction, in the Atlantic

Southern Reach Training: Fungus Safety (Protocol 3984SRT)

 

Space Aliens

Extraterrestrial Languages
by Daniel Oberhaus

Flying chariots and exotic birds: how 17th century dreamers planned to reach the moon

Other Notes

My 3QD Post: The Great Derangement

Searching for ExoPlanets with Christopher Columbus

The Great Derangement: Fiction and Climate

Sabbath Movement Notes

 

Way of the Octopus

Mark Solms' “The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness”

Peter Godfrey Smith’s new book, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, h

Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Sy Montgomery's Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

Christof Koch's Consciousness: Conversations of a Romantic Reductionist

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid? & I Am A Strange Loop

Peter Wohllenben's The Hidden Life of Trees

Deborah Gordon's Ants at Work

Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability

Union of Concerned Scientist's Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's Mushroom at the End of the World

Timothy Morten's Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology

Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

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Also recommend Sean Carroll's podcast with David Chalmers (who is working on a new book on the subject) on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

And Paul Stamets (who has a new book coming out called Fantastic Fungi) video Fantastic Fungi

New Atlantis/Understanding Heidegger on Technology

New Atlantis: Do Elephants Have Souls?

Documentary Film: Soil! The Movie

Film: Salt of the Earth

 

 

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New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson

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The future: devastating rising water levels and shocking inequality

The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by ten feet in ten years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world, and shipping is trade: those containers in their millions had been circulating by way of diesel-burning ships and trucks, moving around all the stuff people wanted, produced on one continent and consumed on another, following the highest rate of return which is the only rule that people observed at that time. So that very disregard for the consequences of their carbon burn had unleashed the ice that caused the rise of sea level that wrecked the global distribution system and caused a depression that was even more damaging to the people of that generation than the accompanying refugee crisis, which, using the unit popular at the time, was rated as fifty katrinas. Pretty bad, but the profound interruption of world trade was even worse, as far as business was concerned. So yes, the First Pulse was a first-order catastrophe, and it got people’s attention and changes were made, sure. People stopped burning carbon much faster than they thought they could before the First Pulse. They closed that barn door the very second the horses had gotten out. The four horses, to be exact.

It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.
 
But okay, you can’t really imagine a catastrophe will hit you until it does. People just don’t have that kind of mental capacity. If you did you would be stricken paralytic with fear at all times, because there are some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren’t going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be. It is an aporia, as the Greeks and intellectuals among us would say, a “not-seeing.” So, nice. Useful. Except when disastrously bad.
 
So the people of the 2060s staggered on through the great depression that followed the First Pulse, and of course there was a crowd in that generation, a certain particular one percent of the population, that just by chance rode things out rather well, and considered that it was really an act of creative destruction, as was everything bad that didn’t touch them, and all people needed to do to deal with it was to buckle down in their traces and accept the idea of austerity, meaning more poverty for the poor, and accept a police state with lots of free speech and freaky lifestyles velvet gloving the iron fist, and hey presto! On we go with the show! Humans are so tough!
 
 Bill's wonderful blog post

 

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