Attention that ensures survival is reciprocal care, not appreciation of cuteness or sentience

Evidence

And in a world where our survival is absolutely bound up with the survival of the ecologies in which we are embedded, it becomes clear that reciprocal attention is what ensures our survival as well. While this kind of attention to the living world certainly involves reverence, it’s something very different from fawning over cuteness or beauty or appreciating nonhuman entities as intelligent or even sentient. (What’s less cute or sentient than intestinal bacteria? And yet we rely on it.) 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. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 500

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely delimits what Odell does NOT mean by attention — distinguishing reciprocal attention from aesthetic/sentience-based appreciation, crucial for defending against the withdrawal misreading.