Children now lack any experiential baseline for ecological abundance

Evidence

The absence of abundance is already accepted. The metaphors of the nature poets, mapping human hearts through once commonly understood imagery, are irrelevant and impenetrable. “The sun of Winter/The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds/Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper/Are quite shut out.” I’m sorry. The missel-what? Can the juniper be monetised? Is this missel-thing for sale? Our children already have no stable baseline from which to calibrate the loss of all that lives. It’s game over. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1974

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the trees-as-infrastructure essay’s thread that inherited ecological knowledge is being lost; here Fisher names the loss of a cultural baseline, not just of species.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: what the unreadability of a 17th-century nature-poetry line (‘the missel-thrush that loves juniper’) says about how we fail to register ecological loss without shared reference points.
• XREF: connects to: Ecological imagination shrinks with the land’s impoverishment — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 34

Broader Connections

• Ecological imagination shrinks with the land’s impoverishment #corroborates (0.88) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 34