Human survival depends on maintaining webs of relationships, not efficient exploitation

Evidence

Even if you cared only about human survival, you’d still have to acknowledge that this survival is beholden not to efficient exploitation but to the maintenance of a delicate web of relationships. Beyond the life of individual beings, there is the life of a place, and it depends on more than what we can see, more than just the charismatic animals or the iconic trees. While we may have fooled ourselves into thinking we can live cut off from that life, to do so is physically unsustainable, not to mention impoverished in still other ways. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 501

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the ‘life of a place’ as the true ethical object — the ecosystem over individual beings — reframing what attention should be directed at.