Preserving public space is inseparable from restoring habitats for endangered thought.

Evidence

Obviously, parks are only one type of public space that we must prioritize and protect. But they provide a useful example of the link between space, resistance, and the attention economy. If, as I’ve argued, certain types of thought require certain types of spaces, then any attempt at “context collection” will have to deal not only with context collapse online, but with preserving public and open space, as well as the meeting places important to threatened cultures and communities. In a time increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene (a geologic era in which the environment is irreversibly shaped by human activity), I find Donna J. Haraway’s term for this era even more useful. She calls it the Chthulucene, in which “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway writes, “One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.” With this in mind, when the logic of capitalist productivity threatens both endangered life and endangered ideas, I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 610

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Haraway’s Chthulucene as an alternative to Anthropocene, used to unify habitat restoration and thought restoration.
• XREF: Connects to Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and to the essay ‘Grafting & Growth’ on trees as infrastructure since restoring habitat meets conserving thought.
• QUESTION: Odell’s move here is rhetorical capaciousness - does equating species and idea extinction pass scrutiny, or does it blur two distinct losses?