Refocusing attention away from news and productivity reveals a more-than-human community

Evidence

As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing. At first this meant choosing certain things to look at; I also pored over guides and used the California Academy of Science’s app, iNaturalist, to identify species of plants I had walked right by my entire life. As a result, more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities; mountain ranges, fault lines, watersheds. It was a familiar feeling of disorientation, realized in a different arena. Once again, I was met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 427

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely demonstrates the ‘not withdrawing’ move — she disengages from the news cycle not into passivity but to build another attention map. Core evidence against the withdrawal misreading.
• XREF: Odell’s disengagement is positive re-engagement, echoing the reader’s question of whether this is capaciousness or evasion — this passage is the strongest evidence FOR capaciousness. — connects to: Individual attention selection spontaneously aligns people into shared communities of sensibility — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 110; Attention, not technology, is what reveals the middle-scale world — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 66