I think a better term might be apprentice fossils. On Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 8:47 AM Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
> Any journey in deep time will be leisurely, and in *Footprints *we > accompany Farrier on an unhurried (and presumably carbon intensive) > itinerary from his classroom in Edinburgh to the sprawl of Shanghai, from > the ailing Great Barrier Reef to an ice-core drilling tent in Antarctica, > and from a nuclear waste storage facility in Finland to a marine research > station on the Baltic Sea. His tour, facilitated by academic grants, > notably does not include any government buildings, climate protests, or > corporate headquarters, and we realize that Farrier’s itinerary isn’t a > political mission so much as a private quest. Marveling at the delicate > intricacy of the world, pregnant with a significance that lies just beyond > our ken, Farrier speaks the wondering language of close observation that > has defined nature writing at least since Thoreau, and arguably since his > early modern predecessor, Sir Thomas Browne. He shows us a world rich with > sense, everywhere encoded by natural and human activity. “Ice is the > planet’s seat of memory,” he writes, what he calls “a global archive > reaching back hundreds of thousands of years,” the natural equivalent of > Borges’s Library of Babel. And even as we melt and burn away what nature > has written into the world, our pollution pumps a new kind of information > into the cloud in an act of diabolical translation. When our books have > been composted and reintegrated into the earth and the internet goes dark, > “our data will persist for thousands of years as molecules of carbon > circulating in the atmosphere.” > > > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fossils-waiting-to-be-on-stoicism-in-the-anthropocene/ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3630): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3630 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78315774/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
