Shannan > Recent Status Updates

Animals were self-contained and people seemed to hold this against them—possibly because most of them had come to believe that animals should be like servants or children. Either they should work for men, suffer under a burden, or they should entertain them.

She and Susan were his only intimates in the city; he trusted them, in part for their capable hands and in part for the puzzle of their willingness to labor indefinitely in menial positions, which linked them to him in a pact of loyalty.

Great section on currency, standards, Potosi, Gold backed pound, Gold transfer to America in WWI….

Love the broad brush of this book and its bold claims to the future.

Fascinating backcasting in new and interesting ways.

Analysis, Marshmello product is fascinating. I recommend re-examining in this chapter.

Harrowing image
“In a school yard, a ten-year-old girl searching for her mother heard the ticking of wristwatches as she passed mostly naked, engorged bodies.”
Imagine. These were maybe wind up mechanical watches. I wonder what an ‘updated for modern audiences’ equivalent would be? How long would postmortem fitbit or Apple watch functions last? Would you have a field of
personal fall alarms?

The bleak irony was that it was only through this eventual abolition act that slaves came to be defined, in British law, as the ‘inalienable property of their masters’. Up to this moment the English common law had neither expressly condoned nor forbidden slavery. But when the argument had turned towards compensation, the law had to state explicitly: slaves were the property of their owners

The word ‘solastalgia’, describes the disorientating grief and emotional, even existential, distress caused by negatively perceived environmental change or destruction, the mining of ancestral lands, house building on a childhood field, the felling of a much-loved wood, even the loss of ‘proper winters’. the effect as a homesickness, for the place that once was and that you haven’t left.

“Nostalgia, yearning and a melancholy air pervade The Willows like river mist, particularly in the otherworldly chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, set on Midsummer Night’s Eve.”

This book is so descriptive of being a person connected to nature and place.

I seemed to see all wild things and places through a ‘last chance to see’ filter. I began to wonder just how well I knew my own wild familiars? I determined to re-engage and set myself challenges…

I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness

And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

- going feral in connection

There are no breeds or varieties, because hawks were never domesticated. The birds we fly today are identical to those of five thousand years ago. Civilisations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same.

every part of a hawk was named: wings were sails, claws pounces, tail a train. Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, for third. Young birds are eyasses, older birds passagers, adult-trapped birds haggards. Half-trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak. When they defecate they mute. When they shake themselves they rouse.