## Metadata - Author: [[Ruthanna Emrys]] - Full Title: A Half-Built Garden - Category: #books ## Highlights - “The Chesapeake doesn’t claim specific territory,” I said. “We claim our actions. We take care of everything in the watershed, every place where the river acts.” What happened next would depend on how the Ringers themselves defined power. Were they more likely to recognize a government built on laws, on paper-and-pixel boundaries? Or a network defined by measurable flows of matter and energy and obligation? ([Location 656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNDZSYK&location=656)) - I tried to ignore the persistent sense that arguing this stuff out in our living room, with a handful of co-present colleagues, was wrong. Even taking into account the people we could reach through the shared board, and the slightly dubious feedback from the patchwork simulation engine, it didn’t seem right to make decisions of this magnitude in analog. It wasn’t even just that we were leaving out millions—billions if we stretched to other watersheds—of people with a stake in our decisions. Trying to keep all our ideas organized without real threading, without the algorithms constantly picking out key ideas and sorting possible approaches and marking the valence and weight of our responses, felt like analyzing river chemistry by drinking a glass of water. ([Location 937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNDZSYK&location=937)) - “Earth, given half a chance, makes a place for life. The planet has seen six mass extinctions, counting this one; something has kept going through all of them. Making sure human civilization survives is the real challenge, and we’re figuring that out. But most of the system inputs are non-human and always were—we just need to make our own inputs harmonize with the rest. ([Location 3898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09CNDZSYK&location=3898))