## Metadata - Author: [[Eileen Crist]] - Full Title: Abundant Earth - Category: #books ## Highlights - In lieu of recognizing that ceding human dominance is the only resolution for preserving and restoring life’s richness, mainstream venues regularly hype technological and managerial avenues for addressing arising challenges—avenues that diligently avoid questioning, let alone confronting, humanity’s colonization of the biosphere. Techno-managerialism—the go-to framework of policy circles, nation-states, corporate entities, research centers, and most universities—aspires to sustain the status quo of Earth as the Planet of the Humans, while striving to serially mitigate or fix any civilization-endangering catastrophes brought on by that status quo. ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07M7Z4JR7&location=110)) - We are all familiar with the fact that a knot becomes more and more difficult to undo as additional knots are piled on top of the original one. Analogously, discursive knots are oft rehearsed patterns of reasoning about the global situation that interfere with the flow of imagination and action in an alternative direction: namely, of contesting what we might call “the trends of more”—burgeoning economies and global trade, a growing human population, rising livestock numbers, multiplying extractive enterprises, and invading infrastructures—instead of regarding them as unchangeable variables around which techno-managerial adjustments must be applied and a mood of resilience (in the wake of consequences) must be boostrapped. ([Location 121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07M7Z4JR7&location=121)) - Humanity is dismantling the very qualities that constitute the living world: variety of life-forms, complexity of life’s interrelations, abundance of native beings and unique places on Earth, and diversity of nonhuman forms of awareness. These intertwined qualities form the cauldron of Earth’s beauty and creativity. They are the ground of life’s evolutionary power, fecundity, and endurance. ([Location 230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07M7Z4JR7&location=230)) - In the wake of the human onslaught, the flame of life is being extinguished. The richness of the living world is coming undone as the human juggernaut eclipses the stupendous diversity of our only cohort in the universe, turning the Earth into a biologically impoverished human colony and “stretching our loneliness to infinity.” ([Location 236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07M7Z4JR7&location=236))