## Metadata - Author: [[Miriam Kate McDonald]] - Full Title: Emergent - Category: #books ## Highlights - David Nogues-Bravo, whilst trying to untangle the climate effects from human-hunting effects in mammoth extinction, estimated that a person would have only had to kill one mammoth every three years to result in their eventual extinction, and that estimate comes from assuming mammoths were fairly abundant in what remained of their ice age world. If that generous assumption is wrong, a person may have had to take only one mammoth every 200 years to result in their extinction! It is likely that the people living through these times were not aware at all of how the water they were swimming in was changing. ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=226)) - Literally everything that we have ever known or recorded on Earth, everything that science has ever uncovered about our biosphere, has been discovered in a disturbed world. This is the first thing that we need to bear in mind when thinking about the water in which we swim. It is turbulent; we have grown within the flow of the water, and our lives have been created by, and have contributed to, its constant movement. Movement that was initiated tens of thousands of years ago. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=255)) - Farming was born in over 14 different places around the world, each with its unique set of domesticated plant and animal species selected from a very wide array of wild habitats and species. ([Location 323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=323)) - Pigeons are the oldest domesticated birds in the world and possibly lived alongside our hunter gatherer forebears in the caves of Mesopotamia tens of thousands of years ago and it’s difficult to overstate just how important that relationship has been to us over the years. ([Location 522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=522)) - Over the last 50 years or so, despite being totally dependent upon the earth, the industrial food system seems to have managed to view itself as existing independently. It seems to assume that the landscape is just a setting and the soil just a substrate on which the marvellous inventions of man can play out. We seem to have conned ourselves into thinking that we can disassemble the world into units and maximise the productivity of those units with no, or negligible, side effects. The modern food system has at its core the belief of civilisation being fundamentally separate from, and dominant over, nature. And of nature being at best a pretty thing to be watched from the kitchen window and at worst the enemy of production. This divided view has crippled our food system, and our world. ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=543)) - nature works in broad brushstrokes across a global tapestry with grazed pastures, scrublands, wetlands, woodlands and wood pasture rippling across our island, infinitely flowing onwards. When a section of that dance is cut out, its edges defined and a certain step repeated over and over again, it ceases to be a dance and becomes a slightly odd staccato movement instead, its vitality gone. This happens when conservationists freeze reserves in time, endlessly coppicing a small area to preserve a species of butterfly, for example, or when farmers till the same patch of ground each year to grow annual cereals. It isn’t the application of a disturbance to a place that allows a species to remain there; it is the continual flexing of landscapes over time that opens up niches here, there and everywhere in which species can participate in the dance. ([Location 1078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=1078)) - Disturbances and interactions can become so evolutionarily interwoven over time that they are difficult to separate. It becomes almost impossible, in fact, to pick out any individuals, species or habitats; they are all one and the same. As the famous naturalist John Muir said: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. ([Location 1087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=1087)) - Life and landscape have history; in other words, species and habitats remember their disturbances, their connections. Memories play out across our island from the resistances to diseases that each of us carries in our blood to our home and its microbial peculiarities to the migratory routes of birds returning from Africa each year guided by the magnetic pull of their ancestral seat. When soils are stripped of their microbes and seeds, they forget their erstwhile allies that healed their hurts, and when species are removed from their landscapes, they forget their patterns of movement that facilitated their, and the landscapes’, existence in the first place. The dialogue between place and life is like a story sung from one generation to the next, immortalising the history of their relationship; ([Location 1098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=1098)) - Rewilding, as it stands now promotes the establishment of the three Cs and a K: Core kernels of self-willed habitat where natural processes can play out unhindered; Corridors of safe passage between cores; Carnivores as very delicate indicators of the health of the habitat; and Keystones as vital players in maintaining stable systems. ([Location 1180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=1180)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Root-Bernstein and Ladle suggest that, just as grazers mediate vegetation levels and predators mediate grazer levels, omnivores mediate the system as a whole, acting as a sort of damping mechanism. Pigs, bears and humans all share very flexible digestive systems, which allows us to switch our food stuff over the year, eating whatever is most abundant; if there are plenty of deer, we will hunt them, but if there is an abundance of apples, we will collect those instead. Our overall impact is to gather surplus and, in so doing, reduce the population spikes of other species, helping systems to stay on a more even keel and guiding them towards stability. ([Location 1408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=1408)) - Across the earth and through time people have increased diversity by engineering small areas of ‘difference’ in landscapes of monotony, allowing a greater biomass and diversity of life to thrive. Scale, however, is key. For ecosystem engineering to have a positive impact on biodiversity, it must create a small area of difference within a larger background habitat. Over the last few hundred years or so, the speed and scale of our engineering have increased and we have flipped landscapes inside out, as it were, with small pockets of ‘wild’ caught within a fabric of disturbance. Our engineering no longer provides a novel pocket within a background of wild stability; the ‘wild’ has become the novel area in a sea of human engineering. ([Location 1462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=1462)) - It is impossible to articulate, in English, a dynamic world of interwoven grasses, trees, animals and water fluctuating through time as a single and eternal entity. It is also impossible to allow people into this process; we have no word for the progression and collaboration of the earth and all life, including humanity, evolving as one. English equips us with neat boxes of ‘things’ that engage in unidirectional, hierarchical interactions. This is not sufficient; we need a language of complexity and mutual dependence instead, one that emphasises connection and process instead of division and structure. One that is verb based instead of noun based. ([Location 2474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=2474)) - We need a language, above all, that is capable of conceptualising and describing the world as a whole, all the interactions between life and the processes that emerge. If we had a language that drew out the cyclical, ever-changing nature of the world and described the importance of relationship and cooperation between all lives, we might find it easier to create a culture that carries within it the knowing of the embeddedness of everything. If we understood and felt at home within a cyclical pattern of the world, we might find it easier to trust in nature’s abundance and loosen how tightly we cling to the notion of control and enforced permanence. Ultimately we might find it easier to both live and die. ([Location 2483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=2483)) - To forge landscapes drawn from a united will, to act in partnership and acknowledge the mutual support, dependence and constraints that come with that relationship requires humility. We must see ourselves as more than individuals, as more than human, as a small part of a large community of life, as a member of no species and all species at once. And then surely what must emerge is the realisation that we are not separate, that our will is not separate, that our body is not separate but is all one. We are not discrete; we never were nor would we exist if we had been. We, and everything else, is one and the same. All life is one, and dances together or not at all. ([Location 2518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=2518)) - Humans exposed the earth to nuclear power; we let it leak out into our biosphere and then we ran before the threat of what we had unleashed, but in our wake, nature swelled. Now, 33 years on, the Pripyat River basin is recovering from the Chernobyl disaster. The Exclusion Zone hums with life as elk, deer, racoon dogs, foxes, boar, bison, horses and wolves roam the landscape once more. Even bears have ambled back. We unleashed the most devastating side of ourselves, and nature adapted. Imagine what could be accomplished if we unleashed the best of ourselves. ([Location 2562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=2562)) - If two sandhopper species living side by side on a wave tossed ashore can break down more seaweed than either can on its own, and the return of one keystone species to a mountain chain can alter the path of a river, imagine what could happen if the world’s most powerful hyperkeystone species, its global engineer, acknowledged itself as a part of the super organism that is Gaia. Imagine what might spring from such a collaboration around the world and what might transpire on our own small island. If farmers, rewilders and everybody else acknowledged that we are all just life bound together with a miraculous island on the edge of Europe, imagine what that island might become. Imagine what that world might become. Imagine an Emergent World. ([Location 2566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BHTXK4PR&location=2566))