## Metadata - Author: [[David Michael Pritchett and J. Drew Lanham]] - Full Title: Mossback - Category: #books ## Highlights - I want to reclaim this term mossback. It paints an image of a person united with their environment, a person moving slowly enough to listen—a person with that selfsame poetry of rock and moss being written in live green script across their backs. A mossback would naturally be conservative—that is, would seek to protect the land and relations it depends on. A mossback would understand interdependence by virtue of their union with bryophytes. Someone comfortable with moss on their back might also be comfortable with an existence separate from the frenzied pace of the plantation economy. In fact, they might even resist a society willing to enslave other humans or to send young humans to war for profit. While a maroon is an escaped slave, a mossback might be the analogous term of someone who has relatively more social power. A mossback is not an enslaved person who escaped but a person who actively rejects participation in an enslaving society. ([Location 185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=185)) - Tags: [[pink]] - My mind ferments and questions bubble up: Are there still liberating ecologies today, rough terrains not yet completely controlled by the economy that has devastated so much of the globe? I think about how many enslaved people died to build the ditch and berm that allowed me to access the swamp. What are we willing to sacrifice for resources? What are the stories about the world we are willing to inhabit? Is the earth a resource or a relationship? Who do we consider inferior, and who do we consider kin? I scratch at bites from mosquitos and wonder what I would be willing to endure in order to escape. I think about the water as a litmus. I wasn’t thirsty enough to risk a drink but have certainly been in situations where I was willing to drink any water, no matter the amount of particulates, to slake my thirst. How thirsty must we be for freedom? How does desire for life animate our choices? Is it better to rebel, or abscond, when faced with unacceptable conditions? And how often do we get to make such a choice? These are the questions I explore in the book you hold in your hands. Answering them requires seeing ourselves and the places we inhabit in new ways. ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=206)) - Stories shape us. From the origin of the universe to the founding of a nation, cosmologies tell us how to understand the world, its order, and our own place within it. In Ancient Mesopotamia, the world was created by the violent slaying of Tiamat. Rome was famously founded by Romulus after he killed his brother. The settling of the American West was buttressed by the “story” of Manifest Destiny, which said that it was the divine right of the United States to colonize North America from East to West Coasts. So many of our cosmologies begin with violence. To see the world differently, we need different stories. ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=254)) - If mossbacks reject the cosmologies that allow for enslaving humans, or for sending young men to die in wars, they must also find new stories or reclaim old ones. They need different cosmologies than the ones that lead to plantation economies to shape how they understand the world. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=262)) - ways of seeing the world differently, or practices that promote deeper kinship. See the place you live in as bound by water rather than mapped by a grid. Write a letter to your ancestors. Learn birdsong or how to track, as a way to be constantly reminded that the world of the nonhuman surrounds us. Be at home in your body, in your bioregion. Put your hope not in the survival of the human species but in the deep earth bacteria dividing every thousand years. Excavate your psyche to find what lies in your own underlands. Walk your local river or creek. Above all, be both wide-eyed in delight at the unfolding beauty all around and clear-eyed about the legacies of destructive lifeways we have inherited. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=267)) - to become a mossback means to get implicated in the mess of life. One must be comfortable with the awkward fact of having flesh, having a body with hunger and excrement. One must be willing to get entangled with the difficult histories that brought us to the present moment, and ready to proceed without knowing the right way. To be a mossback means to understand that the same economy that preys on humans also exploits nonhuman life. The extraction of timber resources from Dismal Swamp was accomplished mostly by the labor of enslaved people. ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=272)) - Most of the people who live around Mount Kenya say that God lives on the mountain. Many of them construct their houses with doors that face the mountain as a sign of respect. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=300)) - The ecologist Aldo Leopold gave us a lovely phrase to describe the interconnectedness of earth systems. He calls it, in his essay by the same title, “thinking like a mountain.” To think like a mountain, he says, is to understand that everything is connected, and not just in an abstract way. ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=326)) - The world is different from up there in what early mountaineers called the rarified air. Before aircraft, this was the only way to get an aerial perspective of terrain. From the mountaintop, the terrestrial geometries become obvious. The landscape-level shapes of watersheds emerge. Patterns undulate across the earth, tracing the movement of water, wind, and tectonics over millennia. How can we think with a mountain-sized perspective, one that looks to the horizon, and sits in clouds, and thinks in geological epochs? Perhaps this is why so many poets and sages have gone to the mountains, for alpine visions both real and figurative. This is why we look to the high places, why we listen to prophets who come down from the mountains. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=333)) - People in power tend to create a “below” so that they can stand “above” along with whomever they deem worthy.1 This logic of hierarchy has played out across the ages but has intensified in the last five hundred years. In the European pre-Enlightenment period, as Europeans encountered more and more indigenous societies in Africa and the Americas, Africa and the Americas were cast as the “below” so that Europe could be the “above.” ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=353)) - Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher whose treatises represent Enlightenment reason, serves as an example of how European supremacy came to justify the prior centuries of plunder of Africa and the Americas. His racial categorization is representative of the logic of above and below present in European thought: “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of talent. The Negroes are lower and the lowest are a part of the American peoples.” ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=373)) - For the last several years, I’ve been thinking about how to escape these hierarchies and the situation we are all implicated in. It’s not enough to flip the pyramid. I’m ready to pack a few essential items, leave a note, and flee to the hills. But the problem is, there is no more rough terrain. There is no place, anymore, that empire cannot reach. The entire globe has been surveyed, mapped, and partitioned. So we must find alcoves and crags, not for escape but for a bit of respite—places where perhaps empire can reach but does completely control, because it runs out of breath. And because we cannot completely escape, we have to find a way to bring everyone along with us back to life, back to a way of being there is no need for escape from. If escape is possible, it must require both creating a community that actively rejects hierarchies and individuals willing to maintain a rough terrain of the spirit by rejecting consumerism and stories that bolster frameworks of above and below. ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=399)) - How many of us look to escape—to the mountain, the desert commune, or a country homestead—and yet still seem to bring with us all the worst parts of that which we try to run from? And so it is not enough to go to the mountains for a high-altitude perspective. We must also direct this mountainthinking inward, to look at the patterns of our inner landscapes, to take the bird’s-eye view of our interior lives and examine how we are shaped by the social terrain we inhabit, the storied genealogy of our ancestral inheritance, and the biochemical intentions of our bodies. By doing so we cultivate a sort of “rough terrain” of the spirit, a way to make it harder for empires to completely control our desires or order our imaginations. ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=417)) - There is a phrase for what happened in the Midwest, as in so many places across North America. “Settler colonialism” does not fly smoothly out of the lips. It rattles in the mouth and rakes the tongue across the teeth. Yet it is the best jargon we have to speak with brevity about a process that took a few centuries. ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=718)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Just because apocalyptic writing has creative imagery does not mean that it is fanciful. Apocalypse is an exercise of what anthropologist David Graeber calls “imaginative counterpower,” which is to say, it helps the oppressed name the powers that seem to control their lives, as well as to imagine an end to these powers. ([Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=799)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As Wendell Berry has noted, there are no large-scale solutions to large-scale problems. But perhaps we can work toward local and provisional responses. ([Location 906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=906)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Apocalypse makes imagination a battleground. Colonization has physical and lasting effects, but it starts with the ability to imagine that indigenous people and their ecologies are less important than settler ecologies. So I think we must first be able to imagine an end to settler colonialism in order to change it. Just as the displacement of indigenous people took sustained effort and attention by those who would benefit from it, so finding a future that upholds the sovereignty of indigenous people and species requires enough people willing to imagine it. That imagination must be formed, I think, in relationships. And what better way to tend to the seeds of imagination than by conversing together as we gather acorns? ([Location 942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=942)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Onondaga elder Oren Lyons says about white settlers, “Every time we [indigenous people] talk about the nonhuman world we always talk about relatives, whereas you always talk about resources.” ([Location 1026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=1026)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rootlessness is a word commonly used to describe the transience and general lack of historic and place-based knowledge associated with whiteness. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=1071)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The truth is, I need community to stay alive. My two-footed standing in life is bookended by a toddler’s crawl and, if I live long enough, a weak-kneed old man’s frailty. My very digestion depends on the metabolic activity of the microbiome in my gut. Throughout our lives, we rely on others to care for us. And beyond the human community, we cannot live without other creatures. ([Location 1326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=1326)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We are all children of Coyote, shaped by hunger. Appetite organizes the very structure of our bodies. Animal physiologists observe that every animal body, from the smallest worm to the largest elephant, is fundamentally a tube. ([Location 1614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=1614)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What is the role of humans in the ongoing story of life, which is the tracing of desire, the appetite-induced merging of bodies into bodies, at times the hungry crossing and at others the fearful honoring of boundaries? ([Location 1678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=1678)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Welcome to the fellowship of the fermented. ([Location 2052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=2052)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The last fifty years have seen as much timber logged as occurred during the entire previous history of human habitation on the earth. R. P. Harrison reflects on this: “We call it the loss of nature, or the loss of wildlife habitat, or the loss of biodiversity, but underlying the ecological concern is perhaps a much deeper appreciation about the disappearance of boundaries, without which the human abode loses its grounding … Without such outside domains there is no inside in which to dwell.” ([Location 2227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=2227)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Finding my own den of escape, of calm, allows me to better partner with others in moving the world toward more freedom. ([Location 2534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=2534)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If we have any hope of living rightly, it will include an understanding of water as the foundation of our life. Tending to its circulation and grounding should be the basis of our social and political organization, just as it is already the foundation of our biochemical enlivenment. As my friend Randy Woodley says, water is the first medicine. ([Location 2603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3RH1NK5&location=2603)) - Tags: [[blue]]