I search for books that don't require me to forget some part of myself, some knowledge or contents of memory, that hold as large and finely grained a mirror as possible up to life as we know it, that might allow me to meet the most of what others are, of what the world actually is, with the most of who I am--and I think this book might belong among them.
This is a history of history. This book explores how the historical tradition handed down to us assumed the planet was only a handful of millennia old and, even as our understanding of the origins of life on earth grew, along with the history of humanity, biases underpinning that original cosmology continue to impede our thinking about the depth of time that precedes it.
Against astronomical odds, Indigenous people living in the Peruvian rainforest know how to combine specific plant species, out of an uncounted array, to produce medicine. They averred that the plants themselves told them how, in dreams. Anthropologists dismissed them—until this author took them at their word, beginning an intellectually honest attempt to hybridize one view of the world with another long ignored.
Building on his earlier work that explores the Peruvian shaman's assertion that they communicate with plants directly in order to aquire their specialized knowledge, the author draws together various contemporary scientific findings that reveal the staggering array of intelligences displayed by non-humans, in this sequel to The Cosmic Serpent.
This book about intelligence across species argues that technology provides us with metaphors for hitherto unconceptualizable aspects of nature: for instance, the internet as metaphor for the mycelial networks via which trees communicate. The author underscores how the technologies in our lives are shaped by corporate ideologies, and consequently shape their users, and imagines technologies as meeting sites between us all—human and nonhuman alike.
This blend of theory and memoir is deeply concerned with the sentience of forests and artificial intelligence, and traces an invisible (one could almost say mycelial) web of deep connection between a range of ideas in its attempt to reckon with what it means to be family and love in the world as we understand it now.
This strange book describes a very useful container of an idea-- the arc of its thinking, in its elliptical and wide-sweeping orbit, traces the contours of stuff that is very large or has a very long life span relative to humans. Not long after this book's publication, Bjork began a correspondence with its author that culminated in them mutually concluding that art comes from the future. It's just that weird and fascinating.