Jenny Odell

In Becoming Animal, David Abram writes about what is lost when we speak and think about the rest of the world as less than animate:
If we speak of things as inert or inanimate objects, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us—we foreclose their capacity to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.

As the sparrow inched along and pecked at the ground in its customary way, I read for the first time about “species loneliness,” the melancholy alienation of humans from other life-forms. Kimmerer writes,
I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you. Given who I am and what I do, I can’t know what that’s like, but I think it would be a little scary and disorienting—like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs.

She adds that “[a]s our human dominance has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”