Ways of Being

It contains so many interesting anecdotes about and insights into the world around us from vastly different perspectives that I'm sure I'll flip it open every once in a while, just to read up on how exactly that experiment with the fern that was able to hear was set up again…

I'm not sure how many of the details will stick, and at times the points were made as stories more than with stringent logic, but it's an inspiring book nonetheless that more than once made me feel deeply entangled with the world around me, and excited about taking the insight seriously.

I found this book quite hard to read for some reason. Some interesting stories and some grand ideas.

Where I am right now, after an overlapping decades-long journey through computability, animal and ecological intelligence, finding human humility after capitalism's techno-categorizing-hubris. Seeking an answer to how technology, how participation in understanding, should adapt to a collaborative-multiple-perspective de-centering of humanity and our binary truths. This sticks to a deep middle, the claims Bridle makes for "opening up to the more-than-human world" are broad, pointed in good directions, and avoid anger or hopelessness while staying critical. My recommendations for adjacent reading would be Frans de Waal's "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are", Emma Marris' "Wild Souls", Richard Power's "The Overstory", and a lot of Ursula K LeGuin, but the bibliography has a whole stack of new reading lined up for me too.