“The point in interrogating these classificatory infracstructures, in order to de-centre the human, is not to put animals or other things on a pedestal or to include them, but to begin to map our interdependencies in larger systems of relational re/production. To simply include or valorize non-humans would deny the obligations humans bear as complexly thinking animals capable of solving some of the major social and ecological problems we've created” (Kier 2010, 306). What is it to care humanly without thinking that humans are the most important thing in the picture? If we want to do both, we need to have some way of caring about atrazine's effects on humans while also caring about its effects on frogs. So, to take an indicator species model is to care instrumentally — we think about the frogs because of what they might tell us about what could happen to humans. [...] Naming and noticing might be a way to care humanly, but not instumentally, to recognize and value the fact that the frogs and the toads and the lizards have their own life that we are just tuning into. This is why I'm interested in projects of ordinary people (which doesn't mean that people can't have training in ecology and still be ordinary people). They, we, you, are using ways of noticing and technologies of noticing, like naming, that don't fundamentally have an allegiance to apparatuses of thinking shaped as a practice of dominion over the natural or social world.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 98 - 99)