How to Do Nothing

As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing. At first this meant choosing certain things to look at; I also pored over guides and used the California Academy of Science’s app, iNaturalist, to identify species of plants I had walked right by my entire life. As a result, more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice I animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities; mountain lines, watersheds. It was a familiar feeling ranges, fault of disorientation, realized in a different arena. Once again, I was I met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here invisible to me before, yet they had been in previous renderings of my reality.

This is where bioregionalism really enters into the text.