Daniel Cox

“Through centuries of effort, people have learned much about the sensory worlds of other species. But in a fraction of the time, we have upended those worlds. We now live in the Anthropocene—a geological epoch defined and dominated by the deeds of our species. We have changed the climate and acidified the oceans by releasing titanic amounts of greenhouse gases. We have shuffled wildlife across continents, replacing indigenous species with invasive ones. We have instigated what some scientists have called an era of “biological annihilation,” comparable to the five great mass extinction events of prehistory. And amid this already dispiriting ledger of ecological sins, there is one that should be especially easy to appreciate and yet is often ignored—sensory pollution. Instead of stepping into the Umwelten of other animals, we have forced them to live in ours by barraging them with stimuli of our own making.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Neither Jefferson nor Madison asked whether a generation of men has the right to bind a generation of women, even though women like Abigail Adams and Eliza Harriot and Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft were asking that question in letters, speeches, and treatises. The answer has implications into the twenty-first century: if women could neither ratify, reject, nor amend the Constitution in the founding era, if the Constitution, in a fundamental sense, did not recognize women as persons, can it truly be said to bind their posterity? The same question can be asked of enslaved Black men, women, and children, like Sally Hemings, and the poor, and free Black men: could any of these people in any sense ratify, reject, or amend the original Constitution?”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the US Constitution

“Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a Black man as president and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains racked with racism, ethno-nationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix those problems.”
― Jonathan Eig, King: A Life

“On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope’s shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible