Status Updates From Bitter Shade: The Ecologica...

Points higher in the hierarchy of isomorphic nature and culture relations afford greater insights because they offer a view across more hierarchical levels. There is thus an inherent asymmetry in the distribution of knowledge withint these hierarchies: those farther up are inherently privileged by virtue of their position in the system. Those farther up can see relations across more levels than those farther down.

When we see ourselves through the eyes of the animal other, we not only see 'something that it is like to be that organism,' but we are standing in another world and seeing from that perspective the limits of our own world.

Kohn writes, 'How other kind of beings see us matters,' especially if it is a jaguar. This matters not only because the jaguar can threaten us, however; it matters because in the return gaze of the jaguar, in this mutual encounter. 'We become something new.' We are able, for a moment, to live in a different nature.

The Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon protect their fields from marauding parrots by constructing scarecrows that look not like their own view of the parrots' main predator, a raptor, but that - by trial and error over many centuries - look like what they imagine the parrots' view of the raptor to be.

The implication is that plants are too far removed from us to trouble our ontology in the same way that animals can. A cat staring at Derrida is disconcerting in a way that a potted geranium is not.