Telling about animal lives
I'm talking about life stories, because every living being tells a story, a story that understands the ones of whom she needs to live & die with. Therefore the orchid, which understood the male bee by adopting the assets of what the flower imagine to be the female bee. [...]
Stories aren't just telling something, they are making worlds exist & invite us to understand them. [...]
Vinciane Depret, Que diraient les animaux si... on leur posait les bonnes questions? (2012)
Stories help us to make history differently.
The myth of modern science is to seek to penetrate the secret, to discover the code of nature, to elucidate the supposed "mechanisms" or the supposed "programming".
But the evolution of species, ecology and ethology show us how the living, far from being able to be known by a simple law, weaves complex histories: in the progressive transformations of species, in the behavior of individuals, in singular relations of the living to their environment.
Ecology is a science of singular beings and not of universal equations, a science of observation rather than of experimentation. As such, it collects data that not only fills tables, but produces a form of universal and vernacular knowledge: stories. What if life sciences basically consisted of collecting the stories the world tells us?
Wildproject - Thoughts of Ecology (2021)
We would compound the Cartesian epistemological error if we ignored (or forgot) that the world already has its own stories.
Deborah Bird Rose, Towards ecological humanities (2004)
Dans un inventaire saisissant de ses gouts litteraires, Emmay Bovary declare: "j'adore les histoires qui se suivent tout d'une haleine, ou l'on a peur. Je deteste les heros communs, et les sentiments temperes. Comme il y en a dans la nature."
"Communs ? " "Temperes" Comment la Nature en est elle venue a etre associee a de tels mots?
Amitav Ghosh, Domesticated imagination (2016)
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