// Day 2: DISTURBANCE + NOTICING

"Humanists, not used to thinking with disturbance, connect the term with damage. But disturbance, as used by by ecologists, is not always bad - and not always human. Human disturbance is not unique in its ability to stir up ecological relations. Furthermore, as a beginning, disturbance is always in the middle of things: the term does not refer us to a harmonious state before disturbance. Disturbances follow other disturbances. Thus all landscapes are disturbed; disturbance is ordinary. But this does not limit the term. Raising the question of disturbance does not cut off discussion but opens it, allowing us to explore landscape dynamics. Whether a disturbance is bearable or unbearable is a question worked out through what follows it: the reformation of assemblages."
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, p. 160.