“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
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One congratulations on the award. Two apropos sci fi Jeff VanderMeer posted this and it reminded me of you. "Jeff VanderMeer: Fiction has a growing problem with nature as we enter farther into this slow apocalypse—neither raw nor cooked—precisely because fiction has for the most part failed to find the distance from the human or from the individual to address issues involving the environment while still being accessible. Accessibility is only one attribute fiction might require for a readership, but it particularly pertains here because even if it is a fool's hope, writers have to believe their words mean something, convey a kind of truth, and are somehow relevant to the moment--or at least not indifferent to it. This task is made more difficult because the real, non-fictional world contains so many examples, on a daily basis, of casual cruelty and thoughtlessness codified as practicality or reasonable behavior or even, in the worst examples, a twisted kind of empathy regarding aspects of the environment and the animals that populate that environment. These unexamined assumptions become agitprop for status quo—and in so doing makes it more difficult for writers, myself included, to even see the basic outlines of their surroundings. – from essay in progress"
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