reading log: cry of the wild

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 ## 2026-04-30
 
+### @{cry-of-the-wild}
+
+There were three epigraphs, one a 2016 report from the World Economic Forum
+estimating that ocean plastic would outweigh fish by 2050, alongside the second,
+quoting Rom 8:19,22 in both Greek and NRSV, which features the word 'apocalypse'
+and apocalyptic imagination, the creation groaning in expectation.
+
+The introduction had interesting reflections on the role of imagination in green
+issues. 'I don't believe in climate change.' It's too big to imagine, I'm numbed
+to catastrophic news and forecasts. 'Yes, it's very bad. Yes, we're all going to
+die. Pass the salt, please. How's your homework going, Rachel?' He says: 'This
+exhaustion of our intellect, our compassion and our capacity for alarm is
+desperately dangerous. Only imagination can reignite them. And only story [...]
+can do the necessary imaginative job. We're dying for want of a story.' This
+book presents 'new-old stories of the natural world from the perspective of the
+besieged.'
+
+So Foster's goal is to restore his readers' capacity to be alarmed, presumably
+by descriptions of present or future catastrophes. He thinks that many of his
+readers are no longer (implicitly: once were) capable of being alarmed by such
+news and forecasts.
+
+I focused on the story of Eeschin the orca. A few observations:
+
+First, the story describes a kind of apocalypse. It is the end of Eeschin's
+world, the end of her clan, the death of her people. It uses apocalyptic
+symbols, particularly plague and judgement. It is in the secular apocalyptic
+tradition in which there is no world-transformation at the end, but the
+catastrophe is final, there is no future after the catastrophe.
+
+Secondly, Eeschin can endure the end of her world and 'did not panic', because
+she has stories that enable her to make meaning out of her loss ('This could not
+have been borne unless it was turned into an epic'), and because she has a
+non-dominating, engaged relationship with the world ('She lived in a world that
+really existed'). It's possible that the apocalyptic end of her world revealed
+what it was that she really needed: her stories and her relationship with the
+world.
+
+It was very moving and made me damp at the eyes. It serves as an example of how
+someone might face an apocalypse with resilience. However, it is different than
+the rhetorical strategy of typical apocalypses, because the apocalypse is not
+one the reader is facing or may face, even imaginatively: it is someone else's
+apocalypse.
+
 ### @{forget-me-not}
 
 The climate crisis has already arrived, and it may soon be 'too late to turn