Hi, I’m Morgan Conover. I enjoy being in nature and writing about it. I started Demure Owl in January 2022 to tell stories from the natural world and to record my thoughts and observations about plants, animals, fungi, rocks, and other non-person beings and our culture’s relationships to them.
Below are a few of my founding principles.
Paying attention, being curious
“I suspect our symbol-wielding intelligence is a manifestation of the creative, shaping energy that drives the cosmos, from the dance of electrons to the growth of trees. If this is so, then our highest calling may be to composition—paying attention to some portion of the world, reflecting on what we have perceived, and fashioning a response in words or numbers or paint or song or some other expressive medium. Our paintings on cave walls, our photos of quasars, our graphs and sonnets and stories may be the gifts we return for the privilege of sojourning here on this marvelous globe.” —Scott Russell Sanders, “Mind in the Forest”
“I’ve learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.” —Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
The foundational ethos of this publication is two things: paying attention and being curious.
The idea for this newsletter (or blog—call it what you will) came about when I began to notice moss in sidewalk cracks during my morning commute into Washington, D.C. about five years ago. I was inspired by the moss’s insistence to live, and the way it tucked itself so neatly into each little crevice and thrived there, cradled by concrete. My curiosity about the sidewalk moss led me to a book called Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. The book prompted me to begin nature walks in the woods of my family’s farm in rural West Virginia. With each step, I became more enamored with miniature life forms—the mosses, the lichens, the bright caps of mushrooms, and how they fit together in a mosaic on the forest floor.
In a very real sense, my newly focused attention revealed a new world to me. I gained a deeper appreciation of the beings that I noticed and pondered because I could name them. Knowing their names was the first step in regaining a sense of connection with them. In the present culture of the United States and other “Western” countries, people can name more brands by their logo than can name trees by their leaves. This is a big problem, especially in our present predicament of severe environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. If humans are to survive the next few hundred years, we would be greatly aided in survival by knowing our fellow species and learning to live in reciprocity with them.
Cultivating awareness of nature is the seed of responsibility because we can only save the species within our awareness. Scientists estimate that we have only discovered about a fifth of all species on Earth. Imagine, at our continued pace of consumption, how many of those undiscovered species will fade into oblivion without any humans noticing. That tragedy is unfolding as I write this. Paying attention and being curious about what we see is the first step in shifting our minds to awareness of fellow beings in nature.
All beings in nature have intrinsic value
Our culture often views nature for its economic or use value. For example, the value of trees are assessed by the worth of their wood or how much they increase property value. They are not always valued for the fact that they provide oxygen, improve air quality, conserve water, preserve soil and guard against erosion, and support wildlife (although this may be shifting, exemplified in movements such as Trillion Trees and #teamtrees).
One of my aims with Demure Owl is to combine modern science with indigenous ways of knowing. In indigenous ways of knowing, all beings in nature have intrinsic value and are recognized as non-human persons. In this instance, “beings” includes all life forms encompassed in the three domains of the tree of life: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya; as well as non-living beings, such as rocks and water. I say “beings” because there’s no appropriate words in English to describe them, especially the non-living beings.
I believe there’s room for both science and indigenous ways of knowing. They help inform and complement each other, and together enhance our understanding of the natural world. There is too much to learn to set one aside.
Humans aren’t exempt from nature
This isn’t a philosophical concept, it’s a scientific one. Even for all our uniqueness among species, humans remain at the mercy of ecological principles, such as: (i) resources are finite on Earth; (ii) nothing truly disappears when we throw it away—all materials in the biosphere (natural or not) can be rearranged and recycled (or not, such as in the case of plastics and some chemicals which persist in the environment); (iii) all systems are ultimately (and often intimately) interconnected; and (iv) nature has evolved over hundreds of millions of years into a stable ecosystem, and humans are disrupting beyond what’s sustainable. Current human interference with the non-human world is excessive and beyond vital needs.
Why ad-free writing matters
“I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me as face-to-face individuals, but to those who never show their face, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested by mechanized means.” —Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
“And most of all, I hope [this book] can help people find ways of connecting that are substantive, sustaining, and absolutely unprofitable to corporations, whose metrics and algorithms have never belonged in the conversations we have about our thoughts, our feelings, and our survival.” —Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Consider Demure Owl a refuge for fractured attention spans. Second to time, your attention is the most precious commodity you have. Just like time and Earth’s resources, it’s finite. The places of the Internet unclaimed by corporations and businesses hawking their products and services are fewer every day. Whether or not they would like to admit it, the media sites supporting themselves through advertisements are beholden to their advertisers.
That’s why I chose Substack for Demure Owl, and that’s why your support matters. This is a place for the public good, rather than a place for more commerce and capital. By subscribing to the newsletter, you support my ability to continue this essential work without our attention being co-opted by the frenzy of online ads and paid promotions.
If these principles resonated with you, welcome to a club defined by caring for the Earth and rejecting predominant ideas about what matters in this world. Subscribe to Demure Owl if you’d like to cultivate awareness of the marvelous diversity on our little planet.
Below is a list of books that helped shape these principles in my mind. Discover them for yourself:
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
Earth Works: Selected Essays by Scott Russell Sanders
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Crossing Open Ground by Barry Lopez
Deep Ecology for the 21st Century edited by George Sessions
Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyches by Bill Plotkin
All photos by me unless stated otherwise.