Every solid thing, whether a toothpick or a trumpet, a porcelain plate or a helicopter, is fashioned from materials once birthed by the earth. Regardless of how profoundly they have been alchemized in the laboratory, the matter that gleams or sleeps in our creations—the stuff that lends its dull density or its porous whimsy to our tools and our machines, to our chairs and our computer screens—retains some trace of its old ancestry in the wombish earth, some memory of an age when it was not fashioned by an exterior will but bodied forth out of strain and exuberance.
David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology