Conserving Active Matter: Activating Conservation? Review of Conserving Active Matter, edited by Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh (Bard Graduate Centre, 2022, distributed by the University of Chicago Press)

“..We have to conserve because conservation is innate to human nature. We’re pack rats. We pile things up. We collect. We save. We hoard. Why do we do this? Because we’ve learned that we need to save in order to survive. We store up food and clothing and other goods to survive physically. We store up skills and habits and memories to survive socially,” contended the cultural geographer and heritage scholar David Lowenthal in his Harvard Baxter lecture in 2014. He subsequently countered, “… nothing survives forever, the notion of keeping anything forever is a counter-productive delusion. We need instead to focus on how things change over their finite life-spans.” I was fortunate to share a few moments with the late Lowenthal in his London apartment, when he, his wife and I mused over dinner about the notions of permanence and change. His books, like his thoughts, resonated with me again and again while I was reading Conserving Active Matter, a considerable volume edited by Peter Miller and Soon Kai Poh within the Bard Graduate Center’s Cultural Histories of the Material World series.