“Your neighbourhood takes on a new feeling when you learn your neighbours’ names and work together to stop an eviction, or pick up prescriptions for vulnerable residents.” Surely, Odell argues, this is a case where doing nothing, where leaving the site with its rich historical, cultural, and emotional significance, is better than the supposedly productive activity of building identikit condos on top of it? A similar area to the west of this is now under threat of being turned into a huge building development. It has been paved over and is now a car park for a fish restaurant. There is a burial site in the city, known as the Berkeley site, which contains burials thousands of years old that might signify the first-ever human habitation of the area.

Her writing is deeply informed by her life in San Francisco, acknowledging her use of land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, and drawing from their ecological knowledge to inform her thoughts on bioregionalism and dismantling systems of oppression. The joy she finds in nature is infectious she takes John Cage’s approach to sound, that everything we hear is music, and applies it to every facet of day-to-day living. She wants us to revel in the natural world around us, in the people that shaped our landscapes, and to question it in a way that helps us find out where and when we live.

She explains the ways in which our attention is monopolised by a capitalist economy, and by a world that is increasingly and addictively online.

The meaning of what it is to do nothing is challenged throughout the book, as Odell draws from her work in art and technology, her love of the natural world, the knowledge of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, and from recent scientific research to challenge your sense of who you are and how you relate to the world around you. Odell’s book is full of unusual case studies and references to artists like Ukeles, which bring her philosophical and practical questions to life. In a proposal for a show called ‘Care’, she aimed to explore personal levels of care by performing household chores in the art museum, and caring for the earth through recycling piles of rubbish, presumably delivered to the museum by her colleagues at the sanitation department. For example, did you know that the New York sanitation department has an artist in residence? Her name is Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and she makes feminist artworks that centre maintenance work (domestic chores, tending to plants, fixing clothes, mending bikes) as something that is artistically valuable. It is more of a rave, a worship, an expression of how many passages I highlighted and the amount of new artists, technologies, and plants I googled while reading this book.

How to do nothing jenny odell review