We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.
Jeff VanderMeerThe map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
Jeff VanderMeerOnce you realize there's less logic in human institutions than you once thought, you see the narrative potential in just about everything around you. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the human world runs on inefficiency and erratic behavior.
Jeff VanderMeerNothing that lived and breathed was truly objectiveโeven in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
Jeff VanderMeerIt should be totally fine to question the objectivity of scientists and the power structures in scientific institutions. The physical laws of the universe are objective, but human beings in any context are not. That includes with regard to science. To some extent, the supposed objectivity of science has given a lot of extra cover to very subjective and eccentric approaches to exploring aspects of ourselves and the universe around us.
Jeff VanderMeer