I have a jungle. Not a tropical jungle – just a small, temperate forest jungle in Devon, South West England. It started out 25 years ago as a vegetable garden next to our cottage at Schumacher College when I first came here after almost three years of work as an ecologist in Costa Rica, ...
The scholar of Native American literature on the vivid tradition of Haida poetry. Robert Bringhurst is a poet, linguist, translator, and essayist who has championed, in a series of remarkable books and lectures, the literary heritage of Native American culture. He’s made it his calling to enroll oral mythtelling in the canon of world literature, ...
Introduction At first sight, science and animism appear to be irreconcilable. Whereas over the last four centuries science has held sway with the view that nature is nothing more than a vast lifeless mechanism that can be understood and controlled by means of experiment and detached analytical reasoning, ‘animists’, in their various guises ...
pages 4—8: Is it possible to grow a worthy cosmology by attending closely to our encounters with other creatures, and with the elemental textures and contours of our locale? We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of ...
Written back and forth over the course of a couple weeks, this dialog follows two thinkers, one a Canadian professor of education, the other an American philosopher and cultural ecologist, as they wander through some traditionally abstract terrain, trying not to lose touch with their animal bodies in the course of their cogitations. David Abram: Greetings, ...
Derrick Jensen: I’d like to start with two questions that might actually be one. They are: Is the natural world alive? And second, what is magic? David Abram: Is there really anything that is not alive? Certainly we are alive, and if we assume that the natural world is in some sense not alive, it ...
Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, ...
The Gaia hypothesis represents a unique moment in scientific thought: the first glimpse, from within the domain of pure and precise science, that this planet might best be described as a coherent, living entity. The hypothesis itself arose in an attempt to make sense of certain anomalous aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere. It suggests that ...
Many scientists and theorists claim that the Gaia hypothesis is merely a fancy name for a set of interactions, between organisms and their presumably inorganic environment, that have long been known to science. Every high school student is familiar with the fact that the oxygen content of the atmosphere is dependent on the photosynthetic activity ...
…the whole of nature is the setting of our own life, and our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Ted Toadvine(1) is an attentive scholar of the phenomenological movement, with an abiding interest in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His approach to phenomenology is considerably more conservative than my own, ...