Cohabiting Earth Seeking a Bright Future for All Life

By: Joe Gray(Editor), Eileen Crist(Editor), Stephanie Mills(Foreword By)

318 pages

Publisher: State University of New York Press

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About this book

This anthology argues that harmony between humanity and our home planet must be built on the pillars of restraint, respect, and reverence.

The eco-catastrophes that we are witnessing today starkly demonstrate how the interests of the Earth's currently dominant species are in lockstep with those of nature's wider whole. Simply stated, humans and the more-than-human world have a shared fate. Just as humanity's unrestrained overreach in the ecosphere is driving a mass extinction event and causing the devastation of lifeforms and places, so it is also jeopardising the prospect of a human future worth living. There is no "humans versus nature" tradeoff: the well-being of both is inseparably entwined. Solutions to the shared predicament of all Earth's beings will thus necessarily be those that strive for harmony between human presence and the rest of nature. This applies to the philosophy we adopt for agriculture, the ways in which human economies operate, our patterns of consumption, and numerous other intertwined threads of our existence.

Acknowledgments

Foreword / Stephanie Mills
Introduction: Undoing Earth's Humanization / Eileen Crist and Joe Gray

Section One: Restraint
1. Restoring Balance through Procreative Responsibility / Nandita Bajaj and Kirsten Stade
2. Restraint in Consumption / Luke Philip Plotica
3. Technologies Fit for an Ecological Future / John Michael Greer
4. Social Ecological Transformation of Economies: Where the Environmental Movement Went Wrong and What Is Needed / Clive L. Spash
5. Artful Descent: An Aesthetics of Existence / Samuel Alexander

Section Two: Respect
6. Is It the Call of the Wild... or of Deep Law? What Is the Moral Heart of Conservation? / Freya Mathews
7. Protecting, Restoring, and Rewilding Ecosystems / Reed F. Noss
8. Coexisting with Africa's Carnivores / Tarik Bodasing
9. For the Bounteous Beauty of the Living Seas / Eileen Crist
10. The Future of Food Production / Ryan D. Andrews
11. Human Identity, Oppression, and the Rigors of Hope / Chelsea Batavia
12. Respecting Nonhuman Life: The Guide for a Better Pathway in Outdoor Recreation / Joe Gray and Ian Whyte

Section Three: Reverence
13. Enchantment, Modernity, and Reverence for Nature / Patrick Curry
14. There Are Gods Here Too: For an Inhumanist Animal Aesthetics / Matthew Calarco
15. Rediscovering Tree Sentience and Our Reverence for Life / Simon Leadbeater and Helen Kopnina
16. Seeking Ecosocial Cultural Change: Boldly Going beyond Nature Deficit Disorder / Sean Blenkinsop
17. Gratitude Is a Way of Life / Kathleen Dean Moore

List of Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

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Biography

Joe Gray is an Associate Editor of The Ecological Citizen. Eileen Crist is Associate Professor Emerita of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.

By: Joe Gray(Editor), Eileen Crist(Editor), Stephanie Mills(Foreword By)

318 pages

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Media reviews

"Cohabiting Earth is a courageous book, both in the blunt assessment of the multiple cascading ecological/social crises we face and in the refusal to give up on efforts to make a better future. This eclectic collection of writers provides a roadmap of how we got here and where we need to go."
– Robert Jensen, School of Journalism and Media, University of Texas at Austin, coauthor of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

"There is no shortage of anthologies on environmental ethics and even on ecocentrism. That said, there is a real freshness and vitality in Cohabiting Earth. I consistently found myself excited to try this volume out in my Environmental Ethics courses. I think my students would greatly benefit from and enjoy it."
– Brian G. Henning, author of Value, Beauty, and Nature: The Philosophy of Organism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Environmental Ethics

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