scholarly journals Language-ing the Earth: Experiential Renewal for a Relationally Sensitive Environmentalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-56
Author(s):  
Patrick Howard
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Living World ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World

This paper investigates human relationship with the larger living landscape that is grounded in experiential renewal. Phenomenology is antithesis to the process of abstraction and objectification through which the world as we experience it is diminished by conceptualization and categorization. Recent studies to understand the natural world as a hermeneutic text offers important reflections on the human mediation of the meaning of the more-than-human-world and assists in understanding the implications of our encounters with the world. Phenomenology, however, is unique in its capacity to bring to expression, rather than silencing, our relationship with the natural world and our human inherency in it. This paper explores phenomenologically sensate reciprocity as it is encountered in lived experience. Through deepening our attunement for our embodied integration in a living world we may relearn and restore a capacity to dwell more thoughtfully with newfound sensitivity, respect, and restraint in the ecosystems on which we wholly depend.

‘Connective Leaps’: Sightlines and The Overhaul

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Gairn
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Human Dwelling ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Vital Element

The Overhaul and Sightlines extend Jamie’s call for attentive, observational writing; what she describes as a “new kind of work that renegotiate[s] our place in the natural world.” This involves not only revisiting our human relationship with “wild” nature, but also acknowledging ourselves as a species with its own natural history: a locus of nature as well as culture. The question of home and belonging is thus an enduring theme in Jamie’s work. Jamie’s keen observations of nature, place and people recognise the limitations as well as the potential of human dwelling in the natural world. Rejecting romanticism, she suggests that while we are certainly capable of appreciating the transcendent in nature, we are also “animal bodies” (Sightlines 5), “a species […] hoping for the marvellous” (The Overhaul 3) who encounter the world through the physical as much as the aesthetic. This chapter considers The Overhaul and Sightlines as explorations in ecopoetics, searching for alternative ways of negotiating our relationship with the natural world. These two collections interrogate the writer’s ability to restore a “sense of ourselves as creatures”, the vital element of reconnection with the more-than-human world which Gaston Bachelard identified as one of poetry’s greatest gifts.

Tending this Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: The Pope's Encyclical in Dialogue with Ecomimesis, a Design Model for Conservation Stewardship

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Pollution ◽  
Anthropogenic Impact ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
World Population ◽  
Natural Ecosystem ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.

The Animistic Way: Contemporary Paganism and the Posthuman

Poligrafi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Victoria Dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Paganism

This article aims to explore the affinities between contemporary Paganism and the posthuman project in how they approach the non-human natural world. On the one hand, posthumanism explores new ways of considering the notion of humans and how they are linked with the non-human world. On the other hand, Neopaganism expands this reflection to the spiritual domain through its animistic relational sensibility. Both perspectives challenge the modern paradigm where nature and humans are opposed and mutually disconnected. They instead propose a relational ontology that welcomes the “different other.” This integrated relationship between humans and the “other than human” can be understood through the semiotic Chora, a notion belonging to Julia Kristeva that addresses how the subject is not symbolically separated from the world in which it is contained.

Using Spreadsheets to Simulate an Evolving Population

2017 ◽  
Vol 79 (8) ◽  
pp. 635-643
Author(s):  
Ryan E. Langendorf ◽  
Paul K. Strode
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Science Teachers ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Biology Teachers ◽  
Arbitrary Degree ◽  
Google Docs ◽  
Living World ◽  
The World

Biology teachers inevitably struggle with how best to teach evolution. Students arrive in their classrooms with preconceptions, many of which are overwhelmingly skeptical, and science teachers are increasingly being pressured to adhere to an arbitrary degree of objectivity that makes discussing scientific worldviews challenging. These challenges have resulted in evolution being taught largely as a series of explanations for questions arising from observations of the living world. In so doing, students may not have a chance to grapple with the worldview that produced those explanations, or develop a more mechanistic intuition for inheritance and change in the world they see around themselves. Here we put forth all the tools necessary for a class to build a simulation of an evolving population experiencing natural selection from scratch in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Not only will this activity help students experiment with the natural world more mechanistically, but it will also allow them to learn as actual evolutionary biologists do.

Inference Towards the Best Explanation: Reflections on the Issue of Climate Change

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Qualitative Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Main Factor ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

Science is an organized enterprise of inquiry which tries to tie together multiple strands of evidence to craft coherent explanations for disparate patterns in the natural world. Philosophers call this enterprise “inference towards the best explanation”. Such inferences at times depend upon detailed quantitative models, but at times one can rely upon the confluence of multiple strands of qualitative evidence. Humans are having unquestionable influences upon many aspects of the earth system at present, on land, in freshwater systems, and indeed the ocean, including devastating impacts on biodiversity. There are many patterns in the world at present – shrinking glaciers, shifting seasonal patterns in species’ life histories, and altered spatial distributions – which point to the signal of climate change, independent of the details of quantitative climate models. Yet, there are many other factors at play, often confounding clear assessment of the specific role of climate change in observed changes in the world. A deeper synoptic understanding of the drivers and impacts of climate change would be incredibly valuable and is urgently needed, even if in the end (though this seems increasingly unlikely) anthropogenic drivers were not the main factor underlying observed climate change.

scholarly journals Governing the Anthropocene

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Delanty ◽  
Aurea Mota
Keyword(s):  
Human Science ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Temporal Shift ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Object Of Knowledge

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.

scholarly journals Marx and Ecology

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Николайчук ◽  
Olga Nikolaychuk
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Energy ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Energy Research ◽  
Alternative Energy Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World

The article presents the study of the heritage of Karl Marx and attempts to apply his views to the modern problems. On the basis of the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, and of the multidisciplinary approach it was be able to trace the urgent need and the ability to achieve the «humanization» of relations of the natural world in the human world. Not by chance 2017 is called the Year of the Environment. Alternative energy research problem will always remain relevant and new. Based on the study of foreign experience in the use of alternative energy sources, we investigated the prospects for the use of energy resources in the world in general and in Russia in particular.

Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal

Contemporary Scottish Writers and the Natural World examines the work of four Scottish poets – John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White – in the light of philosophical considerations of the subject’s relation to the natural world and environmental thought. Drawing in particular on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment and Martin Heidegger on dwelling, the study explores the organic intimate interrelation between the self and the world, including human and non-human relations. The poets’ work is discussed in the context of the main premises of the phenomenological tradition that address the self’s relation with the world, focusing in particular on the sense of place, the vegetal and animal worlds, and foregrounding the dialogue between poetics, the subject and the landscape. The study considers a chiasmic human-non-human animal intertwining as particularly important in the poetry because of its lived experience of the world. Proposing a theoretically-informed discussion, which includes various modes of ecocritical apprehension, it analyses the subject’s perception of intimacy with the materiality of the natural world and the role of language in the registration of perceptual experience as explored in contemporary Scottish poetry.

Kūkai and Dōgen as Exemplars of Ecological Engagement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Parkes
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
The World ◽  
Responsible Manner

The current environmental crisis is largely due to a particular conception of the human relationship to nature. Common in anthropocentric traditions of Western thought, this view depicts human beings as separate from, and superior to, all other beings in the natural world. Traditional East Asian understandings of this relationship are quite different and remarkably unanthropocentric, especially as exemplified in the ideas of Chinese Daoism and Japanese Buddhism. The human-nature relationship in the philosophies of Kūkai (aka Kōbō Daishi, 774–835) and Dōgen (1200–1253) offers a notion of somatic practice designed to bring about a transformation of experience. Both thinkers advocate philosophy as a way of life that can help us to engage the world in an ecologically responsible manner.

scholarly journals The Poet’s “Caressive Sight:” Denise Levertov’s Transactions with Nature

Text Matters ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 145-152
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Poks
Keyword(s):  
Nature Poetry ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Holistic Perception ◽  
Human World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Sense Of Wonder ◽  
The Way ◽  
Denise Levertov

The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday.

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