scholarly journals Seeking Nietzsche’s Great Tree of Humanity: The Overhuman and Powers’s The Overstory

The Agonist ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-60
Author(s):  
Gary Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Ecological Situation ◽  
Mutual Dependence ◽  
Forest Clearing ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
Us West ◽  
Ecological Thinking ◽  
Human Position

This essay reconstructs Nietzsche’s ecological and environmental thought by focusing on his idea of the human-earth (Menschen-Erde) and his deep concern for the natural world. It then articulates these thoughts in a coordinate reading of Richard Powers’s environmentally focused novel The Overstory (2019). Nietzsche understands that the human position on the Earth is precarious and that we are in danger of injuring our fragile environmental surround. I attempt to clarify the contemporary relevance of this thought by showing how his diagnosis chimes with current ecological thinking. Nietzsche saw not only dangers but opportunities in the relation of humans to their environment. His writings as well as his daily life exhibit intense interest in trees and forests. He foresaw that too much forest clearing could endanger the climate, leading to excessive warming. Nietzsche also imagined that the humans might foster a “great tree of humanity” (WS 188-89), a green expansion of their environment, and Zarathustra anticipates living in the world as a garden (Z “The Convalescent”). Richard Powers’s The Overstory speaks to a time that is much more deeply informed about our precarious ecological situation. The novelist dramatizes this in a narrative that brings together a number of disparate individuals, drawn to defend an old-growth US West Coast forest from the state-supported depradations of industrial logging. These figures learn about “the secret life of trees,” their mutual dependence and communication, as they experiment with a new life high among the branches. Their different fates pose a variety of questions relevant to Nietzsche’s ideas for a transvalued Earth. 

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.

„Ludzie bezdomni” Stefana Żeromskiego jako prefiguracja współczesnej powieści ekologicznej

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 414-431
Author(s):  
Dariusz Piechota ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Rational Use ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Ecological Thinking

This article attempts to read Żeromski’s novel as a prefiguration of a contemporary ecological novel. The green reading of the writer’s work redirects readers’ attention towards non-human forms of life, introducing alternative optics for describing reality. The story of Tomasz Judym is tangled with the history of the natural world. While wandering around Paris, Warsaw, Cisy and Zagłębie, the protagonist notices the symptoms which prove the progressive degradation of the natural environment. As one of the few protagonists, he sees the destructive impact of industry on the natural environment. Judym is abandoning the anthropocentric perspective in favour of the biocentric one, making him more sensitive to the suffering of others, understood here as non-human inhabitants of the Earth. Nature is a self-regulating living organism, a powerful element whose contemplation can both delight and frighten. “Ludzie bezdomni” anticipates contemporary ecological thinking, which calls for rational use of earthly goods.

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 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.

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.

scholarly journals The Wind’s Prayer, the World’s Sabbath: Spirit and Place in Lance Henson and Wendell Berry

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 697
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Burkemper ◽  
David C. Mahan
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Activism ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Wendell Berry ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Being

Although a vast body of poetry celebrates the natural world and addresses issues concerning the environment, it can be overlooked in the discourses of environmental activism. In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the unique contributions that poetry makes to a thoughtful, and in this case, theological, engagement with our present environmental crises. Here, we create a conversation between two poets of two different religious traditions. Cheyenne poet Lance Henson’s poem “we are a people” reimagines humanity’s self-conception in light of earthly interconnectedness from the perspective of his own Native American spiritual sensibilities. Christian poet Wendell Berry’s poem “Sabbaths IV” (1983) relocates our understanding of Sabbath beyond its liturgical designations and practices, asking us to attend to “the true world’s Sabbath”. We offer close readings of these two poems that mark the distinctions that emerge from and interact with their respective theological visions, but also where they find common ground. Through this work of reading literature theologically, we argue that these poems both refine our attentiveness to the earth as the site of religious import and consequence, and call upon readers to enact other ways of being in the world amidst the climate catastrophe that are inspired by faith and spirituality.

scholarly journals Ecology and Society. Impacted Ecosystems. Part I

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
Marina Frontasyeva ◽  
Alexander Kamnev
Keyword(s):  
Social Indicators ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Exponential Population Growth ◽  
Great Acceleration ◽  
Economic And Social Indicators ◽  
Exponential Population

Abstract The Earth has existed for more than four billion years and has sustained life for three billion. Human beings have existed for just 200,000 years, yet our impact on the planet is so great that scientists around the world are calling for our period in the Earth’s history to be named ‘the Anthropocene’ - the age of humans. The changes we are now making have exacted a heavy toll on the natural world around us, and now threaten the planet’s ability to provide for us all. Problems of Ecology and Society in the new geological era as the Anthropocene - ‘the age of humans’ - are overviewed. The name is widely recognized as a useful classification of the period in which human activity has created and continues to generate deep and lasting effects on the Earth and its living systems. Examples of the interrelated effects of exponential population growth and massively expanding consumption of natural resources called Great Acceleration are given. Updated ‘planetary dashboard’ of environmental, economic and social indicators charts the trajectory of the Anthropocene are briefly summarized.

Epilogue: Ad Astra Per Aspera

2020 ◽  
pp. 188-200
Author(s):  
Adam Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Imago Dei ◽  
World Today ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Existential Concerns

What happens when the Anthropocene and the imago Dei become corroborative symbols in the astrobiological contexts that shape our engagement with the world today? My argument has been that, in the face of various instances of ecological crises, the Anthropocene symbolizes the existential concerns at stake in this devastation so that we better understand that our way of meaningfully orienting our existence toward the natural world is askew. To remember that we are the imago Dei can give us courage to stay with the trouble of this disorientation a moment longer and imaginatively play out new realities that confront the inevitable ecological devastations that have been wrought upon the earth.

Exiting Socialism Challenges

2006 ◽  
pp. 114-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Social Challenges ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
Municipal Economy

Exiting socialism by almost a third of the earth population appears to be the most prominent event of the late XX century. The author makes an attempt to formulate some challenges of this process and thus a theory of exiting socialism. First, he inquires into the concept of exiting socialism as it exists in the world. Then he analyzes real experiences in this field. The research enables the author to outline the main economic, governmental and social challenges of such exit - from municipal economy to science and culture.

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