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Author: William Bryant Logan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393083845
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
In a sublime exploration of the most unpredictable element of the earth, William Bryant Logan opens our eyes to the astonishing physics, chemistry, biology, history, art, and even music of the air. Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn’s awareness of its mother’s breast—all take place in the medium of air. Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly “safe” air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan’s work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is—like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle—a treasure trove of discovery.
Author: William Bryant Logan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393083845
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a sublime exploration of the most unpredictable element of the earth, William Bryant Logan opens our eyes to the astonishing physics, chemistry, biology, history, art, and even music of the air. Air sustains the living. Every creature breathes to live, exchanging and changing the atmosphere. Water and dust spin and rise, make clouds and fall again, fertilizing the dirt. Twenty thousand fungal spores and half a million bacteria travel in a square foot of summer air. The chemical sense of aphids, the ultraviolet sight of swifts, a newborn’s awareness of its mother’s breast—all take place in the medium of air. Ignorance of the air is costly. The artist Eva Hesse died of inhaling her fiberglass medium. Thousands were sickened after 9/11 by supposedly “safe” air. The African Sahel suffers drought in part because we fill the air with industrial dusts. With the passionate narrative style and wide-ranging erudition that have made William Bryant Logan’s work a touchstone for nature lovers and environmentalists, Air is—like the contents of a bag of seaborne dust that Darwin collected aboard the Beagle—a treasure trove of discovery.
Author: William Bryant Logan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393609421
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing "This deeply nourishing book invites us to reclaim reciprocity with the living world." —Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass Once, farmers and rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls, and baskets. Townspeople felled their beeches to make charcoal to fuel ironworks. Shipwrights shaped oaks to make hulls. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again. Pruning the trees didn’t destroy them. Rather, it created the healthiest, most sustainable and diverse woodlands that we have ever known. Arborist William Bryant Logan offers us both practical knowledge about how to live with trees to mutual benefit and hope that humans may again learn what the persistence and generosity of trees can teach. He recovers the lost tradition that sustained human life and culture for ten millennia.
Author: Anne Elvey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056769514X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Winner of the 2023 ANZATS Award for the Best Monograph by an Established Scholar Applying a re-envisioned, ecological, feminist hermeneutics, this book builds on two important responses to twentieth- and twenty-first-century situations of ecological trauma, especially the complex contexts of climate change and cross-species relations: first, ecological feminism; second, ecological hermeneutics in the Earth Bible tradition. By way of readings of selected biblical texts, this book suggests that an ecological feminist aesthetic, bringing present situation and biblical text into conversation through engagement with activism and literature, principally poetry, is helpful in decolonizing ethics. Such an approach is both informed by and speaks back to the new materialism in ecological criticism.
Author: Ruth Magdalene
Publisher: Blue Rose Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Elemental Ecocriticism: An in-depth exploration of the intricate relationship between nature and human existence through the lenses of four visionary poets. This book delves into the macro- and micro-level injustices inflicted upon the elements of nature, as conveyed through systematically crafted narratives. Through the poetical verses of these four poets, the principles and features of the elements are showcased, highlighting their importance for human ecstasy and existence. A must-read for those seeking a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between humanity and the natural world.
Author: William Bryant Logan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393327787
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Explores the role that the oak tree has played throughout history and in shaping the modern world.
Author: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452945675
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.
Author: Wes Scoop Nisker
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619027690
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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Book Description
Wes “Scoop” Nisker is an award-winning broadcast journalist and commentator, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher, a best selling author and a captivating performer. In How to be an Earthling, Wes draws on his diverse experiences delivering a collection that brims with the insight, humor and wisdom he is famous for. Compiling for the first time, Wes’ best known essays as well as a selection of recent and never before published work, Wes takes readers on both a cultural journey (a tour through the sixties, through the modern environmental movement, the surge of Buddhism to the West) and a more personal one, exploring the motivation behind humanity’s search for spiritual enlightenment.
Author: Caren Yglesias
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786470801
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This book is about materials. The fundamental properties and technical aspects are reviewed within a context of a material's history, the theories of its meaning and making, and its use. Information about the sustainability aspects of each material is included (as a critical necessity in construction). Innovative design comes from an understanding of materials for what they are, how they have been used in the past, and how they can support human activity. The author provides essential information to students and professionals concerned with advancing their design at a time when the consumption of natural resources and the consequences of wasteful practices are of urgent concern. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Author: Jason Goroncy
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666706884
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
This book explores the vital role of the imagination in today’s complex climates—cultural, environmental, political, racial, religious, spiritual, intellectual, etc. It asks: What contribution do the arts make in a world facing the impacts of globalism, climate change, pandemics, and losses of culture? What wisdom and insight, and orientation for birthing hope and action in the world, do the arts offer to religious faith and to theological reflection? These essays, poems, and short reflections—written by art practitioners and academics from a diversity of cultures and religious traditions—demonstrate the complex cross-cultural nature of this conversation, examining critical questions in dialogue with various art forms and practices, and offering a way of understanding how the human imagination is formed, sustained, employed, and expanded. Marked by beauty and wonder, as well as incisive critique, it is a unique collection that brings unexpected voices into a global conversation about imagining human futures.
Author: Richard Hamblyn
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237707
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Clouds have been objects of delight and fascination throughout human history, their fleeting magnificence and endless variety having inspired scientists and daydreamers alike. Described by Aristophanes as “the patron goddesses of idle men,” clouds and the ever-changing patterns they create have long symbolized the restlessness and unpredictability of nature, and yet they are also the source of life-giving rains. In this book, Richard Hamblyn examines clouds in their cultural, historic, and scientific contexts, exploring their prevalence in our skies as well as in our literature, art, and music. As Hamblyn shows, clouds function not only as a crucial means of circulating water around the globe but also as a finely tuned thermostat regulating the planet’s temperature. He discusses the many different kinds of clouds, from high, scattered cirrus clouds to the plump thought-bubbles of cumulus clouds, even exploring man-made clouds and clouds on other planets. He also shows how clouds have featured as meaningful symbols in human culture, whether as ominous portents of coming calamities or as ethereal figures giving shape to the heavens, whether in Wordsworth’s poetry or today’s tech speak. Comprehensive yet compact, cogent and beautifully illustrated, this is the ultimate guidebook to those shapeshifters of the sky.
