An Ecology of Enchantment

An Ecology of Enchantment PDF Author: Des Kennedy
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 155365370X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
For the past 36 years, Des Kennedy and his family have lived largely outside their hand-built house in intimate contact with the Earth its creatures, its changing seasons, and its weather patterns. In this charming book s 52 chapters, Kennedybrings readers deep into his garden, week by week, from winter s dormancy to summer s splendor. With histrademark self-effacing humor, the author captures the essence of the gardening experience, exploring his triumphs, failures, mishaps, and occasional magic. Undaunted by setbacks andlusting for the perfect garden, Kennedy takes readers with him on a gardening journey rich with insights and adventures. The effects of devastating snow storms; the slow-food cuisine of rutabagas, parsnips, and carrots; the gardener's inalienable right to dress in rags; the outlandish behaviour and florid oratory induced by flowering poppies these and scores of other topics meander through the book's gardening year alternately informing, inspiring, and amusing."

An Ecology of Enchantment

An Ecology of Enchantment PDF Author: Des Kennedy
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 155365370X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the past 36 years, Des Kennedy and his family have lived largely outside their hand-built house in intimate contact with the Earth its creatures, its changing seasons, and its weather patterns. In this charming book s 52 chapters, Kennedybrings readers deep into his garden, week by week, from winter s dormancy to summer s splendor. With histrademark self-effacing humor, the author captures the essence of the gardening experience, exploring his triumphs, failures, mishaps, and occasional magic. Undaunted by setbacks andlusting for the perfect garden, Kennedy takes readers with him on a gardening journey rich with insights and adventures. The effects of devastating snow storms; the slow-food cuisine of rutabagas, parsnips, and carrots; the gardener's inalienable right to dress in rags; the outlandish behaviour and florid oratory induced by flowering poppies these and scores of other topics meander through the book's gardening year alternately informing, inspiring, and amusing."

Storytelling and Ecology

Storytelling and Ecology PDF Author: Anthony Nanson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350114944
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
'Finalist' in the PROSE Award (2022) for Language & Linguistics Awarded Honors at the Storytelling World Awards 2022 Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of alienation and disenchantment in modern society, this book investigates the capacity of oral storytelling to reconnect people to the natural world and enchant and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world. Anthony Nanson offers an in-depth examination of how a diverse ecosystem of oral stories and the dynamics of storytelling as an activity can catalyse different kinds of conversation and motivation, helping us resist the discourse of powerful vested interests. Detailed analysis of traditional, true-life and fictional stories shows how spoken narrative language can imbue landscapes, creatures and experiences with enchantment and mediate between the inner world of consciousness and outer world of ecology and community. A pioneering ecolinguistic and ecocritical study of oral storytelling in the modern world, Storytelling and Ecology offers insight into the ways that sharing stories in each other's embodied presence can open up spaces for transformation in our relationships with the ecological world around us.

Enchantment and Exploitation

Enchantment and Exploitation PDF Author: William DeBuys
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826308207
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This unusual book is a complete account of the closely linked natural and human history of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, a region unique in its rich combination of ecological and cultural diversity.

Vital Reenchantments

Vital Reenchantments PDF Author: Lauren Greyson
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192075
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Not all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy. Vital Reenchantments examines so-called cold philosophy, or science, that does precisely the opposite - rather than mercilessly emptying out and unweaving, it operates as a philosophy that animates. More specifically, Greyson closely examines how a specific group of "poet-in-scientists" of the late 1970s and 1980s directed attention to the "wondrous" unfolding of life, at a time when the counter-culture in particular had made the institution of science synonymous with technologies of alienation and destruction. In this vein, Vital Reenchantments takes up E.O. Wilson's Biophilia (1984), James Lovelock's Gaia (1979), and Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980), in order to show how each work fleshes out scientific concepts with a unique attention to "affective wonder," understood as the experience of and attunement to novel effects. What is so unique about these works is that they reenchant the scientific world without pandering to what Richard Dawkins will later term "cosmic sentimentality." Carl Sagan may have said "We are made of starstuff," but he would never insist, as Joni Mitchell did in 1969, that "we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." Instead, they insist on a third way that does not rely on the idea of an ecological Eden - a vigorously vital materialism in which the affective trumps the sentimental. Further, the historical emergence of these works, all published within 5 years of each other, was no accident: each book responded to an ever deepening sense of environmental crisis, certainly, but along with it they responded to, perhaps more than marginally related, narratives of the large-scale disenchantment brought on by modernity or science, and more often than not a mixture of the two. Greyson argues that the persistence of these works and their affectively-charged scientific concepts in contemporary popular culture and ecological thought is no accident. As such, these works deserve recognition as far more than "popular science" and can be seen as essential contributions to more contemporary vital materialist thought and ecological theory. No doubt this talk of enchantment and wonder, so tied to immediate experience, can seem trivial in the face of any number of environmental crises (global warming first among these) that do not just appear ominously on the horizon, but loom as never before. The first task of this book thus to pose the same question that Jane Bennett does at the end of her own work on enchantment: "How can someone write a book about enchantment in such a world?" Does this approach really provide, as Latour phrases it, "a way to bridge the distance between the scale of the phenomena we hear about and the tiny Umwelt inside which we witness, as if it were a fish inside its bowl, an ocean of catastrophes that are supposed to unfold"? Ultimately, Vital Reenchantments argues that affective ecologies, properly attended to, point toward an open present, one that broadens the horizons of the "fish bowl" and allows us to imagine engendering futures that are neither naively hopeful nor hopelessly apocalyptic.

The Enchantment of Modern Life

The Enchantment of Modern Life PDF Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884535
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Deep Time

Deep Time PDF Author: Anthony Nanson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781907359590
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Zoologist Dr Brendan Merlie has wasted his best years in futile pursuit of imaginary creatures. He's now leading a survey of an ecological hot-spot in a forgotten corner of Central Africa. Guided by the enigmatic Salome Boann, a woman strangely at ease in the rainforest, with her own reasons for being there, the team discover a "refugium" of prehistoric plant life. Among the forest people, they also hear rumors of animals unknown to science. Driven by civil war and their own competing desires, Brendan and his companions enter a shifting world in which they must come to terms with the wildness within as well as the wildness around them. The deeper they travel, the more is revealed, far beyond Brendan's wildest dreams...

The Enchanted Life

The Enchanted Life PDF Author: Sharon Blackie
Publisher: September Publishing
ISBN: 1910463892
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
A book of natural wonders, practical guidance and life-changing empowerment, by the author of the word-of-mouth bestseller If Women Rose Rooted. 'To live an enchanted life is to pick up the pieces of our bruised and battered psyches, and to offer them the nourishment they long for. It is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lies at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again.' The enchanted life has nothing to do with escapism or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belonging to a rich and many-layered world. It is creative, intuitive, imaginative. It thrives on work that has heart and meaning. It loves wild things, but returns to an enchanted home and garden. It respects the instinctive knowledge, ethical living and playfulness, and relishes story and art. Taking the inspiration and wisdom that can be derived from myth, fairy tales and folk culture, this book offers a set of practical and grounded tools for reclaiming enchantment in our lives, giving us a greater sense of meaning and of belonging to the world.

Feral

Feral PDF Author: George Monbiot
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022620555X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
As an investigative journalist, Monbiot found a mission in his ecological boredom, that of learning what it might take to impose a greater state of harmony between himself and nature. He was not one to romanticize undisturbed, primal landscapes, but rather in his attempts to satisfy his cravings for a richer, more authentic life, he came stumbled into the world of restoration and rewilding. When these concepts were first introduced in 2011, very recently, they focused on releasing captive animals into the wild. Soon the definition expanded to describe the reintroduction of animal and plant species to habitats from which they had been excised. Some people began using it to mean the rehabilitation not just of particular species, but of entire ecosystems: a restoration of wilderness. Rewilding recognizes that nature consists not just of a collection of species but also of their ever-shifting relationships with each other and with the physical environment. Ecologists have shown how the dynamics within communities are affected by even the seemingly minor changes in species assemblages. Predators and large herbivores have transformed entire landscapes, from the nature of the soil to the flow of rivers, the chemistry of the oceans, and the composition of the atmosphere. The complexity of earth systems is seemingly boundless."

Culture and Enchantment

Culture and Enchantment PDF Author: Mark A. Schneider
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226739274
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Max Weber viewed modern life as disenchanted, an arena from which scientific inquiry had banished magic. In contrast, Mark Schneider argues intriguingly that enchantment—the sense that we are confronted by inexplicable phenomena—persists in the world today, although it has shifted from the natural to the cultural arena. Culture and Enchantment shows that students of culture today operate in social and intellectual circumstances similar to those of seventeenth-century natural philosophers. Just as Newton was drawn to alchemy, scholars today are fascinated by ghostly and mercurial agents thought to account for the meanings of cultural entities. For interpretive disciplines, Schneider suggests, meaning often behaves behaves as mysteriously as the apparitions pursued by centuries ago by natural philosophers. He demonstrates this using two case studies from anthropology: Clifford Geertz's description of Balinese cockfights and Yoruba statuary, and Claude Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths. These provide a basis for actively engaging disputes over the meaning and interpretation of culture. Culture and Enchantment will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience in anthropology, sociology, history, history and sociology of science, culture studies, and literary theory. Schneider's provocative arguments will make this book a fulcrum in the continuing debate over the nature and prospects of cultural inquiry.

Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter

Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter PDF Author: Xin Wei Sha
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019515
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A groundbreaking conception of interactive media, inspired by continuity, field, and process, with fresh implications for art, computer science, and philosophy of technology. In this challenging but exhilarating work, Sha Xin Wei argues for an approach to materiality inspired by continuous mathematics and process philosophy. Investigating the implications of such an approach to media and matter in the concrete setting of installation- or event-based art and technology, Sha maps a genealogy of topological media—that is, of an articulation of continuous matter that relinquishes a priori objects, subjects, and egos and yet constitutes value and novelty. Doing so, he explores the ethico-aesthetic consequences of topologically creating performative events and computational media. Sha's interdisciplinary investigation is informed by thinkers ranging from Heraclitus to Alfred North Whitehead to Gilbert Simondon to Alain Badiou to Donna Haraway to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Sha traces the critical turn from representation to performance, citing a series of installation-events envisioned and built over the past decade. His analysis offers a fresh way to conceive and articulate interactive materials of new media, one inspired by continuity, field, and philosophy of process. Sha explores the implications of this for philosophy and social studies of technology and science relevant to the creation of research and art. Weaving together philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, mathematics, and media studies, he shows how thinking about the world in terms of continuity and process can be informed by computational technologies, and what such thinking implies for emerging art and technology.