Robin Wall Kimmerer holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Botany, and a Ph.D. in Ecology. She is also a member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In Sweetgrass she beautifully braids Western scientific and American Indian spiritual epistemologies into a unified evolutionary-ecological worldview of reciprocity between the human and more-than-human worlds. Braiding Sweetgrass proves that the sketch of that worldview by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, underwritten by Western science, that worldview has for far longer been underwritten by Indigenous ways of knowing
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
Delia Owens’s Crawdads was a smashing success as both a novel (her first) and a motion picture. ’Buked, beaten, and scorned by her feckless father, abandoned by her mother and older siblings, an illiterate girl of ten lives alone on the marshy coast of North Carolina. Befriended by a boy who teaches her to read with the compelling prose of A Sand County Almanac, Kya comes to see her world through the eyes of its author, Aldo Leopold. Kya and Tate grow up and fall in love, but he goes off to college—and she is again abandoned. She becomes a renowned naturalist, artist, and author, but falls sexual prey to a scoundrel, who winds up dead. It’s a murder mystery, but also a story of triumph and a beautiful portrayal of an environment often as reviled by polite society as its once feral celebrant.
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For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…
Although a work of fiction, Demon Copperhead is a truer hillybilly elegy than the book of that title. Barbara Kingsolver’s tale of a boy named Damon, born of a drug- and alcohol-addicted teenaged mother and a copperheaded predeceased father, tracks the storyline of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Copperfield is set in the urban wasteland of Victorian London, Copperhead in the rural wasteland of American Coal Country, where the author herself resides. Conflict with a stepdad lands Demon in foster care and passed around from one exploiter of the system to another. As David finds eventual success as a writer, so does Demon as a cartoonist. And here too there is a Leopold connection. Kingsolver was contracted by Oxford University Press to write the Introduction to the latest edition of A Sand County Almanac. In a noble effort to make Leopold relatable to her elite-phobic neighbors, she stoops to ignoble misrepresentation of the facts. She insinuates that Leopold lived in his rural shack and commuted to his university office in Madison driving a pickup truck—such efforts risibly undermined by having him hunting ducks with a rifle. In fact, Leopold characterizes the shack as “a weekend refuge” and archival photos reveal his ride to be a black Ford sedan. And hillbillies for sure know you shoot waterfowl with a shotgun.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
Greek Natural Philosophy presents the primary sources on the Presocratics in a straightforward way in order to tell a coherent story about the astonishing development of natural philosophy in ancient Greece and its relevance today.
The book begins with historical influences on the birth of natural philosophy, especially literacy and the ecosystem services provided by the natural environment of ancient Greece. It argues that the individual philosophers' thoughts about the nature of the cosmos, living things, humankind, and human culture were linked by a "diachronic dialectic of ideas." Each philosopher's speculations were subjected to a critique by the next generation who crafted more subtle theories.
The dialectical transition is traced from the mythopoeic worldview of Hesiod to the rational worldview of Thales and his Milesian successors, followed by Xenophanes and Heraclitus, then Parmenides and his Eleatic successors, and the qualitative pluralisms of Anaxagoras and Empedocles. An entirely fresh interpretation is provided of the Atomists and later Pythagoreans, whose work culminated in the ideas upon which Galileo, Newton, and the other architects of modern science, continued to build.
In the span of only two centuries, the Presocratics developed the basic principles of philosophy and natural science, ecology, mathematical astronomy, the atomic theory of matter, an inertial theory of motion, and the possibility that our solar system is only one of infinitely many scattered throughout infinite time and space.
The concluding chapter traces natural philosophy through subsequent centuries until its abandonment in 20th century philosophy, leading to the moribund state of philosophy by the end of that century. The authors show how environmental philosophy represents a return to natural philosophy and a model for the revival of philosophy's vigor and relevance in the 21st century.
Greek Natural Philosophy is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in ancient Greek philosophy or in environmental philosophy, and will be of interest to scholars in these fields.
