Developing Ecological Consciousness

A second edition of this textbook is now available. Developing Ecological Consciousness offers an ecology-based, wonder-filled initiation to the Universe and the Planet Earth. It examines the ways in which humans are damaging the Earth and their own bodies and spirits. The book presents paradigms, values, and tools essential for both planetary and personal transformation.

Developing Ecological Consciousness is a unique introduction to environmental studies. In Chistopher Uhl's view it is time to acknowledge the ways that our cultural conditioning leads to separation from self, other, and Earth. This book charts a three-step path for healing this separation, first, by revealing that Earth is our larger body; second, by detailing the sickening state of our Earth body; and, third, by offering the tools necessary for healing both ourselves and Earth.

This book offers an ecology-based, wonder-filled initiation to the Universe and the Planet Earth. It examines the ways in which humans are damaging the Earth and their own bodies and spirits. It also presents paradigms, values, and tools essential for both planetary and personal transformation.

Developing Ecological Consciousness is a unique environmental studies textbook. Rather than working through a list of environmental problems, it aims to help students become aware of the awe and wonder of our planet, understand some of the challenges facing it, and explore possibilities for action and change. This text is invaluable for courses in a variety of disciplines, including environmental studies, biology, sociology, and political science.

This volume presents a fresh picture of the historical development of “conservatism” from the late 17th to the early 20th century. The book explores the broader geographies and transnational dimensions of conservatism and counterrevolution. The contributions show how counterrevolutionary concepts did not emerge in isolation, but resulted from the interplay between ideas, media, networks, and institutions. Like 19th-century liberalism and socialism, conservatism was the product of traveling ideas and people. This study describes how exile, mobility, and international sociability shaped counterrevolutionary identities. The volume presents case studies on the intersection of political philosophy, scholarly practices, international politics, and governmental bureaucracies. Furthermore, Cosmopolitan Conservatisms offers new approaches to the study of conservatism, including the prisms of ecology, gender, and digital history. Contributors are: Alicia Montoya, Carolina Armenteros, Simon Burrows,Wyger Velema, Michiel van Dam, Glauco Schettini, Nigel Aston, Brian Vick, Lien Verpoest, Beatrice de Graaf, Jean-Philippe Luis, Joep Leerssen, Amerigo Caruso, Joris van Eijnatten, Emily Jones, Aymeric Xu, and Axel Schneider.

In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism? Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity’s ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans. Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.

Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world's foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child's behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to "the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

"In a world born of the "big bang," Edwards shows that humanity and the world are together being made into the image of God. The heart of faith is an ecological communion that holds together and grows in love toward the fullness of life imaged in the Resurrection of Jesus. Denis Edwards helps the general reader, the preacher, the spiritual director, the student, and the theologian tear down the walls that too often separate mysticism, theology, prophecy, poetry, and science." -- Book jacket.