Reclaiming Nature

In ‘Reclaiming Nature’, leading environmental thinkers from across the globe explore the relationship between human activities and the natural. This is a bold and comprehensive text of major interest to both students of the environment and professionals involved in policy-making.

Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.

Explores the relationship between the environment, human activity and social justice.

Berger (design, Harvard U.) provides an overview of what possibilities are offered by converting abandoned mines, as well as the physical, philosophical, technological, environmental, political, regulatory and ethical issues involved. In the opening chapters, he addresses the history, size, scope, and various forms of reclamation projects. Subsequent topics cover more speculative and theoretical discussions of aesthetics, space, nature, time and revaluing, together with photographic evidence. The book contains 199 color illustrations and is oversize: 11.25x9.5". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From a hidden spark in the early days of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic soon roared across every nation, decimating lives, economies, and social norms. Rather than uniting people to defeat a common enemy, the pandemic has widened economic, political, and social divisions everywhere. It has pitted faith against reason and inflamed the global scourges of poverty, racism, war, and environmental destruction. The pandemic has also surfaced proposals to remake the global economy and society. Most notable--and infamous--are a set of recommendations from the 2020 World Economic Forum calling for "the Great Reset." Blending welfare state socialism and monopoly capitalism, this would systematically eliminate a fundamental bulwark of personal independence and freedom--the universal right to, and rights of, private property. Is the Great Reset the malevolent scheme of a vast global elite to control the lives of ordinary people or a well-intentioned but dangerously misguided approach to correct systemic ills? Regardless, there is a question we all must ask: how will the dignity, freedom, and power of each human person be protected and promoted when universal human rights and their Transcendent Source have been rendered irrelevant? In The Greater Reset, Greaney and Brohawn trace the historical, religious, political, and economic roots of humanity's perilous condition and how returning to God-given, universal principles of natural law, with equal access to the institutions of the common good, can help build a more just, liberating, prosperous, and hopeful future for every person.

"An indispensable and timely collection which confronts the core questions at the multi-scale intersections of political ecology and political economy today." - Roger Keil, York University

A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders. In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.