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Full Description
What do two white men born in the century before last have to say that could possibly be of any use or value in the current conjuncture of climate collapse, the end of the age of fossil fuels and much life on earth, and the recent re-rise of reactionary forces against progressive politics?
Turns out, a lot, especially for waking to nature, place, life, social injustice, environmental destruction, industrial capitalism and its technologies. Henry David Thoreau - an inspiration for William Melvin Kelley's writing on 'staying woke' - and Walter Benjamin suggest sensory means for waking the consumer asleep under the "phony spell" of the "putrid magic" of the commodity; provide tools of theory and critique for waking to sexism, racism, and placism; empower the weak with a robust vocabulary for telling the stories of people and places; create resources of hope and limit the prospect of despair about the future; and point to pathways for being at home with the living earth. These are all vital facets of psychopolitical ecology.
Waking to Nature with Thoreau and Benjamin discusses topics both writers share in common, such as memory, dreaming, waking, walking, water, swamps, lakes, the body, and the senses, and highlights convergences and divergences between them. It is the first book of psychopolitical ecology and the first to bring together these two timely thinkers and writers for whom life is the union of materiality and spirituality.
Contents
Preface, Acknowledgments, and Introduction
1. Water—Rivers, Lakes, Ponds, and "the Parlors of the Fishes"
2. "The Most Dismal Swamp" is "the Holy of Holies"
3. "The Life of the Swamps" is "the Ministering Mother"
4. Time and Eternity in Ritual, Working, and the Seasons
5. Memory, Dreaming, Waking
6. The Body, the Senses, the Earth, and Capitalism
7. Writing Nature and History
8. Walking, Rambling, Sauntering, and Botanizing
9. Aura and Wildness versus Modern Technology
10. Being at Home with the Earth
Notes
References
Index
