The Web of Life Imperative


Book Description

A book and course that teaches you the Natural Systems Thinking Process A nature connected learning tool enables our psyche to genuinely tap the healing powers of nature and regenerate 48 peaceful natural intelligences in our awareness and thinking. Backyard or backcountry, this practical, multiple-sense, book empowers you to improve your health, relationships and happiness by replacing destructive omissions in how we learn to think with rejuvenated natural sensitivities. Learn how to reconnect your psyche to its nurturing origins in the restorative vigor, sustainability and peace of nature. Help yourself and your community benefit from the profound renewal that lies in the magnificence of a beautiful day, the wisdom of an ancient tree and the fortitude of a weed. Let nature's invincible healing energies help your thinking transform your stress, disorders and harmful bonds into constructive personal, social and environmental rewards. Grow from hands-on, accredited, Applied Biophilia classes, essays, activities, research, internships, ethics, counseling and healing. Strengthen your inborn natural genius. Enjoy an Earth-friendly job, career, internship or teaching certification. Take advantage of subsidized, online courses and degree programs. To understand how and why this book will work for you as it has for so many others, consider the following key intelligence test question, one that ordinarily might help assess a person's mathematical aptitude: "If you count a dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?" "Five," of course, is the correct answer for a math test. Intelligent people say "five" because it is valid in mathematical systems and contemporary thinking and is highly regarded and rewarded by our society. However, we don't solely live our lives or think in mathematical systems. Our natural sense of reason can consider what we know from our actual contact with a real, normal dog, too. That's when our multitude of other natural senses come into play: senses of touch, motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, consciousness, community, trust, contrast, and love. They each provide further information and help our sense of reason make more sense and a more informed decision. They enable our thinking to register that a tail is different than a leg, that a dog has four legs, not five, no matter what might be correct in mathematical logic. It is a grave mistake for anyone not to take seriously the difference between 4-leg and 5-leg ways of knowing and our learned prejudice for the latter. As this book shows, when they are not in balance the schism between their two different ways of registering the world is significant.. Four-leg knowing is a magnificent psychological and physiological phenomenon with deep natural system roots into the eons, the heart of Earth and our psyche. It brings our widely diverse multiplicity of natural sensory experiences into our awareness. Five-leg knowing produces important awareness through abstract imagination, labels and stories. However, when it does not also seek and contain 4-leg knowledge it results not only in our desensitization but in the separation of our thinking from the regenerative powers of Earth's natural systems within and around us. This profound loss produces the many destructive side effects of our artificial world that we can not readily solve. Four-leg versus 5-leg discord creates an entrenched conflict in our psyche between how we think and how nature works. This is a point source of the stress and contamination our society produces in the integrity of people and the environment. It generates our many disorders and troubles that are seldom found in nature. It is important to recognize is that by financially and socially rewarding us for getting "good grades" or for "making the grade" by using nature-isolated 5-leg thinking, our socialization habitually bonds, conditions, programs or ad




The Resilience Imperative


Book Description

Argues that the economy can only be improved through major changes that will make it more decentralized and cooperative, including such novel ideas as energy self-sufficiency, interest-free financing, affordable housing, local food systems and more. Original.




Capitalism in the Web of Life


Book Description

Integrating both social and historical factors, this radical analysis of the development of capitalism reveals the ever-deepening relationship between capital and ecology Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a “world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.




Species Imperative


Book Description

Dr. Mackenzie Connor's goal in life is to be left in peace to study salmon. The only cloud on Mac's horizon is having to meet with the Oversight Committee to defend research intrusions in protected zones. But what Mac wants doesn't matter. There's a darker migration underway, across space. What created the Chasm has awakened to follow its need to feed on living worlds.




Hope Is an Imperative


Book Description

The author has championed the cause of ecological literacy in higher education, helping to establish and shape the field of ecological design, and working to raise awareness of the threats to future generations posed by humanity's current unsustainable trajectory.This volume brings together his most important works.




Goddess as Nature


Book Description

Goddess as Nature makes a significant contribution to elucidating the meaning of a female and feminist deity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Bridging the gap between the emergent religious discourse of thealogy - discourse about the Goddess - and a range of analytical concerns in the philosophy of religion, the author argues that thealogy is not as incoherent as many of its critics claim. By developing a close reading of the reality-claims embedded within a range of thealogical texts, one can discern an ecological and pantheistic concept of deity and reality that is metaphysically novel and in need of constructive philosophical, thealogical and scholarly engagement. Philosophical thealogy is, in an age concerned with re-conceiving nature in terms of agency, chaos, complexity, ecological networks and organicism, both an active possibility and a remarkably valuable academic, feminist and religious endeavour.




Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature


Book Description

The wolf is one of the most widely distributed canid species, historically ranging throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere. For millennia, it has also been one of the most pervasive images in human mythology, art, and psychology. Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature examines the wolf’s importance as a figure in literature from the perspectives of both the animal’s physical reality and the ways in which writers imagine and portray it. Author S. K. Robisch examines more than two hundred texts written in North America about wolves or including them as central figures. From this foundation, he demonstrates the wolf’s role as an archetype in the collective unconscious, its importance in our national culture, and its ecological value. Robisch takes a multidisciplinary approach to his study, employing a broad range of sources: myths and legends from around the world; symbology; classic and popular literature; films; the work of scientists in a number of disciplines; human psychology; and field work conducted by himself and others. By combining the fundamentals of scientific study with close readings of wide-ranging literary texts, Robisch astutely analyzes the correlation between actual, living wolves and their representation on the page and in the human mind. He also considers the relationship between literary art and the natural world, and argues for a new approach to literary study, an ecocriticism that moves beyond anthropocentrism to examine the complicated relationship between humans and nature.




The Greenway Imperative


Book Description

Trailblazing greenway projects from vision to reality In this eye-opening journey through some of America's most innovative landscape architecture projects, Charles Flink shows why we urgently need greenways. A leading authority in greenway planning, design, and development, Flink presents inspiring examples of communities that have come together to build permanent spaces for the life-sustaining power of nature. The Greenway Imperative reveals the stories behind a variety of multiuse natural corridors, taking readers to Grand Canyon National Park, suburban North Carolina, the banks of the Miami River, and many other settings. Flink, who was closely involved with each of the projects in this book during his 35-year career, introduces the people who jumpstarted these initiatives and the challenges they overcame in achieving them. Flink explains why open green spaces are increasingly critical today. "Much more than a path through the woods," he says, greenways conserve irreplaceable real estate for the environment, serve as essential green infrastructure, shape the way people travel within their communities, reduce impact from flooding and other natural disasters, and boost the economies of cities and towns. Greenways can and should dramatically reshape the landscape of America in the coming years, Flink argues. He provides valuable reflections and guidance on how we can create resilient communities and satisfy the human need for connection with the natural world.




Point of Departure


Book Description

Point of Departure offers a practical metacognitive and transformational learning strategy for human surviving and thriving. Using five foundational and interactive Indigenous worldview beliefs that contrast sharply with our dominant worldview ones, everyone can reclaim the original instructions for living on Earth. Without the resulting change in consciousness that can emerge from this learning approach, no modern technologies can save us. The five foundational Indigenous precepts relate to a radically different understanding about: (1) Trance?based learning (2) Courage and Fearlessness (3) Community Oriented Self?Authorship (4) Sacred Communications (5) Nature as Ultimate Teacher Praise for Point of Departure: Four Arrows provides a quintessential critique of how the collective human departure of modern society from “Indigenous Consciousness” has led to the current wholesale exploitation and destruction of “Indigenous Nature” ... while providing the impetus for the urgency of a return to the “Indigenous Mind” as one of the true pathways for our future survival. ~ Greg Cajete Director of Native American Studies, University of New Mexico. Author of Native Science and Look to the Mountain Recognizing the disastrous consequences of the dominant worldview pervading global society, Four Arrows teaches metacognitive strategies to help shift us back toward the Indigenous worldview—the only worldview that can restore balance amidst planetary crisis. With his characteristic insight, he reminds us that interconnectedness with all of creation is the basis of courage that will help each of us, Indigenous and non?Indigenous alike, rise to action in defense of Mother Earth. ~ Waziyatawin Dakota author and activist from Pezihutazizi K’api Makoce (Land Where They Dig for Yellow Medicine) in southwestern Minnesota Four Arrows continues to open our eyes to the possibility of a new society, one founded on the empirical data of thousands of years and within the paradigms of traditional wisdom and the people connected to all of life—theirs, ours, animal brethren and Mother Earth. Point of Departure is a MUST read for anyone who wants to be part of the solution. ~ Rebecca Adamson Founder/President First Peoples Worldwide Anyone who is even slightly Indigenous will nod in recognition all the way through Point of Departure. Using the four sacred directions as cognitive bridges into the circle of all, Four Arrows walks the reader through trance?based, Transformative learning; courage, Indian?style, as connection - not fear-based; and the Indigenous grammar of communication and truth-telling, with neither restricted to humans. Then, binding the hoop together for “all our relations,” Four Arrows recommends re-acquaintance with Nature. The handy “take?away” discussions and “how?to” manuals concluding each discussion draw the reader into the circle, if only the reader is willing. ~ Barbara Alice Mann Associate Professor of Humanities, University of Toledo. Author of Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America




Educational Transformation


Book Description

Educational Transformation is a discussion of the advancement of higher education for the betterment of the human condition and sustainability of the planet. The authors are fully committed to this mission and have addressed elements in this book which will assist likeminded professionals in their contributions toward human advancement. Akamai is dedicated to the betterment of the human condition and sustainability of the planet.