Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture and Eros

Rating:
Summary: A good book...
Review: I like this book and re-read it occasionally. The reviews with individuals are helpful in gettin a semi-diverse opinion of the troubles of our world. Some interviews are definately better than others so do not expect all interviews to blow you away. I have marked 10 or so and come back to these occasionally in order to re-inspire myself.

Rating:
Summary: Wide variety of great thinking in this book.
Review: If your a fan of Derrick Jensen's work you will definately see where he has gotten a lot of the foundations in his thinking.

This book is centered on the question if we we're not happy destroying the landbase that keeps us alive, and gives our inner world substance, than why are we doing it? Jensen than goes on to interview thinkers from many different fields to discuss this phenomenon.

This book is interesting and full of a lot of useful information. I find myself constantly going back through it and referencing interviews that I have found profoundly important.

Definately worth reading!

Rating:
Summary: yes yes yes
Review: is about all I can say - this one contains the thoughts of many brilliant and wonderful thinkers.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring conversations on human/nature relations
Review: This book is comprised of interviews Derrick Jensen had with a diverse group of people that he saw as searching for answers to the question of why modern society was propagating a pervasive ecological destruction of the earth, and if there are ways to live more peacefully with the natural world. The interviewees include anthropologists, psychologists, theologians, and indigenous philosophers. Jensen uses the dialogue form instead of a single-voice narrative "in the hope the reader would experience the story for what it is - a communal effort at working through some of the greatest and most difficult questions ever faced by human beings." This dialogue form was at first distracting, since it lacked the tight organizational structure of written discourse and the argumentative authority of the single-voiced narrative. But as I became more accustomed to the dialogue style I saw that its weaknesses were also its strength. The personality and subjective aspect of the interviewer and the interviewees came to the forefront showing how that which was being discussed was shaped and colored by each of them and the interaction between them. This non-detached orientation helped to make the discussion about human/nature interaction more intersubjective, or less about something out there and more about something constructed by participating subjects in the drama of life. In terms of the interviewer, Jensen was trained in mineral engineering physics in the early 1980's but soon found himself miserable in his "not-too-meaningless", middle class technical job. His quest to find "other models for happiness" (page 2) is apparent in his interviewing style that maintains an intimate personal quality even while discussing abstract theoretical points. Within the dialogues he stays in the background allowing the interviewees to fluidly expound on his penetrating but concise questions. He also is able to do the difficult job of asking follow-up questions that complement and probe further, by building on the interviewees responses. What emerges is the sense of being witness to oral conversations that stir the heart, inform the intellect and inspire the spirit. The interviewees themselves are a "who's who" of the environmental field. From Earth First founder Dave Foreman we hear that "in religious terms... fighting to save biodiversity, the process of evolution, is a way for us to save our souls". The complexity of the fight and the man, come out later in the interview when he tells a story about going to Washington D.C. to be a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. A senator took him aside and told him to put his heart in a safe-deposit box and replace his brain with a pocket calculator because only by quoting economists and engineers and being devoid of emotion would he have credibility. To this he said " But Damn it, I am emotional. I'm an animal, and proud of it. Descartes was wrong when he said, 'I think therefore I am.' Our consciousness, our being, is not all up here in the skullbox, its our whole body we think with...We need that green fire in our eyes. Somehow we've got to remember how to think like a mountain." (page 12) Mathew Fox, tells us of how his Creation Spirituality is about realizing that nature's laws are miracles, and that regaining the mystical awe in experiencing life creates a foundation of love within us, that if missing makes us essentially lost in the world. Then showing the cross pollination of ideas alive in these interviews, he quotes sustainable agriculture advocate Wendell Berry who says that "Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is...the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the creator from the creation." (page 69) The Ecofemist, Charlene Spretnak, proposes a replacement for "mechanistic, dualistic, anti-nature, anti-spiritual modernity" (page 49) not with a nihilistic extreme relativity post-modernism, but with what she calls 'ecological postmodernism'. Based on being embodied and embedded in the natural world, her ecological postmodernism refutes the "death of subject" and the "denial of meaning" of postmodernism. She counters Foucalt's autonomous self with a self based on an interdependent communion with the universe. I regret that the length of this review limits me from going into more of the remaining twenty-seven interviews, but let me finish by saying that when I need spiritual inspiration or intellectual stimulation to enhance my work as an Ecological Anthropologist, this book of conversations will be one of the first places I will turn.