Title: The world in which we occur : John Dewey, pragmatist ecology, and American ecological writing in the twentieth century /
Authors: Browne, Neil W.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press,
Year: 2007
Subjects: Dewey, John, Criticism and interpretation.; Human ecology in literature; Human ecology Philosophy
Abstract: "American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be one with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey's conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. The World in Which We Occur highlights this notion in order to define "pragmatist ecology," a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural. Neil Browne finds this to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century." "To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues that disciplinary boundaries must be opened, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment. Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey's philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.
Contents: An arc of discovery: John Muir's my first summer in the Sierra -- "The form of the new": pragmatist ecology and Sea of Cortez -- Rachel Carson's Marginal world: pragmatist ecology, aesthetics, and ethics -- "The coldest scholar on Earth": silence and work in John Haines's The stars, the snow, the fire -- Northern imagination: wonder, politics, and pragmatist ecology in Barry Lopez's Arctic dreams.