Description
Book SynopsisClimate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, resource depletion, new emerging diseases: scientists have raised awareness on the ecological and societal consequences of the unbridled development of human activities for a long time. Why do we keep destroying nature when science makes it clear that in doing so we risk our own destruction? How can we stop destroying our life-support system and reach some kind of harmony between humans and nature? This book seeks to answer these questions. It describes the inability of modern society to fundamentally modify its relationship with nature, instead engaging in collective fictions such as subject-object duality, matter-mind duality, the primacy of rationality, and the superiority of the human species over all other life. Subsequent chapters identify avenues which could allow human societies to break the current deadlock and forge a relationship with the natural world. This path is rooted in a simple observation: humans have a nature that define
Table of ContentsIntroduction Part one. Humans versus nature Chapter 1. Homo sapiens, a species among many others but not quite like the others Chapter 2. A brief history of the divorce between humans and nature Chapter 3. Subject and object: The mirror of modernity Chapter 4. Matter and spirit: The great illusion Chapter 5. The underside of economic rationality and progress Chapter 6. Journey to the centre of the modern world Part two. Where humans and nature are one Chapter 7. Letting nature touch us Chapter 8. Recovering nature in us through our fundamental needs Chapter 9. Reunifying knowledge of body and mind Chapter 10. Building a social and economic order that serves life Chapter 11. Embracing life that flows through us References
