Search results for ""Author David Rothenberg""

At the very heart of American respect for nature, historically and philosophically, is the notion of the wild. This notion comes under scrutiny in "Wild Ideas", a collection of essays that bring a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the centre of our civilization. Blending well-known and new voices, the volume surveys classical and romantic concepts of wilderness, from the scary to the sublime, and shows why neither serves us anymore. Instead, the authors argue for a "wild culture", in which nature is not opposed to humanity, a mere matter of resources and consumers. A cogent reassessment of the ideas that drive the conservation movement, "Wild Ideas" points out a new direction for future environmentalism. Among the topics discussed are the confluence of wilderness, empire, and race; the way the ecology movement uses language; gendered views of the wilderness; maps and topology, and how they affect our view of the wild; healing by the wilderness experience; and the idea of an urban wilderness.

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A celebrated figure in myth, song, and story, the nightingale has captivated the imagination for millennia, its complex song evoking a prism of human emotions,—from melancholy to joy, from the fear of death to the immortality of art. But have you ever listened closely to a nightingale’s song? It’s a strange and unsettling sort of composition—an eclectic assortment of chirps, whirrs, trills, clicks, whistles, twitters, and gurgles. At times it is mellifluous, at others downright guttural. It is a rhythmic assault, always eluding capture. What happens if you decide to join in? As philosopher and musician David Rothenberg shows in this searching and personal new book, the nightingale’s song is so peculiar in part because it reflects our own cacophony back at us. As vocal learners, nightingales acquire their music through the world around them, singing amidst the sounds of humanity in all its contradictions of noise and beauty, hard machinery and soft melody. Rather than try to capture a sound not made for us to understand, Rothenberg seeks these musical creatures out, clarinet in tow, and makes a new sound with them. He takes us to the urban landscape of Berlin—longtime home to nightingale colonies where the birds sing ever louder in order to be heard—and invites us to listen in on their remarkable collaboration as birds and instruments riff off of each other’s sounds. Through dialogue, travel records, sonograms, tours of Berlin’s city parks, and musings on the place animal music occupies in our collective imagination, Rothenberg takes us on a quest for a new sonic alchemy, a music impossible for any one species to make alone. In the tradition of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Invention of Nature, Rothenberg has written a provocative and accessible book to attune us ever closer to the natural environment around us.

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Although he is known primarily as the inventor of the phrase "deep ecology," Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess's thoughts and approaches have waded through all the major streams and events of our times. From a childhood during World War I through the study of psychoanalysis in Freud's Vienna, through the midcentury hardening of ideologies to the most recent decades with the emergence of ecology as a political force, his life in the throes of nature has always fuelled a will to espouse precise and clear thinking in the face of the great contemporary dilemmas. Through a series of conversations covering the whole span of Naess's rich and complex life, David Rothenberg presents the grand old man of natural philosophy in his own words. What emerges is the personal vision of a life imbued with ecology, which reveals in the most human terms how respect for and contact with the natural world can provide the foundation for a total view of the vast problems of humanity and our place in the world. "Is it Painful to Think?" reveals insights and inspiration, hypotheses and conclusions, but above all paradox, as the difference between ideas and events comes to the surface. These are issues that all philosophers of nature must come to terms with, and this unconventional book seeks not to provide answers as much as stir discussion and reflection. This, says Naess, is where philosophy differs from religion, where conversation veers from pronouncement.

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"Wisdom in the Open Air" traces the Norwegian roots of the strain of thinking called "deep ecology" - the search for the solutions to environmental problems by examining the fundamental tenets of our culture. Although Arne Naess coined the term in the 1970s, the insights of deep ecology actually reflect a whole tradition of thought that can be seen in the history of Norwegian culture, from ancient mountain myths to the radical ecoactivism of today. Beginning with an introduction to Norway's emphasis on nature and the wild, Reed and Rothenberg explore the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is a collection of writings by prominent Norwegian thinkers on humanity and nature, most never before published in English. From Peter Wessel Zapffe, a twentieth-century Kierkegaardian figure, the list goes on to include Arne Naess, activist/critic/artist Sigmund Kvaloy, wilderness educator Nils Faarlund, novelist Finn Alnaes, sociologist Johan Galtung, and social reformer Erik Dammann. Their points of view offer thoughts on the significance of modern life and what it means to be human in the face of deteriorating environmental global trends of the 20th century. "Wisdom in the Open Air" asks and answers a fundamental question concerning the ecomovement: what is the role of deep, often abstract, thinking in the attempt to avert a very real ecological crisis?

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