Award-winning naturalist, poet, and painter Kaufmann (The California Field Atlas, 2017, etc.) invites readers to redefine stewardship of the earth, by uniting \u201cecological science, ethical responsibility, and the needs of the human community\u201d with the needs and intelligences of the non-human community. Ethical responsibility is central to an \u201cecological philosophy\u201d that may lead to \u201cpeople taking care of the land and the land taking care of the people.\u201d He finds that philosophy in Indigenous stories and traditional practices (such as seasonal planned fire burns) born of a deep experiential heritage rather than \u201cravenous\u201d capitalism. California, \u201ca place of starkly disparate ecological plurality,\u201d serves as an example, but the web of connections among human and non-human life applies to any natural habitat. Thinking, Kaufmann argues, transcends the human mind: All ecological systems \u201cmediate something like thoughts through matter, energy, and chemical feedback.\u201d It is possible, then, to think \u201clike a watershed,\u201d and he praises legal decisions that give rivers rights: \u201cWhen legislation defines water as a commodity\u2014when it does not acknowledge water as an expression of watershed-scale intelligence\u2014the protections it offers fail.\u201d When watersheds are conceived as \u201cthinking systems,\u201d then environmental law shifts from emphasizing control toward envisioning \u201cparticipation and reciprocation.\u201d All life, he asserts, \u201cexists as one continuum of consciousness\u201d: Vast networks, for instance, comprise \u201cthe mind of the forest.\u201d Drawing on a wide range of thinkers, including Roger Penrose, Wendell Berry, Robert Macfarlane, and Gary Snyder, Kaufmann makes a compelling argument for a decisive new perspective: What, he asks, \u201cwould the California economy look like if its laws were oriented to resiliency and adaptation, rather than to extraction and waste?\u201d His delicate watercolor drawings and paintings enhance his text.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Award-winning naturalist, poet, and painter Kaufmann (The California Field Atlas, 2017, etc.) invites readers to redefine stewardship of the earth, by uniting \u201cecological science, ethical responsibility, and the needs of the human community\u201d with the needs and intelligences of the non-human community. Ethical responsibility is central to an \u201cecological philosophy\u201d that may lead to \u201cpeople […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}