Cohabiting Earth
Seeking a Bright Future for All Life
Promotes a path of harmony between humanity and Earth by presenting a vision that is comprehensive in scope and offering a positive new identity for humanity.
Description
The eco-catastrophes that we are witnessing today starkly demonstrate how the interests of the Earth's currently dominant species are in lockstep with those of nature's wider whole. Simply stated, humans and the more-than-human world have a shared fate. Just as humanity's unrestrained overreach in the ecosphere is driving a mass extinction event and causing the devastation of lifeforms and places, so it is also jeopardizing the prospect of a human future worth living. There is no "humans versus nature" tradeoff: the wellbeing of both is inseparably entwined. Solutions to the shared predicament of all Earth's beings will thus necessarily be those that strive for harmony between human presence and the rest of nature. This applies to the philosophy we adopt for agriculture, the ways in which human economies operate, our patterns of consumption, and numerous other intertwined threads of our existence. This anthology argues that harmony between humanity and our home planet must be built on the pillars of restraint, respect, and reverence.
Joe Gray is an Associate Editor of The Ecological Citizen. Eileen Crist is Associate Professor Emerita of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.
Reviews
"Cohabiting Earth is a courageous book, both in the blunt assessment of the multiple cascading ecological/social crises we face and in the refusal to give up on efforts to make a better future. This eclectic collection of writers provides a roadmap of how we got here and where we need to go." — Robert Jensen, School of Journalism and Media, University of Texas at Austin, coauthor of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity
"There is no shortage of anthologies on environmental ethics and even on ecocentrism. That said, there is a real freshness and vitality in Cohabiting Earth. I consistently found myself excited to try this volume out in my Environmental Ethics courses. I think my students would greatly benefit from and enjoy it." — Brian G. Henning, author of Value, Beauty, and Nature: The Philosophy of Organism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Environmental Ethics