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Being Salmon, Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild
by Martin Lee Mueller
In the pages of Being Salmon, Being Human, Martin Lee Mueller confronts Western culture's tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon--weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Mueller uses this lens to articulate a critique of human exceptionalism, challenging the four-century-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of our horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it and considering how this enriches our understanding of humanity in the process. Being Salmon, Being Human rewards readers with insightful interpretations of major philosophers--Descartes, Heidegger, Abram, and many more--and reflections on the human-Earth relationship, heralding a new "Copernican revolution" in the fields of biology, ecology, and philosophy.
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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering moss is a mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. In this series of linked personal essays, Robin Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. Drawing on her experiences as a scientist, a mother, and a Native American, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.
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Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a leading researcher in the field of biology, Robin Wall Kimmerer understands the delicate state of our world. But as an active member of the Potawatomi nation, she senses and relates to the world through a way of knowing far older than any science. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she intertwines these two modes of awareness--the analytic and the emotional, the scientific and the cultural--to ultimately reveal a path toward healing the rift that grows between people and nature. The woven essays that construct this book bring people back into conversation with all that is green and growing; a universe that never stopped speaking to us, even when we forgot how to listen.
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The Pine Island Paradox
by Kathleen Dean Moore
A talented storyteller and sage philosopher, the author of Riverwalking shares personal stories about the separation of humankind from nature, challenging Western notions that such a divide is possible, even sacred.
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