The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World - Hardcover

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9781559638388: The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559638389 ISBN 13: 9781559638388

Publisher: Island Press, 2002

Scientists, theologians, and the spiritually inclined, as well as all those concerned with humanity's increasingly widespread environmental impact, are beginning to recognize that our ongoing abuse of the earth diminishes our moral as well as our material condition. Many people are coming to believe that strengthening the bonds among spirituality, science, and the natural world offers an important key to addressing the pervasive environmental problems we face.The Good in Nature and Humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers -- including Ursula Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez -- to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises: global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature.Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, more positively, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. By bridging the gap between the rational and the religious through the concern of each for understanding the human relation to creation, The Good in Nature and Humanity offers an important means for pursuing the quest for a more secure and meaningful world.

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About the Author:

Stephen R. Kellert is the Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, author of Kinship to Mastery (Island Press, 1997) and The Value of Life (Island Press, 1996), and coeditor, with Edward O. Wilson, of The Biophilia Hypothesis (Island Press, 1993).

Timothy J. Farnham is a doctoral candidate at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

From Publishers Weekly:

Inspired by a 2000 conference at Yale University, this eco-spirituality reader explores the idea that "the root causes of modern society's environmental and spiritual crises cannot be understood nor effectively resolved until the split between religion and science, or, more generally, between faith and reason, has been effectively reconciled." Part One, "Scientific and Spiritual Perspectives of Nature and Humanity," comprises half the book and is loaded with academic voices that become slowly and steadily more lively. The book's substantive core, "Linking Spiritual and Scientific Perspectives with an Environmental Ethic," marries ideals to real-life situations via the voices of environmental and resource managers, plus the venerable Wendell Berry. Most of these practitioners have fashioned their own faiths by literally tramping in the woods, and their resulting down-to-earth revelations will reward readers. The final part, "From the Perspective of the Storyteller," is a disjointed but beautiful tail section with offerings by Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez. The ghost of the "land ethicist" Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac), who graduated from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, rightly haunts most of this volume. Reading the book from beginning to end is like watching a noble and important bird of many colors escape from a cage to find soaring flight and final release on a mythical plane. The bird becomes different things to different people, but all can understand its vital message as one of hope.

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