Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective

A philosophical and narrative memoir, Ecology and Experience is a thoughtful, engaging recounting of author Richard J. Borden’s life entwined in an overview of the intellectual and institutional history of human ecology—a story of life wrapped in a life story.

Borden shows that attempts to bridge the mental and environmental arenas are uncertain, but that rigid conventions and narrow views have their dangers too. Human experience and the natural world exist on many levels and gathering from both realms gives rise to novel constellations. In a blend of themes and approaches based on a lifetime of interdisciplinary inquiry, the author wanders these intersections and invites us to exercise our capacities for ecological insight, to deepen the experience of being alive, and, most of all, to more fully enrich our lives.


Contents
Foreword by Darron Collins, president of the College of the Atlantic
Preface
Part I. Transects and Plots
1. The Arc of Life
2. Ecology
3. Experience
4. Human Ecology
5. Education
Part II. Facets of Life
6. Time and Space
7. Death in Life
8. Personal Ecology
9. Context
10. Metaphor and Meaning
Part III. Wider Points of View
11. Kinds of Minds
12. Insight
13. Imagination
14. Keyholes
15. Ecology and Identity
16. The Unfinished Course
Part IV. Coda

RICHARD J. BORDEN holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology at College of the Atlantic, where he teaches. An editor and coauthor of numerous books and articles, Borden has been a United States Information Agency academic specialist and consultant in the area of human ecology, and has served as an advisor to human ecology programs in China, Russia, Europe, and North and South America. The author lives in Bar Harbor, Maine.