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1. Wild Ambitions

   David Cassuto reviews Wild Ideas, a collection of ecocritical essays.

   I want to like Wild Ideas. And I do like large segments of it. Compiled and edited by David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, this collection of essays arose from a symposium on the “wild” and “wilderness” at the fifth World Wilderness Congress in 1993. It takes on several of the major bugaboos of the environmental movement, among them the difference between “wildness” as Thoreau uses the term in his famously misquoted adage, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” and “wilderness,” a term whose meaning has changed more often than Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet.

   tye042 - 26.09.2017 - 12:20

2. Canadian Jeremiad

   Andrew McMurry reviews John Livingstone’s Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication.

   During the central Canadian summer many are drawn to what is known as “cottage country,” a region of lakes and rivers, shield-rock and trees that belts the near-north of the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor. On any July week-end the road- and water-ways of this bucolic district are crammed with eager recreants, speeding toward the natural beauty and repose which, as a result, now exists mostly in memory. In the vicinity of a large provincial “wilderness” area, Algonquin Park, I recently passed some leisurely sunsets observing what has become a rather common sight in those parts: a pair of loons, bobbing and diving in a lake made turbulent by the twilight passages of innumerable jet-skis and power boats. Their haunting calls bounced around the bay, competing with the full-throated roar of outboards and, once, the thunder of a float-plane taking off right over their heads.

   tye042 - 05.10.2017 - 14:59

3. Thoreau’s Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest

   It is time to liberate the forest from the anthropocentric metaphor. Donna Haraway, endorsing Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), says this clearly: “A thinking forest is not a metaphor.” Recent work by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers on “Gaia,” along with Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject,” demands that we reevaluate our tendency toward metaphor when dealing with trees.

   Kohn’s work, along with Michael Marder’s and Peter Wohlleben’s, suggests that we emphasize the cognitive life of trees, rather than harnessing the image of trees as metaphors for human cognition. We must view the forest as a thinking entity in its own right.

   In this paper, I examine Henry David Thoreau’s writing as a model for an encounter with trees that moves beyond mere metaphor. Thoreau draws on his position as an American Transcendentalist and an empirical naturalist to approach trees both philosophically and scientifically. As a poet, he does not make poetry out of trees, but instead sees the poetry that trees themselves create.

   Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:36