The Nature Essay: Ecocritical Explorations is the first extended study of a powerful literary form born out of the traditions of Enlightenment and Romanticism. It traces the varied stylistic paradigms of the ‘nature essay’ down to the present day. Reading essays as platforms for ecological discourse, the book analyses canonical and marginalised texts, mainly from German, English and American literature. Simone Schröder argues that the essay’s environmental impact is rooted in its negotiation of scientific, poetic, spiritual, and ethical modes of perceiving nature. Together, the chapters on these four aspects form a historical panorama of the nature essay as a genre that continues to flourish in our time of ecological crisis. Authors discussed include: Alexander von Humboldt, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Ernst Jünger, W.G. Sebald, Kathleen Jamie, and David Foster Wallace.

Essays that trace the making of a reluctant nature writer.

When the Freeman family decided to transform a drainage ditch into a stream that could again nurture salmon, they knew the task would be formidable but the rewards plentiful. Saving Tarboo Creek artfully blends the story of the family's efforts with profound lessons about how we can live more constructive, fulfilling, and natural lives by engaging with the land rather than exploiting it. Based on the land ethic passionately promoted by Susan Leopold Freeman's grandfather, Aldo Leopold, in his influential book A Sand County Almanac, this timely tribute to our natural environment and the urgent need to protect it is destined to be another inspiring classic.

In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia. We observe the spines and spears, stings and songs of the desert anew. Unexpected. Surprising. Enchanting. Like the desert itself, each essay offers renewed vocabulary and thoughtful perceptions. The desert inspires wonder. Attending to history, culture, science, and spirit, The Nature of Desert Nature celebrates the bounty and the significance of desert places. Contributors Thomas M. Antonio Homero Aridjis James Aronson Tessa Bielecki Alberto Búrquez Montijo Francisco Cantú Douglas Christie Paul Dayton Alison Hawthorne Deming Father David Denny Exequiel Ezcurra Thomas Lowe Fleischner Jack Loeffler Ellen McMahon Rubén Martínez Curt Meine Alberto Mellado Moreno Paul Mirocha Gary Paul Nabhan Ray Perotti Larry Stevens Stephen Trimble Octaviana V. Trujillo Benjamin T. Wilder Andy Wilkinson Ofelia Zepeda

The standard philosophical project of analysing the concept of knowledge has radical defects in its arbitrary restriction of the subject matter, and its risky theoretical presuppositions. Edward Craig suggests a more illuminating approach, akin to the `state of nature' method found in political theory, which builds up the concept from a hypothesis about the social function of knowledge and the needs it fulfils. Light is thrown on much that philosophers have written about knowledge, about its analysis and the obstacles to its analysis (such as the counter-examples of Edmund Gettier), and on the debate over scepticism. It becomes apparent why many languages not only have such constructions as `knows whether' and `knows that', but also have equivalents of `knows how to' and `know' followed by a direct object. Thus the inquiry is both broadened in scope and made theoretically less fragile.

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both the ancients and later thinkers such as Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Hadot traces successive interpretations of Heraclitus' words. Over time, Hadot finds, "Nature loves to hide" has meant that all that lives tends to die; that Nature wraps herself in myths; and (for Heidegger) that Being unveils as it veils itself. Meanwhile the pronouncement has been used to explain everything from the opacity of the natural world to our modern angst. From these kaleidoscopic exegeses and usages emerge two contradictory approaches to nature: the Promethean, or experimental-questing, approach, which embraces technology as a means of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets; and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, approach, according to which such a denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. In place of these two attitudes Hadot proposes one suggested by the Romantic vision of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schelling, who saw in the veiled Isis an allegorical expression of the sublime. "Nature is art and art is nature," Hadot writes, inviting us to embrace Isis and all she represents: art makes us intensely aware of how completely we ourselves are not merely surrounded by nature but also part of nature.

In Book Oneof this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years. This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays that highlight the enduring significance and wide ramifications of McDowell’s unorthodox position.

Visualizing Nature brings together contemporary visionaries to share deeply personal essays on nature, ecology, sustainability, climate change, philosophy, and more. Compiled by editor and poet Stuart Kestenbaum, the contributors represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, each honoring nature's power to heal, inspire, guide, amaze, and strengthen. Activist Maulian Dana of the Penobscot Nation writes on the intertwining relationship of motherhood and Mother Earth. Biology professor David Haskell tells the story of the resilient bristlecone pine trees, which live to be as old as 2,100 years. Iranian scholar Alireza Taghdarreh speaks to his experience of translating Emerson's "Nature" into Farsi. A previously unpublished 1962 speech by Rachel Carson complements the collection of more than twenty essays, each inviting the reader into a quiet space of reflection with the opportunity to think deeply about how they relate to the natural world.