ABSTRACT
This powerful book provides the first comprehensive overview of the intellectual roots of the worldwide environmental movement - from ancient religions and philosophies to modern science and ethics - and synthesizes them into a new philosophy of nature in which to ground our moral values and social action. It traces the origins and evolution of the dominant worldview that has built our industrial, technocratic, man-centered civilization, and brought us to the current ecological crisis. At the same time, it uncovers an alternative cultural tradition in the world's different religions and philosophies and describes how these ideas are now surfacing and coalescing to form an ecological sensibility and a new vision of nature which recognizes the inter-relatedness of all living things. Finally, this book integrates these varied traditions with modern physics and the science of ecology into a larger philosophical whole that provides the environmental movement with a comprehensive vision of an organic and sustainable society in harmony with nature. As ecological disasters continue to threaten our planet, becoming worse with every passing moment of indifference, it has become clear that we must take action. We must change our relationship with nature, and return to the days when our lives were intimately connected to and dependent upon the natural world. Nature's Web lays the foundations for that change by explaining where our complex ideas about nature come from, why they are wrong, and what we can do to change them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |6 pages
Introduction
part |142 pages
Ancient Roots
part |116 pages
Seeds Beneath the Snow
chapter |14 pages
Philosophers of the Brave New World
chapter |20 pages
The Philosophical Counter-Revolution
chapter |13 pages
To Follow Nature
chapter |10 pages
Primitivism and the Noble Savage
chapter |20 pages
Changing Sensibilities
part |136 pages
Green Visions
chapter |14 pages
The Romantic Mind and Imagination
chapter |18 pages
Romantic Cosmology
chapter |20 pages
Utopian Seers
chapter |14 pages
Darwinism and the Web of Life
chapter |15 pages
The New World of Ecology
chapter |10 pages
Philosophers of the Earth
chapter |18 pages
The Cosmic Joy of the New Science
chapter |10 pages
The Resurrection of Gaia
part |63 pages
The Joining of the Ways