American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be continuous with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey's conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. Neil Browne highlights this notion in order to define what he terms ""pragmatist ecology,"" a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural, which he finds to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century. To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues, disciplinary boundaries must be opened up. This is primarily important between the arts and science, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment. Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey's philosophy. Among other texts, he examines John Muir's ""My First Summer in the Sierra"" (1911); ""Sea of Cortez"" (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson's three books about the sea, ""Under the Sea Wind"" (1941), ""The Sea Around Us"" (1951), and ""The Edge of the Sea"" (1955); John Haines' ""The Stars, the Snow, the Fire"" (1989); Barry Lopez's ""Arctic Dreams"" (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams' ""Refuge"" (1991). Together, these texts - with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation - challenge the dichotomies to which we've become accustomed and affirm the values of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic values go hand in hand.
About the AuthorNeil W. Browne is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University Cascades, where he teaches American literature and culture.
ReviewsNeil Browne has produced an illuminating study of John Dewey's philosophy that provides the first sophisticated theoretical grounding for the field of ecocriticism.... A particular strength is its emphasis upon aspects of Dewey's work which anticipate intellectual developments at the end of the 20th century. These include Dewey's philosophical embrace of Darwinian thought and evolutionary biology; his rejection of the dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture, human and non-human that have dominated Western philosophy; and Dewey's insistence upon the contingency and situatedness of human knowledge of the dynamic natural world. - Louise Westling, author of The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction
AwardsCommended for Oregon Book Awards (Nonfiction) 2008.
Book InformationISBN 9780817315818
Author Neil W. BrowneFormat Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint The University of Alabama PressPublisher The University of Alabama Press
Weight(grams) 526g