ABOUT THIS BOOK

American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be one 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. The World in Which We Occur highlights this notion in order to define “pragmatist ecology,” a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural. Neil Browne finds this 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 that disciplinary boundaries must be opened, 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 examined are 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’s The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies that we have become accustomed and affirm the principles of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic

values go hand in hand.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Neil W. Browne is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University Cascades, where he teaches American literature and culture.

REVIEWS

"Neil 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

— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations	000
List of Abbreviations for Works of John Dewey	000
Acknowledgments	000
Introduction: John Dewey and Pragmatist Ecology	000
1. An Arc of Discovery: John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra	000
2. "The Form of the New": Pragmatist Ecology and Sea of Cortez	000
3. Rachel Carson's Marginal World: Pragmatist Ecology, Aesthetics, and Ethics
	000
4. "The Coldest Scholar on Earth": Silence and Work in John Haines's The 
Stars, the Snow, the Fire	000
5. Northern Imagination, Wonder, Politics, and Pragmatist Ecology in Barry 
Lopez's Arctic Dreams 	000
Conclusion: (Eco)logic in the Utah Landscape	000
Notes	000
Bibliography	000
Index	000