An eyewitness account of this controversial environmental action.
Construction plans for the reroute of Highway 55 through south Minneapolis sparked an environmental movement that pitted activists against public authorities in one of the most dramatic episodes in the city’s history. Mary Losure was there; as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio she witnessed the neighborhood’s transformation from a quiet street to the center of an emotionally charged standoff. Fueled by idealism and anger, a diverse coalition banded together to try to stop the highway expansion. Beginning in 1998, this group sustained protests for more than one year and eventually faced an unprecedented show of force by law enforcement.
In Our Way or the Highway Losure offers an inside view of the activist subculture that converged into a makeshift encampment dubbed the "Minnehaha Free State." Here, a retired stenographer befriended EarthFirst! members and appeared in the organization’s national journal, fist raised in protest of the destruction of her home. A pipe fitter abandoned his old life to defend what he believed to be the sacred sites of his Dakota ancestors. A dreamy, dreadlocked seeker hitchhiked to Minneapolis and spent days perched in a doomed cottonwood tree. A police lieutenant watched the trees fall and felt surprising sympathy for the activists’ beliefs. Engagingly written, Our Way or the Highway reveals the motivations, perceptions, and dynamics of those involved in this conflict of wills and ideals.Among the issues Losure explores are the roles of ecoanarchism and grassroots activism in the age of globalization. This fascinating subculture, brought to the spotlight during protests over the World Trade Organization in Seattle and Genoa, has been largely undocumented in the mainstream press. With a practiced reporter’s eye, Mary Losure shows the activists’ world and the way the establishment views them, and ultimately she lays bare the power of the existing order and the fragility and absolute necessity of dissent.Paul Shepard is one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. He has helped define the field of human ecology, and has played a vital role in the development of what have come to be known as environmental philosophy, ecophilosophy, and deep ecology -- new ways of thinking about human-environment interactions that ultimately hold great promise for healing the bonds between humans and the natural world. Traces of an Omnivore presents a readable and accessible introduction to this seminal thinker and writer.
Throughout his long and distinguished career, Paul Shepard has addressed the most fundamental question of life: Who are we? An oft-repeated theme of his writing is what he sees as the central fact of our existence: that our genetic heritage, formed by three million years of hunting and gathering remains essentially unchanged. Shepard argues that this, "our wild Pleistocene genome," influences everything from human neurology and ontogeny to our pathologies, social structure, myths, and cosmology.
While Shepard's writings travel widely across the intellectual landscape, exploring topics as diverse as aesthetics, the bear, hunting, perception, agriculture, human ontogeny, history, animal rights, domestication, post-modern deconstruction, tourism, vegetarianism, the iconography of animals, the Hudson River school of painters, human ecology, theoretical psychology, and metaphysics, the fundamental importance of our genetic makeup is the predominant theme of this collection.
As Jack Turner states in an eloquent and enlightening introduction, the essays gathered here "address controversy with an intellectual courage uncommon in an age that exults the relativist, the skeptic, and the cynic. Perused with care they will reward the reader with a deepened appreciation of what we so casually denigrate as primitive life -- the only life we have in the only world we will ever know."
Wisdom in the Open Air traces the Norwegian roots of the strain of thinking called “deep ecology”—the search for the solutions to environmental problems by examining the fundamental tenets of our culture. Although Arne Naess coined the term in the 1970s, the insights of deep ecology actually reflect a tradition of thought that can be seen in the history of Norwegian culture, from ancient mountain myths to the radical ecoactivism of today.
Beginning with an introduction to Norway’s emphasis on nature and the wild, Reed and Rothenberg explore the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is a collection of writings by prominent Norwegian thinkers on humanity and nature, most never before published in English. From Peter Wessel Zapffe, a twentieth-century Kierkegaardian figure, the list goes on to include Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, activist-critic-artist Sigmund Kvaloy, wilderness educator Nils Faarland, novelist Finn Alneas, sociologist Johan Galtung, and social reformer Erik Dammann. Their fascinating points of view offer thoughts on the significance of modern life and what it means to be human in the face of the deteriorating global environment of the twentieth century. Wisdom in the Open Air asks and answers a fundamental question concerning the ecomovement: what is the role of deep, often abstract, thinking in the attempt to avert a very real ecological crisis?READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press