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This issue of the POIESIS journal brings together writers from the fields of philosophy, media studies and the expressive arts in an effort to grasp our relationship to the environment in a more imaginative way.
Paul Virilio, writing about Grey Ecology, (“…the pollution of the self-created world”) looks at our situation through the lens of speed and the acceleration of reality, while Jason Adams applies Virilio’s concept of popular defense to an aesthetics of resistance. Thomas Zummer’s eco/sophia calls for a remediation of technics and a re-membering of the world; and for Wolfgang Schirmacher, Eco-Sophia becomes an ethics for the human being as technician, the art of living humanely.
David Abram reminds us that underlying our technologized experience is a direct sensuous relationship to the world, one which we can return to through the re-awakening of our primary oral culture in story-telling. For Wes Chester, our fundmental relationship to the world is through an aesthetic encounter which can be cultivated in a disciplined way. And Thomas Trenchard and Sally Atkins make this encounter come alive by telling us of their experiences in the woods - either at night or in the mountains.
The journal is filled with art-work and poetry that embodies the call for a new aesthetics of the natural world, featuring a lengthy excerpt from the important new work by Rishma Dunlop, The New Republic: Reading Towards Ecotopia. As Dunlop says,
Everyone reaches
for nomenclature. Hoop the names of things
to your belt. When you are empty,
eat the words, drink them.
We invite our readers to join us at the feast.
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