No abstract
The scholarly investigation of the convergences between Hindu traditions and the natural world is a relatively recent endeavor, having arisen in the wake of similar projects seeking to identify the intersections between religion, culture, and nature. Partly a response to present and looming environmental threats, this effort has resulted in a wide range of material, from a more general "environmental assessment" of the tradition(s) in question to specific inquiries about the social, economic, and demographic factors that impinge upon contemporary Indians' understandings of nature. This literature review provides an overview of these materials and should offer readers a sense of the topics that have received the most attention from scholars to date.
Aldo Leopold is remembered as a consummate nature writer, a scientist with a philosophical bent, a naturalist informed deeply by his ecological fieldwork, and as an active citizen and conservationist committed to bringing private and public land management into concord. While many of his contemporaries have faded into obscurity, Leopold's work continues to inspire scholars and conservation practitioners to think of social and ecological systems as necessarily integrated. The authors in this special issue probe why this is so by focusing on the ethical, religious, and spiritual roots and branches of Leopold's environmental philosophy and his understandings of land health. I suggest that Leopold's work continues to endure, and receive growing scholarly and popular attention, because he subtly traversed the realm of metaphysics in his writing, creating a challenging dialogue between the sciences and the humanities. KeywordsAldo Leopold, religious naturalism, scientific metaphysics, natural history, nature as sacred.Historian Susan Flader, who wrote the earliest exposition on how Aldo Leopold's scientific thought and ethical insights were deeply related, prefaced her book Thinking Like a Mountain (1994 [1974]) by noting the ways in which Leopold's intellectual legacy has ignited a series of developments in other disciplines. Not one to keep his subjects of interest in discrete boxes, the reach of Leopold's influence is impressive:
Aldo Leopold's essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain' was more than a parable about a redemptive personal moment; it was the fruition of a larger effort on Leopold's part to effectively communicate the fundamentals of a 'land ethic'. I explore striking narrative antecedents to Leopold's 'green fire' moment, including writings by Henry David Thoreau and Ernest Thompson Seton, and articulate why wolves provided the quintessential totem animal for communicating a larger ecological 'drama'. Both these literary antecedents and the essay's ongoing-sometimes surprising-impacts are worth exploring, not just because of the high regard in which the essay itself is held but because Leopold succeeded in navigating a problem that persists in our own time: the gap between scientifically informed understandings of the world and effectively communicating those understandings to the public.
Matthew Hall, The Imagination of Plants: A Book of Botanical Mythology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019), 298 pp., $33.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9781438474380.
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