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Marston Book Services Ltd Reoccupy Earth by David Wood
Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the catastrophic future it portends, makes it clear that we cannot go on like this. Our habits are integral to narratives of the good life, to social norms and expectations, as well as to economic reality. Such shared shapes are vital. Yet while many of our individual habits seem perfectly reasonable, when aggregated together they spell disaster. Beyond consumerism, other forms of life and patterns of dwelling are clearly possible. But how can we get there from here? Who precisely is the 'we' that our habits have created, and who else might we be? Philosophy is about emancipation-from illusions, myths, and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-granted and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Sharing the earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about space and time, place and history, territory and embodiment-questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves. Deconstruction exposes all manner of exclusion, violence to the other, and silent subordination. Phenomenology and Whitehead's process philosophy offer further resources for an ecological imagination. Bringing an uncommon lucidity, directness, and even practicality to sophisticated philosophical questions, Wood plots experiential pathways that disrupt our habitual existence and challenge our everyday complacency. In walking us through a range of reversals, transformations, and estrangements that thinking ecologically demands of us, Wood shows how living responsibly with the earth means affirming the ways in which we are vulnerable, receptive, and dependent, and the need for solidarity all round.If we take seriously values like truth, justice, and compassion we must be willing to contemplate that the threat we pose to the earth might demand our own species' demise. Yet we have the capacity to live responsibly. In an unfashionable but spirited defense of an enlightened anthropocentrism, Wood argues that to deserve the privileges of Reason we must demonstrably deploy it through collective sustainable agency. Only in this way can we reinhabit the earth. Introduction: Reinhabiting the Earth 1Part I: Econvergences1 On the Way to Econstruction 292 The Idea of Ecophenomenology 503 Ecological Imagination: A Whiteheadian Exercise in Temporal Phronesis 654 The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida 80Part II: Experiential Pathways5 Things at the Edge of the World 1056 Reversals and Transformations 1217 Touched by Touching: Toward a Carnal Hermeneutics 142Part III: Reoccupy Earth8 My Place in the Sun 1559 On Being Haunted by the Future 17510 Beyond Narcissistic Humanism: Or, in the Face of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Is There a Case for Voluntary Human Extinction? 202Acknowledgments 219Notes 221Index 251