Robin Wall Kimmerer

Gavin Van Horn

John Hausdoerffer

We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans--and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin. For many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. These five Kinship volumes--Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice--offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors--including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie--invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin. From the recognition of nonhumans as persons to the care of our kinfolk through language and action, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a guide and companion into the ways we can deepen our care and respect for the family of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations.

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set

Robin Kimmerer

Volume 1 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of planetary relations: What are the sources of our deepest evolutionary and planetary connections, and of our profound longing for kinship? We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans-and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin. For many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumes--Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice--offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors--including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie--invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. With every breath, every sip of water, every meal, we are reminded that our lives are inseparable from the life of the world--and the cosmos--in ways both material and spiritual. "Planet," Volume 1 of the Kinship series, focuses on our Earthen home and the cosmos within which our "pale blue dot" of a planet nestles. National poet laureate Joy Harjo opens up the volume asking us to "Remember the sky you were born under." The essayists and poets that follow-such as geologist Marcia Bjornerud who takes readers on a Deep Time journey, geophilosopher David Abram who imagines the Earth's breathing through animal migrations, and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser who contemplates the relations between mystery and science--offer perspectives from around the world and from various cultures about what it means to be an Earthling, and all that we share in common with our planetary kin. "Remember," Harjo implores, "all is in motion, is growing, is you."

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 1, Planet

Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 5, Practice

Kinship

The first book to probe the conflicted attitudes that shaped and constrained noted painter George Catlin, famous for his 19th century paintings of vanishing Native American culture. Forces readers to rethink their understanding of the artist--despite his advocacy for Native peoples.

Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature

Catlin's Lament

Melissa K. Nelson

Brooke Parry Hecht

Katherine Kassouf Cummings

"What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? challenges our relationship to the environment and to each other, not only now but across generations. It is an important question for our time, when communities have become fragmented by a global consumer society, when our selves have become isolated in a competitive and technology-driven economy, and when our spiritual, social, and ecological impacts on human and other-than-human beings extend farther than ever imagined due to globalization and climate change. Through interviews and poetic snapshots into the experience of Indigenous people and others, this book demands that the reader think about how contemporary concerns oblige us to see ourselves as someone's future ancestor and, in turn, creates for the reader a different way of looking at his or her traditions and self"--

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild. This book charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. As they show, far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin. From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from the amazing adaptations of animals and plants living in the concrete jungle to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed urban industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human. Wildness: Relations of People and Place is published in association with the Center for Humans and Nature, an organization that brings together some of the brightest minds to explore and promote human responsibilities to each other and the whole community of life. Visit the Center for Humans and Nature's Wildness website for upcoming events and a series of related short films.

John Hausdoerffer

Books

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