Earthkeeping — The Great Work

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
     Pantheon Books, 1996          ISBN 0679776397
      Elegant in exposition, vast in implication, this groundbreaking work of ecological philosophy compellingly argues the necessity for restoring humanity's lost connections with the sensuous world. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as phenomenology and sleight-of-hand magic, David Abram explains how the processes readers think of as "mental" actually derive from a deeply physical interaction with the rest of nature.

Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future.
     Bell Tower, 2000          ISBN 0609804995
      Thomas Berry is both a brilliant thinker and a theologian, (he is known as a geologian) and this book is the culmination of his career (he's in his eighties). No other writer has such a comprehensive or historically rich vision of the way in which we must address the future. The Great Work is to find a way to heal the planet. Berry tells us how to respond to the earth, enter into a conversation with it -- an understanding on which our life and its depends. He explains the spiritual dynamics of the universe and how we need to move from our human-centered to an earth-centered view of reality. We must recognize that the earth belongs to itself and not to us. Berry's writing is lucid, spare, and beautiful. It is an honor to be publishing him.

Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth:
     Sierra Club Books, 1988          ISBN 0871566222
     

Joseph Cornell, Listening to Nature: How to Deepen Your Awareness of Nature
     Dawn Publications, 1987          ISBN 0916124355
     

Derrick Jensen, A Language Other Than Words:
     Context Books, 2000          ISBN 1893956032
      At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an uncompromising political tract, Derrick Jensen's narrative moves elegantly between the microcosm of Jensen's family and the macrocosm of world history. Parallels are drawn between the abuse he experienced at the hands of his father and the destructive march of "progress" under the banner of a world market. He highlights the inevitable losses of a planet that is dying to keep up with the selfish whims of its inhabitants.

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
     HarperCollins, 1989          ISBN 0060916303
     

Anthony Weston, Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism
     Temple University Press, 1994          ISBN 1566392373
      "Environmentalism in a new key," Anthony Weston's book is an invitation to live "in the presence of the more-than-human...to awake and go to sleep with it, to take its rhythms and cycles for the rhythms and cycles of [our own lives], until the two finally merge into one stream."