Tracking Down Ecological Guidance - Helmuth, Keith

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Résumé :
Tracking Down Ecological Guidance is a road map to an emerging worldview. For several centuries the effect of the industrial revolution has been to reinforce the cultural assumption that Earth is just a storehouse of raw materials for human use, and the faster these resources are exploited the better off the human species will be. This exploitive worldview is failing; it no longer provides believable guidance for the human future. The ecological worldview now emerging is focused on what kind of readaptation makes sense given what is known about how Earth's ecosystems actually work. The essays gathered in Tracking Down Ecological Guidance compose a panorama of the author's engagement with the trajectories of culture and economic behaviour over the past fifty years. While the conflict between the growth economy and ecosystem integrity is central to the book, it is also focused on the means of spiritual survival - the ability to keep working for human betterment and environmental integrity despite the worst that may happen. As the failed adaptation of the industrial-consumer era plays out, the rise of an alternative, ecologically integrated economy becomes essential for human wellbeing. This book charts a journey through the storm of progress to an ecological worldview anchored in beauty and expressed in right relationship to our home places, and to the whole Earth. The book moves beyond the temptation of fatalism to a strategy for enhancing both economic and spiritual survival. Keith Helmuth is a founding member of Quaker Institute for the Future, and a co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick where he now coordinates a community garden project.

Biographie:
Keith Helmuth lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick. He is the Publisher and Managing Editor of Chapel Street Editions, a non-profit book publishing company dedicated to the natural history and cultural life of the St. John River Valley. Previously, he and his family operated North Hill Farm at Speerville, New Brunswick for almost three decades. He is the author of Tracking Down Ecological Guidance and co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy and Paths of Faith in the Landscape of Science.

Sommaire:
Keith Helmuth grew up with a mother who read to her children?-?A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, and The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a book she loved and read aloud to her whole family gathered for repeated winter evenings at the dining room table after supper. He learned to read by picking up the adventure novels his older brother and sister brought home from the bookmobile service that made regular stops at their school in Aurora, Ohi?-Shadow in the Pines by Stephen W. Meader and Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey, for example. The opportunity for employment in the book business while still at university, led to a multi-faceted vocation: bookseller, bookstore manager, college librarian, college teacher, editor, and publisher, in addition to being a community development activist, small-scale farmer and market gardener. Keith Helmuth was the delegate representing the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Canada to the 1990 World Council of Churches' Convocation on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation in Seoul, Korea, where he served as a consultant to the drafting committee for the Convocation's final report. In 2003, he was instrumental in founding Quaker Institute for the Future. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick, where he and his wife, Ellen, maintain a big garden and a small greenhouse....