‘A Beginner’s Guide to Dying’ by Simon Boas
Swift Press, 2024 ISBN 978-1800755031 Reviewed by Piers Warren _____________________________________________________________________________________ [...]
Swift Press, 2024 ISBN 978-1800755031 Reviewed by Piers Warren _____________________________________________________________________________________ [...]
Earth Wisdom Teachings, 2023 ISBN: 978-1739749828 Reviewed [...]
O-Books, 2024 ISBN 978-1803414966 Reviewed by Piers Warren _____________________________________________________________________________________ [...]
Penguin 2023 ISBN 978-0141994260 Reviewed by Ian Mowll _____________________________________________________________________________________ In [...]
The Way of the Buzzard ISBN: 978-1-7391669-0-8 [...]
First Edition: March 2020, Second Edition: January 2022 ISBN: [...]
Bear & Company, 2022 ISBN: 978-1591434252 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
Penguin, 2019 ISBN: 978-0241357682 Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain [...]
Michael O'Mara (2018) ISBN: 978-1789290424 Reviewed by Ian [...]
Profile Books, 2021-07-27 ISBN: 978-1788165648 Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk [...]
Prometheus Books, 2017 ISBN: 978-1633882935 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020 ISBN: 978-1785925474 Reviewed by Chris Holmes [...]
Watkins Publishing, 2020 ISBN 978-1786784704 Reviewed by Piers Warren _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I've [...]
Changemakers Books, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-78904-418-8 Reviewed by Marian Van [...]
Eddison Books Ltd., 2019 ISBN: 9781859064474 Reviewed by Alan Whear [...]
Sounds True, 2018 ISBN: 978-1683640424 Reviewed by [...]
William Collins (2017) ISBN: 978-0008226299 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
Christian Alternative (a John Hunt Publishing imprint) 2017 [...]
Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2018 ISBN: 978-1788600453 Reviewed [...]
Beyond Human Stories, 2018 ISBN 978-1979726252 Reviewed by Trevor [...]
GreenSpirit Book Series, Title No. 8 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, [...]
GreenSpirit Book Series, Title No. 9 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, [...]
Henry Holt & Co (2015) ISBN: 978-0-8050-9888-4 [...]
Coronet, 2017 ISBN: 9781473630109 Reviewed by Marian Van [...]
Paul Francis, 2017 ISBN:9780995758612 Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk [...]
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2018 ISBN 978-1544741123 Reviewed [...]
Chelsea Green, 2017 ISBN: 97811603587464 Reviewed by Marian [...]
The Experiment, April 2017 ISBN: 978-1615193448 Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk [...]
Yale University Press, 2017 ISBN: 978-0300218152 Reviewed by Marian Van [...]
Hodder Paperbacks, 2016 ISBN: 978-1473633360 Reviewed by Ian Mowll _____________________________________________________________ [...]
In this beautifully written book, Sara Maitland sets out on a series of walks through ancient forest and woodland in Britain seeking the symbiosis between forests and fairy stories. She expresses a deep concern that the future of these two sources of healthy life experience is endangered.
The Manual seeks to identify the key elements that enable collaborative groups to thrive, how their healthy development can be facilitated with many practical exercises and rituals drawn from and credited to a wide range of sources. Starhawk illustrates her concepts by applying these elements and processes to a dramatically created fictional co-housing cooperative working its way through difficulties and challenges. And she ends by referring to the amazing levels of global collaboration offered by digital technology and how all organisations must adapt and evolve to the changing contexts of our times.
This ebook on Deep Green Living is a collection of articles written by fourteen different authors and is in four parts. The first is about feeling our sense of place on the Earth, the second looks at our lifestyles, the third is about wildness and the final part discusses our relationship with the natural world. The intention of the ebook is to help us to find our place in the world and to inspire us to live in good relationship with the Earth and all beings.
This author is an ecopsychologist with a counselling practice, and her specialty, which she describes as 'bioregional totemism' takes a much wider and more holistic approach than many of her colleagues. She calls it a self-created, spirit-centred neoshamanic path. It begins with a reminder that everything we touch came in some way from a natural source and that: …even living in the middle of the city, I spend every moment immersed in nature. "
William defines ritual as activities that bring about a change: “symbolic actions through which we can give our soul or psyche an important message”. He says that from ritual we can receive clear and potent messages; have a sense of belonging, but most importantly receive the gift of connection with Nature, with the other-than-human. Ritual can put us in direct connection with the mysterious, the numinous, the Other.
As twigs from the same branch of the same family tree, we have the same instincts, the same repertoire of feelings, the same traits, and many of the same behavioural tendencies as many other species. Such qualities as fidelity, loyalty, morality and altruism are alive and well amongst our quadripedal relatives and the lines dividing us from them are in fact very thin ones. This compact and comprehensive book describes many feelings and behaviours our non-human relatives share with us such as those relating to justice, sex, love, fear, grief, envy and jealousy. This is a readable, interesting and straightforward book backed up with an extensive collection of scientific references.
The decision to have – or not to have—children, says this author, is "a private decision with global consequences." Her book is intended to help those who are involved in making the decision whether or not to remain childless and includes all genders, creeds, cultures and the different reasons for considering this. Her greatest inspiration came from Stephanie Mills’ graduation speech, during the time when the population explosion began to cause concern. Stephanie said, "I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all."
This ebook is about the Universe Story (the story as revealed by science from the Big Bang to the present day) and how it can inspire us in our lives and help to create a better world.
The thoughts and emotions that are stirred awake in us when we walk in a desert landscape have a different quality from those engendered by a walk in the depths of a forest. Different again are the ideas and images that come to mind when we marvel at a mountain peak or stand in a high place and look across a valley. And when we gaze out at the ocean or sit on the bank of a fast-flowing river or find ourselves in the middle of a grassy field, the inner scene changes again. In this unusual book, Mary Reynolds Thompson studies these deep connections between the Earth's primary landscapes and what she calls the 'soulscapes' of our inner lives and how this connection can be used for emotional healing and spiritual transformation.
This would be a good book for study in schools because it offers scientific and technical information about ecology, sociology and psychology at a level that is very accessible. The author, a Scottish environmentalist, relates this to the inner life and thence the outward actions of all of us. Essentially, it’s a book about climate change and the human mind-set that has brought it about but continues to deny any responsibility. It also gives us constructive suggestions for a way forward.
As an environmental lawyer, Canadian writer David Boyd knows full well that much of the environmental news these days is bad news. However he also knows that although news tends to make more compelling headlines than good news, there is good news to be found. Although we have a very, very long way to go, it is a fact that: From air pollution to safe drinking water, from greener cities to renewable energy, we've made remarkable but widely underacknowledged progress. And his aim was to document as many examples of this kind of good news as he could fit between two covers.
Ranging as it does from in-depth explanations of neuropsychological processes to personal stories from surfers, divers, fishermen, sailors and others, this book is so impressively comprehensive that it could easily have been subtitled 'Everything you always wanted to know about our human relationship to water and lots more that you never even imagined.'
Most urban spaces and buildings in the West are designed and built with no sensitivity whatsoever to these subtle energy currents. Which is why Jaime Lerner's book is called 'Acupuncture'. It is all about bringing life back into dead spaces and restoring the flow of energy to places where it has been blocked or stifled. Lerner, who was three times mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, and is also an architect and a popular advocate for sustainable and liveable urbanism, describes how some city planners have worked to restore life and dynamism to ailing urban areas.
I found this to be a searingly exquisite and highly informative work about a young woman’s relationship with a goshawk. Three strands weave their way throughout this eloquently-written autobiography. The first is the author's grief after the sudden unexpected death of her father. The second is her life experience as a hawker and the third is her ever-emerging insights into the work of writer, scholar and teacher, T. H. White, as she contrasts his experiences of keeping a hawk with her own.
In recent years, as modern life causes more and more of us to become emotionally disconnected from the Earth upon which all our lives depend, we are realizing that it is not just the land we live in that needs rewilding but our own selves. This means finding ways to break down all the artificial boundaries that we humans have tried to place between ourselves and the rest of Nature. It means recognizing that we are—and always have been and always will be—an intrinsic part of the Earth, cells in the body of a living planet. Furthermore, it means re-learning how to live our daily lives out of that knowing. It means coming back 'down to Earth' in the truest sense of that phrase: consciously re-immersing ourselves in every way possible in the natural world that surrounds is, both without and within. That way lies healing—for ourselves and our planet.
This book was inspired by a weekend gathering of Pagans and Christians in 2014 in which participants were invited to explore their prejudices and preconceptions, learn more about each other, and find common ground in ‘Celebrating Planet Earth’. It is divided into 3 main sections: Addressing our fears and prejudices, Possibilities for cooperation and The role of ritual practice, myth, music and poetry in each tradition and in inter-faith encounter. Each section has a number of chapters written by various participants and speakers who were at the gathering.
In this useful book, Ingerman not only totally demystifies shamanism for the lay reader but shows how its various tools can also be used as a self-help toolkit by individuals. We can use it to bring our own mind body and spirit back into internal balance, provide our lives with new meaning and hope, bring ourselves back in balance with the rest of Nature and, most importantly of all, do our part in healing our damaged Earth.
Carolyn Baker is one of a growing band of writers who are facing up to the seriousness and scale of the ecological and economic collapse our planet is currently facing and 'telling it like it is.' The sort of world that humans might build out of the ruins of the old one will depend hugely, if not entirely, on our relationships. This includes our relationships with loved ones, with our neighbours and friends, with our children and our elders, ourselves, our bodies, our fellow creatures, the rest of Nature, and the Earth itself.
Have we not always been led to believe that religion is the purveyor of mysteries and all that is supernatural rather than natural? And have we not learned that science destroys mystery by discovering truth? In fact, as Dietrich—professor of philosophy at Binghamton University—so thoroughly and competently explains, religion is actually a biological phenomenon, a property emerging from the process of human evolution. Meanwhile science, we have all discovered, is what destroys our mysteries and reveals to us all that is real about the world.
This is not simply a book about trees. It is a book about you and me and all of us and how we can draw on a reservoir of help and energy that we might not even realize is available to us—i.e. the help and energy of those silent, deeply-rooted companions whose presence we all tend to overlook.