In her autobiography, published in 1932, Austin speaks frankly about her life while also commenting on the events and decisions that formed and influenced her life and writing. A prolific writer, she wrote novels, short stories, essays, plays, and poetry. She was an early advocate for environmental issues as well as the rights of women and minority groups.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIAN From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.
What is the connection between anthropology, philosophy, and geography? How does one locate the connection? Can a juncture between these disciplines also accommodate history, sociology and other applied and theoretical forms of knowledge? In Earth Ways: Framing Geographical Meanings, editors Gary Backhaus and John Murungi challenge their contributors to find the location that would enable them to bridge their "home disciplines" to philosophical and geographical thought. This represents no easy task. Essayists are charged with building a set of conceptual bridges and what emerges is a unique co-joined topography; sets of ideas united by a painstaking and rigorous interdisciplinary framework. Earth Ways is a salient rendering of interdisciplinary thought in contemporary humanities and social sciences scholarship.
With the advent of global warming and the nuclear arms race, humans are rapidly approaching a moment of truth. Technologically supreme, they manifest their dreams and nightmares in the real world through science, art, adventures and brutal wars, a paradox symbolized by a candle lighting the dark yet burning away to extinction, as discussed in this book. As these lines are being written, fires are burning on several continents, the Earth’s ice sheets are melting and the oceans are rising, threatening to flood the planet’s coastal zones and river valleys, where civilization arose and humans live and grow food. With the exception of birds like hawks, black kites and fire raptors, humans are the only life form utilizing fire, creating developments they can hardly control. For more than a million years, gathered around campfires during the long nights, mesmerized by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, prehistoric humans acquired imagination, a yearning for omnipotence, premonitions of death, cravings for immortality and conceiving the supernatural. Humans live in realms of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts, waking up for a brief moment to witness a world that is as beautiful as it is cruel. Existentialist philosophy offers a way of coping with the unthinkable. Looking into the future produces fear, an instinctive response that can obsess the human mind and create a conflict between the intuitive reptilian brain and the growing neocortex, with dire consequences. As contrasted with Stapledon’s Last and first Man, where an advanced human species mourns the fate of the Earth, Homo sapiens continues to transfer every extractable molecule of carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, ensuring the demise of the planetary life support system.”
"This book argues that a world characterized by runaway climate change needs radically new models of scientific and practical expertise to effectively address the emergency"--