Wilding Ecologies, Walking-With Glacier - by Karen Malone & Sean Blenkinsop & Bob Jickling & Marcus Morse (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book is an educational novella composed from diverse encounters of walking-with a glacier, offering the reader possibilities for wilding ecologies as a means to be immersed in more-than-human lives and places. Wild rivulets of ecologies run through this novella, shifting fragments of geologic time over a disintegrating, icy, and watery landscape. Walking-with is positioned in the novella as an embodied methodology for attuning to, slowing down and paying attention. While walking, we weep, and bear witness to the unseen. In turn, this novella works with flows of pedagogy, theory, and collective creative practice. Glacier stories speaking through photographs, prose, poetry, and provocations. Collectively, the gathering of experiences in this book explores what it means to be human and more-than-human in the context of glacial melt and shifting loss. What is means to be changing our planet and, all the time, changing ourselves. Wilding ecologies emerges in the book, as a means to disrupt these anthropocentric ways of knowing, and by showing up, being affected, we can reawaken a newfound love and enchantment.

From the Back Cover

"Wilding Ecologies: Walking-with Glacier" is a courageous and honest attempt of the authors to bear witness, to move beyond just thinking and talking about threatened wild places and landscapes. What is needed, they argue, is to live with and listen to those places too, like the Hardangerjøkulen glacier in Norway. The group draws deep inspiration from visiting the elevated hut of the late ecophilosopher Arne Næss, who held that "the smaller we come to feel ourselves compared with the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness."
--Jan van Boeckel, Professor Art & Sustainability, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands

This book is an educational novella composed from diverse encounters of walking-with a glacier, offering the reader possibilities for wilding ecologies as a means to be immersed in more-than-human lives and places. Wild rivulets of ecologies run through this novella, shifting fragments of geologic time over a disintegrating, icy, and watery landscape. Walking-with is positioned in the novella as an embodied methodology for attuning to, slowing down and paying attention. While walking, we weep, and bear witness to the unseen. In turn, this novella works with flows of pedagogy, theory, and collective creative practice. Glacier stories speaking through photographs, prose, poetry, and provocations. Collectively, the gathering of experiences in this book explores what it means to be human and more-than-human in the context of glacial melt and shifting loss. What is means to be changing our planet and, all the time, changing ourselves. Wilding ecologies emerges in the book, as a means to disrupt these anthropocentric ways of knowing, and by showing up, being affected, we can reawaken a newfound love and enchantment.

Karen Malone is Professor of Education and Environmental Philosophy at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.

Sean Blenkinsop is Professor, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Bob Jickling is Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University, Canada.

Marcus Morse is Associate Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education at the University of Tasmania, Australia.

About the Author

Karen Malone is Professor of Education and Environmental Philosophy at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. She researches Human-Earth relations and applies ecofeminist, posthumanist and Indigenous theoretical perspectives to her studies of the ecological crisis including climate change, militarised radiation and biodiversity loss.

Sean Blenkinsop is Professor, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has been involved in starting three nature-based, place-based, eco-schools (all in the public system) and has written extensively about these experiences and the philosophical underpinnings of eco-education writ large.

Bob Jickling is Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University, Canada. He has interests in environmental education and ethics, and his current research attempts to find openings for radical re-visioning of education. His most recent book is Environmental Ethics: A Sourcebook for Educators. As a long-time wilderness traveller, much of his inspiration is derived from the landscape of his home in Canada's Yukon.

Marcus Morse is Associate Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. His research focuses on place-based and relational outdoor environmental education, community engagement projects, river experience, and wild pedagogies.