Director, Environmental Studies
Professor of English

List of important themes to watch for

Philosophy of nature

Change, process, changeless

Ecocentrism versus anthropocentrism

Individualism (metaphysical): things as individuated and separate

Interrelatedness, oneness

Intrinsic value

Realism: this world only, immanence, materialism

Reality and illusion/unreality

Silence, stillness

Wilderness

Spirituality

Metaphysical spirituality

Animism

Appearance, surface, things-in-themselves. suchness

Being, ground of being, elemental, essence

Eternity, eternal

Meaning, "meaningless"

Mystery, something, presence

Nothingness, void, emptiness, empty, abyss, oblivion

Paradise , heaven

Strange, surreal, fantastic, visionary

Time, timeless

Psychological spirituality

Mysticism

Tranquility, inner peace, equanimity

Ecopsychology, epistemology

Consciousness

Skepticism, limits of knowledge, questions

Paradox

Reason, rational

Social

Fellow activists (Monkey-Wrench Gang)

Retreat, refuge, solitude, withdrawal

Ecosocial politics

Agrarian, primitive, pre-civilization, aboriginal

Anarchy, anarchism, mutual aid, freedom & liberty, order, social peace, p olitics, radicalism

Apocalypse, c oming collapse of industrial age, post-civilization

Critique of current system, the enemy

Earth First! & ecotage & other forms of resistance to current powers

Gender, women, feminism

Individualism & c ommunalism

Utopia & dystopia

Violence & non-violence, guns

Rhetoric

Dualism (us versus them)

Paradox

Questions

Self-deprecation

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