Thoreau's Pedagogy of Awakening

The book explores Thoreau's work and proposes a "Pedagogy of awakening" to address the urgency and necessity of our troubled times. It highlights the Anthropocene crisis, which is the crisis of our way of inhabiting the world and impacting it. The book suggests that Thoreau can guide us in learning how to inhabit the world in a new way.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 146 pages
Publication date: 17 February 2022
Publisher: University Press of America

The book is a poetic and philosophic meditation on Thoreaus work, highlighting a "Pedagogy of awakening", that is, a path towards a non-dual and enlightening experience with Nature, a possible answer to the need of addressing the urgency and necessity of our troubled times. The urgency stems from a series of crises that humankind is now facing—epidemiological, environmental, social, political, economic; however, all those crises, as many have already observed, might be better understood as different faces, or different modes, of the same underlying crisis: the Anthropocene crisis, that is, the crisis whose ultimate origins lay at our feet, triggered by the way we, humans, inhabit—and impact—this world. It seems consensual that humankind has never faced such a terrible array of combined crises that, for the first time in history, puts our very survival as a species in danger. A dense fog has alighted on this small and beautiful blue planet, and one can only hope that the pains and suffering we have been through for so long are the pangs of a childbirth—a new beginning, a new promise—, and not the gaspings of a sclerotic organism that is on the brink of its final collapse. Thence, the necessity. The necessity of a new way of inhabiting this world. And I believe that an excellent guide to teach us how to do so is Henry David Thoreau.

Weight: 238g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780761872726