In today’s world, it’s often too easy to forget about the world outside the window. People struggle daily with stressful jobs, trapped under fluorescent lighting, staring at glowing screens, or surrounded by concrete when they could be outdoors, acknowledging the gifts of natural world. In the face of its absence, we are finally beginning to understand that our connection with nature—plants, trees, animals, and the energy of the earth itself—is more than a luxury; it is a necessary and vital part of our existence. In Partnering with Nature, Catriona MacGregor weaves together historical, spiritual, and scientific examples to emphasize the importance of creating a vital relationship with our natural surroundings. Our separation from nature leads to several devastating effects, whether through stress, feeling a lack of purpose, or the heedless destruction of our environment. Through her exploration of the energies that link humans, animals, and the natural world, she shows how we can learn from nature as we develop our spirituality and ourselves. Through diverse approaches, Catriona offers the reader a solid understanding of why a connection with the Earth is vital to our existence, and how a revival of that connection opens doors to a myriad of benefits in our environment and in our health, our daily lives, and our happiness.

Organised as a dialogue between nature and design, this book explores design ideas, opportunities, visions and practices through relating and uncovering experience of the natural world. Presented as an edited collection of 25 wide-ranging short chapters, the book explores the possibility of new relations between design and nature, beyond human mastery and understandings of nature as resource and by calling into question the longstanding role for design as agent of capitalism. The book puts forward ways in which design can form partnerships with living species and examines designers’ capacities for direct experience, awe, integrated relationships and new ways of knowing. It covers: • New design ethics of care • Indigenous perspectives • Prototyping with nature • Methods for new design and nature relations • A history of design and nature • Animist beliefs • De-centering human-centered design • Understanding nature has power and agency Design and Nature: A Partnership is a rich resource for designers who wish to learn to engage with sustainability from the ground up.

Align Your Creative Energy with Nature’s “Everything we know about creating,” writes Tina Welling, “we know intuitively from the natural world.” In Writing Wild, Welling details a three-step “Spirit Walk” process for inviting nature to enliven and inspire our creativity.

In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.

A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.

In 1969, Ian McHarg's seminal book, Design with Nature, set forth a new vision for regional planning using natural systems. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, a team of landscape architects and planners from PennDesign have showcased some of the most advanced ecological design projects in the world today. Written in clear language and featuring vivid color images, Design with Nature Now demonstrates McHarg's enduring influence on contemporary practitioners as they contend with climate change and other 21st-century challenges.

When researchers gather around lunch tables, at conferences, or in bars, there are some topics that are more or less compulsory. The discussions are about the ho- less management of the university or the lab where they are working, the lack of funding for important research, politicians’ inability to grasp the potential of a p- ticularly promising ?eld, and the endless series of committees that seem to produce very little progress. It is common to meet excellent researchers claiming that they have almost no time to do research because writing applications, lecturing, and - tending to committee work seem to take most of their time. Very few ever come into a position to do something about it. With Simula we have this chance. We were handed a considerable annual grant and more or less left to ourselves to do whatever we thought would produce the best possible results. We wanted to create a place where researchers could have the time and conditions necessary to re?ect over dif?cult problems, uninterrupted by mundane dif?culties; where doctoral students could be properly supervised and learn the craft of research in a well-organized and professional manner; and where entrepreneurs could ?nd professional support in developing their research-based - plications and innovations.