Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field recording and what are its pedagogical potentials? These questions are operated by a methodology of listening that incorporates the spaces of audition, as well as Wright's own practice-based reflections. In doing so, Listening After Nature posits a range of novel interventions. One example is the “Noisy-Nonself,” a conceptual figuration with which to comprehend the presence of reticent recordists. “Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields” offers another unique contribution by reimaging the relationship between the field and studio. In the final chapter, Wright explores the microphone by tracing its critical and creative connections to natural resource extraction and contemporary practice. Listening After Nature auditions water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists, data and stars. It grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and anchors itself to the question: what am I not hearing? In doing so, it challenges Western universalisms that code the field whilst offering vibrant practice-based possibilities.

Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field recording and what are its pedagogical potentials? These questions are operated by a methodology of listening that incorporates the spaces of audition, as well as Wright's own practice-based reflections. In doing so, Listening After Nature posits a range of novel interventions. One example is the “Noisy-Nonself,” a conceptual figuration with which to comprehend the presence of reticent recordists. “Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields” offers another unique contribution by reimagining the relationship between the field and studio. In the final chapter, Wright explores the microphone by tracing its critical and creative connections to natural resource extraction and contemporary practice. Listening After Nature auditions water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists, data and stars. It grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and anchors itself to the question: what am I not hearing? In doing so, it challenges Western universalisms that code the field whilst offering vibrant practice-based possibilities.

In this far-ranging and heartening collection, Derrick Jensen gathers conversations with environmentalists, theologians, Native Americans, psychologists, and feminists, engaging some of our best minds in an exploration of more peaceful ways to live on Earth. Included here is Dave Foreman on biodiversity, Matthew Fox on Christianity and nature, Jerry Mander on technology, and Terry Tempest Williams on an erotic connection to the land. With intelligence and compassion, Listening to the Land moves from a look at the condition of the environment and the health of our spirit to a beautiful evocation of eros and a life based on love.

"Gretel Van Wieren's family cabin, the Cedar Shack, in northwest Michigan's Manistee National Forest, is where she learned to fish and wade in rivers, build fires, send smoke signals, and distinguish false from true morels. It's where she came to love the water and woods, and where she is now trying to teach her children to do the same. But decades of moving from place to place-from Eastern Africa to New England-have made trips back to the Cedar Shack scarce and short-lived. Even after moving back to Michigan, Van Wieren and her husband's obligations as university professors and parents of three overscheduled teenagers have made forest time thin and rushed. It wasn't always like this. For years, Van Wieren studied and attempted to emulate the lives of the mystics. As a pastor in rural, dairy-farming New York, she walked the fields and woods behind the parsonage daily. Remembering that time in her life, Van Wieren concludes that she is out of practice, and she goes to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon's western Cascade Mountains to conduct a spiritual experiment: Is it possible to rediscover a deep sense of connection with the natural world, and can it be done, with children, in today's high-tech, hyper-busy world? Listening at Lookout Creek weaves philosophical and spiritual interpretations of the natural world with personal, hands-on experiences of particular landed places"--

Learn what America's most venerable ornithological institution has discovered about birds in its past 100 years of study.

The editors of this critical volume have compiled a rich group of authors comprised of professors, psychotherapists, counselling practitioners, and doctoral students, to address society’s struggle to find meaning. A rich classroom resource, this book is a particularly important contribution to the Academy given our current lived experience in research, and also for personal reflection. Still in the throes of recovering from the COVID 19 pandemic, economic challenges, environmental disasters, and conflicts in various places in our world, to name only a few of our current challenges, the search for meaning and purpose has become an important pursuit for many. Many people today are looking for an often elusive “more.” This book poses numerous questions reflecting a variety of perspectives on the connections between meaning and service. These diverse perspectives offer readers points of engagement in their own pursuit of integrating meaning and service in their own personal and professional life.

Presents a guide to developing a deeper awareness of nature that includes transformative exercises and quotations from naturalists, arranged as a monthly diary centered around a specific theme.