The World as Home

Required reading for those interested in a livable future, this collection explores the barriers that divide humanity from the natural world and reveals the damning results of that division. The Future of Nature looks through our pervasive ecological crises to the root causes in human culture and offers a path beyond.

From local economies to our genetic heritage, and from environmental refugees to the nature of education, this essential book is both a compendium of the finest writing in Orion and a crucial guidebook for the twenty-first century activist.

From Orion's acknowledgements:

"Our understanding of the relationship between people and the natural world is forever evolving. Orion, for twenty-five years, has endeavored to capture the new thoughts, corrections, modifications, and breakthroughs that change the way we understand that relationship. Orion has also tried to document another phenomenon: for all of the terrible, greedy, and stupid mistakes humanity has made in its stewardship of the environment, there is no lack of love for the world and no lack of good ideas for living in a more sensible way.

The Future of Nature was shaped to give a sense of the fullness of the last fifteen years of Orion. (An earlier anthology, Finding Home, published by Beacon Press in 1992, covers the first ten years of Orion’s history.) In this book we tried not to collect the Orion essays that are necessarily the “best,” but those that point toward a fuller understanding of the world and the possibility of a saner future.

Its six sections map out the territories that the magazine’s writers have returned to again and again: Action is devoted to the principle that real change happens from the bottom up, and within us. Refugees is dedicated to the human lives that are trampled in our abuse of the environment, and sometimes by the movement to protect the environment. Reverence underscores the notion that a worldview based in respect for nature is essential to any effort to protect nature. Boundaries addresses the slippery question of what is natural, and what is not. Monsters makes plain the insanity and short-sightedness of our treatment of the world. And Native reflects the belief of so many Orion writers that in order to heal the places we live in, we must become a part of them."—H. Emerson Blake, The Orion Society