Paper Details

Name: Girija Menon
Country: India

Year: 2016
Volume: Volume-3, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 15-17

The late twentieth century and early twenty first century have witnessed an extraordinary flowering of beautiful and profound environmental writing from throughout the world, and particularly from North America. All ecocritics have expressed the need to plumb the depths of a world beyond ourselves. Man is incapable of being totally ecocentric or absolutely empathetic even with his own kind, but he must keep trying. It should be the goal of what environmental philosophers now call enlightened anthropocentrism which is “a more realistic form of environmental ethics”.
Alison Hawthorne Deming in her 2014 book, “Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit” reflects in essay after essay on the meaning she derives from ideas of and encounters with the animal world – the world that simply “teems and steams with the shared breath of creatures”. In all her works these is a psychological and spiritual hunger to understand her “continuity and connection” with the planet’s many forces, including the life energies of other entities that are not human. Deming offers the following quotation from a 1906 talk by William James : “The blindness in human beings is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”