Conversations On A Country Path: The Collapse Commentaries (Sandy Krolick, Islands Press, 2013)

From the introduction: "Have we lost or perhaps buried our feral capacity to hear alternate voices, the subtle conversations that greet us on a country path when we have left behind the confines and safety of home, city wall, and highway? We think we can continue to ignore this call of the wild and the utterances of nature - drowning them out with our mechanical pumps, our jackhammers, and engines, our explosives, drills, derricks, wells, and chemical admixtures-and all the accompanying machinations that force nature to stand and deliver, as we struggle desperately to sate our hunger for more energy and more of the good old 'high life.' It seems we hear only the voices of other humans, and usually we listen only to those speaking the loudest, our leaders and their well-paid pitchmen. We, in turn, respond most directly to those strident marketers who ply us with the greatest promises, the newest toys and other goodies, things to obscure our own growing sense of alienation and anonymity in an increasingly atomized world of their making. What is globalization? It is just another word for the hypnosis of mass anonymity, the loss of a physical pulse, as we live now faceless, entombed in a world of steel, concrete, and electronic impulses." Here is a series of extended conversations on the challenge of our human predicament today. In the face of environmental overshoot, resource depletion, climate change, peak oil, extreme weather, imperial overreach, constant war, political upheaval, global financial collapse, economic and social unrest, we must try to uncover the historical roots of the crisis and recover the philosophical-anthropology that must be excavated out from beneath the ruble of modern Western civilization if we, along with the planet and its remaining species, have any chance of surviving. (amazon)