Wild Mind, Wild Earth

<p><strong>Exploring the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern Western environmental thought, <em>Wild Mind, Wild Earth</em> reveals the unrecognized kinship of mind and nature that must be reanimated if we are to end our destruction of the planet.</strong></p> <p>Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event&mdash;this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it.</p> <p>In <em>Wild Mind, Wild Earth</em>, David Hinton explores modes of seeing and being that could save the planet by reestablishing a deep kinship between human and earth: the insights of primal cultures and the Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism of ancient China. He also shows how these insights have become well-established in the West over the last two hundred years, through the work of poets and philosophers and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty&mdash;but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal/Zen insights enable us to inhabit even the unfurling catastrophe as a profound kind of liberation. <em>Wild Mind, Wild Earth</em> is a remarkable and revitalizing journey.</p>