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This chapter presents an in-depth analysis of the Women's Intercultural Center in Anthony, New Mexico. The nonprofit organization draws women interested in personal skill-building and empowerment as well as those interested in broader change for social and ecological justice. Using ethnographic methods and document analysis of the news stories, brochures, and videos by the center, the chapter examines how narratives about the environment are articulated in the everyday activities of contemporary activists in the U.S. Southwest. Similar to the chapters on cultural production, one of the draws in studying this particular organization is that its mission is not explicitly environmental. Nevertheless, ecological consciousness is woven throughout the center's focus on women's empowerment in a way that can teach us something new about the intersection between social and ecological justice.

This chapter emphasizes three pivotal moments in Thomas Merton's life. The first, in the late 1950s, was his experience at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, where he suddenly realized that “I loved all people and that they are a part of me”. The second, in 1963, was the experience that triggered his letter to Rachel Carson, an experience of his oneness with all of nature. The third, in 1968, was the experience at the Buddha statues in Ceylon, where he was drawn into oneness with all that is. This book explores the powerful impact of nature on Thomas Merton's spiritual development and budding ecological consciousness. It also explores Merton's commitment to seeing and increased awareness and explores some of the consequences of that commitment: his deepening sense of place and desire for solitude; his expanded love and responsibility for human and nonhuman life; and his evolving ecological consciousness. An overview of the chapters included in this book is presented.

This chapter examines Thomas Merton's early life, looking for examples of seeds: influences and patterns that contributed to his predisposition for ecological thinking. It specifically concentrates on Merton's gift of awareness and sense of place—from his infant days in Prades, France, to his entrance into the Trappist monastery in Kentucky and the turning point of June 27, 1949, when the abbot permitted Merton to pray beyond the confines of the monastery cloister. Three French landscapes in particular—Prades, Saint-Antonin, Murat—as well as the city of Rome show how vulnerable Merton was to the influence of geography and how deeply these places contributed in later years to his love of wilderness and his evolving ecological consciousness. Generally, June 27, 1949, represents the abbot's wise recognition of Merton's need to be in nature, his recognition of the potential for deeper prayer that contact with the wilderness can stimulate, and an official invitation to savor a new awareness of both outer and inner landscapes.

In this chapter, Allen Ginsberg's reaction to Gregory Bateson and the greenhouse effect is revisited and amplified as an instance of apocalyptic encounter, a central experience of the ecological consciousness and the prospect of ecocatastrophe. That amplification includes the creation of his much-anthologized poem, "Wales Visitation." The trajectory of Bateson's career as a scientist, writer, and public intellectual after 1967 is sketched. This includes a well-documented conference he facilitated in 1968 and the publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1972. The year following the events described in this book--1968--is widely recognized as a turning point toward increasing violence and backlash, and the rapid collapse of the liberal consensus that had seen the United States through the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. The epilogue invites the reader to regard that turning point in terms of the emergent ecological consciousness the book has placed in context. The epilogue, too, leaves Bateson at a turning point. In contrast to the other principle figures at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, whose public influence peaked in 1967, Bateson's time as a public intellectual had just begun.

This chapter argues that the films of Jia Zhangke approach the issue of globalization through a particular lens of ecological consciousness and a unique cinematic use of the spatial relationship between man and environment. He also frequently puts various types of ruins in the setting and focuses his camera largely on those people who have been discovered and characterized in China today as cao gen or “grassroots.” This cinematic maneuvering sends out a strong ideological message, directing one's attention to the edges of globalization as an historical monster and to the margins of China as a miracle of globalization, where the lines between the integrated and disintegrated are drawn in a most visible and yet complicated way.

This chapter presents an overview of the evolution of earth art. It recalls works created during the 1960s and 1970s which started to redirect art toward an ecological consciousness, such as Shift by Richard Serra and Ocean Landmark by Betty Beaumont. It discusses art that is normally associated with ecology, namely, site restoration and activist art, and traces their roots in postminimalist sculpture, process art, performance art, and conceptual art. It explains how these precedents, in their decided rejection of modernist ideals and institutions, paved the way for an ecological orientation in artistic practice. It also challenges any erroneous presumptions that earth art is only confined to sculpture in the land or that these early practices have no connection to current environmental concerns.

In the 1960s and early 1970s a profound shift in the Golden State’s history was taking place. The convergence of California’s counter-cultural movement, a Bay Area conservation effort, public insistence on beach access at the Sea Ranch development along the Sonoma coast, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the struggle to pass environmental legislation in Sacramento catalyzed a robust, grass roots ecological consciousness. This consciousness, which spread nationwide, was resident in Douglas. The sea change in public thinking about the importance of protecting the environment that was taking place paved the way for statewide, as opposed to merely local, management of California’s shore.