An Ecology of Communication: Response and Responsibility in an Age of Ecocrisis moves readers beyond the anthropocentric bias of communication study and toward a listening-based model of communication; an essential move toward discerning fitting responses and the call to responsibility in an age of ecocrisis. This book addresses the ecological and communicative dilemma in which the universe, earth, and socio-cultural life world are resoundingly dialogic, all while we create modern and postmodern cultures largely governed by monologue. This book addresses the need to live different, non-dogmatic stories that vivify our links with the natural world, redefining dominant myths of unlimited growth, technology as savior, and linear progress. The ecological crisis, most broadly construed, is a crisis of communication. Scholars of communication, ecology, and social sciences will find this book particularly interesting.
William Homestead is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at New England College.
Table of Contents Introduction: Ecocrisis as a Crisis of Communication Chapter One: The Fitting Response: Calvin O. Schrag and Rational Communication Chapter Two: Integral Meta-Theory: Ken Wilber and Spiritual Communication Chapter Three: To Learn but Not Return: Paul Shepard and Mythic-Animistic Communication Chapter Four: The Pattern that Connects: Gregory Bateson and Aesthetic Communication Chapter Five: Discerning the Unfit: New Age to Ascension Chapter Six: Discerning the Unfit: Interspecies Communication Chapter Seven: The Call to Responsibility: Thoreau and the Voice(s) of Nature Epilogue: A Fitting Responsiveness: Communicating Our Way into the Future
"It takes years of committed and thoughtful engagement with an idea to yield work as broad and fecund as this. Homestead achieves his eco-communicative ethics by reading a vast array of interlocutors with a generosity seldom seen when so much is at stake. This serves him well (and recommends the practice to all of us) as he learns deeply from a wide and multidisciplinary range of thinkers. That said, Homestead is never far from his ultimate concern and original contribution. If we stand a chance for a livable future on the other side of the climate crisis, then thinking such as is demonstrated in this fine book will have been central to keeping us alive to the struggle." -- Ramsey Eric Ramsey, Arizona State University "Homestead interacts with a wide range of thinkers and his own personal experience to articulate how ecocrisis can be understood as a fundamental crisis of communication. An Ecology of Communication comes at a moment when such cross-disciplinary revisits to the very glue that holds our shared meanings together are needed. It's in understanding the ecological force of communication, and its intimate entwinement with the social, cultural, psychological, and sacred, that we remember how to listen to the wider world and know how to fittingly respond." -- Tema Milstein, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
