I just noticed today that a book I contributed to is now available for preorder! It’s called An Ecotopian Lexicon, and it’s set to be in print this October. I wrote a chapter about watershed discipleship, which looks like it may be the last entry in the lexicon. Good job, me, picking one that starts with W…
Here’s a description of the book:
“An Ecotopian Lexicon” is a compendium of 30 short, engaging chapters on ecologically (and eco-politically, eco-socially, eco-culturally, and eco-psychologically) productive terms that should exist in English, but don’t – from the Mesoamerican concept nahual (each individual’s lifelong animal alter ego) to Octavia Butler’s hyperempathy (an illness in her Parable series that helps its protagonist found an ecological utopia) to the Thai term pa theuan (a sovereign, agentive forest).
Drawn from activist subcultures, other languages, and speculative fiction and complemented by original visual artwork from artists in ten countries, “An Ecotopian Lexicon” offers a window into the ‘structures of feeling’ of alternate ecological worlds and worldviews. It thereby attempts to jumpstart the critical process of imagining desirable futures, expands the limited and limiting Euro-American conceptual ecological lexicon, and translates some of the revolutionary ideas emerging in the environmental sciences and humanities to a broader audience.
Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy, with a foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson, An Ecotopian Lexicon will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in October 2019.
Cherice Bock 