The book is a poetic and philosophic meditation on Thoreau's work,
highlighting a "Pedagogy of awakening", that is, a path towards a
non-dual and enlightening experience with Nature, a possible answer to
the need of addressing the urgency and necessity of our troubled times.
The urgency stems from a series of crises that humankind is now
facing-epidemiological, environmental, social, political, economic;
however, all those crises, as many have already observed, might be
better understood as different faces, or different modes, of the same
underlying crisis: the Anthropocene crisis, that is, the crisis whose
ultimate origins lay at our feet, triggered by the way we, humans,
inhabit-and impact-this world. It seems consensual that humankind has
never faced such a terrible array of combined crises that, for the first
time in history, puts our very survival as a species in danger. A dense
fog has alighted on this small and beautiful blue planet, and one can
only hope that the pains and suffering we have been through for so long
are the pangs of a childbirth-a new beginning, a new promise-, and not
the gaspings of a sclerotic organism that is on the brink of its final
collapse. Thence, the necessity. The necessity of a new way of
inhabiting this world. And I believe that an excellent guide to teach us
how to do so is Henry David Thoreau.
