Exploring the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern
Western environmental thought, Wild Mind, Wild Earth reveals the
unrecognized kinship of mind and nature that must be reanimated if we
are to end our destruction of the planet.
Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event--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.
In Wild Mind, Wild Earth, 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--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. Wild Mind,
Wild Earth is a remarkable and revitalizing journey.
