“The Classical Four Elements as Different Ways of Approaching Nature”
By Georg Maier
This article leads us through a path with the four elements — earth, water, air, and fire — “not as parts of things, but rather as different layers of our embeddedness in the world.” Georg’s article was one of the first to articulate the four elements as a methodology for practicing Goethean phenomenology of nature. His essay is frequently used in our education programs.
“Beyond Boundaries: Thoughts on a Science of the Living”
By Craig Holdrege and Jon McAlice
What does it mean to be alive? Where do we draw the line between the living and the non-living? Is it possible not only to change our mind about where to place the border, but to transform our minds into a living thinking beyond borders? In this essay, Craig and Jon strive to think about life itself as a kind of belonging, which means also coming to experience how thinking itself belongs with life. They take time to exactly imagine the way a plant is, how it lives into its environment and environment lives through it. They then precisely imagine how animals live in their world in a radically different way and yet interpenetrate with plants. Finally, they see how humans are not divorced from the world but live in it as thinking beings. As living thinking, scientific research might move beyond drawing boundaries and into participating in nature’s creative unfolding.
“Extinction of Experience”?
By Ryan Shea
In this short essay, Ryan reflects on a recent article in Nature about the decline of direct field experience in contemporary ecological science.
