Wilding Ecologies, Walking-with Glacier

This book is an educational novella composed from diverse encounters of walking-with a glacier, offering the reader possibilities for wilding ecologies as a means to be immersed in more-than-human lives and places. Wild rivulets of ecologies run through this novella, shifting fragments of geologic time over a disintegrating, icy, and watery landscape. Walking-with is positioned in the novella as an embodied methodology for attuning to, slowing down and paying attention. While walking, we weep, and bear witness to the unseen. In turn, this novella works with flows of pedagogy, theory, and collective creative practice. Glacier stories speaking through photographs, prose, poetry, and provocations. Collectively, the gathering of experiences in this book explores what it means to be human and more-than-human in the context of glacial melt and shifting loss. What is means to be changing our planet and, all the time, changing ourselves. Wilding ecologies emerges in the book, as a means to disrupt these anthropocentric ways of knowing, and by showing up, being affected, we can reawaken a newfound love and enchantment. Karen Malone is Professor of Education and Environmental Philosophy at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Sean Blenkinsop is Professor, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Bob Jickling is Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University, Canada. Marcus Morse is Associate Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education at the University of Tasmania, Australia. “Wilding Ecologies: Walking-with Glacier” is a courageous and honest attempt of the authors to bear witness, to move beyond just thinking and talking about threatened wild places and landscapes. What is needed, they argue, is to live with and listen to those places too, like the Hardangerjøkulen glacier in Norway. The group draws deep inspiration from visiting the elevated hut of the late ecophilosopher Arne Næss, who held that “the smaller we come to feel ourselves compared with the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness.” —Jan van Boeckel, Professor Art & Sustainability, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands