Nicholsen gives us an honest and creative account of the challenges we face as members of an ecologically dysfunctinonal society and the opportunities to heal ourselves and the world. Especially useful for instructors who've learned that ecological realism too often disempowers students instead of building capacities for personal and societal transformation.
Max Oelschlaeger, McAllister Chair of Community, Culture, and Environment, Northern Arizona University, author of The Idea of Wilderness
An inspired and beautiful meditation on our present predicament.
green@work Magazine
...heartfelt and well-informed.
The Ecologist
Shierry Nicholsen has fashioned a warm meditation on our chilling capacity for oblivion.
David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous
This book pulls together literatures from art and psychology with a persuasive argument that they need to be considered together in order to answer questions that will be asked by more and more people: What are the roots of the persistent denial and destructiveness that characterize so much of human behavior in relation to the natural environment? What paths of affirmation can lead us out of this impasse? The book forms an eloquent plea for people to break through barriers of defensiveness in order to give loving attention and responsible care to the natural world... and in doing so, to their own full human potential.
Louise Chawla, Whitney Young College, Kentucky State University
With a close reading of a century of important psychological sources, Shierry Nicholsen brings the human mind back to ecology, thereby deepening the reach of environmental concern. A lucid, heartfelt, and inspiring book.
David Rothenberg, Professor of Philosophy, New Jersey Institute of Technology, author of Hand's End and Sudden Music
In a time of catastrophe it is rare and important to open a book that speaks so profoundly to the problem of human destructiveness without losing sight of the equally human capacity for reparation. The Love of Nature and the End of the World is such a book. Remarkably lucid but never facile, it opens our minds to the overwhelming question of the fate of the earth while offering an intense awareness of what it means be overwhelmed and to suffer trauma. Nicholsen's writing, at once erudite and simple, weaves so effortlessly between psychoanalysis and social thought that we can hardly believe they were ever separate and often inaccessible modes of thinking.
Jessica Benjamin, psychoanalyst, author of The Bonds of Love and Shadow of the Other
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 2002
