A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature »

James William Gibson is the author of Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America and The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and winner of multiple awards, including a Guggenheim, Gibson is a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He lives in Los Angeles.

“A fast-paced and highly rewarding account of the struggle to realize a deeper consciousness of the human relationship with nature—before it is too late.”—James Gustave Speth

For more than two centuries, as Western cultures became ever more industrialized, the natural world was increasingly regarded as little more than a collection of useful raw resources. The folklore of powerful forest spirits was displaced by the practicalities of logging; the traditional rituals of hunting ceremonies gave way to indiscriminate butchering of animals for meat markets. In the famous lament of Max Weber, our surroundings became “disenchanted,” with nature’s magic swept away by secularization and rationalization.

But as acclaimed sociologist James William Gibson reveals in this insightful study, the culture of enchantment is making an astonishing comeback. From Greenpeace eco-warriors to evangelical Christians preaching “creation care” and geneticists who speak of human-animal kinship, Gibson finds a remarkably broad yearning for a spiritual reconnection to nature. As we grapple with increasingly dire environmental disasters, Gibson points to this cultural shift as the last utopian dream, the final hope for protecting the world that all of us must live in.

Publishers Weekly

According to Gibson (Warrior Dreams), "No political movement [in the last two decades]... can account for the intensity of feeling expressed by those... who experience an attachment to animals and places so overwhelming that they feel morally compelled to protect them, and who look to nature for psychic regeneration and renewal." He follows the thread of the "recently recovered tradition of Native American spiritualism" and historical figures who rejected a mechanical view of modernism-Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, John Muir, Rachel Carson-arguing that "out of these shards of history came the new culture of enchantment" and a paradigm that stresses a relationship with rather than dominion over other species. The rise of the "reenchantment of nature" is not all sweetness and light; Gibson notes the ecological damage caused by enthusiastic nature tourists and evangelicals' backlash against "nature worship" as idolatry. But the book's message is passionately optimistic. Gibson believes that the cultural transformation gathering momentum and "coupled with political courage to act" can "remake the world." (Apr.)

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Introduction: Call of the Wild 1

Part I Forms of Enchantment

1 Modernity and Its Discontents 15

2 Animals Who Speak to Us 38

3 Holy Lands 68

4 Space Exploration, Gaia, and the Greening of Religion 93

5 Eco-Warriors and Blood Sacrifice 124

Part II Troubles in Paradise

6 Loving It to Death 145

7 Imitation Wildness and the Sacred Casino 168

8 The Right-Wing War on the Land 192

Part III Hope Renewed

9 Fighting Back 221

10 The Journey Ahead 245

Notes 255

Index 291