Becoming Ecological
Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet's Future
Derek Gladwin author Kedrick James author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Toronto Press
Published:27th Jan '26
Should be back in stock very soon
Our lives are profoundly connected to the planet’s unfolding ecological crisis, and the language we use - our words, stories, conversations, and beliefs - determines our ability to respond.
Becoming Ecological offers a fresh and empowering perspective on the natural world by insisting that our relationship with language can transform issues of sustainability and environmental catastrophe. The book explores how language, meaning, and communication can help us in the ongoing process of “becoming ecological” in our daily lives, encouraging us to listen, relate, and act with greater awareness. Language and literacy experts, Derek Gladwin and Kedrick James subvert the norms of focusing on data and policy in conversations surrounding climate change, and instead centre communication and dialogue as the catalyst for ecological transformation. A powerful and unprecedented reframing – they argue that language has the profound ability to renew our personal and social awareness and steer the course of our future as a society.
Drawing from various views on relationships, values, and responsibility, as well as topics like AI, food, compost, sound, economics, improvisation, extinction, climate anxiety, and even the nature of reality, Becoming Ecological is a hopeful invitation to engage with the world differently. Through everyday experiences, this book inspires readers to consider other perspectives, participate more playfully, and spark lasting ecological change.
"Becoming Ecological reminds us that social revolutions can be set in motion simply by changing the stories we tell about our place in the world. The book left me with a strange and unfamiliar feeling: Optimism." - Marcia Bjornerud, author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World and Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rock
"If we’re going to face up to the trouble around and ahead of us, if we’re going to find the kinds of work worth doing, then the way we use language matters. This book is an invitation to get back into conversation with the world, to set words in movement in ways that shift attention, and to show up as creatures who still have a part to play in the ongoingness of life." - Dougald Hine, author of At Work in the Ruins
"An invitation to open up your mind–and perhaps the world's possibilities–by reimagining how things might work. Words matter!" - Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun
"This is the work – the soul work – I’ve been awaiting for decades, genuine environmental humanities. Derek Gladwin and Kedrick James get right down to it from page one of this superb book, which centers decolonial group dialogue as a wonderful, in fact as the format for facing the terrible issues of the age. I’m with Freud: groups all have NPD unless you work on them really hard. This book models the hard work necessary to achieve a just politics at planet scale. At long last there’s a book that gets it spot on: to invert that seventies phrase, think locally – act globally." - Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University
ISBN: 9781487561864
Dimensions: 222mm x 147mm x 19mm
Weight: 480g
304 pages