This Special Issue explores how contemplative practices, and the academic study of contemplation, can sensitize us to ecological travesty and offer us patterns of mind and action that lead to thoughtful responses. Such thinking and practices have the capacity to train our eyes, and all our senses, to perceive that which lies beyond an array of binaries (mind/body, human/animal, nature/culture, self/world, activism/reflection), cultivating within us the reflective awareness, longing, and sensitivity needed for climate and cultural healing. Contemplative Ecology also calls our attention to the specific formations of particular landscapes and the actual communities of life sustained by them. These techniques are, we believe, a crucial part of what Bruno Latour has described as “coming down to earth,” remembering that we are terrestrial beings linked to distinct places even as we exist within a broader planetary ecosystem. Contemplative Ecology invites the sensitivity we need, in the words of Barry Lopez, to become “apprenticed” to our immediate surroundings.
Editors: Ariel Evan Mayse (Guest Editor), Devin Zuckerman (Guest Editor), Douglas E. Christie (Guest Editor), Simone Agnes Ingridsdotter Kotva (Guest Editor)