How much do you think about your place in your ecosystem? Is this something you think about when you eat your dinner, shop for clothes and groceries, fill up your car at the pump, take a walk, even vote?

For quite a while now I’ve been working on how to engage others with these questions of this apsect of self–this idea of our ecological identity. I have now published an open education resource (OER–meaning it’s free!) book utilizing the program Pressbooks through the Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project. I did this for two reasons: I think these ideas are important for us all to explore as soon as possible without any barriers and the nature of the text ended up having multimedia elements, so print media didn’t suffice.

The book is titled Descendants of the Fire: Rediscovering Our Ecological Identity and Connection to the Natural World. It offers a transformative roadmap back to our place within the biosphere. Seamlessly weaving together rigorous systems biology, deep environmental philosophy, and Western and Traditional Ecological Knowledge as the reader explores our human story and our deep interconnectedness with Earth’s living cycles.

While it may sound overly academic, I assure you it is not written in that style. I purposefully utilized a conversational, narrative style of writing to bring the reader along on this journey. In fact, much of the book has the reader imagining a walk through a busy city landscape and city park landscape, stopping to make observations and see connections between self and the natural world–even where one seemingly wouldn’t expect to find such connectedness.

I’m inviting you to take a look, watch some of the embedded videos and engage in the “ecological identity” journaling at the end of each chapter in the book and see where it takes you.

Here is a link to the book. It’s free!

And if you think of others who might find this of interest, please do share.

Thanks.