Product Overview
Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins, a personal history of place, is written from the perspective of a teacher, naturalist, and feminist and uses the metaphor of the biological ecotone as the boundary where inner and outer landscapes of the woman/nature continuum meet.
In this book, Krall proposes a counter-narrative to the usual reading of marginality. In autobiographical narrative that rings with experience, she describes margins as rich as dynamic abodes, places of crossing over and transition as well as spaces of separation and alienation. In reinterpreting journeys and encounters, she maps the shared terrain of the personal, social, and natural fields of our lives. She draws upon Native American sensibilities about place, relationship, and the sacred, in order to deepen our understanding of human/nature bonds, to more fully develop respect and responsibility to others, and to heal the rifts that sometimes set humans at odds with other humans and non-human creatures and threaten life on earth.
I read this book in a single sitting.The words and the tale that they framed pulled me along, promising to bring me to the center of some wisdom. I had to force myself to slow down so that I might appreciate the simplicity, the clarity, and the loveliness, the lovingness of the words themselves. This is a spectacular achievement. The book surprises. I was sorry to come to the end of it. I remember Holden Caulfield's saying sometimes you read a book and you wish the author lived next door to you, so you could just talk some more about it. I felt that way at the end of this one. -- Jo Anne Pagano, Colgate University
Her voice is authentic from start to finish as she weaves the spiritual and intellectual together to develop an alternative curriculum for environmental education. -- Diane D. Brunner, Michigan State University
In Ecotone, Florence Krall walks us through edges--both psychological as well as natural regions that inform the soul. She is engaged in pioneering work because she recognizes it is only through personal story that we can begin to reflect on change--the deep changes necessary in order for us to transform our world. Florence Krall is an ecological philosopher and visionary who writes with wisdom and courage, and knows the only education we can count on is that which is rooted in the earth. The margins she chooses to explore weave feminism, ecology, and pedagogy into a fabric of empathetic thought. This book invites us to see the world whole. -- Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge
Florence R. Krall is Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Utah with interests also in natural history and feminism. She presently lives with her husband in a cabin in Bondurant, Wyoming.
