Excerpted from Water Writing - an essay; presented as part of the ebr Critical Ecologies thread; concurrent with a literary Festschrift in honor of Joseph McElroy’s lifework
Stephen Schryer reviews Mark Taylor and casts a critical eye on the unconditional celebration of complexity.
Claire Rasmussen on geography and the social theory of Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Mike Davis, and Edward Soja.
Bruce Clarke reviews Stephan Harding’s Animate Earth and James Lovelock’s recent book on Gaia, the mother of all systems.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/looped)
Systems theory often seems counter-intuitive. The problem is not with the behavior of systems, but with the conceptually antiquated nature of our intuitions. For instance, typically, “negative” stands to “positive” as deleterious stands to desirable.