Eileen Crist – Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization

February 12, 2022

Eileen is Associate Professor Emerita of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University, and a B.A., also in sociology, from Haverford College.

Her work focuses on the ecological crisis and its root causes and pathways toward creating an ecological civilization. She is author of Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (1999) and coeditor of a number of books, including Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth (2014) and Protecting the Wild: Parks and Wilderness, the Foundation for Conservation (2015). She is also author of numerous academic papers and writings for general audience readers. Her most recent book, Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2019. Eileen is Associate Editor of the journal The Ecological Citizen.

Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization
University of Chicago Press; First edition (February, 2019)

In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism?