The founders of Big Muddy Press, an independent publishing venture, hope to open up a creative space for dialogue, debate, and imaginative renewal with respect to our broken relationship with Nature.
For the vast North American Grasslands,
this estrangement is historically represented by the plow, the blade that sliced the prairie sod into tillable fields; a species of global terraforming.
Transforming Nature into one vast economic resource through technological domination has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe.
Restoring our broken relationship with Nature inevitably entails grief, regret, and sorrow. And yet it must be done…
In the People’s Agreement of Chochabamba, 2010,
it was noted that the regenerative capacity of the planet was in dire straits. In the Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, they stipulated “[the Earth’s] right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue it’s vital cycles and processes free of human alteration…”
Today in 2023 we see both the heartbreak and wisdom in this statement; and since we know the fragile state of the biosphere, we now ask “What must I do and in what may I hope?”
…no regeneration without reimagining…
In other words, we are endeavouring to rehabilitate…
“the personal experience of human beings, as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, and making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speaking…
because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of our banal, prosperous life...for the sake of that which gives life meaning.”