Author Description

"This book deals with climate change not only as a feature of the physical world but also as a milieu, a state of spirit. The climate is, in Tim Leduc's terms, "the context within which we mind all our relations." An ecology of mind is where ideas of mind-ecology relations emerged at the dawn of the environmental movement, and it's important for the author to explore those ideas in a specifically Canadian context. For example, he juxtaposes the Ontario biologist John Livingston and William Woodworth, an architect and a Mohawk from the Six Nations territory in southern Ontario; he also incorporates ideas from other Canadians, such as John Ralston Saul's vision of Canada as a metis nation. What Leduc calls "the braided metis strand of thought" allows him to "bring Livingston's ecology of mind into dialogue with Woodworth's Haudenosaunee Good Mind." The author's own summary of the book reads as follows: "We are living in a climate of great environmental and social changes. These global changes are central to A Canadian Climate of Mind, though they are situated in a Canadian colonial history that reveals the cultural challenge central to a sustainable future. The book begins by contemplating the Two Row Wampum treaty, which represents an Indigenous canoe and a settler ship traversing our common waters. Such a symbol has much to teach about missed historic opportunities and the respect that is central to renewing relations. In attempting to convert the Indigenous canoe to the ways of the ship, and our common waters (land, energy) to usable resources, great turbulence has ensued. Environmental disturbances like climate change are a sign of this; so were the residential schools. While the wampum's two rows are vital, the book is primarily concerned with imagining spaces from which to reweave Indigenous and settler approaches to land/water/climate."--