​About the book 

​Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet's Future was born out of the recognition that we’re living through cascading ecological, political, and cultural crises — what many are now calling the polycrisis: climate breakdown, species extinction, democratic erosion, extractive economies, and rising anxiety about the future. We’re all witnessing it unfold every day, moment by moment.

​But rather than writing another book cataloguing everything that’s broken, what’s rupturing and unravelling, through endless parades of graphs, warnings, and despair, we wanted to try something else.

​So we asked: what if the way forward isn’t only through technology and politics, but through language and meaning? 

​If ecological collapse is, in part, a breakdown of relationships with living systems, as we see it, it’s also a crisis of meaning.

​And that’s what this book explores. It considers “language” in a much wider context of what it means to “become ecological,” as an ongoing process of meaning-making.

​Drawing from various views on relationships, values, and responsibility, as well as topics like AI, food, compost, sound, economics, improvisation, extinction, climate anxiety, and even the nature of reality, Becoming Ecological is a hopeful invitation to engage with the world differently.

​“This is the work—the soul work—I’ve been awaiting for decades…” — Timothy Morton

​“An invitation to open up your mind–and perhaps the world's possibilities–by reimagining how things might work. Words matter!” —Bill McKibben

​About the authors

​Derek Gladwin is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, where he is also a Faculty Associate with the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.

Kedrick James is a Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Director of the School of Education at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.