Elephantoms

Author: Lyall Watson
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 014352688X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
As a child in South Africa, spending summers exploring the wild with his boyhood friends, Lyall Watson came face to face with his first elephant. From that moment on, Watson's fascination grew into a lifelong obsession with understanding the nature and behaviour of this impressive creature. Around the world, the elephant - at once a symbol of spiritual power and physical endurance - has been worshipped as a god and hunted for sport. In this captivating portrait of the elephant, Watson draws from scientific research, anthropological studies, and personal experience to document the animal's wide-ranging capabilities to remember and to mourn; and he reminds us of its rich mythic origins, its evolution, and its devastation in recent history. Part meditation on an elusive animal, part evocation of the power of place, Elephantoms presents an alluring mix of the mysteries of nature and the wonders of childhood.

Death and Compassion

Author: Dan Wylie
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1776142195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Traces the literary history of the elephant, and its role in South Africa's cultural imaginary Elephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time. As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion – or fail to do so – and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists’ accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.

Beyond the Secret Elephants

Author: Gareth Patterson
Publisher: Hangar 1 Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
Gareth Patterson rediscovered the most southerly elephants in the world, the highly endangered and secretive Knysna elephants of the southern Cape, South Africa. It was during this time that he also made the startling discovery of a being even more mysterious than the Knysna elephants – a relict hominoid known to the Knysna forest people as the ‘Otang’. Gareth was at first reluctant to blur the remarkable story of the Knysna elephants with his findings about the otang, That is, until now. The possible existence of relict hominoids is today gaining momentum world-wide with ongoing research into the Sasquatch in North America, the Yeti in the Himalayas, the Yowie in Australia and the Orang Pendek in Sumatra. Eminent conservationists and scientists – among them Dr. Jane Goodall, Dr. George Schaller, Dr. Ian Redmond, Professor Jeff Meldrum and Professor Gregory Forth – have publicly stated that they are open-minded about the possible existence of these cryptid beings. In the course of his unannounced research into the otang Gareth heard many accounts – mostly spontaneous and unprompted – of otang sightings by others in the area over a number of years. These accounts, documented in this book, are astonishingly consistent both in the descriptions of the otang and in the shocked reactions of the individuals who saw them. Gareth Patterson’s work supports the increasing realization that humankind still has much to learn about the natural world and the mysteries it holds. The possibility that we may be sharing our world with other as yet unidentified hominoids is today being viewed as something that should not be discounted. And as humankind, we need to reassess our role and responsibility towards all forms of life that coexist with us on planet Earth. Beyond the Secret Elephants continues the story of Patterson’s search for and eventual familiarity with the remaining Knysna elephants, while also revealing...the presence of an even more legendary creature, a relict hominoid known to the indigenous people as the otang. Dr. Jeff Meldrum. Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology, Idaho State University ...it is impressive when a renowned field researcher writes a book like Beyond the Secret Elephants – following in the erudite footsteps of the late Lyall Watson... Ian Redmond OBE

Elephantoms

Author: Lyall Watson
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 014352688X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

BBC Wildlife

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Animals
Languages : en
Pages : 936

Book Description

Dark Nature

Author: Lyall Watson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780340617885
Category : Biology
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
This work examines the nature of good and evil. Set at a time when violence has replaced moral, religious and philosophical concerns, the author places evil back where it belongs, in nature and in our lives. Lyall Watson is also the author of Supernature.

Resurgence

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Conservation of natural resources
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description

Heaven's Breath

Author: Lyall Watson
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373696
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
A “comprehensive and fascinating study” of how wind has shaped the world as we know it, affecting all aspects of human and natural life—from geography to political history, plant life to psychology, and biology to philosophy (The Observer) Wind is everywhere and nowhere. Wind is the circulatory system of the earth, and its nervous system, too. Energy and information flow through it. It brings warmth and water, enriches and strips away the soil, aerates the globe. Wind shapes the lives of animals, humans among them. Trade follows the path of the wind, as empire also does. Wind made the difference in wars between the Greeks and Persians, the Mongols and the Japanese. Wind helped to destroy the Spanish Armada. And wind is no less determining of our inner lives: the föhn, mistral, sirocco, Santa Ana, and other “ill winds” of the world are correlated with disease, suicide, and even murder. Heaven’s Breath is an encyclopedic and enchanting book that opens dazzling new perspectives on history, nature, and humanity.

Toxic Belonging? Identity and Ecology in Southern Africa

Author: Dan Wylie
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443809268
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Southern Africa’s literatures brim with references to the natural world, its landscapes and its animals. Both fictional and non-fictional works express ongoing debates, often highly politicised, concerning its various groups’ senses of identity and belonging in relation to the land and its denizens. This often involves a pervasive tension between ‘Western’, settler societies’ conceptions of modernity and indigenous world-views, each complicating the often simplistic binarisms drawn between them. In this selection of papers from the 2006 Literature and Ecology Colloquium, held in Grahamstown, South Africa, the complexities of forging imaginative and pragmatic senses of belonging in Southern Africa are explored from a variety of disciplinary persepectives: philosophical, historical, botanical, and anthropological as well as literary. Their subject-matter ranges widely – from Bushmen testimonies to Berlin missionaries, from prehistoric cave-dwellers to Schopenhauer, from white Batswana to lion-tamers – but find themselves echoing one another in intriguing and illuminating ways. These are highly localised meditations on age-old questions: What does it mean to be human within a natural environment? Why do we appear to be so damaging to the ecology that sustains us? Is our presence inevitably ‘toxic’ to our planetary fellow-travellers? How do we forge an ecologically sound sense of belonging in this post-colonial, post-apartheid, post-modern era? If this collection has a single most prominent question binding it together, it is this: What are the limits and potentialities of human compassion towards the natural world?

Elephants

Author: Ellen Greene Stewart
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476645930
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Elephants are a keystone species and have been a part of the magic of the thickly forested land of South Africa for millennia. This book focuses on the history and work of Knysna Elephant Park, a leading South African elephant research facility that has been home to more than 40 elephants in 25 years. Unfortunately, all the mystique of the Knysna elephant has been reduced to a single elephant left alive. Exploring a wide range of topics, this book covers the impact of elephants' interactions with tourists, how they recover from trauma and even their relevance in human healthcare. Renowned elephant researchers explain the majesty of the elephant brain, which has the largest temporal lobe devoted to communication, language, spatial memory and cognition. To this effect, the book emphasizes the threat of poaching to these gentle giants, which has almost forced them to extinction. Perhaps if humans pay attention to how elephants symbolize our relationship with nature, we can learn important lessons about humanity itself.