The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments From 1968 until her death in 1992, Gloria Fromm was my chief editor and helpmate. Her role in my life and influence in this book are great. My most valuable secondary editor and literary advisor, also departed, was my oldest friend, Bill (William F.) Shuter, who taught at Eastern Michigan University. Beyond the lives and deaths of these personae, the first jolt that generated what was to become The Nature of Being Human was the four-year period I inadvisably lived in northwest Indiana, less than twenty miles from the steel mills of Gary (discussed in the early chapters). The second jolt was my meeting with Cheryll Glotfelty in the late 1980s and the force it generated on my understanding of “environment” and “ecology ” (dealt with in chapter 5). The third jolt was my introduction to Joseph Carroll and Ellen Dissanayake around 2001 (and the friendships that ensued ), which sent me in a new and post-Darwinian direction that incorporated the environmentalism of the earlier periods and inevitably led to my interest in consciousness studies. Their intellectual and editorial presence in my subsequent writings is reflected in the second and third parts of this book, where their own work is specifically examined in chapter 16. And then there’s David Barash of the University of Washington, whose expertise has caught a number of imprecisions in some of my rougher drafts. Merely to “thank” all these people who shaped my life seems insufficient. Other people need to be acknowledged as well. Paula Deitz and the late Frederick Morgan, editors of the Hudson Review, have nurtured me for more than twenty years now, teasing out some of my best productions . A few of these are lifted from the journal’s pages and duly acknowledged where they appear in the chapters that follow. I must also give admiring thanks to Ralph Cohen, who edited New Literary History for so many years and who had the guts to publish two of my wilder writings that more timorous and conventional editors couldn’t quite handle. One ix of these appears here as chapter 20, “Muses, Spooks, Neurons.” But if Joe Carroll had not prodded me to attend and give a paper at the conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society at the University of Nebraska in 2003, that offbeat (and very seminal, at least for me) manifesto would never have been written and then expanded for publication. Last, but hardly least, Vincent Burke, senior editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, encouraged and supported me from his first contact with the manuscript, and Gordon Orians, behavioral ecologist from the University of Washington, convinced me (without much resistance) that the book needed a meaty introduction and conclusion, which did wonders in pulling everything together and underscoring the latent themes that run throughout. Of course, my unwitting neurons deserve the most credit of all, even though neither they nor the fiction naturalized as “I” really know what’s going on. Yet they have served “me” well. Without them, nothing. x Acknowledgments The Nature of Being Human This page intentionally left blank ...