The Soul in the Stone

The currently unfolding ecological catastrophe is the result of more than just deforestation, fossil fuel extraction, and factory farming. Behind the immediate causes of the degradation of our environment lies something else: a deeply rooted but ultimately absurd understanding of our place in the universe. Through a series of encounters with a striking array of protagonists - from revolutionary physicists and embattled philosophers to subsistence hunters and Himalayan shamans - The Soul in the Stone exposes the incoherence of the barren, human-centered perspective dominant in most societies today. It recommends instead an alternative worldview: one that acknowledges and honors non-human experience and, precisely because it does, is both more logically consistent and more fulfilling. And might just save the planet.

Ashley Curtis was born in California in 1959. He studied Chinese and Biblical literature at Yale and physics and physics pedagogy at Smith College. From 2009 to 2014 he was co-director of the Ecole d'Humanité in Hasliberg, Switzerland. He has previously published a Shakespeare whodunnit, Hexeneinmaleins (2019), and the philosophical monographs, Error and Loss: A License to Enchantment (2017) and A Vailable Animism (2021), with the Kommode Press, and two books on Swiss history and culture with Bergli Books. He has been a Swiss citizen since 2013 and currently lives in Domodossola, Italy, where he works as a freelance writer, editor and translator.