What if the pollution of the world did not only concern the environment in which we live, but also the flow of our thoughts in every moment of everyday life? What if those thoughts, invasive like locusts, could transform and become "eco-thoughts" that make us and others feel good? Ecology concerns us from the inside, passes through us, and literally shapes us: "what is inside is outside". This book offers "eco-words" and "eco-thoughts" as it sheds light on the traps that our minds construct for ourselves, that we so often fall into whether we mean to or not. It examines the erroneous paths that we sometimes meander down while we are thinking in our everyday lives in order to help us to identify and avoid them.
The thoughts we formulate are not really ours, as if our mind prefers to flow in what has already been thought, lived, and felt. The author offers her reflections and insights to those who wish to direct their minds towards streams of thought that really do belong to us, that make us feel good. In order to do this, we must learn how to disable the “traps” and free ourselves of what is “contaminating” before they take hold and harm us.
An original and thought-provoking examination of how are own internal lives can become toxic, and how to prevent this, that will be of particular value to students and scholars of sociology, philosophy, communication studies, memory studies, and social psychology.
1. Architectures of the Mind and Mindscapes
2. Forms of Symbolic Pollution
3. Visual Pollution
4. Soundscapes and the Ecology of Sounds
5. The Ecological Mind
6. Inter-Speciesism, Anti-Speciesism and Other Beliefs
Postscript: En route. Diary of everyday happiness
Biography
Anna Lisa Tota is Vice-Rector of the University Roma Tre in Rome, Italy and Full Professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture at the Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts in the same university. Among her publications are the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (edited with Trever Hagen, 2016) and Eco-Words: The Ecology of Conversation (2024).
