Book review kind of. Speaking of my dog Francie, I’ve been emailing with my dear lovely old friend Frankie, I just found out her childhood name was Francie, so I’ve switched. She just published her 18th book. It’s as important as her first book (Diet for a Small Planet), it’s called Eco Mind. The thing about this book is it departs from the usual kind of contemporary book we all read and sometimes write, the ones that tell us what to do. This one suggests a change in how we frame our questions, but really it asks about the questioning itself. In other words, this is a real book of philosophy, specifically, epistemology: my friend Morrison is always quizzing himself about my little definition of that pursuit: epistemology = belief, knowledge and truth. Anyway getting back to Francie the person not the dog, she is inviting us to look at how we think about thinking, because our mis-frame of the questions is part of how we've ended up in a precarious place as a species. The book is ultimately optimistic because Francie simply assumes that we can exceed our ways of framing epistemologies and therefore fix things, solve problems, as we reframe the world. The other things that are so important about how Francie writes are that she doesn’t ever scold or reprimand, her tone is entirely positive. And, she runs her institute and a thinks a certain portion of her very considerable intellectual life with her daughter. All the rhetoric we see about families. How about someone who really does it.
