Abstract

As environmental problems escalate, the time to chose and ensure solutions shortens. This text is an effort to explore the myriad facets of a fully, broadly, and deeply conceived notion of dwelling. Drawing on philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and using a poetic yet deeply philosophical style , dwelling is explored and developed in an historical, phenomenological, and realistically hopeful way. Environmental horrors continue to accrue because we are all too often distracted by the splendors of our contemporary world. However, once cognizant of the collapse we are causing, once horrified by the destruction we deploy, the shock horror provides can propel us toward a sustainable redevelopment of our sensibilities and actions toward the natural world; horror can drive us toward dwelling. The concept of dwelling offers us a way of restoring some of the damages we delegate; it offers us as way to re-tell the human stories that placed us on a path toward and into environmental horror. Understanding dwelling entwines us into an evocative vision: a vision entices, entrances, and constructs an imaginative moral mosaic of what our lives could be like if we embraced the natural world that surrounds and supports us; that is, if we came to dwell