by Laura Dassow Walls

About Laura Dassow Walls

Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (2009), Emerson’s Life in Science (2003), and Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995), as well as numerous essays, and the coeditor of several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism.

Cosmos

book Keywords for Environmental Studies

“Cosmos” is one of the most important and most deeply misunderstood words in our vocabulary. In common use, it designates the stars and planets beyond Earth, realms accessible only by telescopes or the most futuristic of technologies. But the complex history of this ancient word suggests that it has much more to teach us—indeed, that we need it now more than ever, for popular usage masks its long history as humanity’s oldest ecological vision of our planet.