“What I think will stay with you for an entire lifetime is to be equipped with the capacity and the tools to find wonder in the world. And that is to find a language for that world, which is supplied through a folk tale, mythology, literature, poetry, and song. And then to also to have the kind of knowledge basis. I still think we suffer from this terrible division between the humanities and the sciences. These two worlds are sundered. I think we need to bring them together. Anybody who has for a moment studied the operations of photosynthesis in a plan or capillary action in trees is just astonished by the miracle of these operations. So I think we need to infuse a kind of a syncretic knowledge, but that would have as its central or its core point of value a rediscovery of wonder in the world. And of course, a world that you wonder at is a world that you cherish and a world that you cherish is a world that you want to preserve. And that, I think, is our only hope.”

Michael Cronin is an Irish academic specialist in culture, travel literature, translation studies, and the Irish language. He has taught in universities in France and Ireland and has held visiting research fellowships to universities in Canada, Belgium, Peru, France, and Egypt. He's a fellow of Trinity College Dublin, an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a senior researcher in the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. He is the current holder of the Chair of French (est. 1776) at TCD. He is the author of Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene, Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene, and other books.

www.tcd.ie/French/people/michaelcronin.php
www.cambridge.org/core/books/ecotravel/24263DF8E2E021915FEF4F937F146D25
www.routledge.com/Eco-Translation-Translation-and-Ecology-in-the-Age-of-the-Anthropocene/Cronin/p/book/9781138916845

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