IN THE CULTURE of the Igorot people of Northern Luzon in the West Philippine Sea, story telling is central. In their dap'ay— stone plazas at the center of every village— stories are told to introduce people, lessons and ideas. It is an example that we will follow in the chapters ahead.
To start, Banayan and I will share the story of the pollution, short-falls and questions that sparked this book's unlikely beginning. For the reader eager for an overview, in our summaries section, we provide a short sentence, a long sentence and a paragraph that each sum up the theory of Earthen ethics which has unfolded out of our journey.
Of course, how a story is told (or a theory for that matter) is just as important as the story itself. In the dap'ay, both tale and telling were inseparably intertwined. Stories were told after a dance and feast; the listeners intently gathered around a fire.
Wile our telling will never be quite so magnificent and meaningful, the dap'ay has inspired us to put great care in our book's presentation and publication. Consequently, the Tractatus Ayyew is published as an Earthbook— an Earth and reader friendly format that embodies the Earthen principles that we'll be laying out in the pages that follow.
Like most theories, the Tractatus Ayyew progresses sequentially. However, unlike most books, the Earthbook format enables a modular arrangement of chapters each with its own URL. Consequently, each chapter of the book is written as a standalone component so that its facet of the theory may be readily referenced and shared. For example, this section of the book can be found at book.earthen.io/en/preamble
To represent the modular geometry of the Tractatus Ayyew, each chapter begins with a mandalic representation of its place within the whole. The full theory (and each chapter’s integration within it) is represented by the full mandala at the top of this page.
As an Earthbook, both the content and code of the book are made freely available. Meanwhile, the print and eReader editions of the Tractatus Ayyew are for sale here on the Earthbook site. Sales are independent of middle-men, with 97% of book sales going direct to the authors.
As a self-contained platform, the Earthbook format enables the authors to track the net-ecological impact of the book's reading and publishing. The book’s for-Earth intention and its ecological accounting are publicly disclosed in the Eartbook's regenerative reporting.
The full content of the Tractatus Ayyew is under a Creative Commons, Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. The Earthbook code (developed first for the Tractatus Ayyew) is made available under a GNU 3.0 license.