Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe (Environment and Society) 1666901849, 9781666901849

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Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe

Environment and Society

Series Editor Douglas Vakoch As scholars examine the environmental challenges facing humanity, they increasingly recognize that solutions require a focus on the human causes and consequences of these threats, and not merely a focus on the scientific and technical issues. To meet this need, the Environment and Society series explores a broad range of topics in environmental studies from the perspectives of the social sciences and humanities. Books in this series help the reader understand contemporary environmental concerns, while offering concrete steps to address these problems. Books in this series include both monographs and edited volumes that are grounded in the realities of ecological issues identified by the natural sciences. Our authors and contributors come from disciplines including but not limited to anthropology, architecture, area studies, communication studies, economics, ethics, gender studies, geography, history, law, pedagogy, philosophy, political science, psychology, religious studies, sociology, and theology. To foster a constructive dialogue between these researchers and environmental scientists, the Environment and Society series publishes work that is relevant to those engaged in environmental studies, while also being of interest to scholars from the author’s primary discipline. Recent Titles in the Series Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe, by Jean-Marie Kauth Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene, edited by Christopher Schliephake and Evi Zemanek Mapping the Environmental Humanities: The Emerging Role of GIS in Ecocriticism, edited by Mark Terry and Michael G. Hewson The Bangladesh Environmental Humanities Reader: Environmental Justice, Developmental Victimhood, and Resistance, by Samina Luthfa, Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan, and Munasir Kamal Loren Eiseley’s Writing across the Nature and Culture Divide, by Qianqian Cheng The Saving Grace of America’s Green Jeremiad, by John Gatta

Art and Nuclear Power: The Role of Culture in the Environmental Debate, by Anna Volkmar Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures, edited by Luis I. Prádanos, Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Suzanne McCullagh, and Catherine Wagner Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia, edited by Xinmin Liu and Peter I-min Huang Ecomobilities: Driving the Anthropocene in Popular Cinema, by Michael W. Pesses Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System, Second Edition, by Hans A. Baer Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities, edited by Stephen E. Hunt Wetlands and Western Cultures: Denigration to Conservation, by Rod Giblett

Environmental Legacies of the Copernican Universe Jean-Marie Kauth

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kauth, Jean-Marie, author.  Title: Environmental legacies of the Copernican universe / Jean-Marie    Kauth.  Other titles: Environment and society (Lanham, Md.)  Description: Lanham : Lexington, 2023. | Series: Environment and society |    Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "This book    re-envisions the cosmos with the holistic, spherical imagination of the    Middle Ages, figured in circles, cycles, epicycles, equants, and offers    a new perspective on the power of images and metaphors to shape the way    humans see the universe and their own role in it"-- Provided by    publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022056383 (print) | LCCN 2022056384 (ebook) | ISBN    9781666901849 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666901863 (paperback) | ISBN 9781666901856 (ebook)  Subjects: LCSH: Cosmology, Medieval. | Cosmology--Philosophy. |    Ecology--Philosophy. Classification: LCC BD495.5 .K38    2023  (print) | LCC BD495.5  (ebook) |    DDC 113--dc23/eng/20230223 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056383LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056384 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For my beloved daughter Katherine, whose brilliant, beautiful life was stolen from her by the reckless use of pesticides, sprayed without our knowledge or permission, and for my surviving children—David, Nikita, and Katya—for whom I fight on. This is my prayer sent into the world for you.

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii Preface: ’Till by Turning, Turning We Come Round Right Introduction: Cosmology, Ecology



xv 1

The circles and cycles of the Ptolemaic universe were first dismantled and rearranged by Copernicus; then the understanding of their natural motion was resolved from circular movement into vectors of rectilinear motion by Descartes and Newton. This paradigm shift changed our conception of the cosmos and our notion of time, and in doing so, influenced the fundamental metaphors with which we think about everything else, including terrestrial models of ecology and biology, nudging us toward a worldview that has enabled systematic destruction of the biological systems upon which life depends. Chapter 1: Dante’s Cosmos



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Dante’s rhyme scheme for La Divina Commedia is not only elegant; it also perfectly and completely embodies the Ptolemaic universe with its circles, cycles and epicycles, spiraling through time just as the planets were imagined to do around a stationary Earth. The privileged place of the circle in Dante, as in medieval cosmology, suggests a permanency, a vast, perfect enclosedness, a comforting sense of cycles coming full circle again that is difficult to recapture now, even in imagination, and that contrasts fundamentally with contemporary ideas of the universe.

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Chapter 2: Enlightenment Echoes



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While after the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, there was some lingering attachment to the circular and spherical paradigms of the past, the dominant metaphors switched quite suddenly to linear concepts, with an acknowledgement of the revolution in the heavens the new cosmology entailed. This chapter examines the echoes of these metaphors in natural philosophy and literature of the Early Modern period through The Enlightenment. Chapter 3: The Infinite Line



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The metaphoric shifts the Copernican universe triggered apply not only to the positions of the heavenly bodies but to the nature of motion itself, and this had profound consequences in perceptions of time, progress, change, and systems of ordering all things. These underlying semiotics, nearly invisible to us in their commonplaceness, in turn influence environmental practices in the world. Chapter 4: Environmental Legacies



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The implications of the shift to linear metaphors play out in the major post-industrial environmental catastrophes of our time: climate change and toxic environmental chemicals. These two greatest threats not only to individual human health but to civilization itself depend on the breakdown of circular processes into linear ones, with inputs and outputs, accumulating consequences, and irreversible tipping points. These threats are predicated on paradigms, metaphors, and symmetries that do not match what we otherwise know of nature and reality. Chapter 5: Paradigm Shifts



Why, to our great detriment, have we overgeneralized from cosmology to ecology with explanatory metaphors that do not fit ecological systems? Metaphors and paradigm shifts have tremendous power, and human psychology nudges us in the direction of simplicity, a unified theory, if you will, even when greater nuance and complexity are called for. No master metaphor or overriding paradigm can accommodate all reality, yet, hobbled by strong cognitive biases, we force them to fit as best we can, hanging onto inherited notions even when outdated, even when, under their influence, we are careening toward

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disaster. Scientific change, once recognized by scientists, emerges gradually into popular culture, but new lessons can dangerously take decades to be translated into more adaptive behaviors. Chapter 6: Alternate Metaphors



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Reimagined explanatory metaphors, not only from medieval European culture, but from non-Western cultures and from new eco-critical thinking, may enable us to correct for the deficits of prevailing paradigms by holding alternate models in our minds simultaneously, to see the world more fully by rejecting binaries and abjuring flat absolutes, embracing complexity, and containing multitudes: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (Whitman, Song of Myself, 51). In this way, cultural understanding and cultural change may catalyze the kinds of real-world metamorphosis we must undergo, or perish. Conclusion

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In the conclusion, I proffer some advice, including the practical: how do we use our understanding of the power of metaphor and the compulsion of culture to choose to succeed, not fail, paraphrasing Jared Diamond in Collapse? We face existential environmental threats and must solve them within a few decades, at most. How can readers change their own mindsets and influence those of friends, family, students, patients, colleagues, and others? And what would a future that incarnated holistic lives on Aldo Leopold’s Round River look like? References Index

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About the Author



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Acknowledgments

This project originated with an NEH-sponsored Faculty Seminar, Bridging the Gap between the Sciences and Humanities, hosted by the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) in June 2003. My debts there are too great to number, but it is a pleasure to be indebted to generous friends, among whom I will name J. Scott Lee, Peter Kalkavage, Phil Sloan, Martin Tracey, Patrick Flynn, Rod Hughes, Betsy Dobbins, and many others. Greatest thanks go to the friends and colleagues in my faculty writing group: Steve Burgess, Wilson Chen, Kaveh Hemmat, Chez Rumpf, Pat Somers, Beth Vinkler, and Zubair Amir. You will each find your mark upon this book if you look for it, and I am forever grateful for your enduring support, generous attention, and kind willingness to allow me to harvest your best ideas. Thank you to my colleagues Tim Marin, Jayashree Sarathy, Al Martin, and Monica Tischler for continuing and enriching my science education. Thank you to my dear friend Barbie Pietz for being my lifelong environmental confessor and personal inspiration. And thanks to many others providing feedback: Richard Grusin, Luigi Manca, Robert Vogl, Sonia Vogl, Tad Vogl, and Anne Marie Smith. The flaws herein, of course, are my own. I am obliged to the anonymous readers of this book in embryo form at Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) and at Lexington Books. Sincere thanks to the anonymous peer reviewer of the manuscript for perspicacious suggestions for improvement. And thanks to capable proofreader Irina Burns for helping to perfect the final copy. Finally, my deep gratitude to Kasey Beduhn and the editors at Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, who saw the promise in this project and offered me a contract, and to Courtney Morales, Emma Ebert, and Taylor Breeding, who ushered the project home.

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Preface ’Till by Turning, Turning We Come Round Right

At the outset, a few words about the enormous emotional weight of this topic: the truth of our environmental catastrophe is so dire that some leap directly from denial to fatalism, and even those who have fought the good fight for decades can feel inclined to throw in the towel, give up, move on to our unimaginable collective demise because it seems easier than the burden of grave decisions and the beginning of, finally, some sacrifice. Perhaps that explains the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic fictions,1 as well as the burgeoning literature in psychology on climate denialism, environmentally linked anxiety and depression, solastalgia, and nature-deficit disorder.2 But Barbara Kingsolver sternly calls out this defeatist thinking: “The truth is so horrific: we are marching ourselves to the maw of our own extinction. . . . So why even try? . . . I do know the answer to that one: that’s called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won’t be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won’t be up to their generation. It’s up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project” (2007, 345). My question is this: what wouldn’t you give up or work for so that your child doesn’t die of cancer or languish in an unlivable world? As Greta Thunberg, the Nobel Peace Prize nominee and teenage activist, has said, castigating her elders, “You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess. . . . You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children” (2018). She offers the possibility of action as antidote to cynical lassitude: “instead of looking for hope, look for action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere” (2019). I am a proponent of active hope and tragic optimism:3 it is only by looking with open eyes at the awful suffering coming from our collective wrong choices and by acknowledging our feelings about that tough reality that we xv

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can then move on and strive toward the greatest environmental rescue now possible. We can choose to work for our best future and claim what we can of joy, even amidst heartbreak; we can reconnect to the Earth and to each other. We know we have the capacity to do this because humans have done this many times before, in times of pandemic, natural disaster, war, and civilizational decline. Climate change is literally a matter of degrees; every fraction of a degree counts, and the co-benefits of solving the problem are immense. The reality is that we have difficult choices, but rarely in human history has there been a more drastic, almost dichotomous choice of outcomes: one path where we surrender to the unthinking impetus toward civilizational collapse and all-out planetary disaster and one path where we save much that is worth saving, reclaiming our natural world and beginning to heal the toxic wounds of the past.4 So much is still possible. So much more than we think may still be within our power. I will come back to these disparate paths again in the conclusion of this book, but in the meantime, it may be worth considering two things: first, that vestiges remain of the older systems of thought, with many traditional cultures presenting alternate views, and second, that much of the alienation of modern life5 is created by the conflict between our new ways of thinking and the really cyclical rhythms of life, and therefore living more in accord with those rhythms will likely promote greater happiness and foster organic connectedness. Women particularly have a bodily cycle—the word menses comes from its monthly tracking of the cycles of the moon—that may keep us more in tune with natural rhythms. Many people treasure seasonal and generational cycles: we grew up with apples grown in the backyard, baking pies in the kitchens of our grandmothers, and now cook the same recipes with children and grandchildren. Writers like Michael Pollan and advocates of the Slow Food Movement, among many others,6 are recouping the delights of older foodways and realizing the limits of efficiency. Every single thing I have personally done “for the environment,” from riding my bike to work to shopping second-hand to installing geothermal and solar to hosting a community garden, has paid tremendous dividends, whether in stronger muscles, slimmer budgets, or greater peace of mind. In the words of the beloved Shaker hymn, Simple Gifts, “When true simplicity is gain’d, / To bow and to bend we will not be asham’d, / To turn, turn will be our delight, / ‘Till by turning, turning we come round right” (Brackett et al. 1998).7 Gratitude for what we have, however modest, is conducive to happiness.8 And in turning again to some of the ways and thoughts of our grandparents and great-grandparents, circling back to our simpler past and adopting what is most valuable, refashioned for our new circumstances, we may find, almost accidentally, our best future. As T.S. Eliot has so eloquently written, “We shall not cease from exploration,” the end of which “Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place

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for the first time” (1943, “Little Gidding”). While returning in this way to the past may at first seem alien, in the end, it may feel like a coming home. We must hear—and follow—echoes of the past into the shadowy future—in hopes of recognizing who we still may be. NOTES 1. See Kauth (2015). 2. The research on the psychology of climate denialism has been robust and revelatory (Kauth 2019). Likewise, increasing attention has been paid to the impact of eco-anxiety on human health and wellness (Passmore, Lutz, and Howell 2022; Feather and Williams 2022; Bingley et al. 2022; Clayton 2021). Solastalgia is a neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht (2005) that means existential distress caused by environmental change (Albrecht et al. 2007; Moratis 2021). The work to read first on Nature Deficit Disorder is Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, with countless follow-ups by him and others. A thorough discussion of the benefits of nature for human mental and physical health are beyond the reach of this project, but research shows that hospital patients heal more quickly when they have a view of nature (Franklin 2012), that nature-based activities can help treat mental disorders (Nigg et al. 2022), and that forest bathing offers real benefits, possibly because of phytoncides, or airborne compounds put out by plants and breathed in by humans (Payne and Delphinus 2019). 3. The idea of active hope, or hope that is not a feeling but an action, comes from Liz Cunningham, in Ocean Country (2015), who credits the idea to Joanna Macy (2012); Cunningham also describes a “passion for rescue.” Scott Barry Kaufman, citing concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl (2006), defines “tragic optimism” as “the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of human existence” (2021). 4. For excellent insights on the two paths idea, see The Lancet’s Countdown, both the report (Watts et al. 2019) and the video, available at https:​//​www​.lancetcountdown​ .org​/2019​-report​/. 5. Karl Marx sees capitalism as leading to alienation from each other and our very way of being human; capitalism, in this view, turns everything of worth into money— so that ultimately, it is all about objects, not humans. 6. Slow Food is a broad-based movement, and the best place to start may be the website at https:​//​www​.slowfood​.com. See also Hendrikx and Lagendijk (2022). 7. Sincere thanks to my friend and colleague Pat Somers for her reference to both Simple Gifts and the quote from Eliot. 8. The literature on happiness, some of the most enlightening and pleasurable reading around, emphasizes that people are often mistaken in thinking more money and things will make them happier, when only a few things actually do: gratitude, social connection, and time in nature among them. I particularly recommend Arthur C. Brooks’s work in The Atlantic, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, and Juliet Schor’s True Wealth.

Introduction Cosmology, Ecology

Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, amid a vast expanse of waves, birds, and marine life, where humans rarely venture, millions of tons of discarded plastic trash swirl through the waters of the Pacific garbage gyre, sullying what would otherwise be one of the most pristine spots on Earth. Pictures from the gyre, only discovered in 1997 by Captain Charles Moore, show a dissonant synthetic mix of clear plastic bags, water bottles and caps, colorful broken children’s toys, parts of pens, lighters: all the detritus of modern society discarded here of all places. Animals trying to live in the gyre are often grossly injured or killed: a tortoise weirdly wasp-waisted from a constricting plastic ring; a seal strangling in fish line and chains; baby albatrosses dead by the dozen on the beaches of Midway Island, their desiccated corpses gradually dwindling away in the wind, leaving bird-shape outlines composed of the brilliant plastic pieces that killed them. The albatrosses, memorably photographed by Chris Jordan, are the most haunting; the parents were only feeding their babies the brightest putative food they could find, the coloring indicative of higher nutrition, and the chicks were only doing what chicks do in eating it.1 Albatrosses did not co-evolve with plastic. The people who bought and used the plastic that plagues these animals could scarcely have imagined that their refuse would someday invade and mutilate albatross chicks on a remote, wild island, that the natural would be so taken over and transformed by the artificial, a sort of perverse and tragic synthetic-biologic chimera. Yet this is merely the most visible way in which we have contaminated every spot on the planet. Dioxins, PCBs, and pesticides are invisible, yet they no less deform life on Earth. Talk of cleaning up the gyre is pointless while the unwieldy inflow of plastic garbage only increases. Latent in our solid waste practices and industrial chemical production is a broken circle: we manufacture and quickly discard toxic materials not designed to return to nature for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, if ever, never considering at what point we will have permanently poisoned ourselves and the rest of the planet in the process. Perhaps, as many environmentalists 1

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have argued, we do this because too many of us do not believe in the truth of circular biological processes; instead, our underlying understanding of the universe—life, reality—is based on a straight line, traveling ever outward. Ravenous for one answer, one explanation, one model for the way things are, we overgeneralize from cosmology2 to ecology, making false analogies from the macrocosm to the relative microcosm. These latent paradigms could account at least in part for why we are doing what we are doing, and why we do not see it clearly enough to stop. Paradigms have changed drastically over the centuries. Currently, we tend to think of ancient and medieval cosmological models as hopelessly benighted, shrouded in ignorance. One surprise in gaining a thorough understanding of Ptolemaic cosmology is that the older model actually provided elegant and plausible solutions, based on observation, that were simply mistaken. Another common error is to think of the science of the Western past, in contrast to Indigenous or other traditions, as simply planting the seeds of the catastrophe at which we have arrived. However, as a medievalist with a more nuanced understanding of this, I find that in many ways, Ptolemaic cosmology was quite opposed to the one under which we now operate. We should neither remain complicit with a social and scientific status quo, making the present model seem a teleological inevitability, nor argue that hierarchical and mistaken models of the past, imbued with their own prejudices and biases, should be re-adopted wholesale. That would of course be both impossible and inadvisable. But such study, and particularly the ability to hold multiple paradigms in the mind at once, can help us analyze how inadequacies in the predominant scientific paradigms since Nicolaus Copernicus have blinded so many to the destruction of our planet’s ability to sustain life. It comes down to our understanding of time as comprised of straight lines, of progress forward leaving the past behind, rather than of time as cycles and circles, the prevailing metaphors of the Middle Ages.3 It comes down to our reductive understanding of matter as atomistic, and discrete, in contrast to the holism of the past. We believe we can pollute “the environment” without polluting our bodies, when in reality, we are a part of it. We believe ourselves separate. We believe that we can break apart and join molecules and DNA without consequences, that our bodies will be fooled by synthetic chemicals and organisms. Part of the problem may be that bodies are fooled—to our detriment.4 Those who study science but not the history of science or its expression in literary and cultural metaphors may be apt to miss these root distortions, focusing on the disaster rather than the reasons for the disaster; but understanding alternate metaphors may be essential to convincing the public of the reality of environmental and biological damage. Although this kind of broad approach to intellectual history may have gone out of fashion in the

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past, I would argue that there is a prudential purpose to defying more recent over-specialization in the effort to identify and resolve fundamental conflicts that extend from the canon into the wider culture. Many years ago, René Dubos, among others, effectively argued against Lynn White’s thesis that held the Judeo-Christian tradition uniquely responsible for our feeling of dominion over creation (2006, 56). But what is significant about the cultural ramifications of physical scientific rather than spiritual influences is how modern science is taken for truth and assumed untinged with bias and metaphor. Also significant is how literally the broken circles are manifested in our assembly line production, unthinking consumption, and careless and inefficient disposal systems. Biological and chemical processes that were once actually circular are now actually not. And while these underlying metaphors are obviously not the only or even the major cause of our unsustainable lifestyle, they are a cause—and an effect as well: the longer we live with broken cycles, the more doing so seems natural. Written under the shadow of impending environmental apocalypse, this book examines how humans conceptualize reality and nature in a way that enables its wholesale destruction by industry, capitalism, and individual selfish interests. Although it is true that humans have negatively impacted their environments for millennia, Barry Commoner was among the first to articulate the sense environmentalists gained in the 1960s and 1970s that the circle of life was broken in a fundamentally new way.5 In his book The Closing Circle, after a long list of the many possible explanations for our out-of-control pollution, ranging from population and affluence to religion and technology, Commoner finally describes the problem of the broken circle at length: Why, after millions of years of harmonious coexistence, have the relationships between living things and their earthly surroundings begun to collapse? Where did the fabric of the ecosphere begin to unravel? How far will the process go? How can we stop it and restore the broken links? Understanding the ecosphere comes hard because, to the modern mind, it is a curiously foreign place. We have become accustomed to think of separate, singular events, each dependent upon a unique, singular cause. But in the ecosphere every effect is also a cause: an animal’s waste becomes food for soil bacteria; what bacteria excrete nourishes plants; animals eat the plants. Such ecological cycles are hard to fit into human experience in the age of technology, where machine A always yields product B, and product B, once used, is cast away, having no further meaning for the machine, the product, or the user. Here is the first great fault in the life of man in the ecosphere. We have broken out of the circle of life, converting its endless cycles into man-made, linear events: oil is taken from the ground, distilled into fuel, burned in an engine, converted thereby into noxious fumes, which are emitted into the air. At the end of the line is smog. Other man-made

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breaks in the ecosphere’s cycles spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbish—testimony to our power to tear the ecological fabric that has, for millions of years, sustained the planet’s life. (1971, 4)

Commoner goes on to assign our broken circle—and planet—not so much to increased population and affluence, as to the way in which we meet our increased needs, to our modes of production: “What happens to the environment depends on how the growth is achieved” (1971, 139). He faults the manufacture of products like non-recyclable soda bottles, synthetic fibers, pesticides, and mercury used for chlorine production; and he argues that people had equally good material lives before the recyclable, compostable equivalents lost out: returnable beer bottles, wool, natural soap, and animal labor. In other words, it was not so much the amount of products used as the kind of products; synthetic organic chemicals are indeed much at fault for the pollution we endure. The amount aspect of this formula has worsened significantly in the decades since Commoner, as has the population component, and the kind argument still holds: “the tendency of the productive technology to pollute” (1971, 166). Even with our enormous world population of nearly eight billion, we could be polluting a lot less if we were smarter about what and how we consumed. Why don’t we? Because we don’t see the circle as broken—we see it as a straightened line. Commoner’s metaphor of the broken circle is apt—and no accident, related to the history of the circular cosmos as it is. It is beyond the scope of this book to fully flesh out the way scientific thought about the cosmos evolved from ancient times through the Enlightenment,6 but one major mathematical pivot in early astronomy will illustrate the changing nature of circular versus linear metaphors.7 For readers unacquainted with astronomy, this may seem complicated: once understood, however, the concept of linear versus circular forces behind orbital motion has tremendous explanatory power. The Ptolemaic universe, as understood by Dante Alighieri, was, to use Alexandre Koyré’s phrase, a closed world, composed of shell upon shell of the perfectly spherical orbits of the planets, all stacked together according to God’s plan (1957). Beyond the Earth, the heavens were flawless, complete, and whole, compassed by the Empyrean where God lived, the outside paradoxically the beginning, the center. This system was rooted in ancient tradition, including Plato’s cosmology. Just a few years before Copernicus, the cosmos still seemed a safe and enclosing place. I will argue in chapter 1 that Dante captures better than perhaps anyone else how this encircling cosmos seemed to a medieval mind. As in Plato’s Timaeus, the sphere is God, who encloses all that there is. It would be difficult to overstate how much this orderly, hierarchical, integral, complete, inherently

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Figure I.1. Petri Apiani, Cosmographia. Source: (The Getty: Internet Archive, 1524), 9 https:​//​archive​.org​/details​/cosmographiaapia00apia.

spherical medieval worldview contrasts with our own. In it, humans are merely part of God’s creation, as envisioned in the medieval Great Chain of Being.8 The breakdown of the spherical cosmos has changed many more elements of our lives than our worldview. Our ecological broken circles are in some ways vestiges of the broken circles of Dante, the broken cycles of the Middle Ages, as older ways of knowing gave way to the much more correct, utterly revolutionary, yet still flawed science of the Enlightenment. It is not that the models of Enlightenment and later thinkers were incorrect; it is that, like every model, they are inadequate to expressing all reality.

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It is worth looking at this quote from Copernicus’s 1543 Dedication to Pope Paul III in The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies: “And when I considered how absurd this ‘lecture’ would be held by those who know that the opinion that the earth rests immovable in the middle of the heavens as if their centre had been confirmed by the judgments of many ages—if I were to assert to the contrary that the Earth moves. . . . ” (1995, 4).9 While a modern reader’s attention might be attracted to the “center” part of this quote, imagining that the most important revolution in Copernicus’s vision of the universe was in the relative position of the Earth, notice how important is the contrast between two words: immovable versus moves. Copernicus’s major point in this passage is that rather than the cosmos rotating in circular motion around a stationary Earth, the Earth itself moves. Less than a hundred years after Copernicus’s revolutionary conclusions, Galileo Galilei accepted and defended Copernicus’s placement of the Sun at the center of things, and the fact that the Earth moves. For Galileo, as for Copernicus, however, natural motion could still only be circular, though Galileo also sees rectilinear motion as somehow preceding circular motion (Shea 1969, 156). Only a few decades later, in 1644, René Descartes describes how all motion is basically rectilinear, and that bodies that move in a circular motion tend to move away from the center of the circle unless pulled back by another force: gravity, as we now understand (1985, II.39).10 This was the moment when the circle was first broken into linear components, as the conceptual shape of natural motion changed, along with the mathematical proof. Circular motion is seen as linear motion, drawn back in through the action of some force toward the center of the circle, as Isaac Newton was to prove not fifty years later in his 1687 Principia. This new understanding of circular movement as frustrated linear movement changes everything. No longer, as Dorion Sagan has described, did “the celestial spheres move in perfectly circular orbits of their own volition” (2010, 34). In other words, although the motion of heavenly bodies has always indeed been circular, or elliptical post-Kepler, as confirmed by observation now and then, an understanding of circular motion as natural was displaced by an understanding of the inherent forces involved as linear. The “natural” direction things wanted to move was now in a straight line. In some ways, these changes reveal how differently we see things, how much our worldview flipped from before to after, and with it, empirical science with all its complex results and implications. Imagine believing that the world stood still, and that the heavenly bodies naturally moved over the surface of crystalline spheres embracing the world like a Matryoshka doll. Imagine the spheres sang. Can we envision the universe, with Dante, as enclosed by God’s mind and empowered by divine love? The beauty of this vision lingered for long, even after the mathematical proofs and observation

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dismantled the astronomy, but eventually, as I will discuss in chapter 2, even the poets surrendered to the newly dominant worldview. William Shakespeare was mostly Ptolemaic and humoral.11 John Donne, though not yet embracing Copernicus, felt acutely the disruptions in the heavens: “And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, . . . / We thinke the heavens enjoy their Sphericall, / Their round proportion embracing all. / But yet their various and perplexed course, / Observ’d in divers ages, doth enforce / Men to find out so many Eccentrique parts, / Such divers downe-right lines, such overthwarts, / As disproportion that pure forme” (1912, 203, 251–57). Though the heavens are thought to enjoy spherical motions, their circular motion, the “pure form,” is newly seen to be thwarted by “divers down-right lines.” By the time Blaise Pascal was writing his Pensées, published in 1670, the human place in the universe had shrunk as the universe had grown: “The whole of the visible world is merely an imperceptible speck in nature’s ample bosom, no idea comes near to it. It is pointless trying to inflate our ideas beyond imaginable spaces, we generate only atoms at the cost of the reality of things. . . . ” (2008, 230, 331). No longer are humans in union with God’s creation; they are turned out into the cold of outer space, atoms at its mercy. The post-Copernican, Enlightenment cosmos is not only center-less; it is also a much emptier, lonelier place compared to the medieval, which was crowded with creatures: animal, vegetable, mineral, infernal, human, and divine. John Milton, writing about the same time, is hard pressed to cobble together a theological position rooted in the old and a solar system accommodating the new; he protests too much: “What if the Sun / Be Centre to the World, and other Stars / By his attractive virtue and their own / Incited, dance about him various rounds?” (PL VIII.122–25). Just about everything after that was the modern paradigm, or merely nostalgic. As Alexander Pope says in 1733, “Through worlds unnumber’d though the God be known, / 'Tis ours to trace him only in our own. / He who through vast immensity can pierce, / See worlds on worlds compose one universe, / Observe how system into system runs, / What other planets circle other suns . . . ” (1856, I.21–28). Both Pope and Pascal see humans as fragmented, as atoms, as only one small, disparate, separate, remnant part of the whole cosmos, yet at the same time, over it all in their ability to comprehend. We see here, integral to the loss of circles and cycles, a radical separation from the system in which we are embodied, a dissolution of mind from body, human from nature, and an elevation of human over nature. The translation of mathematical and cosmological concepts into the literary and popular imagination may be the worst of the problem for the planet, more than the scientific and mathematical solutions per se. This removal from nature allowed for the idea of altering and controlling it to a degree not previously conceived. As Aldo Leopold has famously said, “the first precaution of intelligent tinkering” is to save all the parts.12 We

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certainly have not done that. In the medieval mind, there is really no tinkering with God’s creation. Matter and the Earth are essentially static and stable, though constantly cycling through seasons and at the center of a dynamic cosmos, and humans are mapped onto all that is. In this paradigm, humans are in union with the four elements, the four humors, the twelve zodiacal symbols, the seasons, navigational directions: the entirety of the cosmos, microcosm to macrocosm.13 Beauty and truth are based on pleasing proportions and the unity of the parts in the whole. This is the view embodied by the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Figure I.2), the Great Chain of Being (Figure I.3), and the Vitruvian man (Figure I.4), as popularized by Leonardo da Vinci. In this view, humans do not exert themselves over Nature; they are part of creation. In Alain de Lille’s Plaint of Nature (1980), those who violate nature by reproducing abnormally are akin to usurers, who create something out of nothing: sterile money—and also akin to actual sodomists, as the term is understood today; all are unnatural reproductive acts in the medieval imagination. That explains why in Dante’s Inferno, sodomists and usurers are classed together in Hell. Galileo’s assimilation of Copernicus was, figuratively and almost literally, earthshaking—it shook the Earth from the center of the universe in many ways, changing God’s order in what must have seemed a most unnatural way. It seems grotesque now that Galileo got into trouble with Rome over his findings, but perhaps this gives some context. The twenty-first-century view, so radically different despite recent efforts of environmental writers to forge an eco-centric culture,14 embodies a far-reaching alienation from plants, other animals, our planet, and from nature itself, a notion foreign to the medieval mindset. Echoing Gaians James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis and others, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that our current attitude toward the planet, and nature more generally, is complete inaccessibility, with the planet existing “in the species of alterity” (2005, 72), indifferent to human experience or existence. On the other hand, while in the Ptolemaic universe, the Earth is at the center of the cosmos, it is also the lowest part of the universe—it sinks to the center in the same way that earth, the element, falls to the ground.15 There was a humility—in the etymological sense of humilis from humus, or earth—to this worldview.16 And humility was a chief medieval virtue, in the Benedictine Rule and elsewhere, the opposite of the sin of pride, the sin by which the angels fell. By displacing the Earth from a central place in the cosmos, our greatest astronomers in some ways elevated human intelligence, placing it over the Earth and the cosmos itself in our imagination. The Earth is no longer the center of all things, but it is certainly the locus of greatest importance for us; and we have unquestionably exhibited hubris rather than humilis in our idea of how much of nature we can modify, and control. There is not space for many examples, but one chief example that I will discuss

Figure I.2. Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Pol, Jean) (fl.1399–1416 CE). “Anatomical Man. Man and the Zodiac.” Source: In the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. 1414. Painting on vellum paper. 29 x 21 cm. Ms65-folio161-verso. Photo: Michel Urtado. Musée Condé/Chantilly/France. Used with permission. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure I.3. Robert Fludd, “Great Chain of Being.” Source: (Utriusque Cosmi Majoris Scilicet et Minoris, Frankfurt, 1617), image courtesy of British Library, © British Library Board, 536.l.11.(1), page 4–5.

further in chapter 4 is the way we have altered the chemical composition of our own bodies, and the Earth itself. We have created chemical structures that never existed before us in nature, and we have pre-polluted every baby now born with a toxic alchemy of neurotoxins, mutagens, carcinogens, and endocrine disruptors.17 Our bodies are not simply “in” the world; they are “of” it and continuous with it. So when we contaminate it with irreversibly synthesized chemicals that cannot re-enter cyclical processes, chemicals that

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Figure I.4. Adaption of Robert Fludd’s sixteenth century woodcut of “Vitruvian man,” sixteenth century. Source: http:​//​en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/File:​Vitruvian​_macrocosm​.jpg, Public Domain.

bioaccummulate, biomagnify, continuing on as biocides virtually forever, we are permanently altering human physiology as well. Then, there is climate change. Bill McKibben claimed more than thirty years ago now that we have caused the end of nature. In the same way we are irretrievably damaging the chemical profile of all life, all ecosystems, we are irretrievably altering the climate. As McKibben argues, like the Pandora’s box of genetically altered organisms we have set loose in the world, like the tainting of every drop of rain and every snowflake that fall in places as remote as the Adirondacks or the Arctic, we have irrevocably altered the atmosphere: “we have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature” (1989, 41). Even in a world without us, carbon dioxide levels could take about 100,000 years to return to pre-human levels (Weisman 2007, 41). We

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are treating our climate, too, as a linear process, a tragic commons where we can dump the exhalations of the Industrial Revolution ad infinitum without understanding that its goldilocks conditions depend on delicately poised checks and balances. Returning to the quote from Copernicus, we should notice the movement that Copernicus references. What is important about this movement is not just its presence, but its quality. In chapter 3, I will discuss how the notion of the infinite line took hold on Western cultural imagination. Copernicus’s seminal work not only established the movement of the Earth; it also elucidated the actual movement of the planets and stars. Johannes Kepler established that the motion was not circular, but elliptical, less perfect from a medieval perspective. And Newton’s resolution of circular motion into a vector sum of straight-line motion outward of the planetary body combined with the straight vector inward toward the center of gravitational force, a frustrated forward motion, made motion itself seem less perfect. In doing so, it changed our understanding of time as well, from a recurrence of cycles and circles in the incredibly rich medieval seasonal calendar18 to a straight march forward: progress, really.19 Try imagining time without the visual of a historical timeline, an invention of the eighteenth century that is now indispensable to our understanding of past, present, and future (Rosenberg and Grafton 2012). Try imagining our economic system without a chart of linear growth: growth without limits, consequences, or circling back, an arrow ever upward and outward. To this revolution of what even Copernicus called “common sense” can be attributed the change in our conception of time. Time grew inconceivably vast and irreconcilably imperfect, even as we demarcated it more precisely. And partially for this reason, the idea of the interconnectedness of nature was disrupted. Consider the understanding of natural change over time: there is a big difference between The Great Chain of Being and the Linnaean Classification System as understood via evolution. Evolution never proceeds backwards, only irreversibly forwards. Development too, according to von Baer’s Laws of Embryology, follows this direction as genes for general characters of the group are expressed first, while genes for more specific characters are expressed later. Development and phylogeny both branch forward or outward; they never arch back.20 This can be seen even in early images of phylogenetic trees (Figure I.5). Furthermore, Linnaean classification tends to end with humans toward the top, in contrast to the Great Chain of Being, where they are placed squarely in the middle. Though very recently, there has been an uptick in phylogenetic trees drawn in spirals and spheres, with recent past on the outside and the distant past in the center, most phylogenetic trees have tended to resemble branching lines that leave the past behind.

Figure I.5. Ernst Haekel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Source: (New York: Appleton, 1879), http:​//​en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/File:​Tree​_of​_life​_by​_Haeckel​.jpg Public Domain.

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There is also some truth to this understanding of time. Physicist Sean Carroll refers to the “arrow of time” as one of the chief and undeniable characteristics of our universe (2010). Stephen Jay Gould first popularized the idea of time’s arrow versus time’s cycle in 1987. He situates this contrast between cycles and arrows in the context of the Judeo-Christian prioritization of arrow-like time and the discovery of deep time in the seventeenth century. He argues that the imposition of a major metaphor for scientific progress onto something entirely different—our notion of the shape of history—is the result of a generalizing impulse: Whiggish history has a particularly tenacious hold in science for an obvious reason—its consonance with the cardinal legend of science. This myth holds that science differs fundamentally from all other intellectual activity in its primary search to discover and record the facts of nature. These facts, when gathered and refined in sufficient number, lead by a sort of brute-force inductivism to grand theories that unify and explain the natural world. Science, therefore, is the ultimate tale of progress—and the motor of advance is empirical discovery. (Time’s Arrow 1987, 5)

This is only one example of the collective impulse to unify our understanding of all areas of knowledge under one grand schematic, an arrow that points one way or another, that moves straight ahead versus proceeding innately in a circle or cycle. Gould notes that the ancient understanding of time as cycle has almost disappeared from modern frames of reference. Like Gould, my experience has been that the schematics and pictures involved in this debate prove particularly essential and instructive: “I found that pictures provided a key to my understanding of time’s arrow and time’s cycle as the primary field of intellectual struggle” (Time’s Arrow 1987, 18). Like Gould, I would argue that far from being merely decorative, images and outlines indicate the broad shape of underlying metaphors. Consider, now, by contrast, schematics generated for the sake of environmental education. Ecologists draw intricate ecosystem webs; recyclers use three arrows drawn in a circle. But both of these models are counter to the basic understanding of physics since Newton and evolution since Darwin. Copernicus broke down the system of concentric circles and epicycles and found the rules of the “uniformity of motion,” as he described it. But unfortunately, in many ways, our modern understanding of cosmology is both dominant and universalizing, and in complete contradiction with what we understand of natural systems, which are not simply linear, but interconnecting. On top of capitalism, with its linear growth, commodity culture, and valorization of human greed and self-interest, broken circles and infinite lines are

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one way to account for our unsustainable lives. Each American, in his or her lifetime, will generate 102 tons of garbage, not all of which finds its way to the landfill (Humes 2013). Some of it makes up the two Texases worth of garbage swirling around the enormous Pacific garbage gyre. We use up more raw material per person than ever before: on a gross scale, the amount of materials extraction worldwide has gone from 60 billion metric tons in 1980 to about 92 billion tons in 2005. Domestic material consumption in North America has gone from 6 million metric tons in 1980 to 10 million metric tons in 2005 (Schor 2011, 42, 46). So many of our modern systems are trying to proceed in a straight line when our Earth works on a cyclical system. How do we sustain the cognitive dissonance of an unsustainable system except through the imaginative power of cultural paradigms that in many ways contradict reality? Consider how Michael Pollan has described modern corporate farming as making two linear problems out of one circular solution: “Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution—the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops—and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot” (2006, 68). We mass produce meat in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), which deprives fields of beneficial manure, once commonly used on small-scale farms; which creates toxic waste ponds that contaminate crops downstream with E. coli; and which makes animals miserable, as they wade through their own excrement hock high. We have divided a circle into straight arrows of production and progress, and we have a problem. It didn’t use to be this way, as Commoner has shown. We cannot continue as we have, and the technological fixes (irradiated vegetables and beef recalls) will not remedy the asymmetries we have created. Chapter 5 attempts one possible reply to a very basic question: how could we humans be doing this to ourselves? One answer, at least, is that we have applied a cosmological model to a terrestrial system it does not fit. Even educational images of the big bang are schematized to indicate a straight outward directionality. We have not yet arrived at a unified theory, and if and when we do, it seems unlikely to fully explain biological and natural systems. Indeed, our cosmological models may also not be finished, to judge from the paradoxical sphericity of the hypersphere, one relatively recent model of the cosmos. As with an understanding of the Catholic Trinity, or the idea of light as both particle and wave, greater complexity is called for in our understanding of the cosmos, space, and time. People seem to want terrestrial systems to express cohesion with our cosmic understandings, but that will not necessarily be the case. It could be that everything is fundamentally different on our shorter timescale as opposed to the long one. For us, everything that matters happens in hundreds or thousands of years, not millions or billions.21 What is

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it to us that human history is a mere eyelash in the grand span of deep time? It’s all we’ve got. After all, the universe’s final cause, if there is one, may be to maximize entropy until there is no order in the universe. Our final cause is and must be to minimize and even decrease entropy on a local level, to order systems to promote the common good of humankind, and perhaps even that of other organisms, perhaps even Gaia herself. Our final cause is to protect our children and grandchildren. The end may inevitably be ultimate entropy, but it is in our interest to delay that linear progress on our own timescale, and we do that by circling back upon ourselves, as often as we can.22 Thomas Kuhn describes how new paradigms arise with “destructive changes in beliefs about nature. . . . Since no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines and since no two paradigms leave all the same problems unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problem is it more significant to have solved?” (1957, 98, 110). We tend to move on to the next governing paradigm, discarding the old one in the ash heap of history as we go, losing nuances and peculiarities along the way. There exists no perfect match between any paradigm and reality, or nature.23 But lack of fit in our current paradigm, along with rampant consumerism and out-of-control corporate power, is destroying the planet. In our current imagination, we live, and can live forever, in a straight line forward, but the ecosystems on which we depend are built upon cycles. Anyone who has seen the Google Images of the Pacific garbage gyre can see what happens when we break those cycles. Anyone who has read about the progressive contamination of newborns, the bioaccumulation of toxicants in soil and flesh, the nearly irreversible damage to something as enormous as our climate, can see that something has gone terribly awry in our culture. Our current governing paradigms no longer fit nature—at least not nature here on Earth. Or at least our current conception of and practices in regard to nature are a dysfunctional, vestigial remains from the process of paradigmatic evolutionary selection. Scientific paradigms rely at their heart on metaphors, which George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) show not only define everyday reality but exclude some potentially important aspects of reality that fall outside of the conceptual system. Martin Heidegger theorizes this idea similarly as Enframing, a way of understanding the world, structured by inherited technology and culture, outside of which other ways of revealing reality become nearly impossible (1977). Consider briefly another tossing in the historical paradigmatic ash heap that has limited scientific imagination relatively recently: Lamarckian explanations for anatomical changes over generations. Every school child learns about the contest between two theories for what we now know as evolution, and every school child knows that one is laughable and the other unequivocally true. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck postulated that inherited characteristics were acquired because of conditions around and actions of parents, which

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characteristics were then passed on to offspring, or in other words, heritability of acquired characteristics. The classic example is the giraffe that stretches its neck to reach the highest leaves during a drought and that then passes that stretched neck on to descendants. Gould subsequently criticized this reduction of Lamarck’s thought: “the restriction of ‘Lamarckism’ to this relatively small and non-distinctive corner of Lamarck’s thought must be labeled as more than a misnomer, and truly a discredit to the memory of a man and his much more comprehensive system” (Structure 2002, 177–78). Darwin’s explanation of the same phenomenon, the verifiably true explanation, is that those giraffes whose necks are longest survive the drought and are able to become parents in the first place, passing their long necks on to their progeny. The point, though, is that the more correct explanation became not just received explanation, but dogma. So when scientists exploring gene-environment interactions found actual cases where acquired characteristics were passed along, in the “soft inheritance” so long utterly rejected, the scientific community and the general public were slow to accept the new research. Epigenetics now investigates these exceptions on a regular basis, and indeed a thin stream of exceptions flows through the history of science. Methylation of DNA strands, turning some genes on or other genes off, has been shown to be heritable, although environmentally induced, refuting commonly perceived nature/ culture, genes/environment dualism. The epigenetic work on fat yellow mice versus their thin brown twins is instructive in two ways: first, in showing how this particular scientific paradigm is flawed, and second in showing how important not being constrained by overriding metaphors is, especially when it comes to questions of environment. The viable yellow agouti mouse is a mouse that, when certain of its genes are not fully methylated, is indeed a fat yellow mouse prone to cancer and diabetes. When, however, its genes are fully methylated in utero by its mother’s consumption of a methyl-rich diet, even an identical twin to the fat yellow mouse will manifest as a thin, brown, healthy mouse. The mice have the same genotype, or genetic code, but very different phenotypes, or expressions of genetic code. One substance that skews the mice in the direction of fat and yellow is the addition of bisphenol A (BPA) to its diet. What is shocking is that the level of BPA needed to make the mice fat and yellow is physiologically relevant to humans. In other words, the levels of BPA found in fetal liver cells for the fat yellow mice were comparable to levels found in actual human fetal liver cells (Anderson et al. 2012). BPA, a plastic additive found in can linings, water pipe coatings, sales receipts, baby bottles, and nearly every human tested, is being linked to endocrine disruption, cognitive and behavioral changes, male and female reproductive problems, and obesity. It is very likely that the same exposures that predispose mice to obesity, heart disease, and cancer also predispose humans to similar maladies.

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Angela Hume, writing about Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith’s art book Endocrinology, points out that no threshold exists for chemicals like this: no minimum exposure is safe, and no boundary for the body protects (2015, 839). Stacy Alaimo (2008) refers to “trans-corporeality” to describe the relationship between bodies and toxic environments. This recent research, scientific and eco-critical, complements other studies that are identifying obesogens, or chemicals that promote obesity and ill health, in our chemical body burden. So in thinking of our genetic code in a certain way, as passed on irrevocably, unalterably, again in a straight line forward, we have dismissed the impact of environmental factors on our health and welfare. The way we have traditionally figured inheritance in our linear worldview has led to a genetic determinism that is simply not true, we find. Epigenetics, by contrast, understands a mutual imbrication between genes and environment that more closely resembles circles and cycles. Because phylogenetic trees and heritability as popularly imagined from Darwin onwards partially match up with the arrow of time and with the imagination of the cosmos as outwardly expanding and with the understanding of the nature of motion as an arrow forward, we are predisposed to ignore exceptions to the rule: complications, cycles, and webs. I will resist the temptation to draw an analogy between the phallic symbolism of the straight arrow and the perhaps more feminine circle and cycle, though really, the analogy could be made. I might also comment on modern androcentric approaches to science and environmental issues.24 But that is not the subject at hand. What is important to remember is that all science is conceptualized and communicated via metaphor, though no metaphor or paradigm is adequate. Like the web of life, ideas and concepts that seem unrelated are all unconsciously intertwined in the messy tangle of our brains. The messy tangle of reality is even more complex, as is the relationship between ideas and action, imagination and the way we impose our own schemes on the world. It is important to work toward a better understanding of reality, one that is inherently less destructive and more holistic. In chapter 6, I will explore alternate metaphors not only from older traditions, but from non-Western traditions, local knowledge making, and new ecocritical thinking we could employ to try to step outside dominant Western frameworks. Using the term “Western” as a shorthand for elements of modern culture with roots in modern Western Europe, even when adapted to non-Western contexts, and “non-Western” for cultural phenomena with strong premodern roots, even when adapted to the modern world, can be problematic. Doing so can artificially separate out by geography and culture elements of modernity that include many other thinkers and places. Sebastian Conrad describes this problem well in his critique of discourse on the Enlightenment (2012), and I use these terms with a nod toward the validity

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of this argument. Furthermore, I am not arguing firmly for consonance among medieval Western, Indigenous, and non-Western ideas—of course, each of these categories is teeming with diverse traditions, and each of these traditions is richer and more complex than I can address in a study of this length. Rather, I present an array of ideas that each offer some alternative to the linear and reductionist models on which we now depend. Even basic symmetries for describing ecosystems have gone awry. If we consider what is the best schematic to embody relationships within an ordinary ecology, a forest ecosystem, for instance, perhaps the most accurate portrayal would not be merely the lines drawing relationships between representative organisms, as seen in the average ecology textbook, or even the food web analogy where multiple relationships are drawn. Still, the key symbolic emblem showing these relationships is a line—curved lines in a circle, crossing lines in a web, often with arrows on the ends to show directionality. At some point, a web becomes so intertwined, so complex—much like the web of the internet, or the Worldwide Web—that it becomes not a mesh of lines, but a whole cloth woven of individual threads.25 Timothy Morton describes the term “mesh” as “the interconnected-ness of all living and non-living things” (Ecological Thought 2010, 28). Perhaps we should imagine, too, not a neatly woven cloth or mesh, as Commoner or Morton might have done, with straight warp and woof—this model too is perhaps too humanly constructed—perhaps we should imagine instead a cloth-like boiled wool, whose fibers are intermingled, tangled, matted together, inextricably bound one to another. Or perhaps we imagine something more complex still, like the individual cells in an organism, all working in concert, all dependent upon one another, all communicating in complicated ways we are just beginning to understand. Josh A. Weinstein cites the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and others in arguing for a “web of interdependencies . . . and interpenetration” (2015, 769). Hume argues that “the body at risk [is] that body which is delineated precisely at its risky points of contact and interpenetration with other environmental bodies. . . . Its contours should be understood . . . in terms of sites of perfusion between cells, tissues, organs, pathogens, chemicals, and particulate matter” (2015, 823). Perhaps we should think of it as energy flow throughout the ecosystem. And here we come closer to ideas embodied by deep ecologists, eco-phenomenologists, and others among the more mystic of the environmentalists: Lovelock and Margulis, for instance.26 Much more attention has been given in recent years to Native American metaphors, webs and circles, that contrast with modern Western ones. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony describes a world linked and interconnected like a spider’s web, in which every animal and plant, even rocks, are living, intelligent persons bound together as one.27 Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, similarly describes a world alive

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and permeated with meaning: “In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places” (2013, 55). Kimmerer describes how the Onondaga Thanksgiving Address expresses gratitude for all things in order, beginning with the cycles of life themselves, and then proceeding through Earth, water, fish, plants, trees, animals, birds, winds, thunder and lightening, “our Brother, the Sun, . . . our oldest Grandmother, the Moon,” the Stars, the Teachers, and the Creator (2013, 107–15). This sounds strikingly close to St. Francis’s prayer to creation, which also praises Creator God, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brothers Wind and Air, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister and Mother Earth, and finally, Sister Death. Onondaga time, too, as in the Middle Ages, is circular: For in the popular way of thinking, history draws a time “line,” as if time marched in lockstep in only one direction. Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once, as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. . . . In the way of linear time, you might hear Nanabozho’s stories as mythic lore of history, a recounting of the long-ago past and how things came to be. But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come. If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge. . . . (Kimmerer 2013, 206)

This conception of time remarkably resembles medieval Christian readings of the Bible as both history and prophecy, the time that is past and the time to come, cycling on. Kimmerer presents Native American views of the natural world, time, and creation that are a refreshing alternative, a healthful antidote to modern Western ones. Despite her brilliant building of verdant, generative, countercultural metaphors, however, Kimmerer, along with many readers of the medieval Western tradition, somewhat misconstrues and reduces the history of nature metaphors in the West: “In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom” (2013, 9). While it’s true the medieval schema is hierarchical in some senses, it is God who is on top, with angels, archangels, spheres, and principalities in between, and we humans are all here on Earth, with the plants and animals and minerals, and Hell under our feet. In medieval cosmology, the Earth is middeneard, or “middle earth.” Being at the center of the cosmos, in the middle of the Earth, is not a compliment. So while humans can occupy Heaven, Earth, or netherworld, this is more about rich orderliness than hierarchy. Furthermore, although it is true that the Great Chain of Being shows hierarchy in everything, with the lion the king of the beasts, the eagle the emperor of birds, and

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the diamond the paragon of stones, the geometry is spherical, not linear, and there is also a way in which these orders are more about symmetry than rank, more about encompassing and imagining a whole, than hierarchy as moderns tend to imagine it, a line downward. Hence, the encyclopedic demonologies, angelologies, bestiaries, parliaments of fowls, and even lapidaries, cataloging all the mystical qualities of stones. These genres describe and categorize the wonders of creation, more than they aim to place some as less than. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the two truly admirable characters are the humble parson and the lowly plowman. The lion of the lion’s share in medieval beast fables is not necessarily the one to emulate. Hence the startling comfort of medieval Corpus Christi plays with the divine, the virtuous, the bawdy human, and the infernal all commingled, devils and demigods cheek by jowl in medieval cathedrals with saints and angels. There is a juxtaposition and amalgamation of high and low that rarely occurs the same way in the modern imagination. Think of medieval tapestries, so far from modern lawns, with natural landscapes carpeted with flowers, rabbits, dogs, and species of all kinds and forms; of manuscript marginalia with mythical beasts, killer rabbits, fornicating nuns, and farting monks right alongside sacred texts; or, as an extreme, of Hieronymus Bosch’s late medieval work. So while humans may now be thought of by some as the apex of modern evolution, certainly, that is less true of creation as imagined before the change in cosmologies. When we talk of the Middle Ages being hierarchical, we are limited by seeing hierarchy as a single or branched line; yet medieval hierarchy is much more a whole cloth than a single strand. Of course, that hierarchy was at least as bad as now if you were a woman or from the lower classes; nevertheless, it was in many ways a hierarchy that was less destructive of the natural world because of its sense of order, place, and dynamic stasis, rather than throughput, inputs, and outputs. Some more beneficial metaphors could be recuperated from the early Western tradition itself, in addition to the alternatives to be found in other traditions. Ecocritics have been feeling their way closer to a more adequate set of metaphors and paradigms in recent years.28 Though it may be impossible to accurately represent reality with any one set of metaphors, metaphors are indispensable to conveying truth, ultimately—even in scientific descriptions. They are present in language and in our minds no matter how much we strive for perfect abstraction; indeed, they are likely the mode by which we attempt abstraction.29 And understanding the history of that abstraction, with all its flaws and particularities, may enable us to sense the gaps between current paradigms and reality. In other words, we need to understand, or at least revisit, the circular/cyclical/spherical paradigms of the past, but with a difference. And the medieval cosmos is not the only “other” set of metaphors we should compare our own against. I am not urging a return to the

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previous model, far from it, even if that were possible. But I do think fully comprehending the alterity of the previous model and holding it in one’s mind alongside the modern one can offer a helpful corrective, in much the same way that fully understanding a Native American cosmology alongside one’s own primary understanding can be a corrective. Kimmerer argues similarly that “We see the world more fully when we use both” (2013, 46). There are insights to be gleaned from each varying paradigm; furthermore, there is much to be gained first from the cognitive dissonance involved, and second, from the gestalt picture the different perspectives can give us. Since the circular/cyclical view of the Middle Ages, we have ignored or repressed the reciprocity between humans and nature in favor of profit and economic growth, both of which rely on linear models. We have dramatically altered the planet, ecosystems, and climate through advanced technologies developed by the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism, and in some ways, there is no going back. So while we cannot return to or restore the Dantean worldview, we need to reimagine the paradigms in which we operate in a way that takes into account the governing shapes of older and other views. William Egginton, in his extremely perceptive article on Dante’s cosmos and hyperspheres, argues that much was lost or forgotten with the Copernican understanding of the cosmos: . . . there is an excellent explanation for why one must look to the fourteenth century for models of expression adequate to the challenges posed by nineteenth and twentieth-century advances in mathematics: namely, that in the course of the Scientific Revolution, wherein were laid the epistemological foundations for the discoveries of modern science, certain possibilities of thought and imagination were discarded, forgotten, and certain abilities were, if only temporarily, lost. The Middle Ages has long been painted as a period whose culture was hostile to free thought and new knowledge; perhaps it is now time to recognize that it was also a time in which phenomena could sustain mutually exclusive and contradictory explanations, when the battle between faith and science had not yet been conclusively won by either side, and when the efforts to bridge the stories they told could produce conceptual edifices whose mere possibility would be unthinkable only 200 years later. (Egginton 1999, 196–97)

Egginton argues that we ought to enable ourselves to envisage our cosmos as spherical, as Dante imagined it, not only as rectilinear, as Newtonian physics would have us do. He points out, with Robert Osserman, that despite more advanced cosmologies, “we have not yet overcome our tendency to think in terms of a flat universe” (1999, 197). His point is that we have confined our imaginations within only one possible paradigmatic field. While clearly, not all environmental degradation is caused by the vast shift in metaphors from

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23

circular to linear in nature, some has been, and that metaphoric shift was influenced by extrapolation from the changed scientific understanding of cosmic motion described here. Science is both informed by and communicated via metaphor and generative of new meanings and new metaphors, filtering out into the wider culture. While granting humanity great gifts and technological advancement, many thinkers in modern Western civilization have committed the teleological fallacy of thinking that all roads led to our science, the summit of science so far; that human understanding of the cosmos evolved along lines destined to prioritize our paradigms, the fittest paradigms so far. Many do not think we need the ideas that have been left behind, faded into the background, or become extinct, whether those ideas are medieval European or Native American. But we have done far more than that intellectual harm in limiting our mental operating systems as we have. In search of the simplest laws underlying the cosmos, we have lost some of our understanding of the complexity and intertangled variety of life. We have amputated our natural sensitivity to the fact that when we tug on one strand in the web, all others are irremediably altered. We are destroying our habitats, dismantling our climate, and poisoning our children. If we do not school our imaginations and amend our governing metaphors—soon—we may ultimately lose all the gains of civilization— including our own lives. NOTES 1. Brian Massumi details how Niko Tinbergen, a pioneer of ethology, finds that often, all is not right with the automation of instinct, that perceptual intensity can be the trigger for gull chick feeding so that the most unnatural of decoys, those that “overshoot the limits of the normal in the direction of what he called ‘supernormal stimuli’” were often most effective (Massumi 2). Within the umwelt of the particular creature, as defined by Jakob von Uexküll, Thomas A. Sebeok, and latterly, Dorion Sagan, the gull or albatross parents are unable to perceive the food as false within their biosemiotic carriers of significance (2010). 2. Here, when I say cosmology, I mean experienced cosmology, as employed by Rémi Brague (2003, 5). 3. By metaphor, I follow George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in defining it as a “conceptual system” that “structures(s) what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people” (1980, 3). They argue that “human thought processes are largely metaphorical” (1980, 6). See chapter 5 for further discussion. 4. For just one example that summarizes recent research in the arena of endocrine disruption, see Retha Newbold et al. (2007). 5. See also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: “The vision of the ecology movement has been to restore the balance of nature disrupted by industrialization

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and overpopulation. It has emphasized the need to live within the cycles of nature, as opposed to the exploitative, linear mentality of forward progress. It focuses on the costs of progress, the limits to growth, the deficiencies of technological decision making, and the urgency of the conservation and recycling of natural resources” (1980, xxi). 6. For work that does explore the shift in conceptions of the cosmos from Middle Ages through Enlightenment, see Helge S. Krage (2007) and Pietro Daniel Omodeo (2014). See also Robert S. Westman (2011), Marjaž Vesel (2014), and Todd Timberlake and Paul Wallace (2019). The seminal work on Bacon and the Enlightenment shift in metaphors is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Enlightenment’s “own ideas of human rights then fare no better than the older universals. . . . The reason is that enlightenment also recognizes itself in the old myths. . . . Enlightenment is totalitarian” (2002, 3). Here, they recognize how new myths and metaphors tend to dominate, even against reason. 7. Already by the early fifteenth century, the flat, planar iconography of the Middle Ages had yielded to the vanishing point of perspective drawing in art, capturing the whole scene portrayed by a latticework of straight lines disappearing into infinity, so that even all that was seen had a radically different shape. Artists like Giotto experimented with convergent lines in architecture, but later Renaissance architects like Filippo Brunelleschi in 1415 and artists like Masolino da Panicale in 1426–1427 developed true single-point perspective. See J.V. Field (1997) for a thorough exploration of the intersection between art and mathematics. Henri Lefebvre argues that perspective with its vanishing lines is a culturally dependent construction of space: “The vanishing line, the vanishing-point and the meeting of parallel lines ‘at infinity’ were the determinants of a representation, at once intellectual and visual, which promoted the primacy of the gaze in a kind of ‘logic of visualization.’ This representation, which had been in the making for centuries, now became enshrined in architectural and urbanistic practice as the code of linear perspective” (1974, 41). 8. See Arthur Lovejoy (1936) for his original discussion of the Great Chain of Being. Key to the Great Chain of Being are the ideas of continuity and plenitude, ideas that I will continue to stress: the sense of fullness of creation, Thomas Aquinas’s “wonderful linkage of things,” which has to some degree been lost in our modern scientific paradigms but that has considerable validity in ecology if not cosmology. 9. The original Latin is as follows: “Itaque cum mecum ipse cogitarem, quam absurdum α’χρο’αμα existimaturi essent illi, qui multorum seculorum iudiciis hanc opinionem confirmatam norunt, quod terra immobilis in medio cœli, tanquam centrum illius posita sit, si ego contra assererem terram moveri. . . . ” (Copernicus 1543). 10. “It was Descartes, in 1644, who was the first to provide a complete, fully-worked out system, capable of replacing Aristotle tout à fait. By the time Hobbes’s system appeared, in 1655, Cartesianism was already attracting the attention of natural philosophers throughout Europe—even those who were not persuaded by Cartesianism found themselves having to address it” (Henry 2016, 38). 11. For a thorough presentation of literary and philosophical reaction to the Copernican Revolution, see Michael J. Crowe, Theories of the World: From Antiquity to the

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Copernican Revolution (2001). On Shakespeare’s relation to the natural world generally and the Ptolemaic universe specifically, see E.M.W. Tillyard (1943), Todd Borlik (2011), Bruce Boehrer (2013), Tom MacFaul (2013), and Charlotte Scott (2014). Thomas McAlindon (1996) and Dan Falk (2014) likewise explore how cosmic metaphors are worked into the plays and context of our most famous writer right in the thick of these cosmological changes. 12. The exact quote is “If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering” (Leopold 1986, 190). 13. For more on the harmony between the human body and the cosmos, the body as a microcosm corresponding to the macrocosm of the universe, see S.K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass (1977, 144–58). 14. See especially Lawrence Buell (1995). 15. See Aristotle, Physics, Bk. IV (1947). 16. Timberlake and Wallace put it this way: “The natural motion of the elements in the sublunary region was different. The sublunary elements sought their proper place in the universe with reference to the center of the universe, which served as the ‘bottom’ of the entire structure. Heavy elements had a natural tendency to fall toward the bottom (center), while light elements had a tendency to rise upward. The heaviest element was earth, so earth would naturally tend to fall toward the bottom and accumulate in a sphere around the center of the universe” (2019, 79). See also Josh A. Weinstein “Humility, from the Ground Up: A Radical Approach to Literature and Ecology” (2015). Albertus Magnus called the Earth “like an excrement” (Brague 2003, 203, quoted in Danielson 2014, 158). 17. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore environmental contamination in full, but please consult the following: CDC (2010); AAP (2012); President’s Cancer Panel (PCP) (2010); and Steingraber (2010). 18. For more on the medieval calendar, see Phillipp E. Northaft (2018) and Rivka Feldhay (2006). 19. For a good discussion of modern linear scientific metaphors, like progress, frontiers, journeys, and assembly lines, see Iina Hellsten (2009). 20. Thanks to friend and biology colleague Al Martin, who pointed out the exception of gene flow through a “braided stream,” in which divergent branches on a phylogenetic tree may fuse or reunite due to breeding between different groups. This challenges the definition of “species” since different species ideally should be genetically different enough not to interbreed. 21. I say this with a concessionary nod to Annalee Newitz’s brilliant Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013). In it, she argues that we should plan for a million more years of human history. 22. I am reminded of Leopold’s narrative of atom X—which cycles innumerable times through diverse plants, animals, and humans—and atom Y—which is washed by industrial agriculture through the system very quickly (1953, 111–15). 23. For recent eco-critical examination of the term “nature,” see Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (2009); I use the term advisedly, for lack of a better.

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24. For a primer in ecofeminism and environmental ethics, see works by Kristen Hessler and Elizabeth Willott (2011), Gita Sen (1994), Karen J. Warren (2000), Carolyn Merchant (1980), and Donna Harroway (1990). More recent theorists link environmental degradation and climate change with toxic masculinity (Brough et al. 2016; Brough 2019; Tan 2019). 25. We might even imagine the radically new cloth constructed from the intertwined cellulose nanofiber tendrils of kombucha fungus. Cf. Suzanne Lee “Grow Your Own Clothes” (2011), http:​//​www​.ted​.com​/talks​/suzanne​_lee​_grow​_your​_own​ _clothes. According to Hume, Bersenbrugge portrays hormones as “mesh” (2015, 831). See Warren (2000, 66–68) for another search for apt metaphors. 26. For a summary of shallow versus deep ecology, see Arne Næss (1973); see also James Lovelock (1979; 2010). 27. These metaphors are pervasive in Ceremony, but see also Jude Todd (1995). 28. Read Donna Haraway (1990) and Cary Wolfe (2010) for imaginings of post-human metaphors and paradigms. 29. For more on how abstraction works to change relations among people in ways that have real consequences, I recommend Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978), who writes from a Marxist perspective about monetary systems and globalization, which, though abstractions, greatly affect actual lives and material circumstances.

Chapter 1

Dante’s Cosmos

As thick on the ground as studies of Dante’s numerology and knowledge of science are,1 a more detailed understanding of his conception of the cosmos can shed yet more light on his use of metaphors, verse form, and material reality.2 And understanding the cosmological system that persisted well into the Renaissance, and how thoroughly it permeated the entire medieval worldview, can be instrumental in providing a contrast with our own post-Copernican views. This chapter will take Dante’s Divina Commedia as a case study in the close integration between medieval metaphors, verse form, and philosophy and the exact configuration of the cosmos Dante explores. Although the cosmos Dante portrays has been described as circles nesting one within the other,3 the Ptolemaic schema that Dante inherited and studied so well was considerably more complex, augmented by eccentric circles, epicycles, equants, and various other mechanisms to adjust for aberrations like retrograde motion in the outer planets.4 Dante’s cosmos appears elegant and pure compared to this elaborate system, which nevertheless managed to limp along until well after Copernicus, predicting events with respectable regularity. Many have described the importance of circles to Dante’s worldview, though most critics see Dante’s circular design in general terms. Allison Cornish says that Dante was not arcane, that he provides only the “large strokes of cosmic design” (2000, 8). John Kleiner claims that Dante paints his cosmos in broad strokes and that he ignores the intricacies of Ptolemy, but this is not entirely the case. In reference to Paradiso 8, Venus’s epicycle, Kleiner argues that it is “impossible to say for certain whether Ptolemy is being accepted or refuted . . . whether Dante is endorsing the epicycle as real or construing it as yet another dangerous pagan myth” (2000, 721). But there are hints at least that Dante endorses this complexity more subtly—in verse form and geometric structures, for instance. Here I lay claim to a methodological concern expressed particularly well in John G. Demaray’s book on the link between the cosmos and poetic form. He accuses our modern epistemological-linguistic approach of “disengaging 27

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poems [of this period] from their aesthetic, iconographic and even their ideological settings” and argues that “linguistic criticism needs to consider the powers of iconography and ideology upon poetry” (1987, 10).5 I argue that the basic idealized forms pervade not only Dante’s cosmos, but his poetry, in ways it is difficult for us to imagine. The privileged place of the circle in Dante, as in medieval cosmology at large,6 suggests a permanency, a vast, perfect enclosedness, a comforting sense of cycles coming full circle again. Inferno seethes within rings; Purgatorio spirals upwards;7 finally, in Paradiso, Dante rises through the circular orbits of the heavens (see Figure 1.1). The whole of Dante’s cosmos is complete and divinely patterned on a spherical, circularly rotating model. This piece of cultural imagination, rooted in Aristotle and Plato and radically influential in cosmic metaphors throughout the Middle Ages,8 contrasts drastically with our own, conditioned as it is by modern mathematics and astronomy. Personally, I feel this disjunction with a sense of nostalgia; yet however beautiful Dante’s whole, organic cosmos, I cannot read it as true, and not primarily because of the position of planetary bodies. Space—and

Figure 1.1. Dante and the Divine Comedy in Duomo, Florence, Tuscany, Italy. Dante holds a copy of the Divine Comedy next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above. Source: This fresco painting is by Domenico di Michelino (1465). Public Domain.

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time—in my imagination, I realized, proceed in a straight line out to infinity.9 I wondered: is the tremendous difference between our vision of the cosmos and Dante’s fully accounted for by the Copernican movement of the Earth from the center of things? This is not, I think, the whole story: perhaps not even the most important point. Rather, the most dramatic change was the resolution of circular motion into its vector components, making lines the primary and naturalized motion of the universe, as opposed to the uniformity of the sphere and circle. It was here that the most basic shape of things, the shape of natural motion, changed and with it, the imagined form of so much else: space, time, progress. I will contend that the primacy of circular versus linear motion, arising from astronomic theory and including all the complications of the Ptolemaic system, is essential to an accurate understanding of the nature of Dante’s cosmos and his verse form.10 To do so, I will also show how fundamentally our own concept of the circular motion of the cosmos differs from Dante’s. Dante, like most writers and thinkers, was affected on a deep level by the predominant cosmological metaphors of his time, just as we are now, and he formed his poetry in accordance with his, not our, vision of those conceptual shapes.11 DANTE’S PTOLEMAIC FRAMEWORK Before the change from the Ptolemaic system, the impulse was to explain the cosmos—and much of the rest of the world—by compounding circles, saving appearances by preserving the ideal form. After the change, the motion of the cosmos, as well as many other aspects of the world, began to be explained by means of deconstructing complex forms to their simplest element. Linear motion is not so much an ideal form, like the circle, as the most basic component, and our reductionist impulses in science and literature have not ceased. The imaginative basis for the motion of the cosmos carries over into other arenas. In the Middle Ages, the trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) was considered a lower order of study than the quadrivium (Math, Music, Geometry and Astronomy), but medieval thinkers like Alain de Lille routinely used analytical methods common in one discipline to examine phenomena in the others, and even in the loftiest fields of study: Philosophy and Theology. Alain’s epitaph, in fact, claimed that “He knew the two, he knew the seven, knew all that could be known” (1980, 3). In Theologicae Regulae, Alain applies the methods of the quadrivium, and Geometry in particular, to analyze Theology (1980, PL 210.622–684). Different ways of knowing in different fields and, of course, Nature herself could all be used together to explore a universe created by God, whole though humans see only parts; the liberal arts were often

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seen as themselves a component of the Great Chain of Being (see Figure I.3). Dante marshaled all the academic forces in his arsenal to construct his view of the cosmos. The medieval cosmos was founded in the root texts of medieval culture, and the main concepts changed surprisingly little from ancient times until the sixteenth century. In the Timaeus, Plato describes the creation of the universe as the creation of the perfect creature: But for that animal that is to embrace within itself all animals, the fitting figure would be the one that has embraced all figures within itself, however many there are; so for this reason too, he worked it in circular fashion, sculpting it into the form of a sphere, the figure that keeps itself in all directions equidistant from its center to its extremities and which, of all figures, is the most perfect and most similar to itself, since he considered that similar is vastly more beautiful than dissimilar. (2001, 33B)

The idea of the circle or sphere “that embraces all figures within itself” recurs throughout ancient and medieval iconography and symbology. It was essential to Euclid’s foundational text. Since our mathematical system, including the Arabic numerals we take so for granted, was not introduced until the Middle Ages, every mathematician and astronomer from Euclid on depended on his Elements,12 which itself likely drew upon Plato’s school of thought. Euclid still provides an excellent education in geometry. Euclid’s propositions are replete with proofs inscribing figures within circles or spheres. In the Middle Ages, the circle was seen to enclose all other major forms. The triangle within the circle often represents the Trinity,13 or the more elaborate schemas of Joachim of Fiore with his three interlocking circles representing the three ages: Old Testament (Father), New Testament (Son), and Second Coming of Christ (Holy Spirit) (Figure 1.3).14 The square corresponds to the four elements, the four humors, the four seasons, the four cardinal winds, the four cardinal points of the compass, all embodied in the Pythagorean tetrad,15 or the four evangelists,16 who, along with their emblems—lion (St. Mark), ox (St. Luke), angel (St. Matthew), and eagle (St. John)—are often inscribed inside the domes of medieval cathedrals, and might remind mathematicians and readers of Dante of the insoluble problem of squaring the circle. T and O maps of the known world, figured in Mappaemundi throughout Europe, resemble the cross within circle of Euclid, also figured in rose windows and Dante’s Heavenly White Rose. The geometry of the pentagon within the circle recalls the Eastern Star—the conjunctions of Venus with the Sun, which forms a perfect pentagram on the zodiacal circle—the five wounds of Christ, the three sets of five holy mysteries, the five petals of a rose, or, if you like, the more elaborate and partly pagan symbolism of Phi and the golden mean

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Figure 1.2. Diagrams from Euclid’s Elements. Source: (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Green Lion Press, 2002). Used with permission.

described in The DaVinci Code.17 In all of these examples, circular geometry encloses and trumps the inscribed linear figures. In three dimensions, the others of the five perfect solids also fit within the sphere, as with Euclid’s inscribed icosahedron in Book Thirteen, Proposition Sixteen (Figure 1.4). These proofs show the mathematical perfection as well as all-encompassing symbolism of the sphere, as would the later famous drawing by Kepler of the Platonic solids. Beginning with Plato, the regular or Platonic solids, the only five shapes that can be so constructed, with identical regular polygons, were also believed to compose the smallest particle of each element: earth (cube), water (icosahedron), fire (tetrahedron), and air (octahedron). The final Platonic solid (dodecahedron), with its nearly spherical shape and twelve faces that represent the zodiac, was thought to represent the universe as a whole (Timberlake and Wallace 2019, 77). Surprisingly, the dodecahedron has been proposed in the twenty-first century as the underlying shape of space (Luminet et al. 2003). My point in showing these proofs is to demonstrate how perfect circularity and sphericity consisted not only in the simple form but in the form compounded, as in Ptolemaic theory. Again, while it may seem that Dante

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Figure 1.3. Joachim da Fiore, Liber Figurarum, Trinitarian Circles. Public Domain. Source: https:​//​commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/File:​Liber​_Figurarum​_Tav​_11​.jpg By Beppeveltri (2013). Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Figure 1.4. Diagrams from Euclid’s Elements. Source: (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Green Lion Press, 2002). Used with permission.

presents a simple system of spheres,18 work by Pötters (2003) and Hart (1988) suggests we should be looking more closely at the geometry and math. We should also, I would argue, look more carefully at the astronomy. Not only a circular form, but also circular motion conform to Plato’s idea of the perfect: “ . . . and so, as a circle turning in a circle, he established a heaven that was one, alone, solitary. . . . He begat a happy god” (2001, 34B). In this vision of the cosmos, the emphasis is on motion, on progress through time, not just geometric figures. Alain de Lille provides a medieval example of the view of circular motion as perfect: “The firmament in its

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daily revolution makes all things go round with it, not in a frivolous pattern of rotation but according to the instructions of [Nature’s] teaching: it returns to the place from which it set out and proceeds again to the place to which it is going” (1980, 131). This motion is perfect because recursive; it closes back on itself. Plato displays a very intimate connection with the universe in his discussion of ideal motion. His argument is partially based on a feeling of what is fit and aesthetically pleasing: And it was not right—nor is it right—for him who is best to do anything except that which is most beautiful; so, once he did some calculating, he discovered that of all things visible by nature, nothing unintelligent will ever be a more beautiful work, comparing wholes with wholes, than what has intellect; and again, that it’s impossible for intellect apart from soul to become present in anything. Through this calculation, then, by constructing intellect within soul and soul within body, he joined together the all so that he had fashioned a work that would be most beautiful and best in accordance with nature. (2001, 30B)

Of course, to later ears, this could sound like the province of a Christian God as well. The claim to beauty and perfection in mathematic models persisted for long, though those models changed in detail and essence. The idea of saving appearances, after all, meant showing things as they ought to be. The appeal to intellect we may see echoed in the famously intricate structure of the Commedia; a modern audience, scarcely tolerant of the tightness of a sonnet, or even of meter and rhyme, wonders why Dante would go to so much trouble. But in his verse form, Dante is constructing divine intellect—a sign in itself of the soul. How else could Dante design a universe worthy of God than by embedding in every line—in the description of the heavens and in the shape of the verse itself—the most perfect of forms, not simply, but in all the complexity of the revealed, visible cosmos. Aristotle played an important role in shaping the Ptolemaic universe inherited by Dante. For Aristotle, “The perfect is naturally prior to the imperfect, and the circle is a perfect thing. This cannot be said of any straight line:—not of an infinite line; for, if it were perfect, it would have a limit and an end: nor of any finite line” (De Caelo, 2001, 269a: 19–24). Aristotle also agrees with Plato about the nature of motion: “There is, then, something which is always moved with an unceasing motion, which is motion in a circle. . . . Therefore the first heaven must be eternal” (Metaphysics 2001, 1072a: 20–23).19 Aristotle articulates an idea that continues very strong into the Middle Ages: that erotic love or attraction is the force at the center of the universe (Metaphysics, 2001, 1072a, 25–36). This force, exerted on objects, in itself created the circular motion of the heavenly bodies, the motion of a

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lover toward his beloved; unimpeded, these bodies want to move in a perfect, circular motion. That seems difficult, if not impossible, for a modern audience to intuitively understand.20 Aristotle, whose works quickly rose to prominence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, differed from Plato on the matter of celestial motion in one very important way. While Plato describes the heavens as composed of the four ordinary elements, Aristotle argues that the seemingly natural circular motion of the celestial region indicates a fifth element, ether, whose natural tendency is to circularity and completeness, as opposed to the natural rectilinear tendencies of earthly elements, which sought their natural place in the universe in reference to its center, the bottom, the Earth.21 As a result, Aristotle argued that the celestial element inherently differed from the other four elements, and that unlike them, it was fundamentally incorruptible. Besides the heavenly motion in a circle, celestial bodies are unchanging, eternal, and so radically different from the Earth that they are composed of a different stuff.22 It is not surprising, then, that Dante would think to use the motion belonging to them as a means of conveying divinity. Augustine elaborates on these models, but largely conforms to the basic cosmological concepts. He sees mathematics as intimately connected to the physical world: Look closely at the beauty of the graceful body and you will see that numbers are held in space. Then look at the beauty of motion in a body and you will see that numbers are involved in time. Enter into the art from which the numbers come, and ask there for time and space. . . . Go beyond even the spirit of an artist that you may see eternal numbers. Then wisdom will shine upon you from its inner abode and from the shrine of truth. (Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, Book 2, Chap. 16.42, PL 32.1264, qtd. in Guzzardo 1987, 7)

Augustine describes numbers—mathematics—as inherently tied to space, to motion, and to art and the artist. Dante also sees the poem as not merely a static structure, with line numbers to be counted on the page; rather the numbers are part of the living, read poem, counted off as a dance through time instead. The numbers of the poem comprise an artful motion through time and space.23 Although by Christian times, the universe no longer has a soul per se, the celestial spheres still lay claim to beauty, perfection, and even divine love. Drawn from Pythagorean theories of music and mathematic ratios, the harmonia mundi—the music of the celestial spheres—embodies aesthetic perfection overlapping with mathematic precision. This is Dante’s background, one in which intelligence, soul, math, music, and the movement of the stars are all expressed in the form of the perfect sphere, a crucial conceptual form that,

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while all-encompassing, is nevertheless dependent on mathematical authority that circularity is the naturalized movement of the universe, the way that things want to move. CIRCULAR MOTION IN THE MODERN COSMOS When did the shape of natural motion change, and how was circular motion’s metaphoric impact subsequently lost? We cannot fully grasp the difference between Dante’s model and our own unless we look, though only briefly, at pivotal conceptual changes in the understanding of circular motion that separate us from Dante. Though we often think of Copernicus’s rearrangement of the planets’ positions as the turning point in the astronomical revolution, Copernicus’s 1543 De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium did not immediately change the metaphoric valences of circular motion; for Copernicus, the circle remained the perfect form for the cosmos. Copernicus describes Ptolemy’s model, with its various fragments that do not belong together, as monstrous: “such parts made up a monster rather than a man” (1995, 5). Although Copernicus accepts the perfection of circular orbits, he sees the compounding system of epicycles and deferents, or circles upon circles, as horribly complicated and therefore imperfect.24 Thus, compounded circular motion acquired pejorative connotations. Mathematics as a subject became even more the province of the divine, as opposed to followers of Aristotle, who saw it as “irrelevant and futile”; geometrical forms were seen as the essential properties underlying reality (Shea 1969, 153, 158). As far out ahead as Copernicus was, there was a lag time as the implications of these new ideas were worked out. Even after Galileo, moreover, an intuitive reading of Dante’s metaphors was not lost all at the moment Copernicus’s system gained acceptance; in this case, important aspects of the metaphor of circular motion fell away only once mathematic models were perfected. Kepler, carefully plotting the orbit of Mars from observational data, described planetary orbits as ellipses with the sun at one focus in 1605, much to the prejudice of his own preference for circular motion, though even Kepler preserved the idea of sphericity in the enclosing shell of fixed stars.25 When, in 1610, Galileo began to describe the imperfect nature of the supposedly perfect heavenly bodies, as seen through his new invention, the telescope, he further challenged the stuff of the universe, and the perfection of God’s creation. His assertion in Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences that a projectile fired from a cannon curved in its path toward Earth because of two forces, inertia and gravity, set the stage for a different understanding of circular motion in heavenly bodies as well (Hawking 2002).

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In 1644, Descartes bucks the tradition of the ideal circle, describing all circular motion as ultimately linear: “All motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle always tends to move away from the centre of the circle which it describes” (1985, 39). Or, The whole of space is filled with bodies, and the motion of every single body is rectilinear in tendency; hence it is clear that when he created the world in the beginning God did not only impart various motions to different parts of the world, but also produced all the reciprocal impulses and transfers of motions between the parts. (1985, 42)

Here came the big break, as the conceptual shape of natural motion changed, along with the mathematical proof. Circular motion is seen as linear motion, drawn back in through the action of a force toward the circumference of the circle. Or, as Newton demonstrated in Principia, an object traveling along an elliptical orbit would continue along a straight path tangential to the curve unless corrected in its course by another force pulling on the object from the center (1687, Principia, Book I.1.1, 239). The resulting line of travel forms the outer side of a triangle, a vector sum of the other two lines, the pull of gravity and the body’s momentum.26 As the lengths of the outer edges of the triangles approach zero, the figure approaches perfect circularity. The inability to ever reach such a point highlights the difficulty known from the ancients of ever squaring the circle, of figuring circumference, area, or volume without the assistance of Pi. This new understanding of circular movement as frustrated linear movement changes everything. The metaphors turn on a dime. Bacon, in 1620, in his Novum Organum, shows the dissemination of these revolutionary ideas and the origins of the modern attitude: not only does he reject circular celestial orbits as a “fiction”; he formulates the radical novelty of his project in terms of rejecting circular motion: “An instauration must be

Figure 1.5. Drawings by Author.

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Figure 1.6. Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis: Principia Mathematica. Source: (Gutenberg Project, 2009), II.1.1. http:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/28233​/28233​-h​/28233​-h​.htm, Public Domain.

made from the very foundations, if we do not wish to revolve forever in a circle, making only some slight and contemptible progress” (1990, 109–10). So from the beginning, progress is linked to the shape of the cosmos. In 1657, in De Homine, Hobbes repeats the same idea: “For life is a perpetual motion that, when it cannot progress in a straight line, is converted into circular motion” (1991, 54). In both these examples, we see the idea of straightforward, linear motion as progress, of circular motion as the inhibition of linear advancement.27 The mathematical resolution of circular motion into straight line dramatically influenced the modern imagination—rooted in the foundations of the scientific method, the incipient notion of progress, and the onset of the Enlightenment perhaps even more than the re-imagination of the Earth away from the center of the universe. Because rectilinear motion was previously associated with the earthly, circularity with the divine, the reversal of these metaphors impugned the nature of the divine itself. Before this hairpin

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turn in history, lines were confined within and limited by the perfect, though sometimes boundless, spheres in which they were inscribed; after, the hierarchy of shapes is absolutely upended: lines are understood to continue on without limits and to compose the spheres that hitherto held them captive.28 Dante’s audience would have understood the way in which epicycles express divinity by compounding perfection; a modern audience, on the other hand, sees epicycles as unnecessarily complicated, as lacking simple perfection. It is important to keep this contrast between modern and medieval cosmological metaphors as well as the deficiencies in our own metaphoric vocabulary firmly in mind as we turn now to Dante’s poetry. VERSE FORM IN DANTE’S COSMOS What does the loss of a fundamental spatial metaphor mean for the reading of Dante? For one thing, we should look more closely at his imagined cosmos with spheres and circular motion, Euclid and Ptolemy, clearly in view. In addition, while Dante’s cosmos is perfect, we should examine the way his narrative and rhyme scheme hint at compounded perfection, the epicycles and retrograde motion so important to the idealization of the circle in the Ptolemaic system. The cosmos is both perfect and complex; just as with squaring the circle, a solution may be both unimaginable and real. Thus, Dante suggests the divine. Perhaps it becomes clearer how the cultural imagination of the medieval cosmos is manifested in Dante’s Commedia when we consider two things: first, the degree to which Dante’s poem is concerned with the structure and meaning of the cosmos and second, the way in which it contrasts with our own basic understanding of natural motion. As Northrop Frye has said, “Every human society, it seems, looks at its environment through a transparent cultural envelope of its own construction. There are no natural societies, in the sense of human groups living directly in and according to nature, able to dispense with such an envelope” (1984, 5). We miss less in Dante if we become more aware of our own cultural envelope. In the Middle Ages, poetry and math were not set in different corners. After all, both Dante and Chaucer were poets who also wrote astronomical treatises.29 The trivium and quadrivium (our humanities and sciences) intersected considerably in the Middle Ages. Demaray demonstrates these correspondences in “the great ordering icons of medieval world cosmography and biblical representation” (1991, 1), most prominently in icons of pilgrimage and in the circular and wheel elements in Gothic cathedrals, particularly rose or wheel windows and circular labyrinths, which moved petitioners physically around in a spiral to their destination in the center (1991, 27, 56). Demaray also discusses the “noble numbers of poetry” (1991, 3) and reminds us that Dante

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sees the center of the universe as a book.30 The created universe is a book subject to interpretation in the same way as the Bible, the word of God; and both are to be read and reread at different levels of exegesis through Christ, the Word of God, words congruent with physical reality. Elsewhere, I have examined how the model of the divine text varies even in its format: in the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, the names of the saved are written in a book, while the names of the damned are inscribed on a scroll, evocative of the Old Testament, the synagogue, and the Jews, who were believed to be damned if not repentant (Kauth 1998, 99, 114). The shape of the artifact, the shape of the verse form, is very important to the content, and just as the created cosmos can be read as a book, so can Dante’s book be seen as a microcosmic representation of God’s creation. Seen in this light, we can better understand why Dante’s verse form was not just a numerological, but also a theological statement. The importance of circles, spheres, and circular motion in Dante can scarcely be overstated.31 In Paradiso, as Dante ascends with Beatrice into the heavens, her eyes are fixed on “l’etterne rote” (Par., i.64), and Dante is moved beyond the human “Quando la rota che tu sempiterni / desiderato, a sé mi fece atteso” (Par., i.76–77).32 [When that wheel which You make eternal through / the heaven’s longing for You drew me.] Here, the circular motion of the heavenly bodies is impelled by their love for God: the things of the universe, when acted upon by the higher force of God’s love, want to move in perfect circles, and so, then, does Dante as he is drawn up among them. In the Sphere of the Sun, surrounded by two dancing rings of spirits, the center of the circle is a metaphor for truth: “e vedräi il tuo credere e ‘l mio dire / nel vero farsi come centro in tondo” (Par., xiii.50–51). [Truth centers both my speech / and your belief, just like a circle’s center.] To be true, Dante’s speech must be circular, rooted in and revolving around a central point; its form must be a true form, unchanging and incorruptible. Thomas Hart has ingeniously argued for triangular- and quadrangular-formed verse lines where the text treats geometry, but these shapes are inscribed within a larger, more perfect, circular form (1988, 106–9). We can see how God himself is “colui che ‘l cinge” [he who surrounds] and how truth, divinity, and the nature of the universe are figured in mathematical terms even more so the further Dante ascends, particularly once he reaches the Primum Mobile, or the Ninth Heaven: La natura del mondo, che quïeta il mezzo e tutto l’altro intorno move, quinci comincia come da sua meta; E questo cielo non ha altro dove che la mente divina, in che s’accende

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l’amor che ‘l volge e la virtù ch’ei piove. Luce e amor d’un cerchio lui comprende, sì come questo li altri; e quel precinto colui che ‘l cinge solamente intende. Non è suo moto per altro distinto, ma li altri son mensurati da questo, sì come diece da mezzo e da quinto; e come il tempo tegna in cotal testo le sue radici e ne li altri le fronde, omai a te puòesser manifesto. (Par., xxvii.106–20) [The nature of the universe, which holds the center still and moves all else around it, begins here as if from its turning-post. This heaven has no other where than this: the mind of God, in which are kindled both the love that turns it and the force it rains. As in a circle, light and love enclose it as it surrounds the rest—and that enclosing, only He who encloses understands. No other heaven measures this sphere’s motion, but it serves as the measure for the rest, even as half and fifth determine ten; and now it can be evident to you how time has roots within this vessel and, within the other vessels, has its leaves. (Mandelbaum 1982)]

The outermost sphere is at once the outside and the beginning, with the center still, and the swiftest motion on the outside, the sphere closest to and most impelled by God. God is the sphere, much like Plato’s spherical deity, and his simple essence is the force behind the motion, enclosing everything. All is circumscribed within the sphere—it encompasses all figures—as in the quote from the Timaeus with which I began this discussion.33 Using the best of Ptolemaic astronomy, Dante locates this mystic metaphor quite precisely in his imagined cosmos. At least before the condemnation of certain of Aristotle’s teachings in 1277, Aristotle’s argument that there could be no other vacuum beyond our own cosmos agreed well with a conception of God as filling and enclosing everything in the universe (Grant 1996, 169–177). As in Aristotle, Dante repeatedly equates perfect love with the force behind perfect motion in a circle, and divine knowledge as well: “Dunque costui che tutto quanto rape / l’altro universo seco, corrisponde / al cerchio che più ama e che più sape” (Par., xxviii.70–72). [And thus this sphere, which sweeps along with it / the rest of all the universe, must match / the circle that loves most and knows the most.] Knowledge, love, God, motion, spheres: all the stuff of the cosmos is

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one, and all is acted on by God’s essence, just as in transubstantiation, bread and wine become in essence God, though their accidental qualities are material and Earthly. The nature of God becomes available to Dante, as he is made able to see it and the movement of the heavenly bodies, though continually his vision fails. “Quinci si può veder come si fonda / l’esser beato ne l’atto che vede, / non in quel ch’ama, che poscia seconda” (Par., xxviii.109–11). [From this you see that blessedness depends upon the act of vision, not upon the act of love—which is a consequence.] Seeing clearly, or understanding with the intellect, precedes love, though the latter follows of necessity. Again, intellect is privileged, and one of its highest objects is the physical laws of the universe. To understand these laws is to approach an understanding of God. If in Nature, God’s book, one can read the five petals of a rose as figuring the five wounds of Christ, anatomizing higher, more perfect heavenly bodies can lead to exegesis that reveals God, at least on the anagogic level. In his final image of God incarnate, of the essence behind the material, Dante resorts to a geometrical image to explain the inexplicable: Qual è ‘l geomètra che tutto s’affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, pensando, quel principio ond’ elli indige, tal era io a quella vista nova: veder voleva come si convenne l’imago al cerchio e come vi s’indova. (Par., xxxiii.133–38)34 [As the geometer intently seeks to square the circle, but he cannot reach, through thought on thought, the principle he needs, so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see the way in which our human effigy suited the circle and found place in it. (Mandelbaum 1982)]

As we saw with the explanation before of the circle broken down into triangles, the area of the circle can be approximated as the triangles decrease in size and the circumference approaches circularity, but this squaring of the circle can only ever approach a limit. It is a mathematical model of unattainable perfection. Here again, I am reminded of the human form incorporated into the divine circle and the earthly square in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian man. In fact, Vitruvius, prolific architect of the first century, B.C.E., first described this image of a human inscribed within a square and a circle, the fundamental shapes of the cosmos (1931, Book III, chap. 1.3) (Figure I.4).35 On a more macabre note, images of Saint Catherine and her wheel and others undergoing the horrific torture of being broken on the wheel are abundant on the pages of medieval manuscripts, as are images of Lady Fortuna spinning her wheel, onto which are strapped the forms of people ranging

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from prince through pauper. Though Dante may have considered proportion important in a measure of man, and though he very likely imagined the cosmos mapped onto the human form, he would not likely mean us to imagine this metaphor only in such literal terms; rather, we are to imagine the mystery of the Incarnation, God made man, in terms of an insoluble mathematical problem. Moreover, how can the stuff of God, the circularly moving element of the heavens, be incorporated into the Earth-bound, rectilinear imperfection of earthly matter?36 Recall that Joachim of Fiore, placed by Dante in the Fourth Heaven and credited with the skill of prophecy (Par., xii.140), expressed the geometry of the Trinity by means of interlocking circles that also represented the three ages of divine time (Figure 1.3). Also recall that meter, in poetry or music, is another form of math for Dante.37 And of course, the expression of the Trinity within the interlocking three-lined terza rima has often been noted.38 The form of the rhyme is doubtless meant to amplify the theological schema so carefully laid out. But the terza rima also moves through time and space: its trinity is not static or one-dimensional; its shape is more like a spiral.39 We should take this idea a step further and consider, as a medieval intellectual would, how to relate poetics to mathematics and astronomy. A sense of absolute mathematical order, of Platonic intelligence, predominates in both Dante’s verse form and his vision of the cosmos. If poetry is so strongly associated in Dante with the cosmos, and the cosmos with circular perfection, which represents God himself, then the poetry should take on the numbers, or the shape, of the cosmos. What would that be? If poetry mimics form in the Ptolemaic universe, it should include not only circles, but circles upon circles, or epicycles (Figure 1.7). Although an eccentric circle is sufficient to account for the movement of the sun around the Earth in the Ptolemaic universe, there are other heavenly

Figure 1.7. Michael J. Crowe. Theories of the World; From Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution, 32, 35. Source: Used with Permission.

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movements that are not so simply explained. An epicycle/deferent system gives a more realistic representation of the movement of heavenly bodies (Crowe 2001, 32, 35). The looping movement of such a system very aptly describes not only planets that appear to make a simple orbit around the Earth, but the movement of planets, like Mars, that appear from our point of view to move backward in their trek across the night sky in a retrograde motion. This part of the Ptolemaic system accounts for the phenomena while at the same time “saving appearances” by doing so with circular motion alone. The system keeps circles, but circles compounded by circles. This, we find, is precisely the shape of terza rima: aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe . . . a spiraling circle through time, that “recapitulates as it progresses” and returns always to the “stelle,” its movement a perfect representation of the stars’ movements in Dante’s schema. The rhyme scheme not only portrays circular movement, but the precise kind of spiral circularity displayed by the retrograde movement of the “wandering” stars. Dante’s verse form expresses the numerology inherent in three, the Trinity, and thirty-three, Christ’s age at death, and also the geometrical perfection of the celestial spheres. The fourteenth-century illumination found in Bodley Library Oxford MS Holkham misc. 48 attempts to illustrate this compounding of circles in the form of Dante’s White Rose, the true home of the blessed in Heaven; while rose windows compound circular and other symmetries in two dimensions, the individual circles around the saints of the Rose rather awkwardly attempt to express these circles within circles in three dimensions, as though the saints themselves were orbiting bodies (Figure 1.8).

Figure 1.8. MS. Holkham misc. 48, p. 145. Source: ©Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC 4.0. https:​//​digital​ .bodleian​.ox​.ac​.uk​/objects​/10974934–30a5​-4495–857e​-255760e5c5ff​/surfaces​/a4c142bd​-57ba​-43a6​ -9c44​-f4750f0f3d50​/.

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The White Rose represents not just Heaven with saints encircling the Virgin Mary; it represents the communion of saints, the corporate body of humanity generally: living, dead, and still to come—an image of community, symmetry, and interconnection I will come back to in chapter 6. Perhaps Dante’s terza rima suggests even more subtle theological nuances. Alain de Lille sees retrograde motion as a heavenly manifestation of human imperfection: “Just as an army of planets fight against the accepted revolution of the heavens by going in different directions, so in man there is found to be continual hostility between sensuousness and reason.” Like bodily humors, however, these oppositions are seen as part of the natural order, though they elsewhere signal deviancy, “Do you not know what deviation of earthly rotation, what disorder in the worldly order . . . have forced me [Nature] to come down . . . ?” (1980, 119, 130). One could argue that the retrograde motion implied in Dante’s verse form conveys divinity incarnate—Jesus—or humans themselves, the heavenly shaped to the mortal. Dante’s epicyclic verse form is incomplete: it does not link back on itself, but then neither would heavenly motion, necessarily. Just as Dante’s senses so often fail to communicate the divine, just as they collapse in the face of the Empyrean and therefore better express a sense of the inexpressible beyond, so his verse form is a snapshot, a section taken out of a larger whole. His verse form conveys a sense of continuity beyond his actual poem, precisely because his rhymes at the beginning and ends are left dangling unmated. We are to imagine a whole beyond his or our conception, a spiral that incorporates both ancient cycles and Biblical history. Modern poetry we would perhaps expect to conform to modern ideas of the cosmos as well, which, one could argue, it mostly does: a linear progress, subverting a sense of a beginning or an end, blank verse goes to stream of consciousness. This modern idea of linearity as progress, of the switch from coming “full circle” to “going in circles” occurred at the same time that science was resolving circular motion, which had been the natural, divine motion, into linear vectors. It requires a real effort, an archeological imagination, to read this aspect of medieval cosmology as believers. On the other hand, while we would expect that such trends would never turn round again—that there is no cycle, no repeating of history—we might be wrong. William Egginton argues that one of the newest models for the natural shape of the cosmos, the hypersphere, is more accurately envisioned in Dante than in our imaginations (1999, 195–216). A hypersphere, very simply described, is a universe whose outermost edge is also its center. If we imagine the light at the edge of the universe coming toward us, we must understand that that light is the oldest light in the universe, originating with the Big Bang. But if the edge of the universe is the oldest, it is also from the time of the greatest density, when the universe was only a dot at the center of the sphere

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that we now imagine our universe to be. The edge is also the center, and what we see there is the remote past, actually observed now in the stunning pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. Egginton argues that a hypersphere allows for the contradiction of both here and there, now and then, of perfect sphericity that Dante’s God represents. In the model of the hypersphere, it can also be evident “how time has roots within this vessel and, within the other vessels, has its leaves” (Par., xxvii.117–20). Perhaps someday we will decide that our straight lines to infinity are merely points on an expanding sphere, where the infinite beyond is also the origin, where God can both foresee the future and allow us free will in the present, where we have not really lost the past. Perhaps this new cosmology resembles Dante’s in two ways: it holds out for us the possibility of an impenetrable problem, of the mystery of an intellect larger than ourselves that lies just beyond our grasp; and it offers a vision, once more, of an enclosed, not an open and infinite, universe. NOTES 1. See especially Allison Cornish, Reading Dante’s Stars (2000); Thomas Elwood Hart, “Geometric Metaphor and Proportional Design in Dante’s Commedia” (1988); and Wilhelm Pötters, “Beatrice: or The Geometry of Love” (2003). 2. This chapter was first published as an article: Jean-Marie Kauth (2006), “The Shaping of Dante’s Cosmos,” Medievalia et Humanistica 32: 7–24, all rights reserved. Thanks to Rowman and Littlefield for granting permission to use it. I also wish to convey my gratitude to Peter Kalkavage, Phil Sloan, J. Scott Lee, and all those involved in the ACTC (Association for Core Texts Conference)-sponsored NEH seminar, “Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sciences,” held June 2003 at St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland. This project is a direct result of our reading and conversations there and at later conferences. 3. John G. Demaray describes Dante’s cosmology as “a cosmic temple constructed of circles nested within circles” (2000, 232). 4. See M.A. Orr for information on Dante’s sources (1913). Ptolemy came to Dante primarily through Alfraganus; he read much of Aristotle and Plato’s Timaeus. The rest of his astronomy came from secondary access to other Greek and Arabic astronomers and philosophers, particularly through Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas (Orr, 1913, 150–56). Orr compares Dante’s knowledge of astronomy with that of another learned contemporary, Ristoro di Arezzo, in order to show the excellence of Dante’s understanding (157–61). Nearly all of Dante’s works make mention of some aspect of the cosmos (Orr, 162). 5. See also Demaray, Cosmos and Epic Representation: Dante, Spenser, Milton and the Transformation of Renaissance Heroic Poetry (1991). 6. Alain de Lille sometimes envisions the cosmos using metaphors that overlap with those of Dante, who was much indebted to him (1980; 1978; 1965).

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7. Demaray (1969, 1–24) argues that the structure of Mt. Purgatory resembles the actual topography of Mt. Sinai. 8. Boethius, in his summary of the Timaeus, describes the soul, which having “its motion gathered / Into two circles, moves to return into itself, and the Mind deep within / Encircles, and makes the heaven turn, in likeness to itself” (1973, Book 3, meter 9, 13–17). Time and eternity also revolve in a circle: “For just as, of a number of spheres turning about the same centre, the innermost one approaches the simplicity of middleness and is a sort of pivot for the rest, which are placed outside it, about which they turn; but the outermost one, turning with a greater circumference, the further it is separated from the indivisibility of the central point, the wider the spaces it spreads over” (1973, Book 4, prose 6, 65–73). 9. See two discussions of infinity: Pierre Duhem (1985) and Richard C. Dales, including his section on the transmission of the Timaeus through Calcidius (1990, 9). 10. Thomas Kuhn describes the move of the Earth from the center to the periphery of the universe thus: “To move the Earth was to break the continuous chain of created being” (1957, 113). See also Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield (1961) and Alexandre Koyré (1957). Amos Funkenstein (1986) describes the influence of astronomical study on particular theological problems. 11. Hart points out correspondences between Dante’s geometric figures and numbers of verse lines on the following basis: “If Dante wished to conform his poetic design to some specific geometric figure(s), one method available to him was the proportionality of geometric constants” (1988, 105). 12. Many Westerners had to depend on Boethius’s translation and abridgment; see Russell Peck (1980, 25). 13. Pötters lays out the perfection of Dante’s geometry as corresponding to line numbers, arguing that Dante must have known decimal fractions. He identifies the emphasis Dante places on circles and spheres: “one formal pattern [occurs] over and over again: the fundamental principle underlying the design of the cosmos and of infinity finds its expression in the geometrical figure of the circle” (2003, 294). 14. See F. Russo (1954, 139–48) for a bibliography of work tracing the influence of Joaquim in Dante. Marjorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich (1972, 329) suggest that Dante was influenced primarily by the visuals and less by the full details of the theory of Joaquim’s Liber Figuraraum. 15. S.K. Heninger is particularly thorough and enlightening on the Pythagorean tetrad, (1977, 99–118) as well as many other symmetries in medieval and Renaissance diagrams of the universe. His many period images enrich an understanding of how numbers and symmetries worked together to figure the universe. He also demonstrates vestiges of these symmetries in twentieth-century culture, as for instance, this insight: “Not only does [Figure 63a] demonstrate the paradox of opposites reconciled, but also the paradox of mobile stasis—to use an image from T.S. Eliot, how the wheel may turn, and still be forever still” (1977, 104). 16. John J. Guzzardo provides a useful Appendix of the meanings behind all these numbers (1987, 121–31). 17. For a fascinating discussion of pentagonal symmetry in the verse form of the Gawain-Pearl poet, see Edward Condren (2001). Condren asserts the long

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tradition of “the notion that mathematical principles afford access to essences” (4). He finds Euclidean geometry and the perfection of Phi in the line numbering of the Gawain-Pearl Poet and argues that the math argues more strongly than anything else could for the structural unity and ordering of the poems, for the overall plan and meaning of the four poems in the manuscript, and as conclusive proof of a single author. 18. Most diagrams in editions of the Commedia show a simple system of spheres. 19. John Freccero argues that the movement of Biblical history from the Christian perspective is recapitulary, rather than linear, moving backward in time to reinterpret the Old Testament: “Christian history or Biblical allegory (they are one and the same) move in the same way as terza rima” (1998, 96). 20. Todd Timberlake and Paul Wallace describe Aristotle’s view of this well: “Natural motions were simply the fulfillment of an object’s purpose. Every simple object (composed of only a single element) could have only one natural motion. . . . The uniform circular motion allowed celestial bodies to move, but to do so in an unchanging, repetitive pattern that would last for eternity” (2019, 79). 21. Later commentators use Aristotle to argue that even the Earthly elements, and the Earth itself have a spherical form; see Edward Grant (1996, 119). 22. See Grant (1996) for a very detailed discussion of this and other aspects of medieval cosmology. See also Timberlake and Wallace (2019). 23. Manfred Hardt parses Dante’s theory of numbers, counting line numbers and calculating ratios (1988, 81–94). Hardt’s work contributes to an understanding of Dante’s calculations, but I would add that we should treat the poem as motion through time, not just as a static structure. 24. Robert Westman points out that Copernicus too wanted to preserve circular motion: “Copernicus reshuffled Aristotle’s natural motions, assigning uniform circular motion to the Earth, the planets, and the elements and demoting all rectilinear motions to the status of temporary, non-uniform deviations from circularity. In this new account, all the planets shared ‘a certain natural desire, which the divine providence of the Creator of all things has implanted in the parts, to gather as a unity and a whole by combining in the form of a globe’” (2011, 30–31). Marjaž Vesel argues that Copernicus was an astronomer-philosopher, at base a Platonist, and that “[He] was truly a man of the sixteenth century, not the seventeenth. . . . Copernicus never thought of himself as a revolutionary; quite to the contrary. His aim [was] . . . to restore it by relying on the true, authentic foundations, principles and postulates of the ancient philosophy and astronomy, which were violated by the predominant Ptolemaic astronomical tradition. . . . Copernicus did so by harkening back to and rescuing the time-honored, yet forgotten ancient tradition of terrestrial motion” (Vesel 2014, 17–18). Vesel further argues that while André Goddu (2010) sees Copernicus’s project growing out of his Aristotelian thinking, it actually arose more from his Platonic propensities, as argued by Anna de Pace (2009) (Vesel 2014, 20). 25. See Grant (1996, 121) and Heninger (1977, 128) on Kepler. 26. The Oxford English Dictionary (2022) entry for vector cites its first use, in 1704, in astronomy: “A Line supposed to be drawn from any Planet moving round a Center, or the Focus of an Ellipsis, to that Center or Focus, is by some Writers of the

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New Astronomy, called the Vector; because ’tis that Line by which the Planet seems to be carried round its Center.” This could be confusing, because by vector sum, I mean the sum of the two vectors: of gravity exerted on the planet and the momentum of the planet as it travels on. In this sense, the OED’s second, more modern definition of vector applies: “A quantity having direction as well as magnitude, denoted by a line drawn from its original to its final position.” 27. Many others have discussed Bacon’s role in promoting the notion of progress without linking it explicitly to the change in cosmological views. For more on the former point, see Brian Vickers (1992), Robert Faulkner (1993), and Megan Allyse (2009). I will discuss this further in chapter 2. 28. Alfred W. Crosby (1997) also sees a quick turn in history here, but attributes it more to a general Western European penchant for measuring and quantification, of all kinds of things: time, space, mathematics, music, painting, and bookkeeping. 29. Chaucer wrote the Astrolabe and Equatorie of the Planets, and Dante, the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra. For Dante’s influence on Chaucer see Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy (1989). 30. See also Ernst Robert Curtius (1953) on nature as book. 31. Richard Poss comments on the importance of stars and circularity to Dante’s moral lesson (1997, 58). 32. All quotations are from Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Divina Commedia (1982). All translations, unless otherwise noted, are from Mandelbaum: Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1982). Subsequent quotations are noted in the text. 33. Alain de Lille repeats the well-known saying that shows how this idea maintained currency throughout the Middle Ages and beyond: “God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (1965, 297). 34. Dante’s final vision of the divine was once thought cold and mathematical, but Hart persuades us otherwise: instead, the ending of the Commedia portrays an intellect that loves and moves in a mystic, insoluble math problem because we must move beyond human intellect (1988, 2). This is one way in which we now see cosmology and math as impersonal and cold, tending out away from the world, while medieval people understood the stars and the amazing perfection of math and symmetry as a sign of the perfection and beauty of God’s universe, part of the enclosing universe. Often, students find it very difficult to understand why Dhuoda tutors her son in the right way of living by using numerology, with verses that play on William’s age and acrostics that compose his name—or why Hildegard of Bingen sees divinity and love in the cosmic egg. Hence, I have been teaching Medieval Literature with a lecture version of this book early in the semester for decades. 35. For more about the tradition of geometrical figures graphed onto the human figure, a microcosm of the world, see Heninger (1977, 144–58). The body was seen as being in harmony with the cosmos. According to Paracelsus, astronomy and philosophy are the foundations of medicine, and “half of the body and also half the number of diseases” are contained in the sphere of the heavens (Cassirer 1963, 111). 36. Although the problem is difficult, it is not unprecedented. Alain de Lille says in the Plaint of Nature that “In other things, too, the form of the human body takes

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over the image of the universe” (1980, 122). Note, too, that in the schema of the five Platonic solids, the cube is associated with earth because “in the case of the cube its uprightness on a quadrate base conveys a certain impression of stability, which property also belongs to terrestrial matter” (Kepler 1619, Book II, 58–59, qtd. in Heninger 1977, 129). 37. Condren (2001, 4–5) reminds us that Boethius’s De Musica emphasizes the connection between music and number theory and relates the tale of the relative importance of members of the quadrivium throughout music history. For more on the relationships between music and astronomy embodied in Pythagorean music theory and the harmony of the celestial spheres, see Heninger (1977, 132–43). 38. Mario Di Cesare claims that, besides emphasizing the Trinity, terza rima “might be the substance of the work” (1989, 282). He finds the incomplete rhymes at the ends troubling and wonders about the significance of all three canti ending in stelle (286). See also Seth Zimmerman (1994, 23–29). 39. John Freccero has said that “the perennial problem in literary interpretation is the problem of the relationship of form to content, or of poetics to thematics” and argues that poetics and thematics are related more closely in medieval literature than in other literatures (1998, 92). He argues that the terza rima, like all verse forms, is “a spatial representation of time” that can be characterized as having “autonomous and infinite forward movement, whose progress is also recapitulation,” or a spiral form. He does not, however, note precisely what sort of astronomy this verse form resembles as it moves forward and backward through time; rather, he sees it as suggestive “of narrative logic, particularly autobiography” (1998, 93–94).

Chapter 2

Enlightenment Echoes

This chapter will investigate how the metaphorical reverberations of the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton developed, how they infiltrated the culture so deeply through the writings of Bacon, Hobbes,1 and others, and how they were assimilated by selected major authors in Western Europe. In part, at least, the dramatic shifts critics describe—the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the growth of the modern nation-state, the emphasis on individual liberties, the metaphoric conception of the universe—were not just drivers of the transformation in the understanding of matter in motion but also were fomented by the mathematical change in the shape of motion. Consider the relation of lovers to movement in one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d. (Sonnet 116)2

This beloved, firmly Ptolemaic poem captures the point of this chapter in two respects: first in the way that love, a human emotion, is mapped onto the world, put in terms of navigation and motion, and second, in the way the 51

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important point about love is its stability. It is an “ever-fixed mark” on the sphere of the firmament, a star whose “height be taken,” clearly referring to navigational measurements with an astrolabe, a North star, we might say, around which the rest of the stars rotate. Love remains still and permanent, a saving point of reference, while the “wand’ring bark” of the lovers steers through the storms of life. Life on Earth may be tempest-tossed and variable, but the star provides an existence beyond that is ideal and unchanging. In the Ptolemaic system, within which Shakespeare still functioned in 1609 or before, what is valued most about the heavens is their invariable and perfect nature; even the wandering stars, or planets, are thought to be predictable and governed by the highly codified, geometrical laws of Nature and God.3 In the word “remove”—”bends with the remover to remove”—we can hear more the sense of literal movement, closer as Shakespeare is to the original etymology of “re-move” (Lt. re-movere). Notably, removers should not remove, and perhaps they should not even move. And too, the sense of wrong movement in “error,” tied etymologically as it is to “errant,”4 conveys a pejorative tone to movement, which, by bringing the author into the action while rejecting the error, aligns him with the faithful, unchanging lover and the eternal fame of poetry, so often alluded to in the sonnets. The understanding of time—”Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom”—also expresses an understanding of permanence and temporal stasis in the judgment day that is to come at the end of time. How much the cultural landscape would “alter as it alteration” found just a few years later. I will discuss in greater detail four points posited before and one point particular to this chapter: First, the century plus of the Copernican revolution brought rapid and far-reaching cultural change whose importance could scarcely be overstated.5 Second, before these changes, the Earth stood still, and even the motion of the heavens was in some ways possessed of the nunc stans, the “standing now” or divine eternity of the scholastic tradition; after, motion itself became immeasurably more important as the imagined cosmos was decentered, made vastly larger, and thrust into inconceivably swift motion. Third, whereas before, from Aristotle until the Scientific Revolution, there was no movement without a primum movens, or God the Prime Mover—the architect of the universe whose love bound together the heavenly bodies and caused the spheres to sing—after, humans became movers and acquired agency. Fourth, the point I have emphasized most, the mathematical change in the natural shape of movement from circular to straight line produced enormous results in how humans behaved toward the world within their power. Fifth and finally, it is important to explore why this change in the nature of movement had such extensive effects on human culture. Much of it had to do with the broader use and application of the notion of motion during this period—particularly in Bacon and Hobbes, and sometimes in ways that

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seem counter-intuitive now, as in describing politics and human emotions— and this enabled it to have significant and sweeping effects on culture, which can be discerned in the literature of the period and long afterward. In some ways, even after Heaven and Earth were putatively dissevered, by the middle of the seventeenth century and later, and less warrant granted for reading Nature for divine meaning, there was still the urge to connect cosmic motions with human ones. As new ideas about the shape of motion inspired theories of progress, attitudes toward change changed, including the extent to which it was permissible for humans to act on nature. Most natural philosophers of the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment have seen motion and time as inseparable, as indeed, they are.6 I will therefore unavoidably discuss time in relation to motion in this chapter but reserve the most in-depth discussion of the shape and direction of time for the next chapter. In later chapters, I will also argue that the failure of the intrinsically linear motion of our current scientific paradigm to be fully generalizable onto biological and ecological systems, despite our destructive efforts to do so, shows the inadequacy of firmly dwelling within any one scientific paradigm or imaginative model. Rather, we should exercise our imaginations by understanding different ontological paradigms that are true in different ways.7 REVOLUTION Despite the pivotal nature of Copernicus’s work, it is easy to misconstrue how entirely he reimagined the world. In many ways, the Ptolemaic universe lingered for him as well, and in many ways, he did not foresee the full scope of the changes his reconfiguration would initiate. Robert Westman argues that Copernicus’s motivations in asking key questions about the universe included not only questions about God’s unlimited power but also what prognostications of the future could be trusted from study of the stars (Westman 2011, 23–24). The fact that even Copernicus, justly credited with spurring the Scientific Revolution, still hoped to find answers to questions of what happens on Earth by looking at the stars hints at how reluctant humans have been to give up a connection between events in the heavens and in their own lives below, an impulse I see continuing still, in ways much more profound than fringe indulgence in horoscopes. Owen Gingrich articulates this continuing fascination aptly: “Tycho Brahe, the renowned Danish observer and Kepler’s sometime mentor, expressed it in the motto Suspiciendo despicio—‘By looking upwards, I see below.’ It was a false scent, to find in the clockwork of the stars the key to personal affairs, yet the knowledge of the planetary rhythms did unlock Newtonian physics and with it the fundamental understanding of the physical universe” (1993, 4). This parallelism between the heavens and

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the terrestrial world and even the personal actions of human actors continued through Bacon and Hobbes and beyond, even as the model and shape of what the universe was expressing changed radically. Regardless of his intentions, Copernicus’s work had wide-ranging effects. Much as I am attempting to do, Westman explicitly navigates the tension between the history of local knowledge making and the big-picture history that examines cultural and scientific change over time: “ . . . this approach leaves open the task of explaining how, across time, specific readings, meanings, and evaluative judgments made in one cultural setting circulated, metamorphosed, persuaded, or dropped away in others” (Westman 2011, 27–28). Westman shows how important ideas about the cosmos were being negotiated both before and after Copernicus, and one thing that emerges from his research is that the answer truly mattered to the culture overall. As I. Bernard Cohen has said, “the alteration of the frame of the universe proposed by Copernicus could not be accomplished without shaking the whole structure of science and of our thought about ourselves” (1985, 51). The influence wouldn’t have seemed swift, perhaps, to those alive at the time—change often seems imperceptible to those in its midst—but it was swift, and the radicalness of the shift in metaphors resulting from the new scientific model was negotiated by major philosopher scientists in the century or two following Copernicus and picked up on by major thinkers and poets in the culture until, almost without knowing it, the worldview of the intelligentsia, and eventually the culture at large, had transformed in fundamental ways that have helped to cause our environmental crisis. Cultural change followed quickly on the heels of astronomical innovation and mathematical explanation. Andrea Bardin describes how pivotal the mathematical understanding of matter in motion was at the time: As the Aristotelian world picture collapsed, the concepts of matter and motion underwent a process of reduction to mathematical description and to physical explanation which eventually resulted in what was later canonised—after Newton—as classical mechanics. In this process ‘matter in motion’ assumed ambivalent meanings: on the one hand it named extension and body, the abstract object of the new natural philosophy; on the other hand it named what resisted, at different levels and in different domains, this very process of reduction. (Bardin 2016, 26)8

I would add to Bardin’s analysis that it was not just the mathematical reduction, which changed the meaning of motion and the nature of matter—making it more contingent, imperfect, and passive; it was also the shape of that motion, circular to linear, resulting from the mathematical reduction. Nevertheless, he also explores how “connecting Descartes’s and Hobbes’s

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enterprises will make it possible to explain how the struggle carried on by early modern mechanical philosophy against the monstrosity of matter in motion generated epistemological monsters in the domains of both the natural and the civil sciences” (Bardin 2016, 26). It is fascinating and counter-intuitive to a modern reader to learn how profoundly changes in the understanding of physics influenced even political theory, a seemingly unrelated field. Hobbes concerns himself with a political leviathan. Certainly, I claim that one of the epistemological monsters created in this seismic shift has been an environmental leviathan. STILLNESS TO MOTION The science of motion is important, of course, and anciently debated, but in Bacon and Hobbes, motion encompasses more, and it involves human beings and human action much more than we commonly imagine. Geoffrey Gorham emphasizes that “for Hobbes all change—including perception, imagination and memory—as well as causation, power, and activity are nothing but motion. That’s why he insists a body at rest cannot act upon or even resist a moving body. Furthermore, Hobbes’s basic physical principles are laws of motion. . . . Brandt remarked many years ago that Hobbes ‘should more correctly be called a motionalist’ than a materialist” (2014, 81–82). This emphasis on motion, and its generalization to so many more abstract ideas, is striking even upon a first reading of Hobbes. This contrasts fundamentally with the previous Aristotelian and scholastic understanding of motion and time in the nunc stans. Peter Casarella summarizes this concept: “Theologians of the thirteenth century also inherited the notion that divine eternity could be equated with a form of simultaneity. They recognized a tradition of learning whereby Augustine had defined God’s eternity as an eternal presence, which is later distinguished by Boethius from the ‘present’ of human experience. This distinction is transmitted in the scholastic tradition as the Divine ‘standing now’ (nunc stans) that stands opposed to the creaturely ‘flowing now’ (nunc fluens)” (2016, 141–42). There is a sense in which, like Shakespeare’s conception of love, the firmament of fixed stars and beyond that, the Empyrean, where God lives, all moves, but in a circular movement that is so perfect as to resemble stillness in some way. Even though, as Lynn White long ago noted (1967), the Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a finite timeline to classical cyclical time, that timeline tended to be circular still, as in the diagrams of Joachim of Fiore (Figure 1.3), and complete. Even Galileo—who was among the first to realize that a body set in motion would remain in motion, without a prime mover actively moving

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it—understood that perpetual motion to be circular local motion (Henry 2016, 11). The stasis of the earlier model translates in some ways to a general conservatism and resistance to change. As Westman describes, “although ‘research,’ the discovery of new knowledge, is the guiding presupposition of all areas of knowledge in our own age, in the early seventeenth century novelty was not part of the traditionalist ethos: it was neither sought nor expected. In fact, in the tradition-laden world of the university, it was seen as dangerous. Heavenly practitioners of that period attempting to advance claims to new knowledge had to seek out other grounds on which to build their positions” (2011, 44). So not only was there disruption in the motion of the universe, propelling it rapidly over vaster distances, as the science of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo seemed to do; not only was there disruption of the Earth from the still center of the universe; there was also disruption in the very fact of undermining the all-important authorities of the Middle Ages.9 The concept of motion in Bacon and Hobbes is both broader and more widely applied than in modern idioms. The word “motion” occurs 334 times in Bacon’s Novum Organum and 99 times in Hobbes’s Leviathan alone. Along with so many other traditions from antiquity, Hobbes explicitly rebelled against the tradition of nunc stans: “But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans, as the Schools call it; which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite greatness of place” (1651, Leviathan, 4.46.22, 450). Hobbes asserts that the ancients could not grant time as an endless succession since that might impugn free will. Additionally, far from understanding time, space, and objects as still, Hobbes conceives of motion as comprising nearly everything: But seeing all effects are produced by motion, he that supposing some one or more motions, can derive from them the necessity of that effect whose cause is required, has done all that is to be expected from natural reason. And though he prove not that the thing was thus produced, yet he proves that thus it may be produced when the materials and the power of moving are in our hands: which is as useful as if the causes themselves were known. (1845, Seven Philosophical Problems, 3–4)

We would not now suppose that all effects are caused by motions. Note, too, that once human beings understand the motions, they gain the power to re-produce the motion, and here we should understand production very generally; so with humans gaining the “power of moving,” they are called to act upon the world in a way only imagined previously for God. Furthermore,

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the nature of Hobbes’s motion is fundamentally different than before. John Henry expresses this well: So, Hobbes was a member of a select group, and should be recognised as one of only four thinkers who developed a system of natural philosophy which can be said to be kinematic in so far as it invoked only motions of bodies in its explanations. These kinematic systems allowed forces of impact or collision, but rejected all occult notions of forces, such as attraction and repulsion, and can be said to be different, therefore, from more dynamic versions of the mechanical philosophy (such as Newton’s), which allowed occult, or unexplained, forces. (2016, 11)

This contrast between dynamic motion, in which the object can have a force to move itself, versus kinetic motion, where objects are actively moved, points to another shift in the understanding of motion and movers in Hobbes. PRIMUM MOVENS AD HOMO MOVENS The Prime Mover or Primum Movens, God, is in charge of motion and typically imagined as constantly maintaining it. Henry puts it this way: “According to Aristotle, everything that moves has to be kept in motion by something acting as a mover, and motion ceases when the mover ceases to act (the scholastics even had a Latin dictum to sum this up: omne quod movetur ab alio movetur)” (2016, 11). In the loss of the Prime Mover God, many critics emphasize the Copernican Revolution as a battle between Faith and Reason, and perhaps exploring how radical this shift is demonstrates why the church felt compelled to fight it, even to the point of the unspeakably horrible act of burning Giordano Bruno at the stake.10 But the other part of this inversion is how humans are transferred into the position of the movers of things in the universe, one step on the path to human-manufactured progress as we know it now. The split between before and after is dramatic. Ultimately, not only were humans given greater power as movers; the Prime Mover also lost powers. Westman discusses how the new science unseated assumptions about the divine: “Evidence of a new temper among celestial practitioners—not just modernizers—came with the appearance of another nova in 1604. . . . Unlike the earlier nova, this one persuaded even traditionalists to begin to move these unpredicted events out of the extraordinary realm of divine, miraculous meanings and causes and into the ordinary domain of strictly natural causes” (Westman 2011, 43). As with Galileo’s discoveries about the imperfection of the material of the heavenly bodies, the capriciousness of astronomical events began to persuade the scientific

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community and even the general public of the disconnect between a Creator God and the movements of the stars. No longer could all of creation be read for lessons and meaning as it had been. Bacon is widely credited with being the chief architect of the Scientific Revolution. And some argue that from the start, the scientific method he pioneered and the notion of progress he instantiated were meant to encompass not only scientific inquiry or profit for society, but much more. Robert Faulkner maintains that Bacon planned the societal revolution he began: “The writers who deny that the modern vision was planned tend to find its cause in the continuing influence of Christianity and ancient philosophy. . . . The early accounts seemed to suppose a natural or inevitable expansion of mutually useful enlightenment—a ‘natural progress of civilization,’ as Turgot put it. . . . ” (Faulkner 1993, 11). Faulkner shows how imbricated in the fabric of modern science and capitalism are root notions of individuality over community and progress over nature and its cycles. He identifies Bacon’s scientific method as radically Machiavellian in its advocacy for individual interests over the common good. He at once credits Bacon with utilitarian science, the modern industrial nation-state, and progress as commonly understood. These revolutions have been double-edged swords, to be sure. Bacon’s work has been often read as amputating natural philosophy not just from tradition but also from God and from an understanding of Nature as sacred, imbued with qualities beyond just raw materials. Some of Bacon’s critics, in recognizing the effects of his project, argue that he characterized nature in a hostile way that shows the underlying toxic division of humans from the rest of the world (Merchant 1980; Faulkner 1993). As I see it, while Bacon’s efforts were not necessarily intended to produce the effects it has, the new ideas he promulgated certainly changed undergirding assumptions and metaphors in a way that influenced the results. Faulkner characterizes Bacon as basically immoral in his approach to nature: “It is precisely the sweeping salience of Baconian immoralism within modern civilization, at least in its exploitative stance toward nature, that enrages contemporary environmentalists. Morality returns with a vengeance, and Bacon is the object of vengeance precisely because, as Caroline Marchant [sic] puts it, he is responsible for the ‘total program’ of domination of nature for human benefit” (Faulkner 1993, 17). It seems a great deal to credit one thinker with such radical change; Bacon could not have accomplished what he did without the scientists who came before and after. But what came after certainly seems in part a consequence of his enormous influence, putting him almost in the position of a prime mover himself. Bacon was aware that shifting understandings of the universe might be threatening: “Others fear, from past example, lest motion and change in philosophy should terminate in an attack upon religion” (1902,

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Novum Organum LXIII, 71). And at times he seems to try to couch his findings diplomatically enough to avoid the fates of Bruno or Galileo. Hobbes also posited a greater role for humans, not just God or impulses native to matter, to be movers: “Now as in the motion of natural bodies three things are to be considered, namely, internal disposition, that they be susceptible of the motion to be produced; the external agent, whereby a certain and determined motion may in act be produced; and the action itself. . . . ” (1991, Man and Citizen 243). The three forces are not unlike the three forces that were newly understood to move the Earth, where before Copernicus, the Earth did not move: it stood still at the center of the cosmos. Whereas once, the motion that did occur was understood to be initiated and maintained by a Creator God, now the image for motion was more often understood to be a human being throwing a projectile into the air or some other more complicated motion, and now that human thrower himself became a model for motion in the cosmos. Note that there remains in Hobbes an “internal disposition.” This idea of motion being related to an internal disposition of the object that moves makes it more understandable that the natural motion of the universe should be internalized in the way that we too move, through space and time and the natural world, as well as life narratives. There is still a way that objects and humans alike want to move. Newton, building on the radical recasting of Milton’s God and universe, depicts a God who is subordinate himself to the laws of mechanics and geometry, in the process making geometers and physicists equal in some senses to God in their power to comprehend and even manipulate matter in the universe (Rogers 2019). In a letter, Newton characterizes the creative power of a first agent or God who “understood & compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of the Sun & Planets & the gravitating powers resulting from thence . . . very well skilled in Mechanicks & Geometry” (Newton, qtd. in Rogers 2019, 103). In the new-gained explanatory power of their theories, natural philosophers like Newton become themselves tantamount to homo movens, like God in being possessed of absolute free will and, to some extent, in being coextensive with the universe via knowledge of its underlying physical laws.11 THE SHAPE OF MOTION IN BACON AND HOBBES It is fascinating how fundamental the shift from cycle to line is in the language of Bacon and Hobbes as they construct the basis of the modern world. The fact that Bacon’s instauration was based in nearly its first articulation on a foundation of linear progress, rather than “revolv[ing] forever in a circle”

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(1902, Novum Organum, XXXI, 18), as I discussed in the last chapter, is very telling. The Novum Organum itself proceeds in a line outward, abandoning many traditional and received teachings and forging its own path; once Bacon has cleared the path of vain idols, he becomes the primum movens of his own work “directing it perpetually from the very first” (1902, Novum Organum, Preface, 7). In his criticism of previous thinkers and their attachment to perfectly circular motion, Bacon derides the human habit of mind that yearns to make connections between disparate, unrelated things, even as he does so himself in ways that seem strange to us: The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet invent parallels and conjugates and relatives, where no such thing is. Hence the fiction, that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, thus rejecting entirely spiral and serpentine lines (except as explanatory terms). Hence also the element of fire is introduced with its peculiar orbit, to keep square with those other three which are objects of our senses. (1902, Novum Organum I.XLV, 23)

The Novum Organum, published in 1620, precedes Descartes’s almost universally accepted findings by twenty-four years, and Newton’s proof by much longer, but Bacon already firmly rejects celestial bodies moving in perfect circles in favor of some line—straight, serpentine, or spiral—in keeping with his theories on forward progress. Note that planets moving in a line of any kind is counter to the medieval imagination of planetary orbits as thick ethereal spheres.12 That said, Bacon had not yet accounted for the precise movement of heavenly bodies and provided a separate kind of revolutionary motion particular to them: Let the seventeenth motion be the spontaneous motion of revolution, by which bodies having a tendency to move, and placed in a favorable situation, enjoy their peculiar nature, pursuing themselves and nothing else, and seeking, as it were, to embrace themselves. For bodies seem either to move without any limit, or to tend toward a limit, arrived at which they either revolve according to their peculiar nature, or rest. Those which are favorably situated, and have a tendency to motion, move in a circle with an eternal and unlimited motion; those which are favorably situated and abhor motion, rest. Those which are not favorably situated move in a straight line (as their shortest path), in order to unite with others of a congenial nature. (1902, Novum Organum II.XLVIII, 264)

Bacon seems at pains to account for circular orbits while seeing straight-line motion as most natural. Still, the disparagement of circular motion in Bacon’s

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and Hobbes’s quotes not only culminates in Descartes’s mathematical claims about linear versus circular motion, as explored in chapter 1, but also in the way Descartes talks about the motion of logical thinking: “ . . . we nevertheless could not place this argument before infidels, who might accuse us of reasoning in a circle” (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 1641, 1–1). In the end, Descartes, drawing on the assumption of rectilinear kinetic motion of Isaac Beeckman, developed his highly influential theory of kinetic rectilinear philosophy, which settled the question for most who read it (Henry 2016, 11; van Berkel 2013). Rectilinear motion, as it was constitutive of circular motion, divested circular motion of its purpose and inherent validity and stripped it of divine or transcendent value. Reportedly, Newton himself was perplexed by the “seemingly deist implications of his discovery of vast, impersonal laws and processes in the universe” (Rogers 2019, 79). And at the same time that these processes became impersonal, change itself was elevated in status, as articulated in Galileo’s Dialogo. Sagredo says he cannot understand why it is an honor to be accounted “impassable, immutable, inalterable,” or that it is “a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable, etc.” Instead, Sagredo prefers, in contrast to the medieval system, a state of constant alteration: “It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable, by reason of so many and so different alterations, mutations, generations, etc. which are incessantly made therein. . . . [If it were] one vast heap of sand . . . I should have esteemed it a lump of no benefit to the World, full of idlenesse, and in a word superfluous” (1632, 44–45). Perhaps linear motion seems inherently more changeable than circular since it never retraces the same path. The implications and ontologies of motion and change were very quickly altered in the justification of what appeared to be the case scientifically; we see a radical shift in values as thinkers rationalize what is in one discipline as what should be in vastly different domains. MOTION, EMOTION, AND THE POLITICAL WORLD It is surprising how much more important the shape of motion is than geometrical shapes themselves, and this is partially explained by the more general senses of the idea of motion than we now possess. Motion in Bacon and Hobbes encompasses senses, emotions, political action, and more.13 In Bacon, everything from vacuums to gunpowder explosions to surface tension to putrefaction to vomiting to yeast causing bread to rise is explained in terms of motion (1902, Novum Organum II.XLVIII). So many things we would put under the heading of chemical processes or light waves or magnetic or other kinds of attraction, Bacon classifies as motion of various sorts. Under the

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quality of cooling motion, various medicines also cited in the Hippocratic writings are mentioned: “The violet, dried roses, lettuces, and other benign or mild remedies, by their friendly and gently cooling vapors, invite the spirits to unite, and restrain their violent and perturbed motion.” Likewise, opium is able to “strengthen the spirits, render them more robust, and check their useless and inflammatory motion, by which means they contribute not a little to the cure of diseases, and the prolongation of life” (1902, Novum Organum II.L, 277). So bodies themselves are constantly in motion, internally and externally. In the motion of trepidation,14 Bacon sees a direct resemblance between heavenly and animal bodies: It is the motion of an (as it were) eternal captivity; when bodies, for instance, being placed not altogether according to their nature, and yet not exactly ill, constantly tremble, and are restless, not contented with their position, and yet not daring to advance. Such is the motion of the heart and pulse of animals, and it must necessarily occur in all bodies which are situated in a mean state, between conveniences and inconveniences; so that being removed from their proper position, they strive to escape, are repulsed, and again continue to make the attempt. (1902, Novum Organum II.XLVIII, 265)

It is telling that trepidation is now used almost exclusively as an emotion, whereas originally, it was a physical motion, earthly bodies imitating heavenly ones. Bacon additionally imagines the senses as a kind of motion: “Objects escape the senses either from their distance . . . or because the impression is too violent, or because the senses are previously filled and possessed by the object, so as to leave no room for any new motion” (1902, Novum Organum II.XL). It is difficult to fully comprehend what he can mean by the senses being so filled by an object that there is “no room for any new motion”; we can imagine eyes blinded by light, and perhaps even the overstimulation of rods and cones in the retina could prevent a new stimulus from activating them again, but we do not typically state the problem in terms of motion. In fact, we talk about visual perception as a chemical change from a cis to a trans retinal, isomers of photopigments in the rods and cones. Bacon also sees nature as being animated by spirit in motion: “Let the required nature, therefore, be the action and motion of the spirit enclosed in tangible bodies; for every tangible body with which we are acquainted contains an invisible and intangible spirit, over which it is drawn, and which it seems to clothe” (1902, Novum Organum II.XL, 216). So there is some sort of movement inherent in objects, which helps to explain some of the disparate forces he was attempting to comprehend.

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Hobbes describes how he understood both the objects impressing themselves on our senses and the senses themselves in terms of motion: “All which qualities called sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything else, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion)” (1651, Leviathan, 1.1.4, 9–10). In some ways, we could also perceive this as true, thinking about sound waves and their effects on eardrums, yet we generally do not now think of senses in terms of motion. Hobbes understands many mental processes as kinds of motion: thoughts, dreams, and imagination: “All Fancies are Motions within us, reliques of those made in the Sense: And those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after Sense” (1651, Leviathan 1.3.2, 16). Mental processes seem counter-intuitively described by motion to the modern sensibility. Another sense of the word “motion” rarely thought of in common parlance is “e-motion.”15 In Leviathan, chapter VI is entitled “Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Motions Commonly Called the Passions, and the Speeches by Which They Are Expressed.” In it, Hobbes describes two motions in animals, vital and animal or voluntary motion: And because going, speaking, and the like Voluntary motions, depend always upon a precedent thought of whither, which way, and what; it is evident, that the imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion. And although unstudied men, do not conceive any motion at all to be there, where the thing moved is invisible; or the space it is moved in, is (for the shortness of it) insensible; yet that doth not hinder, but that such motions are. (1651, Leviathan 1.6.1, 33–34)

What seems most interesting about this description of voluntary motion is how the visible motion of a body is continuous with an invisible motion of the mind and senses. So while in some ways fewer values—about perfect, God-like circularity—are projected onto motion, other impetuses are newly imposed, with motion beginning first in the human mind and then projected out into the world. Hobbes’s chapter “On the Emotions, or Perturbations of the Mind,” in Man and Citizen, shows this link between the movement of objects in the cosmos and the movements of the human mind: “ . . . Even the enjoyment of a desire, when we are enjoying it, is an appetite, namely the motion of the mind to enjoy by parts the thing that it is enjoying. For life is perpetual motion that, when it cannot progress in a straight line, is converted into circular motion. . . . Emotions or perturbations of the mind are a species of appetite and aversion, their differences having been taken from the diversity and circumstances

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of the objects that we desire or shun” (1991, Man and Citizen, 54–55). Here, in perhaps the best example from Hobbes, we see how emotion is figured in terms of motion, and how the natural emotion, one that expresses the greatest liberty, is straight, not circular. To multiply examples, Hobbes also describes the emotions of hope and fear as motions: “Whenever, in truth, we simultaneously conceive of an evil and of some means whereby that evil may be avoided, the motion that ariseth we call hope. Similarly, if, with good impending, we conceive of some means whereby it may be lost, or if we imagine that some connected evil may be drawn to it, the emotion is called fear” (1991, Man and Citizen, 56). Note that in this passage, “motion” and “emotion” are used equivalently. Although we don’t often consciously think of it, this equivalence between the motion of bodies in the heavens to the motion of human thought is firmly rooted in our language and our cultural metaphors. Because of the overlap between motion and emotion, constraint of motion or enforcement of nature can, oddly enough, be construed as freedom. The violent motions of Bacon and Hobbes are not necessarily violating nature in their view: “Bacon . . . judged that violent motions ‘do not do much for the nobler transformations and alterations of similar bodies, for these bodies do not obtain any new stable and steady consistency from them, but a transient one which is always struggling to restore itself and break free,’ so that ‘it would be very beneficial if we could impose a fixed and stable nature on bodies by violent means’” (Pesic 2014, 86). So in a converse complement to Bacon’s quote about “revolving forever in a circle” and Hobbes’s quote that life “when it cannot progress in a straight line, is converted into circular motion,” straight motion—even if violent or against the usual motion of the object—becomes liberty itself, and that linear motion is expected not only of objects, but human emotions, political movements, and the evolution of scientific progress.16 Hobbes, following on Bacon (1902, Novum Organum II.XLVIII), very directly makes the comparison between motion—even against nature—and individual liberties: “Liberty, that we may define it, is nothing else but an absence of the lets and hindrances of motion: as water shut up in a vessel is therefore not at liberty, because the vessel hinders it from running out; which, the vessel being broken is made free” (Hobbes, Dominion 1841, 120). In fact, Peter Pesic uses this understanding of liberty as motion against the preferences of nature to counter Carolyn Merchant’s allegation that Hobbes advocates violence against nature.17 Bardin points out that “Hobbes was determined to extend mechanics to the political field where, as in morality, Descartes’s metaphysics explicitly denied any possible application of mechanics, because res cogitans was supposed to introduce an unpredictable element of liberty in

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the bodily motion characterising the mechanical-physiological functioning of human passions” (Bardin 2016, 9). Bardin further contends that In Hobbes’s peculiar geometry, points, lines and surfaces were physical entities, just as imagination, speech and all the ‘phantasms of mind’ were physical effects of bodily motion (of light and sound). In short, the objects of geometry were as ‘material’ as any other natural phenomenon, with the difference that they were entirely under human control. And it is precisely starting from the basic assumption that the possibility to construct an object entails the possibility of knowing and controlling it (and both geometrical figures and the body politic are a human product), that Hobbes’s epistemological innovation in civil science emerged and was later consolidated. (Bardin 2016, 10)

There are many examples where Hobbes compares the motion of bodies to the motion of peoples. For instance, in discussing what causes seditions, Hobbes likens the body politic to bodies in motion (Hobbes, Dominion 1841, 150). Perhaps this is where we get the idea of political movements. Nevertheless, as peculiar as these comparisons between mechanical and civic movements may seem, they are part and parcel with the rest of our pre-Enlightenment legacies, ones that established a basis for our complete domination of nature. The movement of whole peoples is often delineated as motion and progress. In Leviathan, Hobbes assigns the role of motion for his Artificial Man to those who “conveyeth it to the public coffers” or “issueth the same out again for public payments,” like “collectors, receivers, and treasurers” (1651, Leviathan, 2.25.13, 168). Hence, the economic structure and individuals involved in its administration become the blood vessels and moving blood of the body politic: “whose veins receiving the blood from the several parts of the body, carry it to the heart; where being made vital, the heart by the arteries sends it out again, to enliven, and enable for motion all the members of the same” (1651, Leviathan, 2.25.13, 168). Of course, the Artificial Man is headed by a monarch, but Hobbes details how in a Civil government, those powers are often divided up. Additionally, “the popularity of a potent subject . . . is a dangerous disease; because the people (which should receive their motion from the authority of the sovereign) by the flattery, and by the reputation of an ambitious man are drawn away from their obedience to the lawes. . . . ” (1651, Leviathan, 2.29.20, 220). Here we see that, as with individuals, active voluntary motion is preceded by motion in the mind of the body politic: “For the sovereign is the public soul, giving life and motion to the common-wealth” (1651, Leviathan, 2.29.23, 221). Perhaps it seems natural to compare the corporate body to individual ones, but how different Hobbes’s impersonal model is from the communion of saints imagined by Dante, as can

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Figure 2.1. Frontispiece of Leviathan engraved by Abraham Bosse, with input from Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, 1651. Source: Public Domain.

be seen in the Frontispiece of the former compared to manuscript illuminations of the latter (Figures 2.1 and 1.7). I think commonly, now, “progress” is not often thought of literally as motion forward in a straight line “pro-gress”18—though that unconsciously undergirds the advances we are speaking of when we speak of progress. But motion is very different in Bacon and Hobbes, and the nature of motion so much more important, perhaps because recently contested. As they construct the basis of the modern world, the new movement of heavenly bodies provides a new formula for both individual freedom and political movements. Because objects want to move in a certain direction, they are in a sense also imputed to have wills and even emotions, as Bacon asserts: “For these words, nature, art, and violence, are a kind of trivial short-hand [compendia verborum sunt, & nugæ]; and people ought not only to refer this motion to nature, but also to look for the particular and proper affection and appetite of the natural body in this motion itself. For there are many other natural motions arising from quite different passions of things” (Bacon 1882, On Principles and Origins, 345; De Principiis Atque Originibus, 398). This idea plays a part in my argument by showing how directly the naturalized motion

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of the universe, whether ancient, medieval, seventeenth-century, or modern, is mapped onto human agency, human emotions, human bodies, natural processes, and rightful production. This goes to show one way that what we have done during the Industrial Revolution—creating chemical substances that never existed before human manipulation, igniting nuclear weapons, manipulating genetic codes, violating rules of nature once considered sacred—was all along naturalized and justified and just plain understood to be the inherent motion of the universe—progress ever outward, a continuation of natural processes rather than a perversion of them. And Bacon, Hobbes, and many others deftly applied lessons from the new sciences to the political realm. In summary, by the time of Bacon and Hobbes, and certainly after Descartes, natural motion in the universe is reduced in a torturous philosophical reworking from a perfect, holistic, loving exertion of God to a mechanistic grid controlled by human agency, from a dynamic to a kinetic process. In the old realm, there were varieties of motion—circular, straight, and spiral— apportioned to the rightful places elements wish to be in the universe, with the circular the most divine and basic; in the new realm, circular motion devolves into no natural motion at all except for linear motion, which when forced to be circular, is imagined as compounded, frustrated, and counter to progress. To some extent in later years, linear motion itself became naturalized. Before this change, matter was imbued with robust, sacred, almost magical inherent qualities; in the new mechanical view of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and Newton, geometrical objects have shapes and sizes and motions, but no qualities. The new model is stripped down, geometrical, mechanical, inert, shorn of mystery, bereft of the rich, interesting qualities and complexities in nature that more closely resemble what we think of now as biology and ecology.19 THE METAPHORS IN POETRY We have seen how drastically the change in the shape of motion altered everything else. What I will be arguing in subsequent chapters is that this underlying physical concept thwarted and thwarts our efforts to work within terrestrial biological and ecological systems that operate differently, in circles, cycles, webs, and meshes. So while the innovations of the Scientific Revolution and the understanding of all motion as linear enabled us to comprehend much of the world in a more functional way, it also resulted in grave dysfunctions, and a model of production that is ultimately unsustainable. Part of the work of the cultural shift came not just from scientists but also from the brilliant poets whose work helped to translate and integrate the new scientific models into everyday life and individual imaginations. Just as Bacon and Hobbes are often considered two giants of the seventeenth-century

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Scientific Revolution, so John Donne and John Milton dominate and permeate the literature of that century. Despite playing on themes similar to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, the astronomy of Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” written in 1611 or 1612, seems modern, notwithstanding Donne’s discomfort with this new system.20 In pleading with his wife to minimize the public display of their grief at parting, Donne enjoins, “Moving of th’earth brings harms and fears, / Men reckon what it did, and meant; / But trepidation of the spheres, / Though greater far, is innocent” (9–12). Here, he and Ann are compared to the heavenly spheres; Majorie Nicolson points out that “Shakespeare . . . was probably less conscious of three worlds [macrocosm, geocosm, and microcosm] than Donne became even during Shakespeare’s lifetime” (Nicolson 1960, 27). As with Bacon’s use of the word trepidation,21 humans and planets alike can tremble, unlike Shakespeare’s “ever-fixed mark.” They are contrasted to “dull, sublunary lovers,” a Ptolemaic concept, though since below the sphere of the moon, those lovers are Earth-bound, imperfect, and plodding. And just a few years after the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne’s poem appears with the word “remove” almost to allude to Sonnet 116: “Dull sublunary lovers’ love / (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit / Absence, because it doth remove / Those things which elemented it” (13–16). Though John and Ann too are parted, they are not truly separated like those merely Earthly lovers who are removed from each other. Their love is higher and better than that. The metaphor the poem is most known for compares the two lovers to two points of a compass: If [our souls] be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th’ other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. (“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” 27–36)

This poem in many ways shakes the new model off, embodying in their love the comforts of the circular motion of the compass that is fixed, centered, firm, perfect, and “just”; it moves and returns to itself—and to home—in the

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end. In the poem, the lovers themselves are circles.22 However, it is worth noticing that the lovers are also the compass, creating the circles they become; they are makers and actors rather than simply acted upon by a geometer God. As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, Donne is acutely conscious of the doubts generated by the “new Philosophy,” the old model’s circles and spheres “thwarted”23 by “down-right lines.” “An Anatomy of the World,” written about the same time as “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” illustrates the epistemic crisis created for Donne by the new model for the universe: And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this world’s spent, When in the planets and the Firmament They seeke so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies. ’Tis all in peeces, all coherance gone; All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Son are things forgot. (205–14)

Among the problems with the new astronomy are the search for new planets, the lack of coherence, the conversion of perfect circular motion to “down-right lines,” the relationship between the heavenly bodies, and the loss of hierarchy and place on Earth and, presumably, in the cosmos as well. The moving on to other planets since the old one is “spent” is particularly curious, given how much we have treated our own planet as disposable, our fictions glorifying distant new worlds we can supposedly colonize once we have used up this one, just as certain videogames generate a fresh new world with one click. Donne further characterizes the world, like the dead subject of the poem, as much declined in the new system: “She that had all magnetic force alone, / To draw and fasten sunder’d parts in one” (221–22). Here perhaps we can read the world when it was at the center of the universe, able to unite elements that belong together in a rightful home,24 like to the compass in “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Also criticized is the change in the firmament and in the stars: “And in these constellations then arise / New stars, and old do vanish from our eyes” (259–60). We see too in Donne what seems a direct reflection of Bacon’s diminution of circular motion, almost as if it were from Bacon’s passage quoted above, if that were possible for a poem dated to 1610: “For his course is not round, nor can the sun / Perfect a circle, or maintain his way / One inch direct; but where he rose to-day / He comes no more, but with a cozening line, / Steals by that point, and so is serpentine. . . . / So of the stars which boast that they do run / In circle still, none ends

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where he begun” (268–72, 75–76). Rather than direct influence, it seems likely Donne, like Bacon, was processing the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and others. The word “cozening,” or cheating, along with “steals” contrasts with the trueness of the compass’s circle, which ends where it had begun. Here, unlike in Bacon, “serpentine” has a distinctly deprecatory tone, suggesting not only wandering and stealing, but perhaps even the serpent. Neither the sun nor the stars can keep a true circle or return to where they began, an image of instability. Finally, in this poem Donne represents humans as usurping the place of the primum movens: “Man hath weaved out a net, and this net thrown / Upon the heavens, and now they are his own. / Loth to go up the hill, or labour thus / To go to heaven, we make heaven come to us. / We spur, we rein the stars, and in their race / They’re diversely content to obey our pace” (279–84). Donne derogates humans’ hubristic new position as homo movens, though he does not outright deny that humans have such power. In Dante’s Purgatorio, the prideful labor up a spiraling hill toward heaven (Figure 1.1), bowed down under heavy rocks, and are cleansed of their sin in the process; here, they proudly harness the heavens themselves, and Donne’s tone suggests nothing good can come from such outsize arrogance. Perhaps he was right. Then too, the way the stars are spurred and reined in their race recalls how Phaethon of Greek mythology, a mere human, begs his father Helios’s chariot, the sun, and recklessly careens across the sky, burning up everything until Zeus must strike him down with a thunderbolt to save the world. The rest of Donne’s poem articulates dismay at the imperfection and disproportion of Earth in the new system, as well as the disharmony found among the stars. Like the later Hobbes, Donne finds “how ugly a monster this world is” (326) as the link between Heaven and Earth is broken: “If this commerce ‘twixt heaven and earth were not / Embarr’d, and all this traffic quite forgot. . . . ” (399–400). In the parting of heaven and Earth, not only the purity of the previous physical model is lost; there is spiritual damage done as well. Regardless of whether Donne approves the new astronomy, however, it seems to impinge upon his poetic vision, and he is ruthfully aware of the metaphoric and spiritual implications of the new system, in a way we, perhaps, cannot be. And while at this time, visions of the heavens vary among poets and natural philosophers, they all persist in drawing profound parallels between what goes on there and human life on Earth. Milton is sometimes described as demarcating a cultural dividing line between Ptolemaic and Copernican: “Before he [Milton] began to write it in its epic form, his Ptolemaism had greatly abated, if it had not been wholly exchanged for Copernicanism” (Masson 6:525–45, qtd. in Westman 2011, 50).25 Milton alludes to Galileo three times, calling him an artist (PL 1.288),

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and had met him.26 With a publication date of 1667, Milton’s Paradise Lost precedes only Newton’s Principia among the thinkers discussed so far, and may have influenced Newton in the potentially heretical implications of his work (Rogers 2019). Regardless, Milton’s work postdates Descartes’s most important writing by a couple of decades and shows its influence. While John G. Demaray characterizes Spenser as displaying “a skepticism toward and a delight in the ‘old’ medieval history and iconography,” he argues that Milton “is seen sharply to reject that medieval iconography associated with ‘processional,’ collective religious pilgrimage to the medieval world’s supposed iconographic ‘center’ at Jerusalem” (1991, 5–6). Milton is basically modern: “Universal history is revealed using both ‘scientific’ information and traditional epochal events. . . . Paradise Lost is therefore seen as a new sort of universal epic containing both traditional revisionary elements, an epic with iconography dependent upon empirical eyewitness accounts of voyages as well as upon supposed inward spiritual vision of immaterial essences and immortal realms” (Demaray 1991, 6).27 This rejection of medieval thought extends, I would argue, not only to iconographic symbols but also to large-scale cosmological semiotics like the direction of motion.28 What is the relationship between human intellect and the cosmos for Milton? Karen Edwards argues that Milton shifts the emphasis from relying on the senses to assess the easily legible Book of Nature—second only to the Bible in its explanatory power of God to man—to a more abstract intellection, relying on mathematics and the new cosmology: “We need to think of Hell and Chaos in terms of logical rather than geographical or geometric space” (2014, 121). She also argues that cosmology generally was a special case in the history of the Scientific Revolution, developing as it did its theories and observational tools earlier than other sciences; cosmology “disturbed the era’s primary metaphoric conception of the natural world” (2014, 109). For that reason, changes in views of the universe had outsize effects on cultural understandings of the natural world, a larger point I am making. In Book VIII of Paradise Lost, Raphael says he does not blame Adam for inquiring about the nature of the Heavens, but ultimately, he does warn against prying too far into God’s mysteries: “the great architect / Did wisely to conceal . . . / His secrets to be scanned by them who ought / Rather admire. . . . ” (PL 8.72–76). God leaves people to dispute “his Fabric of the heavens” (PL 8.77) so that he can laugh at their attempts: “Hereafter, when they come to model heaven / And calculate the stars, how they will wield / The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive / To save appearances, how gird the sphere / With centric and eccentric scribbled over, / Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb” (PL 8.79–84). Here, as in Donne, the inappropriate pride of astronomers is criticized, in a move that encompasses the pre-Copernicans in the model

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described, but potentially the post-Copernicans in their prying inquiry. Yet, while hedging his bets against linking God’s truth too tightly to any one cosmological model, Milton ultimately justifies the new model by the argument that the “bright Luminaries” should not serve the Earth by moving around it, but vice versa: That bodies bright and greater should not serve The less not bright, nor heaven such journeys run, Earth sitting still, when she alone receives The benefit. . . . Yet not to earth are these bright luminaries Officious, but to the earth’s habitant. And for the heaven’s wide circuit, let it speak The maker’s high magnificence, who built So spacious, and his line stretched out so far; That man may know he dwells not in his own; An edifice too large for him to fill, Lodged in a small partition, and the rest Ordained for uses to his Lord best known. (PL 8.87–90, 98–106)

Milton rationalizes and naturalizes the new model, making it seem the most appropriate and in accordance with God’s dignity. Though Galileo was to remain condemned by the church until 1992, Milton is already completing the work of justifying the new astronomical model aesthetically and theologically, tinged by heresy though that theology may be (Rogers 2019). Note, too, that the new much larger distances required by the Copernican model are now a sign of God’s greatness. And although the initial description of creation envisions a Creator God in the old style, inscribing the circular universe with a compass—”Then [he] stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand / He took the golden compasses, prepared / In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe / This universe, and all created things. / One foot he centred, and the other turned / Round through the vast profundity obscure; / And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, / This be thy just circumference, O world” (PL 7.224–31)—God himself is now responsible for the linearity of it as well: “his line stretched out so far” (PL 8.102). Moreover, rather than being the circle in his Platonic essence, God resembles a natural scientist who measures, creating the circle just like a mathematician with a compass. Eden, too, is linear: “Eden stretched her line / From Auran eastward to the royal towers / Of great Seleucia . . . ” (PL 4.210–12). We see here the impulse, after a cultural resistance to scientific revolution, to eventually align what appears to be most true in the physical cosmos with what is right and good and in keeping with God’s intent. However, while seeming to preserve divine intelligence, the

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new system, a vastly different paradigm, cannot help but reshape fundamental assumptions and operant metaphors, even so soon as Milton. Milton likewise justifies the speed required by the new understanding of the universe: The swiftness of those circles attribute, Though numberless, to his omnipotence, That to corporeal substances could add Speed almost spiritual. . . . . . . But this I urge, Admitting motion in the heavens, to show Invalid that which thee to doubt it moved. . . . . . . What if the sun Be center to the world, and other stars By his attractive virtue and their own Incited, dance about him various rounds? Their wandering course now high, now low, then hid, Progressive, retrograde, or standing still. . . . (PL 8.107–27)

So here, Milton is not only admitting to the possibility of the heliocentric universe, with the Earth now equivalent to other stars, or planets. He is also admitting the three different motions of the Earth, as well as the Earth ranking alongside the other wandering stars (planets) and defending it by saying, essentially, so what, as long as God intends it to be so? And he points out the flaws of the previous system in language very similar to Donne’s “thwarts”: “In six thou seest, and what if seventh to these / The planet earth, so steadfast though she seem, / Insensibly three different motions move? / Which else to several spheres thou must ascribe, / Moved contrary with thwart obliquities. . . . ” (PL 8.128–32). “Thwart,” with its sense of transverse, or twisted, allied with the old notion of epicycles, implies both a perverseness to the earlier models of motion, and a primacy for straight-line motion. Raphael concludes by dismissing Adam’s curiosity: “ . . . heaven is for thee too high / To know what passes there; be lowly wise . . . / Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live, in what state, condition or degree, / Contented that thus far hath been revealed / Not of earth only but of highest heaven” (PL 8.172–78). Slipped in almost as a matter of course is the acknowledgment that if we are just one planet among others, other planets and other lives could exist, an idea that had been contested for centuries, at least since Aristotle’s firm denial. The fourteenth-century philosopher Nicholas Oresme threaded the needle by claiming that while it would have been within God’s power to create other worlds, other worlds did not in fact exist (Kragh 2007, 146).

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Under the influence of global exploration then proceeding, Milton describes Satan in Hell as monarch over a new world, with further new worlds yet to seek: “Space may produce new worlds” (PL 1.650). One such new world would be Eden. So while in Dante, Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell are alike part of one ordered spherical cosmos, Milton envisions multiple worlds: “There is a place. . . . / another world, the happy seat / Of some new race called man, about this time / To be created like to us, though less / In power and excellence, but favoured more / Of him who rules above” (PL 2.345–51). When Satan enters the world, he does so by building a bridge from Hell to Earth: “Paved after him a broad and beaten way / Over the dark abyss, whose boiling gulf / Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length / From hell continued reaching the utmost orb / Of this frail world” (PL 2.1025–30). In Dante, Hell is enclosed at the center of the Earth itself; in Milton, it is a whole, separate realm, vaguely situated in a universe of uncertain symmetry: “Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide / In circuit undetermined square or round. . . . / And fast by hanging in a golden chain / This pendent world, in bigness as a star / Of smallest magnitude close by the moon” (PL 2.1045–53). And while Raphael advises human humility in all such questioning, the temptations to further exploration and expansion are obvious.29 Not this passage alone, but much of Paradise Lost can be read as rebuke of the idea of homo movens and reassertion of primum movens. Yet one of the most common tropes of Milton criticism is the Promethean attraction of Milton’s Satan, as one who moves and shapes events to his will.30 So we find in Milton all the essential elements of the new model, of the sudden cosmological changes: from nunc stans to the universe in dizzying motion, from the universe with a stable Earth at its center to a solar system with the sun at the center and the Earth simply another planet orbiting, from a modestly-sized enclosed universe to a vast and limitless one in which the world is a spot or grain or atom,31 and from the universe governed by perfect circles, cycles, and spheres to one of God’s endless line. Milton not only defends this new paradigm. He also helps to manufacture theological and cultural justifications for the new model, as against the attractions of the old—The Discarded Image, so beautifully described by C.S. Lewis. As Lewis says of Dante, “Pascal’s terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind” (1964, 100). We see in this quote from Blaise Pascal, a younger contemporary of Milton’s, a view of the universe that is a counterpoint to Milton’s. Milton, pervasively influential as he is, played no small part in allowing the culture to make a sudden shift so thoroughly. The basics of this we have understood for some time, but what has not, perhaps, been so well understood is how greatly these shifts give a sort of permission to endless exploitation and prompt the imagination toward boundless expansion and ecological disaster.

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The dramatic change in cosmological models results in a universe from which humans are profoundly estranged, in which we still abide. The most poignant example I can summon from the nineteenth century comes from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, from a turning point right before the accident that precipitates Tess’s heartbreaking disasters. Her little brother asks if all the stars “whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life” are worlds like theirs. “I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.” He then asks if they live on a splendid or a blighted one. “A blighted one,” she replies—truthfully, tragically, and presciently (1891, 31). Immediately thereafter, we see just how merciless the universe is to Tess and all innocents. Hardy, a notable and unblinking poet of English landscape and un-allegorized nature, schooled in the science and astronomy of the day, captures the sense that all the luxuriant beauty of the natural world, including Tess, is corrupted by the artifices of humans and an unfeeling, Godless universe.32 Do we think of ourselves as objects in motion, following the natural direction of the cosmos? Perhaps we do subconsciously; in fact, I argue that we unfortunately do, though not so clearly as Bacon, Hobbes, Donne, and Milton express, possibly because the recent abrupt change from a very different model made them sharply aware of the different systems for bodies in motion. Unintentionally, we may feel compelled to follow what we see as the natural straight-line motion of the universe, though against the wary cautions of our poets. And it is this kind of cultural archaeology that can enable us to understand unconscious concepts, unspoken principles, and unexamined ontologies that are urging us over the precipice, rushing us on to extinction, in an almost Thanatic impulse toward death. Progress is dubious. We are not moving on in a line forever outward. The universe may be vast, but on Earth, we are in one place forever, by all accounts. Even colonizing Mars would not solve the problems of our planet and the wretchedness of humanity.33 So we can make improvements in the inclusiveness of our ethics, the sustainability of our society, the benefit of material goods for the whole, and the generation of those material goods while preserving ecosystems. We can perfect our politics. We can work to reshape our imaginations. But perhaps the greatest myth we must relinquish is that there is some destination toward which we are headed, that there is some Heaven or El Dorado at the end of the line: progress, manifest destiny, colonial expansion, endless resource exploitation, and insatiable materialistic consumption. Instead, we must shelter in place, tend our own gardens, work

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with the circles and cycles of our terrestrial home, and find Heaven in the here and now on Earth, a hauntingly medieval concept.34 NOTES 1. Hobbes was not only an intellectual inheritor of Bacon; he worked for him for many years. Robin Bunce outlines this connection: “Hobbes’ work as Bacon’s amanuensis is well documented. . . . Hobbes took notes for Bacon, translated his Essays, and spent time conversing with him” (Bunce 2003, 41). 2. T. McAlindon, in Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, assures us that “Shakespeare’s understanding of nature was fundamentally traditional. . . . He made full use of the established synthesis of cosmological ideas derived from Aristotle, Plato, and the Presocratic thinkers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, a system which had been reinforced over the centuries by Ptolemaic astronomy and Galenic medicine” (1991, 4). McAlindon also argues that microcosmography, or the study of the nature of humankind, flourished, “but almost always in the context of cosmos, and on the assumption that the microcosm and the macrocosm are constructed from the same basic substances, operate on identical principals, and are closely interconnected” (1991, 3). The wooden porch over the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was spangled underneath with stars, and often referred to in the plays (Falk 2014, 13). And the very name and shape of the Globe theater, with its rectangular stage within a circle resembling the circularized square, “(an emblem of the cosmic tetrad) and of the squared circle (an emblem of the timeless and the infinite ‘rendered finite and timely . . . by transformation into the square of the elemental tetrad’” (McAlindon 1991, 3). While E.M.W Tillyard (1943) saw the Elizabethan world system as simply the Great Chain of Being, McAlindon argues that it is better understood as comprised of the twin world models of order and chaos. S.K. Heninger (1977) critiques the simplicity of Tillyard’s view, especially as embodied in his title (The Elizabethan World Picture), arguing that, on the contrary, “there was an astonishing range of concrete diagrams reflecting a full array of conflicting thought” (1977, xvii). Ernst Cassirer “demonstrates carefully how Renaissance thinkers arrived at their vision of the orderliness of nature—an orderliness reducible to and definable through mathematical principles. He shows how the hierarchical, Neo-Platonic view of the cosmos, with its qualitative differences between the various strata that constitute the spiritual and physical universe, gave way to the ideas of the homogeneity of nature and the essential similarity of historical phenomena, making it possible to deal with both scientifically” (Domandi in Cassirer 1963, viii). All of these critics, then, see much of the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment in embryonic form in Renaissance cognitive dissonance. Kent T. van den Berg discusses how the metonymy between the Globe Theater—or the playhouse more generally—and the World or Cosmos influenced metaphors in Shakespeare: “[The architecture of the playhouse] embodies a complex world view that juxtaposes different metaphoric perceptions of the cosmos as a theater” (1985, 23). In the new era of globe making and cartography, humans escape hierarchy, not even privileged or in the center but detached from it and able

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to “move upward and downward according to [their] free will. . . . The globe, as a human artifact, manifests human freedom not only to stand outside the world, but also to regard the microcosm as being equivalent or superior to the macrocosm” (Van den Berg 1985, 36). The detachment described allows people to be objective, to step outside themselves, but also nature—above self and nature. They occupy imaginative space previously occupied only by God. 3. Leo Marx argues that though there were competing models for the New World underlying Shakespeare’s plays, particularly The Tempest—virgin land, bountiful garden, harsh wilderness—Shakespeare’s plays and Elizabethans more generally adhered to ancient and medieval values: “Few recognized that a most striking fact about the New World was its baffling hospitality to radically opposed interpretations” (32). He calls these two views of humans’ relationship to their environment “ecological images” or “root metaphor[s], a poetic idea displaying the essence of a system of value” (30). 4. “Error” from the Latin errare has the sense of wandering or going astray from the correct path, “wand’ring,” as in Sonnet 116; even a synonym, “deviation,” comes from de-viare in the Latin, or off the way. Unless otherwise noted, all etymologies are from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2022). 5. It is not the task of this volume to thoroughly explore the history of the Scientific Revolution, but only certain of its metaphors; for more, see Carolyn Merchant (1980). 6. There is a sense in which the motion and time have never been understood as more closely connected (possibly even identified) than they are now. Matter, energy, motion, and time are just different sides to the same four-sided die, according to the Einsteinian model. The Middle Ages and the Enlightenment have very different conceptions of motion in more ways than can be addressed here. Motion for the medieval scholastics was Aristotelian—potentiality becoming actuality—in a way that now appears incredibly overcomplicated. Descartes and Galileo found this hopelessly convoluted and re-imagined motion in terms of purely geometric position. For more on the similarities and differences between space and time, including challenges to the Doctrine of the Similarity of Space and Time, see George Schlesinger (1980) and Sean Carroll (2010). For more on philosophy of time, see Henri Bergson (1889) and Martin Heidegger (1927). 7. I am indebted to my colleague Steve Burgess for pointing out that “dwelling” is precisely the way Heidegger would speak about the modern understanding of being as having major implications for our views about the environment. The Question Concerning Technology is the go-to work by Heidegger on the environment (1977). See also Casey Rentmeester’s Heidegger and the Environment (2016) and further discussion in chapter 5. 8. Cassirer’s foundational work is well worth reading, particularly on how the change in the theory of motion completely altered the relationship between subject and object: “Taken as an object of knowledge, movement and even the material mass itself possess ideality. . . . The new conception of the nature of movement required and created out of itself a new concept of the world. As the problem of movement became more and more the intellectual focal point of research, and as it was ever more precisely understood in its new form, the corresponding need for a radical transformation

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of the theory of the elements and of the theory of the universe became more and more urgent” (1963, 173). He further argues that the changed conception of motion alters human relations to and imagination of nature. Catherine Gimelli Martin adds that Pascal also recognized and was troubled by “problematic aspects of a system that would necessarily reground all subject/object distinctions” (1996, 57). 9. Here I cannot forget the way Chaucer voices the contrast between experience (or experiments) and authority in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue: “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, were right ynogh to me / To speke of wo that is in mariage. . . . ” (1987, WBT, III.1–3). 10. Bruno was executed for various heresies, including his belief in other inhabited worlds and an infinite cosmos, as well as a God who “was present in everything, everywhere, always” (Falk 2014, 87–89). 11. At the same time, Edwin Burtt points out that “both God and man are threatened with banishment from the system as either uncaused First Cause or as secondary and in-efficient cause: the former becomes a quasi-mechanical principle, and the latter a mere ‘bundle of secondary qualities’” (1924, 80). Edward Casey points out that “This resecularization of the world via quantification . . . would not have been possible without the theological reflections of the preceding several centuries. Theology and physics are closely allied in their common effort to conceive of space in utterly maximal terms: a marriage epitomized in the intimate intertwining of Isaac Newton’s physical and theological writings” (1997, 102). 12. “One observes, furthermore, that the planets are pictured between the circles inscribed in this graphic [Apiani’s Cosmographia (Figure 1.1)]. This might be surprising, for the modern concept of an orbit—depicted as a circle (or ellipse) marking a planet’s trajectory—tends to be read anachronistically back into such schematic models. Modern depictions naturally show planets on the lines rather than between them. However, this is not how Aristotle or the Middle Ages understood planetary locomotion. Each planet was thought to be carried by an ethereal sphere. The thickness of the shell of each sphere, as in this picture, is at least as great as the planet’s diameter. Moreover, also perhaps surprisingly, there is absolutely no space between the spheres, for that would imply a vacuum, which Nature abhors” (Danielson 2014, 9). 13. Thomas Spragens makes a similar claim: “Vast conceptual revolutions often turn around very small hinges. . . . It would, of course, be a gross oversimplification to attribute such a remarkable intellectual cataclysm to the transformation of a single concept. Nevertheless, the more that one examines the logical structure of the seventeenth-century intellectual transformation, the more he is impressed by the absolute centrality to the whole process of a new view of motion” (1973, 53). 14. Trepidation—or the medieval idea of oscillation in the precession of the equinoxes, completing a circle within about 25,800 years—was being rejected for a linear model of precession by some astronomers as early 1317, but the matter wasn’t settled until much later (Nothaft 2018, 5.3). 15. Fifteenth century (denoting a public disturbance): from French émotion, from Middle French esmouvoir ‘excite,’ based on Latin emovere, from e-movere (OED 2022).

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16. Merchant sees the scientific method as linear in and of itself: “The linear hierarchy of apprentices, novices, and scientists who passed along the observations, experimental results, and generalizations made the scientific method as mechanical as the operation of the universe itself” (1980, 186). 17. Pesic, Merchant, Brian Vickers, Katharine Park, and others debated over decades whether or not Bacon’s system advocated “torture of nature.” Bacon never said those exact words, but Merchant makes an excellent case that Bacon did think of scientific investigation as a kind of torture—tying his language to torture of humans accused of witchcraft and animals cruelly vivisected: nature should be “straitened” on the rack, among other such metaphors (1980; 2006; 2008). Merchant’s brilliant contributions and great influence are generally acknowledged: especially important, for my purposes, is her contention that “for sixteenth-century Europeans the root metaphor binding together the self, society, and the cosmos was that of an organism. As a projection of the way people experienced daily life, organismic theory emphasized interdependence among the parts of the human body, subordination of individual to communal purposes in family, community, and state, and vital life permeating the cosmos to the lowliest stone” (1980, 1). After the Scientific Revolution, humans, animals, and all of nature were reduced to automata moved by impersonal, mechanistic motions (1980; 2006). 18. “Late Middle English (as a noun): from Latin progressus “an advance,” from the verb progredi, from pro- “forward” + gradi “to walk.” The word was associated with “progressive motion of a planet” from the fifth century onward (OED 2022). 19. According to Bardin, Hobbes continued to see biological models and biological growth as grotesque, monstrous, and even cancerous, while mechanical ones maintained the clean, unbiased aesthetic of Descartes’s res cogitans, “an eternal non-moving Reason concerned with ideas matching the primary quality of bodies” (2016, 5–6). Because of the grotesqueness of natural individual human growth, “the collective body has to be an artificial one, whose mechanical motion would function, on the contrary, according to the alleged laws of (human) nature” (Bardin 2016, 17). 20. Donne’s predilection for poetry on space and worlds and spheres and time has been noted for decades. See William Empson, who argues that Donne “was interested in getting to another planet much as the kids are nowadays” (1957, 338). Marjorie Nicolson documents the importance of the circle in seventeenth-century poetry, noting that while Donne could say in 1613 that “Perfect motions are all circular,” he also documents the breaking of the old Circle of Perfection (1960, 79). She says also that “Donne . . . was a modern. His contemporary Shakespeare, who lived on, like Donne, into a world of telescopes and stars and expanded space, remained an Elizabethan” (1960, 169). Malabika Sarkar notes that in Ignatius his Conclave (1611), “Donne shows his knowledge of the 1610 Sidereus Nuncius” (2012, 213). 21. This word only became commonly used in English around 1600, and the OED’s first quotations for both senses are from Bacon (2022). 22. Martin sees both Donne and Milton as uniting “divine human shape, love, and astronomy.” But, in her thorough review of literature on the topic, she refutes critics who see Donne as allegiant to the new astronomy and points out that not only does Donne critique the new astronomy, but he also “describes his lovers’ motions

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revolving around a calm spherical center, and not an unknown planet somewhere off in the stratosphere.” She points out that “all major authorities on seventeenth-century astronomy” have been critical of this view, which recurs nonetheless. Finally, she points out that modern readers find an interpretation of Donne that sees him adopting the new astronomy “feels better”; perhaps this says more about the biases of the modern reader, unable to imagine loving the old model (2014, 143, 148, 150, 151). Perhaps modern readers should examine their own aesthetic prejudices, cultivated by the new paradigm that in itself has limitations. 23. From Middle English þwerte, meaning “transverse, cross,” from the adjective thwart ‘perverse, obstinate, adverse,’ from Old Norse þvert, neuter of þverr “transverse, cross,” from an Indo-European root shared by Latin torquere “to twist” (OED 2022). 24. Milton says something similar about Creator God: “[He] then founded, then conglobed / Like things to like, the rest to several place / Disparted, and between spun out the air, / And earth self balanced on her centre hung” (VII. 239–42). 25. Martin refutes Arthur Lovejoy’s accusation that Milton is “backward-looking” (1962) in his entertaining the “thwart obliquities” of the Ptolemaic system, and she enumerates the many post-Copernican qualities of the universe that Milton prefers, including an “industrious” rather than a “sedentary Earth” (PL 8.32) (1996, 50). 26. Milton says of his visit to Galileo in 1638, “there it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought” (Areopagetica, 538). See Dennis Danielson for a summary of the scholarship on Milton and Galileo (2014, 78–99), as well as many other early astronomers. 27. Erwin Panofsky says of this relationship between ideology and iconography: “We really read ‘what we see’ according to the manner in which object and events are rendered by forms under varying historical conditions” (1939, 11). He asks critics “to examine the “intrinsic meaning [of art and literary works] against . . . the intrinsic meaning of as many other documents of civilization historically related to that work or group of works, as he can master” in order to develop full-fledged iconographic systems (1939, 16). 28. Although some of Demaray’s readers criticized him for making too great a leap in linking big-picture history to postindustrial and postmodern theories of history, I would say the praise for his ambition is more appropriate than the criticism of sketchy details. Christopher Hodgkins commends the way Demaray’s “diachronic approach” in From Pilgrimage to History makes “a saltatory leap in historiographical development” (E22, E24). Ronald R. Macdonald says that the premise of Demaray’s Cosmos and Epic Representation “emerge[s] only fitfully and then rather dimly in the body of his text” (1994, 128). I would say that approaches like his demand a fresh look, especially considering our current perplexing environmental Gordian Knot. 29. Martin characterizes Donne as agoraphobic and Milton as claustrophobic in imagination; she sees the lovers in Milton as fundamentally different from Donne’s in the way they are eager to venture out into boundless space: “voids, abysses, wastes, wildernesses, and other newfound spaces” (2014, 155).

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30. See Raphael Jehudah Zwi Werblowsky (1952). Neil Forsyth capably summarizes the research on Satan as “tragic hero” (2014). 31. “When I behold this goodly frame, this world / Of heaven and earth consisting, and compute / Their magnitudes, this earth a spot, a grain, / An atom, with the firmament compared / And all her numbered stars, that seem toll / Spaces incomprehensible (for such / Their distance argues and their swift return / Diurnal)” (PL VIII. 15–22). 32. See Anne DeWitt (2007; 2013) for a description of Hardy’s involvement in the science of his day, including astronomy, and of the way most of the educated class incorporated scientific innovations readily into their worldviews. She cites Gillian Beer (1996) and George Levine (1988) in putting forth a “one culture” model that is “a rejoinder to C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures,’ whose account of science and literature as fundamentally at odds with one another Levine criticizes in his preface” (DeWitt 2013, 4). DeWitt characterizes Hardy’s fiction as full of “pessimistic implications of the universe’s vastness and its entropic doom” (2013, 16). 33. For an excellent exploration of this possibility, I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. 34. Cf. Voltaire’s “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (1893). Also, John Lennon’s Imagine: “Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try. . . . ” (Solt, Egan, and Ono, 1988).

Chapter 3

The Infinite Line

My argument in this chapter is that the changes in cosmographical models and symmetries affected not only spatial concepts, but those of time and related systems of ordering. Whereas before, time was chiefly envisioned as circles, cycles, a spiraling and sacred calendar, after, time became the timeline: an arrow extending straight out into an unknowable and infinite future, leaving the past irremediably behind.1 Time is increasingly conceptualized as motion, and that motion after Copernicus became motion in a straight line. From those elements of ordered and quantified time, we arrive at progress, radical change, and linear, regimented systems of organizing all reality, and from that has followed, perhaps inevitably, the loss of the ability to recognize that “what goes around comes around,” leading to the ruination of our natural systems. An aphorism attributed to Mark Twain quips that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. But we often no longer feel compelled to observe any such poetical resonances with the past. We rush heedless into new problems that create unintended consequences that require new solutions that in turn create new unintended consequences. We must pose the correct grounds and terms for the question: not, perhaps, how the shift in the understanding of motion and time during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions has influenced us, but rather, what among the historical and cultural contingencies we have inherited is allowing humans on the whole to be blind to the catastrophically unsustainable way we are living and managing our planet right now.2 It is the current status quo, mainly a product of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and appertaining cultural change, that is preposterous, and most people are far from asking fundamental enough questions about the assumptions that support that status quo.

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TIME A great deal of work has been done to show how dramatically the revolution in the concept of time, triggered by the change in astronomical models and increasing mechanization, changed daily life and people’s experience in the world.3 We see movement between two major shapes in the conceptualization of time through the Middle Ages, though these do not change so much over time as with predominance of tradition. While Hellenistic culture largely saw time as operating on cycles or circles, the Hebrew tradition described time and history as a finite line, beginning with Creation and ending in Apocalypse. Even between Plato and Aristotle, there is some disagreement, as Plato creates a cosmogony, imagining the creation of the cosmos like that of an individual being. Aristotle was faulted for his belief that the universe is eternal, one of the main quarrels scholars had with him as his works were reintroduced to Western culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Grant, 63–82). The recapitulary movement of Dante’s terza rima and of Joachim da Fiore (Figure 1.3) shows the spiral movement between ages, as New Testament reinterprets Old Testament and presages the age to come, as I discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, if the underlying metaphor for time is an object in motion, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue (1980, 42), it is not surprising that the change in the understanding of motion should have so dramatically altered time as well. It is also not surprising, then, that one major concept of time during the Middle Ages should have not been forward motion at all, but rather, nunc stans, the standing now. After the Scientific Revolution, Western culture no longer thought of the universe predominantly as a cosmos, an ordered and meaningful whole. What has been less often argued is how this change in the trajectory of time in the new universe also influenced the human narrative arc.4 We have now a sense that time goes ever outward, boundless and unstoppable, creating the mistaken illusion that there will always be a livable future for us. Because we do not believe we will ever come back to the same point in time, as in the older understanding of time as cyclical and repetitive, we are primed to transform everything, drastically, understanding change, evolution, progress to be the naturalized and beneficial motion of the cosmos and of time. But we have gravely erred. As I will discuss in chapter 4, all kinds of irreversible processes, radically altering the fabric of biology and ecology, are entered into heedlessly, in part, I argue, because of our understanding of the shape of motion and time in the universe. Whereas before, most of our activities and objects returned to the soil as we did, now we are creating toxic monstrosities and forever chemicals; bioaccumulating and biomagnifying down through generations; altering every foot of ground, every drop of water in the

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seas, every molecule of air on the planet; building piles of garbage on top of disturbed geological layers so that we have become a geologically significant stratum ourselves: the Anthropocene.5 The changed sense of time and of history urge us not to return to the practices and memories of our ancestors, but to innovate and evolve, even while exceeding the bounds and limits of our natural systems and human capacities. Consider the Latin word annus, from which spring our words annual, biennial, perennial, etc. We think of it as meaning year, but it also has the sense of circling or making a ring. As S. K. Heninger describes, “Time itself is such a circle measured by the heavenly bodies, as both the Bible and Plato’s Timaeus tell us. It was argued, in fact, that the word for the yearly unit of time, annus, was taken from the word annulus, ‘ring.’ John Swan, an early seventeenth-century Cantabrigian, states the case for this derivation: ‘In Latine the yeare is called Annus, because we may say of it, revolvitur ut annulus. For as in a ring the parts touch one another, circularly joyning each to other, so also the yeare rolleth it self back again by the same steps that it ever went’” (1635, 361–62, cited in Heninger 1977, 4). Anus may be etymologically related through Latin and Proto-Indo-European and means a ring of another kind (OED 2022). So the underlying metaphor for year was a ring, a circuit. The Earth does in fact complete a ring or circuit around the sun, but do we think of time that way so much as progress along a timeline? With time, as perhaps with motion, the transition away from the ancient and medieval nunc stans meant not only that time was not standing still anymore;6 it was also minutely quantified.7 And in being minutely quantified, it also ceased to be perceived as any kind of whole, just as increasing atomism alienated humans from nature and shifted attention to parts rather than a whole, as many ecocritics have described.8 Joseph Weizenbaum describes the contrast between older model and new perceptively: We must think that Bach had the whole plan in his mind all the time, that he thought of the Art of the Fugue as a unified work with no beginning and no end, itself eternal like the cosmos, and like it enormously intricate in its connections, circles within circles within circles. We might then find it possible to think of life as having been not merely punctuated but entirely suffused by this kind of music, both on the grand cosmological-theological scale and on the small day-to-day level. Such time is a revolution of cycles and epicycles within cycles, not the receptacle of a uniformly flowing progression of abstract moments as we now “know” it to be. And nature itself consisted, to be sure, of individual phenomena, but individual phenomena that were constantly repeating metamorphoses of themselves, and hence were permanent, eternal. “What is eternal is circular, and what is circular is eternal,” Aristotle said, and even

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Galileo still believed the universe to be eternal and to be governed by recurrence and periodicity. (1976, 22)

Clearly, this is a radically different imagination of time from now; cosmological time before Copernicus was in some ways static though moving, like the beating of a heart or the continual flowing of a river. Time was not thought divisible from the rest of creation. T. McAlindon asserts that through Shakespeare, “an understanding of time is held to be a basic prerequisite for comprehending the whole natural order,” that this idea was expressed in “emblematic diagrams of the universe as a complex temporal unit. . . . an expanded tetrad” with three concentric circles representing heavenly bodies, the twelve months of the year, and human beings mapped onto the seasons (1991, 13). Space and time in this model are absolutely interlocked and express similar circular and quadrilateral symmetries. Time is also relatively stable, repeating itself year to year, at least within the great ages represented by Joachim of Fiore’s Trinitarian diagram (Figure 1.3). Medieval society ran in cycles dictated by the stars, by a carefully calculated calendar. C. Philipp E. Nothaft describes it thus: “the need to regulate civil and ecclesiastical life by means of a calendar posed a technical-astronomical problem to medieval society” (2018). We tend to take the calendar for granted, but a great deal of thought and computation went into figuring Easter and correcting for the Julian calendar overestimation of the year, causing the recession of the vernal equinox, with the Gregorian reform occurring in 1582, possibly influenced by Copernican heliocentric astronomy (Nothaft 2018). The crowning example of the medieval calendar may have been the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Figure I.2). Not only did the anatomical Zodiac Man (and Woman) capture time and the cosmos mapped on to the human figure; each calendar month gave an emblematic illumination of typical activities for that month, capped by a demi-circle of the sky at the time with appropriate astronomy and zodiac symbols, as well as the time and date in thin concentric circles toward the outside. These are not just pretty pictures; the calculations were based in the latest astronomical theory in the “so-called Alfonsine Tables,” which continued current well into the sixteenth century (Nothaft 2018, 5.3). So—along with the canonical hours and liturgical cycles—hours, months, days, and years are charted out in a recurring rhythm that brought a symmetry and wholeness to this lavish, gold-leaf embellished portrayal of late medieval life. Other calendars focused on saints’ days, or holy days (holidays), of which there were many in the medieval year, with “nine-tenths of the days in the year . . . allotted, over the centuries, to some saint or another” (Wright 1968, 47). The Corpus Christi plays embodied the cycle of Bible stories year after year. Not only the stars, but also the moon, were seen as having immediate import for the physiology of the human

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body, and charts and calendars were consulted for traveling, bloodletting, hair-cutting, diet and hygiene, and other medical treatments; there were medical almanacs then, just as there were the more familiar agricultural almanacs (Nothaft 2018, 5.1).9 The medieval sense of time did not change all at once, even with the advent of increasingly advanced timepieces. The history of clocks goes back long before they became imaginatively powerful in the way that they were during the Enlightenment.10 There are records of town clocks being constructed in Europe as early as the fourteenth century (Jaritz 2016). Chaucer references all kinds of instruments measuring space and time, including sundials, clocks, and, of course, the astrolabe (Falk 2019, 246). By Shakespeare’s time, they had become an example of advanced technologies: “Timepieces weren’t just any gadgets; they were, in fact, among the most sophisticated mechanical devices of the age. The first mechanical clocks had appeared in the late thirteenth century with the first pocket watches dating from the early 1500s” (Falk 2014, 102). As Lewis Mumford argues, “The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence. Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions” (Mumford 1963, 14). Famously, clocks became a model for the workings of the human brain, whereas now, we are more likely to use metaphors of our most advanced technology, the computer. New mechanisms for keeping track of time via clocks surely began to change people’s sense of time being a spherical whole, but the overall medieval sense of time prevailed to a degree for centuries: “Being cyclical, Time also represents a stable order which accommodates both change and permanence. The heavenly bodies are not only agents of mutability but also clocks, images of order and constancy: thus ‘most of the first clocks were less chronometers than exhibitions of the patterns of the universe’” (White 1962, 122, qtd. in McAlindon 1991, 15). Carolyn Merchant sees clocks as symbols representing the “ordered motions of the celestial spheres” (1980, 217) (cf. Figure 3.1). And although for the intervening centuries, clocks imitated the heavens rather than the other way around, almost as soon as the relevant mathematical and astronomical proofs were made, the model inverted. The wheels of a clock first imitated the celestial spheres, then supplanted them as the model for the world became more and more mechanistic. As opposed to the calendars, circles, cycles of ancient times through the Middle Ages, the clock with its minute division of time—of hours, of days, of months, of years—began to govern all movement and the understanding of reality itself. Ontologies rapidly flipped in the seventeenth century. Clocks and watches are literally circular and cyclical. Many sources from the fourteenth century on refer to the circles and wheels of watch dials and

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Figure 3.1. Wells Cathedral Clock, c. 1386, showing pre-Copernican view of the universe. Source: CC BY-SA 4.0. By DeFacto—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:​//​commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​ .php​?curid​=58712448.

gears, often comparing them to the workings of the mind. So on the one hand, we could internalize the circularity we still see in clocks, yet we have long ago accepted the quantization and linearity of time. Now we have mostly switched to digital time, with completely different, mostly linear and demarcated, metaphors. Even digital numerals on the iconographic digital clockface are composed of straight lines compounded. Think of the difference between our two sets of twelve hours, or twenty-four hours, in a line,

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counting down—and the canonical hours, which formed the shape of the day and were set to the cosmos—sunrise, sunset: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, compline, all proclaimed by the call of church bells. Most people are not aware that in the Middle Ages, hour length differed rather dramatically between summer and winter, particularly so far north as England— because hours marked changes in the heavens, not equally measured time. Canonical hours were spans or arcs, not just points of time. My chickens, just like Chaucer’s Chauntecleer and Pertelote, know precisely when dawn and twilight meet darkness each day, and their crowing tests my neighbors’ patience, though this would have been one of the most common sounds in the Middle Ages: “Wel sikerer was his crowing in his logge, / Than is a clokke, or an abbey orlogge. / By nature knew he ech ascencioun / Of equynoxial in thilke toun; / For whan degrees fifteen weren ascended, / Thanne crew he, that it myghte nat been amended” (NPT, VII.4043–48). [Much surer was his crowing in his lodging than is a clock or an abbey horologe. By instinct he knew each ascension of the equinoxial in that town. For when fifteen degrees were ascended, then he would crow, it might not be amended.] J. D. North notes that Chauntecleer keeps equal hours (1988, 117). Note, too, that this cock keeps better time than a mechanical clock or orlogge (a clock or sundial). Pertelote’s dream theory is also reasonably sophisticated (Kauth 2013). Surely, we are all still biologically hooked into changes of season and daylight, but we are alienated from these markers by digital time and artificial light. In the Middle Ages, there were actually two periods of sleep, which we now view as borderline pathological.11 How often do we miss sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, as we go through the calibrated minutes of a modern day: Coordinated Universal Time? It is striking that clockworks, with their wheels upon wheels of gears, themselves imitating the imagined circular shape of the heavens, became not models from but models for the universe as astronomical theories changed, eventually resulting in a clockwork universe, more than a universe-shaped clock. Bacon classifies the wheels of the gears conveying motion one to another in a way very similar to heavenly bodies: “the motions transferred and multiplied from wheel to wheel. . . . ” (1902, Novum Organum, LI, 287). We can see in the motion of the gears a mechanistic translation from motion into other motions, but also into time. Bacon, in considering the power of human intellect and industry and its control over nature up to his time, also presciently extrapolates from the limited “effects already placed within his power” to the boundless ability of humans to shape reality to their desires: “the observations of man and operations of nature (which are the souls and first movers of that variety) are few, and not of deep research; the rest must be attributed merely to man’s patience, and the delicate and well-regulated motion of the hand or of instruments”

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(1902, Novum Organum, LXXXV, 63). Note that, as described in the last chapter on motion, humans and nature itself have become the “souls” and “first movers” in altering nature and manipulating fate through the “mechanical arts,” equating the “well-regulated motion” of either a human hand or an instrument. And although all this is supposed to be in service to humankind, there is now no guiding genius, besides human, behind decisions made and actions performed. Additionally, in this process, Bacon is explicit in comparing clocks and mechanisms to the regular motions of the cosmos and the newly ordered motion of humans: “To take an instance, the manufacture of clocks is delicate and accurate, and appears to imitate the heavenly bodies in its wheels, and the pulse of animals in its regular oscillation, yet it only depends upon one or two axioms of nature” (1902, Novum Organum, LXXXV, 63). In the overlap between old and new astronomies, clocks are both like to the ancient heavens in their wheels, as well as like to the new measure of time in “its regular oscillation”: the back-and-forth motion of a pendulum and escapement reduced time to a few basic axioms, in the same way Euclid simplified the complexity of geometry to basic axioms and common notions, and in the same way Descartes would reduce time and space to an impersonal grid. Notice too the reference to the pulse of animals; William Harvey’s understanding of the circulation of blood in animals dates to 1628, just eight years after Bacon’s Novum Organum, giving impetus to the reduction of flesh and blood, biology and ecology, to quantized time and basic principles. Harvey himself made the comparison between heavenly macrocosm and human microcosm: “The heart . . . is . . . the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world; for it is the heart by whose virtue and pulse the blood is moved” (1628, 49). And Harvey clearly saw the heart as a mechanism: “[The heart] is a piece of machinery, in which, though one wheel gives motion to another, yet all the wheels seem to move simultaneously . . . ” (1628, 37).12 At the same time, as Marjorie Nicolson points out, when it came to thinking of the motion of circulation, Harvey reverted to conceptualizing that motion as a circle (1960, 132), which it essentially is. While the circulation of the blood cannot, like mechanical clocks, be reduced to a few axioms or variables, the interesting thing is that much of the time-based function of the body, like the operation of the heart, we do consider irrefutably true, though much more complicated, with some details still beyond our ken. Yet it is worth considering what a ground shift this is and to what degree extrapolations from this comparison have run afoul of the truth. Bacon articulates also the modern sense of human intelligence moving endlessly on through time:

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The human understanding is active and cannot halt or rest, but even, though without effect, still presses forward. Thus we cannot conceive of any end or external boundary of the world, and it seems necessarily to occur to us that there must be something beyond. Nor can we imagine how eternity has flowed on down to the present day, since the usually received distinction of an infinity, a parte ante and a parte post, cannot hold good; for it would thence follow that one infinity is greater than another, and also that infinity is wasting away and tending to an end. (1902, Novum Organum, XLVIII, 24–25)

Here begins a different understanding of infinity, incomprehensibly vast, and stretching in either direction in a way that cannot be understood or compared. This is radically different from the conception of time in the Middle Ages. Here, too, it is the human intellect that is restless and presses on through time, constantly acting, rather than a divine architect of the universe who imagines all at once and time as a whole, nunc stans rather than nunc fluens. But there is a contrast even with the nunc fluens of before, which flows without effort, bearing humans on its stream while God oversees the whole. Now, the flow of time seems itself pressed forward by human effort, homo movens, so that time plus events, or progress, seems to require constant human agency, while God remains in the background as a sort of inactive, unmoving presence. Andrea Bardin puts it this way: “As a general and perpetual ‘cause’ of motion, God’s immaterial eternity coincided thus with the subject of knowledge of a clockwork universe deprived of any qualities and therefore perfectly suitable for a perfect geometrical description, in which only human reason was allowed to participate” (Bardin 2016, 7).13 First, the clockwork universe is divested of qualities; then that is misapplied to animals and nature, until they too become abstractions, not individuals: generalities, not the particularities that actually make up biological and ecological truth. We also see this misapplication of mechanics to life in Hobbes’s description of the Artificial Animal: Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joynts, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the artificer? (1651, Leviathan, 7)

Here too, the life of animals is reduced to “but a motion of Limbs,” like “springes and wheeles” of a watch, showing perhaps the influence of not only timepieces, but of Harvey’s work, published just a couple of decades

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before. In this comparison, not only is the complexity of life reduced; the agency of human creators is elevated, to the level of Nature, if not God. The artificer of watches and manipulator and measurer of time becomes akin to the “Artificer” of all creation, Creator of time and measurer of the universe. Life may be created as simply as making a watch, with that motion measuring time as well as movement.14 It is no accident that we say “hands” or “face” of a clock, anthropomorphizing as usual, human superimposed onto machine, and machine onto human. As Geoffrey Gorham observes, “Hobbes insists that motion, which plays numerous important roles in his natural philosophy, presupposes time. But he seems to advance a reductionist, even idealist, conception of time itself. For example, he denies that time itself can measure motion; rather motion measures time. Indeed, time is ‘imaginary’ and only the present is strictly real” (2014, 80). Motion continues in Hobbes to possess reality and even shape, while time loses its reality and circularity, diminishing into the tick-tick of clock gears going around. Moreover, whereas images from the medieval calendar inscribed seasons, circles, cycles, and the cosmos holistically onto the human body,15 holding cosmos and body in balance according to the same four qualities of hot, cold, dry, and wet (Figure I.2), Hobbes’s view makes bodies obey the new mechanical laws of motion and time. Now we strap Fitbits to our wrists or clutch iPhones in our hands and regulate our lives thereby, organism subjected to mechanism. This is just one way we internalize the strict measurement of time and space in ways that would have been impossible in the Middle Ages.16 We discipline our bodies according to time. We work out according to reps and minutes and compete athletically with stopwatches that measure time down to the millisecond. We set alarms and hit snooze for just nine minutes more, rather than waking gradually with the dawn light, resulting in health impacts from disrupted circadian rhythms that are still being investigated.17 We see these shifts in literature as well, of course. In Dante, time is important, but calibrated to celestial movements, on God’s time, not measured incrementally. Dante picked the perfect date to venture into Hell, Good Friday of the year 1300, ending on the Sunday after Easter, though his experience there seems oddly timeless, and calibrated to days, not hours. Nevertheless, time, like cosmological location, is concretely sited in Dante. Chaucer plotted much of his poetry around cosmic timings and consulted astronomical tables and instruments much more than is commonly recognized (North 1988). Medieval calendars showed much greater awareness of both sun and moon cycles than now and are most often drawn in the shape of a circle or ellipse. Milton’s Hell, by contrast, is “Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / And time and place are lost . . . ” (II. 893–94). Milton’s God is outside time: “Him God beholding from his prospect high, / Wherein past, present, future he beholds, / Thus to his only son foreseeing spake” (III.

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77–79). As with the conception of space, Milton’s cosmos expresses a vast subjectivity in contrast to the rooted solidity and wholeness of Dante’s. There is still a sense of time apportioned out in seasons in Milton’s creation story: “Let there be lights / High in the expanse of heaven to divide / The day from night; and let them be for signs, / For seasons, and for days, and circling years. . . . ” (VII.339–42). But time in Milton seems much more relative and displaceable. Amy Boetsky argues that “one consequence of the Fall for Adam and Eve’s experience of temporality is that time begins to be felt as a measure in a new way” (2001, 380). With work, outside the Garden of Eden, comes the need for productivity and time management. Later literature only reinforced these changes, and in fact, some argue that a changed understanding of time altered the nature of literary expression in fundamental ways as well. Ian Watt, in discussing the newfound sense of reality or verisimilitude in the novel as it emerged in the first half of the eighteenth century, argues that the very consumption of time by described details was essential, and much in contrast to time as portrayed and metered out in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literature. With the abandonment of Aristotle’s three unities, which had occurred centuries before, comes a newfound emphasis on the “temporal dimension in human life,” Watt contends (1957, 23). Shakespeare, though far from adhering to the unities, stages even his history plays in an ahistorical past: “In this Shakespeare reflects the view of his age: he had been dead for thirty years before the word ‘anachronisms’ first appeared in English, and he was still very close to the medieval conception of history by which, whatever the period, the wheel of time churns out the same eternally applicable exempla” (Watt 1957, 23). As opposed to this early disinterest in “minute-by-minute and day-to-day temporal setting,” Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding latch on to these aspects of the everyday passage of time, sometimes even matching events to exact times of the day and the unfolding moment, as in Richardson’s epistolary novels. Watt attributes this change directly to the Scientific Revolution: “At the same time Newton and Locke presented a new analysis of the temporal process; it became a slower and more mechanical sense of duration which was minutely enough discriminated to measure the falling of objects or the succession of thoughts in the mind” (1957, 23–24). This change in the experience of time, both lived and literary, is part of the very nature of the modern age. Oliver Burkeman, author of a new book on time management, 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, points out the change in daily human experience from the Middle Ages, a “time without timetables”: “ . . . there’s one set of problems you almost certainly wouldn’t have experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had ‘too much to do,’ that you needed to hurry, or that life was moving too fast. . . . And none of this was simply because things moved

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more slowly back then. . . . It was because, so far as we can tell, [medieval peasants] generally didn’t experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all” (2021, 1.1). He contrasts that with our experience today: “We imagine time to be something separate from us and from the world around us, ‘an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. . . . ’ To see what [this] means, consider some time-related question . . . and without being fully conscious of it at first, you’ll probably find yourself visualizing a calendar, a yardstick, a tape measure, the numbers on a clock face, or some hazier kind of abstract timeline” (2021, 1.1). Time ticking away as a hand moves around the clock or a number moves along a line brought a new quantification to time that hadn’t existed before and that was visibly and audibly connected to constant motion—the constant motion of the gears of a clock— and all of these new notions for time also had an implied or actual direction to it—a straight line forward into the future, leaving behind the past in a way more profound than before. As Weizenbaum has argued, the conception of the world as experienced through timekeeping devices “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences [eating, sleeping] that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality. . . . This rejection of direct experience was to become one of the principal characteristics of modern science” (1976, 25). Rejection of experiential evidence allows for the destruction of the world before our eyes. Time also becomes convertible to money. The clichéd expression “time is money” is usually attributed to the authorship of an American Enlightenment writer—Ben Franklin in his Advice to a Young Tradesman (1961, 304); Franklin was borderline obsessed with scheduling his own time to maximize personal progress each day, as becomes clear reading his autobiography. Time becomes instrumental, a resource with which to construct things on an assembly line, or exchange for cash, or alter the course of our projected future. And so we feel a compulsion to use our time to build, change, and construct, whether those things we build, change, and construct are ultimately useful and beneficent or not. It’s a confounding paradox. In addition, the quantization and monetization of time obliterated the sense that human experience— and the world—is a whole complete thing. And this alteration of sensibility certainly helped give rise to the atomization, reductionism, compartmentalization, and dissection of nature as a whole: Wordsworth’s “we murder to dissect” (1896, 28). We kill time, dissecting it down to the very second, urgently moving ourselves along a timeline without thinking very hard about what we are doing with it, until whole days disappear into the morass of routine and productivity, while the ends of that productivity, and what that productivity does to our ecosystems, are left largely unexamined. Thoreau said, “Let us spend one day as deliberately as nature. . . . Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation . . . determined to make a day of it”

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(1999, 78). For Thoreau, the fast pace of modern life—the haste of news and post office and timekeeping of train schedules—anesthetized human beings to reality, nature, and their own existence. How much truer is that now? PROGRESS We tend to take for granted that progress is both real and desirable. We generally don’t see it as metaphorical at all. According to Robert Westman, the notion of progress did not begin with Copernicus through Galileo, though perhaps it proceeded from their discoveries: “‘Progress’ had neither the well-articulated status nor the authority of a standard of heavenly knowledge that it acquired well after this study’s period of concern” (2011, 45). Progress may be a nebulous concept, shapeshifting to the form desired, yet there is some common understanding of it as movement forward along a line, given or not. The idea of progress captured in the modern term “progressive” implies a sense of improvement in human society over time; but progress at its origins conveys movement toward a certain end, a specific destination that can be discerned by intellect and determined by natural law. It is not simply motion in a direction, but movement along a clear line, moved by either a primum movens or via human reason itself. This line was increasingly seen as pre-determined in a way analogous to biological development or evolution, itself seen as relatively determinant. Whereas in Aristotle, growth or development were seen as motivated by a final cause, final causes were cast away in the wake of Bacon and Descartes and progress seen as mechanistic, like the course of a planet on its trajectory around the sun or a ball rolled along an inclined plane. While Thomas Malthus early on questioned the notion that unlimited growth was possible, as population could quickly dwarf food supply, Karl Marx saw technology as inherently able to better human living standards in a progressive manner, so long as workers controlled the means of production. Progress, after Darwin, also implied the ability of humans to tailor human nature and the natural world to suit their whims and ideals since neither human nature nor nature itself was seen as fixed, by God or essence, given the malleability implied by evolution, or change over time in response to selective pressures. Direct lines led from this notion to social Darwinism as championed by Herbert Spencer and others, to colonialism as analyzed by Edward Said, and to the radical exploitation of nature, the raw materials of material progress. Behind all these movements lies the simple directionality of the cosmic line. Now, movement through time, as through space, is linear, not circular.

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An understanding of progress as a general sense of conditions being better in some ages rather than other ages is certainly not new with the Scientific Revolution; rather, ideas of a golden age were metamorphosed to serve the new agenda. Robert Nisbet elucidates currents of progressivism from the Greeks through the Middle Ages: “Both of the strands I have identified as crucial to the European conception of human progress—awareness of steady, cumulative advancement of culture from remote past to distant future and, along with this awareness, belief in a golden age of morality and spirituality ahead, in the future, on this Earth—are highly visible in the writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries” (1980, 77). While this may be true, a sense of the golden age is very different from a sense of mechanistic, directional progress in a line. Some thinkers on the notion of progress make a clear distinction between the idea of gradual evolution over time and the intentional invention of progress as we now understand it, and which I argue depended on the new naturalized sense of motion and time. Furthermore, Nisbet’s triumphalism rings untrue in an era of environmental degradation, climate change, and political destabilization.18 There is a general sense of disillusionment as it becomes clear that things are not improving unidirectionally in the ways modern Westerners may have hoped. For some decades now, the visible detrimental effects of industrialization have prompted thinkers to qualify their belief in success: “Now it seems that a thoughtful citizen of a modern country must be prepared to defend the benefits of progress, or at least to reconsider them while being aware of the defects as well as the advantages” (Faulkner 1993, 3). Decades on, we begin to see that progress as our culture has conceived it is eminently unsustainable. Many of the mottos about progress subsequent to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, like “better living through chemistry,” would be difficult to say now with a straight face, given the consequences we are seeing already. As Loren Eiseley so aptly puts it, “Bacon was one of the first time-conscious moderns. He felt on his brow as did no other man . . . the wind of the oncoming future. . . . Today the great machine that Bacon so well visualized, rolls on, uncontrolled and infinitely devastating, shaking the lives of people in the remote jungles of the Congo as it torments equally the hearts of civilized men” (1997, 130, 132). Robert Faulkner takes up Eiseley’s understanding of the machine of progress as devastating to people the world over and argues further that Bacon’s fundamental, Machiavellian immorality is so destructive because of “its exploitative stance toward nature.” Faulkner sees Bacon’s understanding of progress not as a historical evolution but as a “real revolution in political philosophy” (193, 19). This revolution in notions of progress has warped so many of the hopes dependent upon it. Marx is himself very clear on the abuses of nature inherent in notions of progress:

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All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth— the soil and the worker. (Marx 1867, Capital, 638)

Marx is particularly talking about progress that is extractive, rather than additive, in the root of which word, one can see linear progress: ex-trahere, from the Latin, “to draw out or away,” with tract having the further sense of “period or lapse of time or space, progress, duration” (OED 2022).19 Progress must obviously be questioned now, as we begin to see with our bare eyes the fruits it has borne. Unquestioned faith in progress got us into this mess, and it ignores the possibility of civilizational collapse. As Jared Diamond (2004) has detailed in his examinations of the Greenland Norse, Easter Islanders, Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans), Mayans, and more, many civilizations in history have collapsed, some very suddenly, at least to some degree because of environmental degradation. Like the occupants of Easter Island building bigger and bigger statues until they had consumed all the trees needed for survival, these civilizations seemed to superficial observers at a pinnacle of wealth and success shortly before complete collapse. McMansions, golden toilets, Amazon Prime, and private rocket ships should not breed complacency. Aldo Leopold, at the birth of the environmental movement, witnessing the destruction of nature, begins to question the notion of progress and whether “progress” is truly advancement or improvement: “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free” (1953, xvii). Since Leopold wrote these words, we have a ballooning standard of living on average, though with greater income disparities than at any time since the Great Depression, but we are increasingly impoverished when it comes to wild things. Steven Pinker (2011) is too sanguine about progress by half—because he assumes an unchanging backdrop of nature against which the human dramedy is enacted. But others argue more convincingly that now, if we integrate technology more closely into the biosphere, achieving a mature technosphere (Frank et al. 2022), real advancement may be possible, a golden age where humans and nature can coexist harmoniously, perhaps for millions of years.

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EVOLUTION The images used to express evolution, often figured as an ever-outward branching tree (Figure I.5), while a useful schematic, are sometimes taken as closer to a real representation of what happens in evolution than they should be. Like the notion of progress, what we really mean by evolution and evolutionary processes is imagined, not in particulars and individuals, but in broad, abstract schematics, nearly always as branched lines. What those branching lines show, in their transection of time and history, is the change in whole species; but what really occurs is much more complicated, involving trillions and trillions of individuals, all varying slightly or greatly, and all with different life stories that make up the grand scheme of the success or failure of a species over time. Tyler Volk argues that because of the arrow of time and increasing complexity that nearly always occurs over time in evolution, there is arguably an inherent directionality to it, potentially even progress, as we conceive it (1995, 191–92). This last point seems dubious, yet it is not astonishing that notions of progress may have informed Darwin’s thinking and, perhaps even more so, the subsequent way that evolution has been viewed. Weizenbaum puts this well: “Darwin’s understanding of time was radically different. He saw nature itself as a process in time and the individual phenomena of nature as irreversible metamorphoses. But he was far from being the originator of the idea of progress that is now so much with us. Indeed, he would not have been able to think his thoughts at all, if something very nearly like our current ideas of time had not already been an integral part of the common sense of his era” (1976, 22). Yet, though the virtual irreversibility of evolution may hold true, the broad notion of evolution as an arrow is grossly reductive, and the idea of evolution as progress or goal-oriented is off the mark. Darwin in his Origins of the Species is much truer to the particularities of individuals; it is chiefly in the abstraction of his theory that so much is lost and the whole reduced to branching lines. Yet his story of change over time begins with a description of how humans have altered species to hew to their own desires by means of artificial selection: plants, dogs, cows, pigeons, and many more. So while this was only used as an example to illustrate natural selection, human agency was an important part of the conversation from the beginning. We can hear in it Bacon’s insistence on the power of humans over nature, and we can see the foreshadowing of much greater interference as we willy-nilly alter the genetic codes of all life now. We should remember too, that while the branched lines of evolution stretch forth into the future, periodically, whole branches are abruptly cut off forever. Additionally, the tendency toward the teleology of social Darwinism, the idea that human groups and races are subject to the same forces of

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natural selection as in biology, began early. These theories are not only clearly employed for racist ends; they also reverse the relationship between cause and effect; this or that group of people are not successful, and therefore, they must be genetically less fit. One of the major objections to Darwin’s ideas on evolution was the fact that the timeline was extended from a mere 6,000 years or so of Biblical history to an almost unimaginable expanse of time during which whole ecosystems and all their creatures came to pass then passed away: four billion years staggers the human mind. And just as when space expanded to vast infinities, so time expanding similarly reduced human importance in a way troubling for many. It is the very explanatory power of evolutionary thought that can lead to reductionism.20 Not just motion through space, but motion through time—metaphoric for a sort of understood evolutionary process—we imagine always moving forward and improving, though of course evolution does not necessarily imply improvement, only change in fitness—the ability to survive and reproduce—in respect to conditions. IMPLICATIONS Any good student of Dante and Milton can see the difference in the cosmologies between the two systems and begin to extrapolate to cultural differences. But what few have fully comprehended is how vastly dissimilar the past view is from our own, with which we have been conditioned, and how utterly our own worldviews have allowed us to behave in profoundly irrational and destructive ways. As Naomi Klein writes in a recent article about Jeff Bezos launching into space wearing a cowboy hat and boots while the rest of the world burns and drowns, “[he] came back gushing about how he had seen the future, and it was toxic space dumps. . . . This, right there, is the crux of our crisis: the persistent fantasy, despite all reason and evidence, that there are no hard limits to capital’s capacity to keep turning life into profit, that there will always be a new frontier to keep the lucrative game going” (2021). From interest produced by capital to assembly lines to efficiency studies to wage slaves stealing from employers if they take time to pee, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions have completely revolutionized our understanding of time as a thing, like materials and land and people, that is likewise measured and sold, used up or purchased. As Marx outlined in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, human beings, their labor, and their time are reduced to money, estranging us from ourselves, from our “species-being,” from each other, and from nature: “Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply

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that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (1844, XXIV).21 The atomization, individualization, and alienation that Marx recognized, even if he could not solve for it, conditions us to lose sight of the impossibility of our notions of linear growth and progress. The linear, never-ending drive for profit and progress goes hand-in-hand with the continuous drive to extract fossil fuels from the Earth, with little to no regard for future impact. How we view time, as something to be used, changes how we view nature, as something to be used. Measuring a thing reduces it, causes people to value it only by its one-dimensional quality. A watch shows minutes, not days, a microscale, value for the long term subsumed to the short term. One can plan a day that way, perhaps one can plan a business cycle, but not ten or twenty years, or lifetimes, and not sustainability, because sustainability is ultimately a long-term project, fundamentally different from the sum of its parts, its minutes and days. The modern conception of time and our current technomania—and attendant ecocide—are fundamentally linked to our notions of progress. Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, challenges the widely accepted view that science is making progress toward the Truth, as I will discuss in ensuing chapters. Science may advance toward truth asymptotically, approaching more and more closely a limit where truth exists, but it will never arrive at that limit. Further, scientific progress along such a line depends fundamentally on the rationality of human beings, much in question even in the United States with the current surge in scientific denialism; on strict and ethical adherence to the scientific method; on substantial funding, continual training, and unremitting work of scientists in organized groups; on shared societal trust in verified experts; and on careful keeping of records, written or electronic, which would certainly be imperiled if civilization collapses even modestly.22 And I would argue that our approach to truth is nowhere near so curvilinear and neat: there are huge gains and huge losses with every overriding paradigm that emerges, an idea developed further in chapter 5. “You have the watches, but we have the time,” said Taliban fighters to occupying Americans, traditional society confronting a Western colonizing one (Mercer 2021; Pressfield 2011, 17). Obviously, the Taliban are malevolent, reprehensible, and backward. But what does that “backward” I just used imply? Certainly, it suggests a notion of progress as forward motion that is faulty at best; we like to think of progress as inevitable.23 Certainly, there are “directions” we would like to “go,” toward greater human rights, individual freedoms, general prosperity. But too often we think of progress as always good as well as forward moving, though in some ways, our “progress” is actually backward on the measures we should care about most. We have managed to build a globalized developed civilization by exploiting the fossil fuel

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energy of hundreds of millions of years and the stored fertility of 13,000 years of prairies and forests in the United States, the new frontier for our manifest destiny, after nearly eradicating the indigenous culture that had sustainably stewarded this land over all those thousands of years. Capitalism is spending our capital all right, natural resources banked over all the preceding millennia. And when our own resources are exhausted, we exploit others’. We have colonized other countries and are taking their non-renewable resources, leaving behind mine tailings, devastated rain forests, depleted soils, and destroyed cultures. Consider the understanding of time that the Taliban fighter implied: static, unyielding, cyclical, tied to place. Stabilitas is the Benedictine hallmark of commitment to one specific place over time, to knowing and caring for it, and it is inseparable from another important hallmark: stewardship. Our violent and often temporary bringing of democracy to other parts of the world is particularly illustrative of our image for understanding time, moving our ideas onto different places on the map, making progress, building empire, as if human civilization of the planet were merely a big game of Risk, and the dominated places all alike, interchangeable and nondescript, obliterating history, temporal contingencies, and local knowledge and particularities. L.M. Sacasas, author of a scholarly newsletter “The Convivial Society,” tells an anecdote about the loss of the night sky. In LA during a blackout, alarmed citizens called 911 to exclaim, “what is that glowing thing in the sky?!” It was the Milky Way. Most of them had never seen it. How much more are we likely to think of the heavens as impenetrable and vast, headed off in a grid-like direction, lines through space and time, when we can’t even see the stars? As Sacasas says, we don’t think of many of our technologies, including those around time, as technologies anymore (Klein 2021). It’s hard to imagine how greatly our embrace of technology has changed the way we perceive and act in the world, but surely, this is part of the reason we no longer associate stars with Earthly stories but with more abstract concepts, and immense distances ever out. We’re divorced from natural rhythms in ways that are not good for our health, as we impose on ourselves ideas of time and motion structured more by modern physics than biology and ecology. Our idea of time, like our idea of space, is an object, a measurement, linear rather than recurrent, profitable rather than present. And it is part of the reason we measure time no longer by the motion of a heavens we witness every day, nor by the changes in nature all around us, but by the ticking of an ever-present internalized clock. And an astronomer said, Master, what of Time? And he answered: You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.

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You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons. Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness, And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space. Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless? And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not from love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds? And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing. (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet 1923)

NOTES 1. See Tyler Volk for a discussion of the metaphoric valences of the arrow of time, as well as the colonialism of imposing the West’s CE/BCE great count from Christ’s birth—and other hegemonic features of the International Calendar—on virtually the whole world (1995, 165–70). The unidirectionality of the arrow of time embodied in entropy, discovered by Arthur Eddington in 1927, is not an underlying law of physics but has recently been linked to quantum entanglement (Linden et al. 2009; Wolchover 2014). 2. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” David Wallace-Wells begins as he describes the incipient consequences of climate change (2017). 3. Jacques Le Goff was among the first and best to discuss the revolution in the measurement, nature, and experience of time. He linked the change from the medieval to modern “psychology of time” to the increased economic and social life of the later Middle Ages (1991): “It is a fact that the sense of time and conceptions of the hereafter change, that in the cities the cyclical time of the Church is replaced by the linear, valuable time of the merchant” (1980, 35). See also Ernst Kantorowicz (1957) and Marc Bloch (1931, 1937). Volk writes intelligibly about how time “gets mapped into space . . . transform[ing] the mysterious substance of time into more familiar objects in space that we can see, hold, and share. Psychologists call this the spatialization of time” (1995, 155). For much more on the changing nature of time-consciousness, consult Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum (1996). 4. Malabika Sarkar cites Stephen Hawking (2002) in identifying two reasons for changes in notions of time: observation by telescope and the new laws of motion:

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“Time acquired a dimension of relativity and, with it, a new sense of urgency. Newton’s laws of motion may have been formulated after the composition of Paradise Lost, but the range of ideas on which they were based were in circulation much earlier, and Newton drew upon the fundamental work done by Galileo to which Milton and his contemporaries had access” (2012, 98). 5. Though they were not the first to use the term or the concept, “anthropocene” was first popularized by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 (Edwards 2015; Dawson 2016, 19). The Geological Society of London has considered making it a formal geological epoch (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008) but has not yet done so. Nevertheless, the term is widely used without irony or scare quotes. 6. Ernst Cassirer describes fifteenth-century Nicolaus Cusanus’s view of time thus: “Time is to the soul as the eye is to vision. Time is the organ the soul uses to fulfill its basic function, which is to order and sift the multiplicity, i.e., that which is variously dispersed” (1963, 42). 7. Alfred W. Crosby describes the older attitude thus: “Time, beyond the individual life span, was envisioned not as a straight line marked off in equal quanta, but as a stage for the enactment of the greatest of all dramas, Salvation versus Damnation” (1997, 28). Once usuary became more common and time came to have a quantifiable value, worries were generated about quantification of other intangibles, like love or heat or velocity (Crosby 1997, 71). In the early Middle Ages, plainchant had no time signature or consistent rhythm; by the end of the Middle Ages, about the same time clocks were being developed, so was notation for musical time signatures, which became increasingly elaborate ways of measuring and reproducing sound as it moved through time. 8. Crosby describes the quantization of many things, including time, which hinged, he argues, on understanding time “not as a smooth continuum” and instead “as a succession of quanta” (1997, 80), lending itself to measurement by the tick-tock of gears, weights, and escapements, rather than the smooth flow of water clocks or hourglasses. He summarizes the Western passion for pantometry succinctly: “reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualize it on paper . . . and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta” (1997, 228). Descartes thought of time somewhat idiosyncratically: God re-creates the world at every single moment with a different configuration of its material parts, so that time “passes” as different configurations of matter come into being (1639, Meditations, 33, 78–79, 116). Barry Commoner lays much of the blame for our current environmental degradation on the specialization of knowledge and the atomization of problems into separate parts: “Now the reason for the ecological failure of technology becomes clear: unlike the automobile, the ecosystem cannot be subdivided into manageable parts, for its properties reside in the whole, in the connections between the parts” (1971, 187). 9. See also E.G., Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (1997). 10. In his readable account of time and timekeeping, Ken Mondschein begins by describing the Antikythera Mechanism, an astonishingly advanced first-century B.C.E. geared device for calculating calendars and predicting planetary motions (2020, 2).

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11. Derek Thompson writes well on this subject (2022): “Beginning in the 1700s, the industrial revolution—its light, its caffeine, its clocks, and above all, its work schedules took Europe’s biphasic sleep in its hairy arms and mushed the two phases together.” The literature on artificial light disrupting circadian rhythms and sleep cycles is vast. A. Roger Ekirch pioneered the study of medieval-Renaissance versus modern sleep (2001; 2006). Notably, it was the advent of electric lights that lessened the impact of celestial phenomena like stars, moon, and comets. Ekirch notes that then, as now, deaths are more likely to occur when circadian rhythms are at their lowest ebb, during the early morning hours (2006, 14). 12. For more on Harvey; the Scientific Revolution; changes in the understanding of motion, including the motion of the blood; and mechanistic views of the body, see A. Rupert Hall (2014) and Jessica Riskin (2016). 13. Catherine Gimelli Martin credits Milton and Pascal with a kind of “new calculus” that laid the groundwork for solving the problem of God or the ghost in the clockwork universe that Newton was to inherit (1996, 73). 14. Mechanical automata emerged during the Middle Ages and evolved alongside increasingly sophisticated timekeeping devices: from medieval moving golden birds and beasts to Leonardo da Vinci’s armored knight to mechanical human figures constructed by clockmakers that were able to write words and perform music. Some mechanisms, like the Antikythera Mechanism, are extant from ancient times. See E. R. Truitt (2015) and Jill Riskin (2016). One could argue that this impulse ends in everything from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to genetic modification and AI. 15. Seb Falk shows how many calendars mapped the zodiac onto the human body (2019, 249). 16. Mondschein points out that modern timekeeping accuracy “has permitted scientists to redefine what time is: instead of time being measured by the relative movement of physical things, the physical dimensions of objects are measured by time. . . . If Einstein returned us to a relativistic world, the atomic clock turned Aristotle’s logic, where time is knowable only by the universe of moving things, on its head: the universe of moving things is knowable because we have a precise and unchanging measure of the second” (2020, 163, 172). 17. Recent research suggests that electric light has the capacity to disrupt sleep in hunter-gatherer communities almost immediately upon introduction (Iglesia et al. 2015); Russell G. Foster demonstrates that “every aspect of our physiology and behavior is constrained by a 24 h beat arising from deep within our evolution” and that disruption of these cycles by modern interference with zeitgebers (time givers, or cues from the external environmental of the time) can cause mental and physical illness. Strikingly, we have a built-in clock in our hypothalamus: the superchiasmatic nuclei, or SCN, that receives direct signals from the retina, signals that persist with most cases of blindness but that are eradicated with the loss of the eyes (2020). See also the announcement of the 2017 Nobel Prize to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young for identifying the gene and proteins that control the circadian rhythm of organisms ranging from humans to fruit flies (Nobel Assembly 2017).

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18. See Gottfried (2017). Nisbet acknowledges that “one of the prime assumptions of the modern idea of progress was the invariability of nature, a nature that would be the same tomorrow as it is today and was yesterday” (1980, 338). 19. For more on Marx’s view of human alienation from nature and his concept of “metabolic rift,” see John Bellamy Foster (2000). 20. See Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin (1985) for more on Darwin and the ontological assumptions behind Cartesian reductionism. 21. For more on time according to Marx and Engels, see Dohrn-van Rossum (1996). 22. Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker, in their work on planetary intelligence, argue that we are at a particularly perilous point in human and planetary development because while the planet has evolved from an immature to a mature biosphere, we are stuck in the phase of immature technosphere. They insist that we must develop into a mature technosphere, where technology sustains rather than destroys the biosphere. 23. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote against the fallacy of inevitable progress in A Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation” (1963).

Chapter 4

Environmental Legacies

In Global Environmental Health, I tell my students that there is one central organizing question for the course: If, according to nearly unanimous scientific consensus, we know that climate change and environmental degradation are heading us toward a bleak future and possible ecological and civilizational collapse (and we do), and if we know that there are excellent solutions like renewable energy, chemical regulation, conservation, and restorative agriculture on the table that we could implement immediately (and we do), then why are we not doing more to counter these effects and save our own and our children’s lives? This is not a rhetorical question, but a real one: not, “Why are human beings so stupid?” but, “No, really. Why are human beings being so stupid?” What in our cognitive biases, psychological makeup, and contingent historical and cultural legacy is bringing us to the brink? This book is one effort to answer that question. This chapter will examine the heights of our exploitive follies, the depths of our environmental destruction, and a few counterexamples to the warped way in which we see the world. In the qualities of our greatest environmental disasters, we can see the metaphysical prejudices imported from our dominant metaphors. While it seems as though, in our consuming all resources and contaminating all commons, we are positing a line that travels ever out and thereby an infinite future for ourselves and human civilization, we are actually positing a future where the Earth, our only home, will have to be used up and discarded, while we deceive ourselves into believing there is some replacement planet to which we can venture on and which we can likewise consume. Every once in a while, the disguise on this illusion slips, and the truth is revealed. Perhaps that explains the fictional and actual obsession with space travel, as if any inhospitable rock could be made, within an imaginable timescale, even nearly the home for us that Earth is now, as if we too were not creatures contingent on the ecosystems in which we have evolved, and as if all the universe were just fodder for our invention. But largely, people seem to hold these impossibilities in tension at the same time, contradictory though they are. 107

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CLIMATE CHANGE So far as we know, we are the only intelligent life in the universe, yet how intelligent can we be if we are turning our one bright, beautiful home into a tragic, contaminated cesspool? It may be, as James Lovelock once said, that we are too stupid to prevent climate change (Hickman 2010). Are we not smarter than bacteria in a petri dish that grow until they exhaust the food supply and die in their own waste? Of course, one answer to the Fermi paradox is that the reason we haven’t yet found other intelligent life in the universe is precisely this: that all such life eventually develops advanced technology and extinguishes itself.1 Yet this does not, in my view, seem probable; after all, not all civilizations on our planet are equally destructive—why should all intelligent life in the universe be?2 Rather, we tend to take as a matter of course what is actually completely contingent, perhaps as some excuse for our behavior. As with the subtitle of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, we have a choice, between making sacrifices that would allow us to sustain human life and preserve the planet on which all life evolved, and plummeting heedlessly over the death-cliff of status quo—and it beggars belief that we are collectively choosing the latter. I write this during COP26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference). The Conference of the Parties haggles half-heartedly, it sometimes seems, as one political party in the United States, the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, undermines all effective action, causing the United States to veer violently from climate action to withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and back again. The people of India struggle to rein in coal-burning power plants as soaring temperatures make air conditioning ever more necessary (Shih and Dennis 2021). Island nations make their pleas for continued existence; and children beg adults to stop stealing their futures. The line of emissions, scarcely abated during COVID-19, creeps ever upward. One very clever UN Development Program video, voiced by Jack Black in English and other famous actors in other languages, portrays a velociraptor striding before the conference participants. The dinosaur has some words of wisdom for humans: “Listen up, people. I know a thing or two about extinction, and let me tell you—and you’d kind of think this would be obvious—going extinct is a bad thing. And driving yourselves extinct? At least we had an asteroid; what’s your excuse?” The dinosaur points out that fossil fuel subsidies are akin to subsidizing giant meteors and that that money could be spent on much better things, like alleviating poverty. “So here’s my wild idea,” he says. “Don’t choose extinction” (Cheng 2021). As a way of capturing how crazy, how non-rational our current actions are, it’s not bad. Apocalyptic fictions and science-fiction scenarios are now needed just to

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express what is actually happening, in real time.3 It is certainly difficult truly to wrap one’s mind around the absurd tragedy of what we are doing. We have suddenly taken the circles of the carbon cycle, quietly and slowly sequestering carbon in the Earth’s crust over the millions and millions of years of life on Earth, and reversed that process, turning it into a freight train barreling in a line straight out into our atmosphere in a mere heartbeat for the planet. Consider the famous hockey-stick graph of CO2 levels over time as measured by ice core data over 800,000 years (IPCC 2021). Time is linear in this graph already, mapped on the x-axis—levels of carbon dioxide appear to go up and down along the y-axis. But up until modern times, this is what cycles look like when graphed to a line: regular periodic up and down movement, the same numerically—although metaphorically, up and down is very different from round and round, a common understanding of normal cycles. The carbon cycle is a spiral that may look like an up and down line when graphed linearly against time, like a spiral coil looked at from the side, while a spiral looked at from the end resembles a circle: channel the view of a slightly stretched-out slinky from the end rather than in profile. The carbon cycle only exhibits this kind of symmetry when measuring CO2, however; in reality, it is the planet breathing through the lungs of its forests; and now, the planet is breathing out CO2 with unprecedented rapidity, with a limited ability to breathe back in again. With the industrial age, the line of CO2 in the atmosphere breaks free of the cyclic rhythm and makes for the stratosphere, soaring in a unidirectional line ever outward, just as we now imagine time and space to operate. How do we not see this as a broken system? As cycles that are now permanently and radically disrupted? How do we not understand that we are potentially fracturing fundamental mechanisms of our planet? Perhaps it is because we are not unused to this imaginative shape of things in an unbounded line out or up, perhaps because so often, a sharp curve upwards implies success: a climbing stock market, soaring GDP, growth of all kinds on which our economic system is predicated. Often, we expect and desire unrestrained upward growth. So rather than see this change as utter disruption of natural rhythm and balance, as suffocation, slow or sudden, of all life on Earth, we see this as just one more of the anomalous, ahistorical moves humans have made, often without suffering much, and sometimes even as a leap to prosperity. We don’t necessarily believe there must be limits, natural or otherwise.4 No longer do climate catastrophes have to be written as putative, futuristic. Now, we see these catastrophes as everyday headlines: Along with much of the Pacific Northwest, a small town in British Columbia hit 121ºF and then burst into flames, joining the list of towns like Paradise, California that have been virtually wiped off the map by climate-induced wildfires (Isai 2021).

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Water shortages and historic drought plagued the American West, while air polluted by the hundred plus wildfires dimmed the horizon from the West Coast to New York City; Hurricanes Henri and Ida bore down on the Northeast one right after another, with rainfall exceeding all-time records, drowning people in basement apartments where they slept; the United States, China, and Germany all experienced record, catastrophic flooding, with houses and people swept away and hundreds drowned or missing, including twin infants in Tennessee pulled from their father’s clinging arms as he desperately tried to save his four children (Ramirez 2021). All these occurred in just one summer—and this is far from a complete list—and we can expect it to get worse every year. There is a failure to see where this line we’re on is going, a failure of imagination, a failure of extrapolation beyond the known and witnessed. Climate deniers talk about natural cycles, but this is not natural, nor is it a cycle, or at least not one in any way meaningful to us. Cycles exist in terrestrial ecology, in life, not the cold, hard, linear lifelessness of space. We’re losing many things for good—coral reefs, irreplaceable species, a livable climate, unpolluted ecosystems. Outside predictions of runaway climate change include transforming the Earth into a Venus-like planet. The processes we are entering into, knowingly, are linear, and potentially irreversible, and capable of completely eradicating the circles and cycles of life. While healthy organisms maintain homeostasis through feedback loops, disease processes like cancer are also mostly linear, and culminate in death. And here we are talking about death of the one big life: our living Earth. Individuals can grow ill and pass away: this is the cycle of life. But the death of the organism Gaia, ecocide of all we know, would kill not only us but all known life. As Lovelock argued long ago, causing the death of Gaia would not be easy, but it could be possible, and it would be permanent—and his predictions preceded knowledge of the terraforming effects of climate change decades in advance of its widespread acceptance: “What is certain is that with Gaia’s intelligence network and intricate system of checks and balances [circles and cycles] totally destroyed, there would be no going back. Our lifeless Earth, no longer a colorful misfit, a planet that broke all the rules, would fall soberly into line, in barren steady state, between its dead brother and sister, Mars and Venus” (1979, 42, emphasis added). If we trigger truly runaway climate change, the rock that was Earth will continue to circle in its orbit at the same time it hurtles on a line through space, expanding ever outwards. In our grandiose pride, we have grossly misunderstood how translatable the underlying linear motion of the cosmos is to our terrestrial system, whose life literally depends on circles and cycles. If we continue this status quo, the cycles and systems of life will be ended forever on this planet, perhaps everywhere in the universe.

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And with the extinctions of many precious forms of life, including our own, there is no circling back, there is no coming home. ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMICALS Environmental chemicals are the other major area where modern chemical processes have completely abandoned the cycles of nature. Where before, nearly every substance on Earth biodegraded into component parts, now, we are taking hydrocarbon chains from fossil fuels out of that cycle and fixing them in initially useful, but destructively long-lasting configurations: the best examples here may be plastics and forever chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and per- and polyfluroalkyl substances (PFAS). The chemicals of concern identified by the Chemical Safety Act include asbestos, solvents like carbon tetrachloride and methylene chloride, pigments like Violet 29, brominated flame retardants, and phthalates, often found in personal care products (EPA 2021). The truth is there are more of such chemicals than can be properly evaluated, and the US EPA has an abysmal track record for accepting deceptive studies conducted by the industries manufacturing the chemicals they oversee. Mostly since the 1950s, 8,300 million metric tons of virgin plastic has been produced, and most of it is still with us in one form or another (Lear et al. 2021). Plastics in the ocean never biodegrade; they can only photodegrade into smaller and smaller pieces until they become microplastics that are readily ingested by every creature on Earth. They have been measured in the guts of most marine life, ranging from zooplankton to macroinvertebrates to fish to seabirds to whales, and are found everywhere, even on the floor of the Mariana Trench (Chiba et al. 2018). Microplastics migrate through the food web (Setälä et al. 2014; Rochman et al. 2015) and cross the blood-brain barrier, causing immune changes and cell death once there (Kwon et al. 2022). It is currently not possible to completely filter microplastics like polypropylene, nylon, polystyrene, and polyvinyl chloride from our water or keep them out of soil and food, and most of our clothes are synthetic; every wash of a single fleece jacket puts 1.7 grams, or thousands of individual non-biodegradable microfibers, into circulation (Hartline et al. 2016). Plastic pieces in the oceans, micro or macro, act as sponges that soak up toxic substances, causing increased contamination when swallowed by marine life (Katsnelson 2015; León et al. 2018). Plastic also continues to leach toxic substances into surroundings, whether in water, soil, bodies, or microbiomes (Lear et al. 2021; Kwon et al. 2022). Their chemistry is inherently toxic and complex, with 1,518 chemicals of concern among the 6,000 involved in plastic production, either as feedstock or additives; it is uncertain whether a circular economy for

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plastics would ever be possible (Aurisano et al. 2021). In addition, while plastics were first foisted on the public as a solution to fossil fuel companies’ massively stockpiled toxic byproducts, plastics’ contribution to climate change is being increasingly recognized (Altman 2022). Alan Weisman’s World without Us, a fascinating imaginative experiment—what if humans just left the Earth?—postulates that while many human artifacts would quickly return to nature, a few indelible catastrophes would persist almost indefinitely: CO2 in the atmosphere and plastics in the oceans most notably (2007). Bioaccumulation and biomagnification are inherently linear processes because of the nature of these persistent pollutants, as they endure and build up in the environment and amplify up the food chain. Rachel Carson clearly and presciently delineated these in Silent Spring a full sixty years ago. In just one example, she describes the application of DDD, a cousin of DDT, to kill a nuisance gnat, Chaoborus astictopus; although the pesticide was applied at extremely low levels, 1/50 parts per million, it was applied repeatedly until the western grebes inhabiting the lake began dying in startling numbers, their fatty tissue levels of pesticide at 1,600 parts per million. The DDD had built up in increasing levels through trophic levels: plankton to herbivorous fish to carnivorous fish to fish-eating birds. And although the DDD had disappeared from the water, it persisted in the living beings of the lake (1962, 47–48). DDT and DDD, banned now for 50 years, reside in the fabric of life still, a perverse distortion of the circles and cycles of generation and death that normally returns life to its elements: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.5 As the line of toxic emissions into the environment climbs, so climbs the line of disease and disability in children and adults. Most people do not realize that the overall incidence of childhood cancer has been increasing about 1 percent per year for decades, or that now, more than one in three women and one in two men will get cancer and that 21 percent of Americans will die of it. Between 24 percent and 34 percent of U.S. adults have metabolic syndrome brought on in part by exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) (Heindel et al. 2017). Even while knowing many people dealing with neurocognitive disability, few go beyond anecdotes and consider the astounding statistics on how environmental exposures are affecting our brains. Many people have heard of the travesty of environmental justice that occurred in Flint, Michigan, with levels of lead in some houses as high as 15,000 ppb (15 ppb is the action level), twice as many children with high lead levels (Campbell et al. 2016; Ingraham et al. 2017), and a spike in fetal deaths (Ingraham et al. 2017; Grossman and Slusky 2019). Fewer understand that it’s not just Flint, and it’s not just lead; the entire world is increasingly contaminated with thousands of toxic environmental chemicals that pervade our ecosystems, air, water, soil, and selves and cause increasing rates of death and disease. Indeed, lead is one of the few real success stories in

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public health regulation of chemicals. To show that we could change lives by regulating chemicals, I begin nearly every presentation with a chart showing the precipitous drop of lead in the blood of children, with now only 1.4 percent of children at greater than 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood (µg/ dL) compared to 88.2 percent in the late seventies (Jones et al. 2009). The economic benefits of decreased lead levels have been estimated at $110–319 billion per birth cohort in the 2000s, compared to the 1970s (Grosse et al. 2002). And as research has shown harm at lower levels of exposure, we have been able to decrease the action level from 10 µg/dL to a reference level (97.5th percentile) of 5 µg/dL in 2012 and 3.5 µg/dL in 2021 (CDC 2021). No level of lead is considered safe. How was this incredible public health victory accomplished? Lead was regulated, banned from gasoline and paint. At the time, the industries fought back viciously, arguing that we wouldn’t have effective paint or gasoline that worked if we protected children.6 But we did. The cynicism of the paint and gasoline industries is astonishing, unless, that is, one considers the cynicism of the tobacco industry and the chemical industry more broadly.7 And of course, the numbers don’t capture the true human impact, and indeed, the people whose intelligence was not stunted by exposure to lead have no idea the fate they were spared by sensible regulation. But we do understand the suffering and disability of the children who were critically poisoned, with children of color enduring higher levels than white,8 and it is unforgivable. Lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium never decrease in toxicity because they are elements and don’t ever break down; like PCBs, dioxins, and many pesticides, they are xenobiotic: foreign and hostile to life. On the other hand, one could think that because they existed on the Earth before humans, they are “natural.” But it is not natural for humans to have such close contact with these substances—only through mining, digging up the bowels of the Earth, and using them in production are humans exposed to such high levels. They do not belong in the cycle of life at all, and once there, they persist. The legacy of these chemicals will remain with us to some degree forever; baby food, rice, and apple juice are still contaminated by arsenic because of arsenical pesticides used decades ago (Wilson 2015). But most would agree that our creation of toxic chemicals de novo, chemicals never before existing in the four-billion-year history of the Earth, is categorically worse. The CDC Biomonitoring Project measures levels of chemicals of concern in Americans’ blood and urine, and what they have found, given the research on health harms, is very concerning (2009). While the news is good on lead and on cotinine, a breakdown product of nicotine,9 levels of even more worrisome chemicals are trending steadily upward, some, like PFAS or polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), reaching high levels before even gaining widespread attention. PFAS, which have been found in nearly every person

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tested in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) studies from which the CDC samples are drawn, are forever chemicals that steadily accumulate in the environment and human fat tissues and have been linked with a wide array of diseases.10 Most people also harbor measurable levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), one of the PFAS most commonly found in non-stick coatings, and linked to immune and reproductive dysfunction and liver damage (Cui et al. 2008; Tarapore and Ouyang 2021). Biphenol A (BPA), of baby bottle infamy, has been found in the urine of 90 percent of those tested and has been linked to endocrine disruption, reproductive effects, immune dysfunction, changes to brain structure and function, and cancer, among other impacts.11 Before the Environmental Working Group tested the cord blood of infants, no one realized that all babies are now born pre-polluted with an average of 200 toxic chemicals each, ranging from carcinogens to mutagens to neurotoxins to hormone disrupters (EWG 2009). With more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals registered for use in the United States, only a very small portion have ever been tested for safety, and those that have been tested have typically employed single-substance exposures and short-lived animals like rats, whereas humans live in a toxic soup of hundreds of chemicals with synergistic effects and have decades of life during which to develop diseases with long latency periods, like cancer or Parkinson’s Disease. Children and fetuses are especially vulnerable because of the long lifetimes ahead of them and because their metabolizer systems are immature (Infante-Rivard et al. 1999; Nielson 2010). Under the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), only six substances were banned since its signing in 1976, and the ban on asbestos was overturned in court when challenged by the industry. In addition, pesticides were excluded from TSCA (EPA 2021), even though more than a billion pounds of pesticides are applied each year in the United States alone (Atwood and Paisley-Jones 2017). Although the EPA has attempted to strengthen TSCA with the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, improvement has been hampered by political appointees, the influence of the chemical industry, and the actions of the Trump administration. Furthermore, among the Trump administration’s last-minute slew of policy sabotage, the treacherously named Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science rule crippled the ability of scientists to use epidemiology to regulate chemicals (Eilperin and Dennis 2021). This rule has since been vacated and remanded under the Biden administration. The European Union long ago instituted an inherently different and more effective kind of regulatory system, one that employs the Precautionary Principle, assuming that new chemicals might possibly damage human health. This is in contrast to the US system, which demands that enough people die to meet an impossibly high standard of proof that a certain chemical causes a certain disease, a standard that has made commonsense chemical regulation

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unachievable. In the European Union, the presumption of innocence is on the side of human individuals who do not wish to endure toxic trespass.12 In the United States, each and every one of us is an unwitting and unwilling guinea pig of the chemical industry. What we would expect from these dramatically varying regulatory mechanisms and industrial practices is correlative disparities in disease outcomes by country. And that is precisely what we do see. While about 9 children per million develop Wilms’s tumor in the United States, the rate is 2–4 per million in East Asia and 16.5 in Harare, Zimbabwe (Chu et al. 2010). A comparison of samples of breast milk found in women in Denmark compared to Finland, countries that are otherwise much alike, genetically and culturally, found distinct chemical profiles, with scarcely any overlap between the two groups’ measurements of PCBs, dioxins, and pesticides; the group exposed to the worst toxicants had significantly higher levels of health problems in their children (Krysiak-Baltin et al. 2010). It is beyond the scope of this project to provide a full review of the effects of environmental chemicals on human health, but it is worth highlighting the impacts on our most vulnerable and most precious beings: our children.13 Children are particularly affected by environmental exposures from conception onward,14 through every moment of their lives, in the air they breathe, the water they drink, the food they eat, and the places where they live, learn, and play. They are exposed to toxic contamination in breast milk, pets, household dust, rain, snowflakes, even and especially in the pristine reaches of the Arctic.15 Pesticide Action Network (PAN) documents widespread increases in all kinds of health outcomes among children, from cancer and autoimmune disruption to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and lower IQs (2013). Cancer is the number one disease killer of children and the number two killer overall. Childhood cancer rates have increased about 1 percent per year since the 1970s, and these cancers are solidly associated with exposures to pesticides and other environmental chemicals. There is only space for a small sampling of the decades of studies linking pesticides and other environmental chemicals to childhood leukemia (Infante-Rivard and Weichenthal 2007; PCP 2009; Bailey et al. 2015; Metayer et al. 2016; Van Maele-Fabry et al. 2019; Kripke et al. 2020) and brain cancer (Davis et al. 1993; Pagoda et al. 1997; Van Maele-Fabry 2013; Vidart d’Egurbide Bagazgoitia et al. 2018), among other cancers, and cancers in adults (Mills and Yang 2003; Weichenthal et al. 2010). The President’s Cancer Panel has identified the drastic increase in cancer overall as linked tightly to environmental exposures, including agricultural and landscape chemicals, industrial and occupational exposures, medical radiation, and other environmental causes, arguing that most cancers could be prevented. The Panel argued that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated. . . . The American

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people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.” The President’s Cancer Panel further recommends that “each person . . . become an active voice in his or her community. Individuals [should let] policymakers know that they strongly support . . . measures that will reduce or remove from the environment toxics that are known or suspected carcinogens” (2009, i, 112). This is how activists succeeded in changing policies on lead and tobacco—by fighting hard against industry and reshaping cultural expectations. Sandra Steingraber has gone to great lengths to show how, despite solid evidence in the scientific literature, cancer generally has not been seen as preventable but as inevitable or a result of poor individual choices. But there is no way that the drastic increases in cancer and other diseases can be explained by genetics, bad habits, or any other fact than environmental influences. Finally, the Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative (CCPI) is trying to educate the public that most childhood cancer is preventable (CCPI 2021). And since that is the case, most of those deaths could have been averted by safer environmental practices. In the same way that children are dying of leukemia, brain cancer, and other cancers that are unnecessary, so we need to see increases in ASD, ADHD, and lower IQs as avoidable. For educators, it is frustrating to focus as we do on honing skills, perfecting tests, and supporting students, when we could better nourish intelligence by simply halting the poisoning of brains in the womb and ever after. The wonderful Phil Landrigan at Mount Sinai has described a “silent pandemic” of neurological deficits from toxic exposures (Grandjean and Landrigan 2006). An all-star lineup of experts on the role of environmental chemicals in neurocognitive damage have written the TENDR Consensus Statement, which finds that children are at “unacceptably high risk” (Bennett et al. 2016). Right now, 1 in 44 children, and 1 in 27 boys, are diagnosed with ASD, compared to 1 in 150 just a few years ago (2000), and 4 in 10,000 in the 1980s (Maenner et al. 2021; CDC 2022). Pesticides have been repeatedly linked to ASD, ADHD, and other neurobehavioral disorders. Robust studies link organophosphate pesticides like chlorpyrifos to ASD; children who lived in closer proximity to sprayed fields had significantly higher rates (OR 1.7–2.3) of ASD (Shelton et al., 2014). PCBs, dialkyl phosphates (DAPs), polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and quite a few other EDCs have been linked to an alphabet soup of delays in development and mental functioning, including ADHD and ASD (de Cock et al. 2012; Stamou et al. 2013; Lizé et al. 2022). An astonishing 11 percent of U.S. children had been diagnosed with ADHD in 2011, up from 7.8 percent just a few years before (2003), an increase of 5 percent per year (Visser et al. 2014). The annual societal “cost of illness” for ADHD is estimated at $122.8 billion (Schein et al. 2022). Recent studies have shown that we are systematically lowering our children’s IQs by exposing them to pesticides like organophosphates

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and pyrethroids (Bouchard et al. 2011; Engel et al. 2011; Rauh et al. 2011; Gunier et al. 2017). An estimated one-fourth of all American children lose IQ points to pesticide exposures. Children exposed before birth to organophosphate pesticides at the highest level—the highest 20 percent—tested 7.0 IQ points lower than children exposed at the lowest level—the lowest 20 percent (Bouchard et al. 2011). Average on the IQ scale is 100; genius is 140; and disability begins at about 70. Moreover, in this ground-breaking and heartbreaking study, children in the lowest 20 percent of exposure are not at zero, or even non-detectable levels. The number of U.S. children’s IQ points lost to pesticides so far is estimated to be almost as great as the number lost to lead, 17 million versus 23 million (Bellinger 2012). As one group of researchers put it, “A loss of five points in IQ is of minimal significance in a person with an average IQ. However, a shift of five IQ points in the average IQ of a population of 260 million increases the number of functionally disabled by over 50 percent (from 6.0 to 9.4 million) and decreases the number of gifted by over 50 percent (from 6.0 to 2.4 million)” (Schettler et al. 2000, 14). The cost of IQ points lost to organophosphate pesticides alone is estimated at $194–782 billion (Gaylord et al. 2020). So while we have lowered the costs to society of poisoning our children with lead, we are now losing comparable wealth and life quality to other environmental chemicals. In addition to this, childhood exposure to pesticides is highly correlated to later development of Parkinson’s Disease, as well as Alzheimer’s (Stetka 2014; Yan et al. 2016). Birth defects have also been on the increase as a result of environmental exposures. Birth defects are the leading cause of infant mortality, 20.6 percent of infant deaths in 2017, according to the CDC (MMWR 2008; Almli et al. 2020). Down Syndrome, gastroschisis, and anencephaly have all increased since 1999 (EPA 2012). Male pesticide applicators had significantly higher numbers of children with birth defects in Minnesota (Garry et al. 1996) and Egypt (El-Helaly et al. 2011), and neural tube defects occur more frequently when pregnant mothers are exposed to pesticides (Brender et al. 2010; Addissie et al. 2020; Finelli et al. 2021). Anencephaly, or a baby born without much of the brain, is more common when mothers are exposed to pesticides at work (Lacasana et al. 2006), and spina bifida is twice as common among children with fathers exposed to Agent Orange (Ngo et al. 2009). Hypospadias (a defect of the male urethra), micropenis, and cryptorchidism (undescended testes) have all been linked to environmental chemicals, including one study that found a 36 percent increased risk of hypospadias with an exposed mother and a 19 percent increased risk with an exposed father (Rocheleau et al. 2009). In addition, the high rates of testicular cancer had allowed researchers to predict the higher rate of birth defects. There were also smaller testicles and lower sperm counts, on average, even among the relatively disease-free Danish boys (Main et al. 2006). As a result of both early and later exposures,

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sperm count is on the decline globally, with fertility dropping 50 percent in the last 50 years, with no end to the trend in sight (Swan and Colino 2021). Furthermore, we are so fixated on the role of diet and exercise in obesity that we ignore the way we are pouring obesogens and other endocrine disruptors into children’s bodies, and not just through food intake. A review by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) found linkages between pesticides and diabetes as well (Thayer et al. 2012). Puberty has been starting earlier in both girls and boys since the late 1990s, an estimated two years earlier in girls, and early puberty in girls is associated with higher risks of breast cancer and polycystic ovary syndrome (Walvoord 2010; Maron 2015). Research has tied these changes to EDCs (Parent et al. 2005; Zhou et al. 2022), and exposure to environmental chemicals at critical times, including in utero, may be particularly influential (Kelley et al. 2019; Padula et al. 2020; ACOG 2021). EDCs are also likely linked to the increase in autoimmune disease (Parks et al. 2011; Popescu et al. 2021; NIH 2022). Here are other cycles we are breaking out of completely, tampering with the circles and cycles of life, the menstrual cycle, the life cycle, generational cycles, in ways that are hubristic at best and diabolical at worst. Let’s not forget asthma. The number of children with asthma in the United States has gone from 2.1 million in 1980 to 7.1 million in 2009 and is the most common chronic childhood illness in the United States (PAN 2012). Asthma disproportionately affects people of color, with 1 in 6 black children in Chicago living with asthma (Thometz 2018). In Chicago, the overall asthma rate in children is 12.9 percent, but that varies from nearly 0 percent in some neighborhoods to 44 percent in others (Gupta 2008). Much of the increase in asthma is attributable to air pollution, but it has also been linked to pesticides and other environmental chemicals (Sunyer et al. 2006; Hernández et al. 2011). In other words, our toxic affluence/effluence is causing widespread, often severe, preventable disease and death in our children. The image below illustrates how steadily an array of childhood afflictions is increasing. I am reminded of the words of Greta Thunberg, “you say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future before their very eyes” (2018, 2:20). The most conservative, established, trustworthy medical experts agree. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 2012 issued a Statement on Pesticides that sounded a stern and definitive warning that “Chronic toxicity end points identified in epidemiologic studies include adverse birth outcomes including preterm birth, low birth weight, and congenital anomalies, pediatric cancers, neurobehavioral and cognitive deficits, and asthma.” They further stated that “the evidence base is most robust for associations to pediatric cancer and adverse neurodevelopment . . . [including] brain tumors and acute

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Figure 4.1. Children’s Health Harms on the Rise. Statistics show steady increases in many childhood diseases and disorder. Childhood cancer and diabetes are recorded as incidence (new cases per year), while other harms are given as prevalence (total cases at a given time). For more details, see Boyle et al. (2011), CDC (2022), Lawrence et al. (2021), Maenner et al. (2021), Ogden and Carroll (2010), NCI (2022), Zablotsky et al. (2019), and PAN (2013, 2). Source: Infographic by author, 2022.

lymphocytic leukemia . . . reductions in IQ and abnormal behaviors associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism” (Roberts et al. 2012, e1757). Likewise, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have thrown their weight and authority behind protecting children from prenatal exposures by eliminating toxic environmental agents: “Patient exposure to toxic environmental chemicals is ubiquitous, and preconception and prenatal exposure to toxic environmental agents can have a profound and lasting effect on reproductive health across the life course” (ACOG 2013). The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) followed suit in 2015 (Di Renzo 2015). The Endocrine Society issued their first Scientific Statement 2009 and then their second in 2014 “as a wake-up call to the scientific community about how environmental EDCs affect health

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and disease” even at very low levels (Gore et al. 2015). These statements, particularly taken together, represent a scientific consensus among a wide range of medical experts that the chemicals we are steadily dumping into the environment are just as steadily undermining human health and destroying human lives. At some point, we may face non-linear effects. We are changing our environmental conditions much faster than we could possibly adapt to these changes. As the lines of environmental illness climb ever upward, where will all this end? Will we witness the widespread infertility of The Children of Men or The Handmaid’s Tale? Will we see a large proportion of our children succumb to environmentally triggered disease? How many children must die or have their lives ruined before adults are ready to act? Already, so many do. The truth is we are not sure how chemically breaking the cycles of life will end. Not everyone agrees on how very harmful and irreversible are the effects of environmental contamination. In the fight about environmental exposures and disease between the toxicologists versus the epidemiologists and endocrinologists, the toxicologists are the ones dependent on an outdated Cartesian model, bereft of qualities and complexities necessary to accurately represent reality.16 They theorize mostly linear dose-dependent relationships between exposures and disease, though that is very far from a fair representation of disease causation in many cases. Though it is true that in some cases, enough carcinogen introduced into a cell culture will cause cellular damage, or that coal-tar painted on the ears of rabbits will eventually cause every one of them to have cancer, or that workers in certain industries will almost invariably develop disease, what we are learning is that cancer causation, endocrine disruption, and neurocognitive damage are in most cases much more complex and non-linear, with some outsized effects happening at very low doses.17 Actual disease may begin with a mutation in a cell in response to an exposure, but the body typically has immune defenses that attack and eliminate circulating cancer cells. Many environmental chemicals linked to disease, however, increase the likelihood of cancer not because they mutate cells but because they impair the immune system.18 Some do both. Also important to preventing disease is the body’s ability to detoxify, to eliminate noxious substances from the system. Reductionism, atomism, and linear thinking miss synergistic, multiplicative, and low-dose effects. When genetic causes of cancer are thought of, existing genes or gene mutations an individual possesses that predispose them to cancer might spring to mind, a sort of Mendelian fate or doom gene. The highly penetrant BRCA genes that are strongly linked to early-onset breast cancer are popularly known, but inherited single mutations like the BRCA genes account for only about 10 percent of breast cancers overall (Davis et al. 1998; Lichtenstein et al. 2000), and primary genetic factors account for only 5 to 10 percent of all

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cancers (Lichtenstein et al. 2000). The effect of overall heritable factors may be higher, 27 to 42 percent for breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer in one study (Lichtenstein et al. 2000), 5 percent (glioma) to 38 percent (prostate, esophageal) for a wide range of cancers in another (Sampson et al. 2015). Inherited genetics can include more than genes directly implicated in carcinogenesis, for instance a mutation in the PON1 gene that codes for the PON1 enzyme, important in the metabolization of toxicants, in effect causing longer exposures (Nielsen et al. 2005, 2010). Poor metabolizer genes occur in about 40 percent of people measured, countering the idea that these mutations are rare (Infante-Rivard et al. 1999). PON1 polymorphisms are associated with doubled rates of childhood leukemia when also exposed to insecticides or 2,4-D in utero or during childhood (Infante-Rivard et al. 1999). An excess risk of brain cancer with the PON1 polymorphism only manifests when also exposed to pesticides (Nielsen 2005, 2010; Seow and Lim 2019). Our genes, evolving over millions of years of selection cycles, cannot shift rapidly enough to accommodate a linear and accelerating influx of xenobiotic chemicals into air, water, soil, and food. The toxicological model is the basis of our very rudimentary system of EPA registration of pesticides and other environmental chemicals. Chemicals are tested, if at all, on animals, assessing acute, rarely chronic effects. The level that is reported as the no-observed-adverse-effect-level (NOAEL) is then divided by ten because the subject was not human (inter-species variability) and may be dissimilar in some ways, and by another ten because of variation among individuals (intra-species variability), and finally by another 10 (after 1996) as a precaution to protect children before setting the level of pesticide residue tolerances for food. Some notorious studies done on human beings were performed in hopes of eliminating that 10-fold inter-species dose protection because tests were conducted on humans, not other animals; in some cases, these studies were flawed and not peer-reviewed, resulting in lax regulation (van Gemert et al. 2001; Lockwood 2004; Oleskey et al. 2004; ShraderFrechette 2007; Sheppard et al. 2020). In the fight between the toxicologists and the epidemiologists, one uses simplistic computer or animal models, in a Cartesian view removed from reality, isolating systems and considering only ideal, controlled environments, assuming linear relationships between exposures and disease. The other employs methodologies that variously examine what actually happens in real time, with all the flaws that come with operating in the real world rather than in vitro—in cell culture—in silico—in computer models—or in vivo, in genetically manipulated lab animals. In my work surveying the literature of environmental chemicals and their effects on human health, I see researchers complicating their views every year. Going forward in research into disease causation, scientists are

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increasingly focusing not only on the genome, not just on the metabolome (body burden analysis), but on the exposome, or the palette of exposures at different life stages that every human alive now endures (Li et al. 2020; Fenton and Birnbaum 2020). Yet in the popular imagination, the model for environmental chemicals and human health is simplistically and linearly understood if at all. As in other areas of genetic research, we find it is often gene expression, not the genome per se, that is affected by exposure to pesticides and other toxicants, and these epigenetic changes can be passed down the germ line, from generation to generation. So, for instance, a recent study found that exposure to malathion, an organophosphate pesticide, upregulated or downregulated genes linked to cancer in human lymphocytes (Anjitha et al. 2020). These genes were linked to physiological processes ranging from immune function to tumor suppression, and cancers ranging from CML to colon and brain cancer. This change in expression now demonstrates some of the mechanisms behind epidemiologic associations between cancer and pesticide exposures, long observed among agricultural workers and their children. Furthermore, this study shows that while at high doses, cells just died, low-level exposures were sufficient to cause cancer in cells that survived (Anjitha et al. 2020). Similarly, among children exposed at moderate levels to organophosphate pesticides, there are higher levels of cancer than at low doses; at very high levels of exposure, however, there are lower levels of disease among offspring. One set of researchers explain how this could happen by describing all the competing risks of exposure to toxic pesticides like chlorpyrifos: “Within the context of competing risks, ALL is only one outcome affected by exposure along a continuum ranging from subfertility to congenital malformations to fetal loss. In this framework, an elevated risk of ALL would be observed at a moderate level of exposure, but at higher levels of exposure, the observed risk would decrease as the risks of more severe outcomes such as malformation or fetal death increase” (Rull et al. 2009). In other words, the hypothesis is that at high levels of exposure, the fetus simply died, never having been born to experience disease. These studies, among many others, fly in the face of assumptions about dose-effect relationships, often portrayed as a linear graph. Real life is not a line; it is a plexus of entangled relationships, too complex to map out or graph or even to know or perceive by human measurement, not that we should stop trying. By treating reality as linear, we are trampling with clodhopper boots through the delicate flower garden of life. Some researchers are beginning to comprehend these complexities as they see challenges to the myth of single genes being susceptible to single exposures and causing single diseases. Gene-environment interactions, sometimes abbreviated as GxE, are much more complicated, circular, mesh-like, recursive. And of course,

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the contamination, bioaccumulation, and biomagnification we are talking about affects not just human life, but all plants, animals, all organisms: every part of Gaia. Dolphins are just one example of other organisms gravely affected by our gross corruption of ecosystems. Researchers found that there was a high mortality rate among first-born baby dolphins in the polluted waters off Sarasota, Florida. Of course at first, they blamed the mothers: were maternal skills simply lacking among dolphins on their first try? Of course not. What was happening was that the mothers had bioaccumulated so many toxicants that their breast milk outright killed their first-born calf. Having “off-loaded contaminants to a calf,” the body burden of adult females was then lower than males, “allowing the second-born calf a better chance of surviving” (Schwacke et al. 2002). And of course what we see in other mammals, we see in humans too. Pesticides and other environmental chemicals have been shown to cross the placenta and contaminate breast milk (Anderson et al. 2000; Landrigan et al. 2002). Breast milk is at the top of the food chain, and arguably the most contaminated food on the planet. And we see similar disproportional offloading of contaminants to first-born human children as well (Waliszewski et al. 1996; Iida and Nagayama 1999; Yang et al. 2002). We generally think of children as susceptible only to the exposures a mother experiences while children are in utero, but it is the whole history of exposure, her full body burden,19 as well as the father’s, and even the exposures grandparents and great-grandparents may have had. The contaminants we dump into the environment, expecting some linear disease response if any, enter reproductive cycles, bioaccumulating and biomagnifying up through the food chain and down through the generations, haunting even our own heredity. How is it that we think we can continually pour billions of tons of poisons into air, water, soil, and people without severely harming human health? It is only because, I and others argue,20 we see ourselves as separate from nature and on a limitless line into a future where we will somehow find some other technological solution to our morass of technological problems. Some of the poisons we are exposing ourselves and all other organisms to could dissipate relatively quickly: most air pollutants and organophosphates, for instance. Others will linger basically forever: plastics, dioxins, PFAS. Even if we do manage to bring our use of these chemicals to an end, or at least under control, the only real resolution will be time, leaving this period of toxic contamination behind as a line in the geological record, along with the geological scars of all our massive earth-carving alterations of the planet.21

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HUMANS AND FOOD Bioaccumulation and epigenetic change are only some of the ways in which humans are living linearly when the human animal is built on a cyclical model. While we maintain some sense of cycles, in the seasons, for instance, we are increasingly losing a sense of generational and daily cycles. We in Western society increasingly live alone and increasingly break bonds with family, even parents, seeing ourselves as independent units, easily transportable, rather than immersed in an organic community. Estranging family members is even at times seen as “an expression of personal growth” (Coleman 2021). As I discussed in the previous chapter, we ignore circadian rhythms, the “circ” of sunrise and sunset to which our bodies are tuned, shiftwork keeping the hearts of cities beating long after dark. And as people are ever more protected from temperature changes by heating and air conditioning, even weather and seasonal variations seem to matter less; most Westerners have no sense of what it means to eat seasonally. Perhaps this loss of rhythms is due not only to our disconnect from light, dark, wind, rain, snow, the outdoors; perhaps it is also is in part because while people in traditional societies, hunter-gatherers among the Inuit and the Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, might imagine themselves passing the same traditions, knowledge, environment, and foodways down to their children and grandchildren, people in Western society, particularly in the United States, are preoccupied with upward mobility, with propelling their children in a line up the hierarchy of education and income, leaving the past behind. Perhaps this is one reason for increasingly stark disparities in wealth and income— there is never too much affluence in a system that prizes an ever-upward trajectory. But we are thwarting our own ambitions in this regard by passing down through our lineage bioaccumulated chemicals that reside more or less permanently in soil, water, bodies, and ecosystems; we transmit through our germ lines accumulating genetic damage in the form of epigenetic changes, often to our detriment. As many others have observed, we have also broken cycles in our food production.22 We are what we eat, and our bodies are meant to be fueled and built in symbiosis with our local environment. Not only have we broken the cycle of life by using artificial inputs to generate chemically contaminated crops that kill the microbes in the soil, along with the microbes we depend on in our guts. Not only do we fail to compost our food waste and excreta, whose nutrients should be fed back into the Earth. We also, egregiously, waste 40 percent of our finished food in the United States, 33 percent globally (EPA 2022); that is, the food whose generation is 31 percent of the total human carbon footprint—for which we contaminate the Earth and kill the soil

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and poison our children—we throw in the landfill, where it digests anaerobically, generating methane.23 By contrast, innovators are working to return our food system to a vestige of its former wholeness and circularity: biomimicry, permaculture based on natural systems, urban organic agriculture—there are many ways to reimplement natural food systems despite the formidable challenges of industrial agriculture and globalized food.24 Just as we can see how our cultural, technological, and industrial bridling of the world artificially imposes linearity, we can see how underneath that, the wholeness and circularity of natural systems reassert themselves when allowed to flourish, to rewild, to recuperate from our impositions. Oddly, we human animals struggle against the reins of our own invented constraints at times, as do so many other living systems on the Earth. Perhaps what is needed is to unharness our imagination by considering alternate models we know to be true that nevertheless challenge conventional thinking about the overall nature of reality. ECOSYSTEMS, TREES, BACTERIA: RADICAL INTERDEPENDENCE Models and paradigms from ecology are more fit for life on Earth than those drawn from cosmology. Ecosystems are still conceived of as webs, counter to the linear ins and outs of human management. It would be well-nigh impossible to graph or schematize our true relation to the world and to other organisms. This book is primarily conceived of as a save-the-humans kind of project, but there is no saving humans without saving the other animals, plants, and microorganisms we are in community with. Many foresee that the Anthropocene has launched the beginning of the sixth mass extinction (Newitz 2014; Kolbert 2014). It is unfortunately beyond the range of this book to do justice to the subject, though others have.25 However, we have only to consider a few case studies to see what we are doing. Climate change directly imperils the survival of polar bears (Molnár et al. 2020; Bromaghin et al. 2021); corals, along with the one-third of marine species they support (Zoccola et al. 2020); and a multitude of other species in the near and longer-term future (IPBES 2019; Román-Palacios and Wiens 2020). Though humans compose just 0.01 percent of life, they have destroyed 83 percent of wild mammals, with the result that among mammals presently on the Earth, 36 percent by weight are humans, an additional 60 percent are our food mammals, and only 4 percent are wild mammals. Poultry for human food dwarf wild birds 70 percent to 30 percent by weight (Carrington 2018; Bar-On et al. 2018). It’s not just larger animals: monarch butterflies and other pollinators are, many of them, on their way to extinction because of our destruction of

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habitats and widespread pesticide use (Schultz 2017; Dicks et al. 2021); and the biomass of insects globally has been reduced by an astonishing 80 percent in just the last 30 years as a result of industrial agriculture, climate change, and intensive pesticide use (Carrington 2019; Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO) and others are increasingly linking human health to the health of ecosystems and biodiversity, calling for a “planetary health” approach: “These changes are essential to avoid widespread and profound damage to ecosystems, upon which human survival ultimately depends” (2015, 237). So often, humans feel that they must impose their agency on nature to manage it, rather than nature managing itself; as we have seen, this is an Enlightenment, much less so a pre-Copernican attitude. But what we are increasingly finding is that natural forests, for instance, rarely need to be “managed” (Jaroszewicz et al. 2019). Often, that is a euphemism or excuse for cutting trees. Rather, when nature is left to itself, it recuperates, restores its networks, its cycles, and its organisms, in a process of rewilding, an idea that may in the future supplant the more human-dominated models of conservation, preservation, and restoration.26 In destroying trees, people often think in terms of destroying natural resources or raw material versus what we are actually doing: destroying a community and an intelligence, what is actually there. Suzanne Simard has shown how fungal networks in the forest floor link individual trees and allow for almost instantaneous, complex communication: “the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes . . . as rapidly as phone calls. . . . Why do they have human-like behaviors, and why do they work like civil societies?” (2021, 5). It turns out that there are mother trees, and that, perhaps, these mothers love their sapling children too, providing them food, water, and wisdom, favoring their own. Trees are not just the straight boards we make them in sizes we designate: one-by-fours, two-by-ten-by-tens. They are branches, both above and below the Earth, governed by symmetries that are simple in some regards but complex in others. They are, it turns out, webs of roots and mycorrhizal fungi and chemicals that communicate one with the other in a relationship of mutualism and cooperation, just as we do with our commensal bacteria. Their root networks are as complex as neural networks, and perhaps as intelligent (Simard 2021). Trees, in other words, are more like the spirits of the woods we once imagined than the raw material for our production that we have made them. In fact, perhaps that is the beauty of wood as material; my hardwood floors are not just lines composed of narrow strips of oak; they are also curved arcs and rugged swirls, the life and grain of the wood emerging out of human rectilinear constraints, beautiful with the full and unpredictable

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rhythms of nature beyond our manufacture. We standardize and polish and hew without seeing that our materials have a life beyond us. In contrast to our dominant linear paradigms, we exist in networks of radical interdependence with other organisms. Recent study of the microbiomes of individuals, communities, soils, and ecosystems have revolutionized our understanding of identity. The effects of gut bacteria on human health are so intricate and complex as to be scarcely able to be unraveled. It is a shock to learn that the cells of our microbiota (bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, protozoa), which are part of us and without which we could not survive, outnumber our human cells ten to one. We are ourselves complex ecosystems, not unitary monoliths headed on a straight track through time. In addition, these microbes depend for their functionality upon horizontal gene transfer from the environment; in other words, our microbiome is in constant contact and interchange with the people, animals, and microbiota that surround us (WHO 2015, 8). In the meantime, while scientists frantically document disappearing microbiome communities among traditional hunter gatherers (Schnorr et al. 2014), we have extinguished much of the gut microbiome of our ancestors (Maixner 2021; Kulbatski 2022). The new understanding of microbiomes challenges our ideas of autonomy, atomism, and linear relationships. Abiotic or gnotobiotic mice, germ-free animals grown as controls, are thoroughly unhealthy, demonstrating gut abnormalities, vitamin deficiencies, poorly developed lymphatic systems, and shortened lifespans (Fiebiger et al. 2016). Children raised in the absence of farmyard manure, without having their immune systems adequately educated, face higher risks of autism and other maladies (Gilbert et al. 2013; Hsiao et al. 2013; Gilbert and Knight 2017). Talk about returning to the Earth: fecal microbiome transplant (FMT) is now the gold-standard treatment for the dire intestinal infection Clostridium difficile (C. diff) and holds promise for treatment of Crohn’s Disease, obesity, and autism (Kelly et al. 2014; Kang et al. 2017; Tabouy et al. 2018). Our gut microbes regulate not just our gut health, but even our thoughts via the gut-brain axis (Sampson and Mazmanian 2015; Silva et al. 2020). This research flies in the face of Manichean or Cartesian dualism of body and soul. Mind and body are inseparable. Humans living with pets have different and perhaps more diverse and healthier microbiota than those without (Tun et al. 2017; Kates et al. 2020). Antibiotics kill lethal pathogens but also kill and stunt and impede the beneficial gut biota we must have to survive and thrive. We are not the discrete, separate beings we once thought ourselves; rather, we are plural, we are legion, we are shared, we are one. We cannot improvidently interrupt the cycles of life without consequences, as so many others have argued. That is not to say we should never do so—as a human, I greatly value antibiotics and vaccines that have saved my life,

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perhaps many times over. But we should administer interventions judiciously, with an understanding that unintended consequences are likely. Thus, antibiotics to save a child from pneumonia are one thing; antibiotics systematically and automatically laden into livestock feed to increase growth and prevent infection in filthy conditions are quite another. We are linked in webs of community by our microbiome, to our experiences, to other humans, to our animals, to our soil, to our food, and of course to microbes themselves. What we used to consider commensal microflora, or microorganisms neutral to our health, are now understood as essential to it. Babies born via C-section face health consequences when they are not inoculated with their mother’s vaginal microbiome, so much so that some well-educated mothers are swabbing their children with vaginal secretions at birth when a C-section is vitally necessary.27 It’s not just microbes that link mother and child, by the way: fragmentary DNA from the child continues to circulate in the mother’s body for her whole life, forming a microchimera, or composite creature on a cellular level.28 We are accustomed, perhaps, to think of microbial exchange during sexual intercourse or childbirth, but usually in the context of communicable disease, not in the sense of beneficial microbiomes that forge a lifelong link among individuals, that continue to live, reproduce, and flourish down through generations, independently of human genetic inheritance.29 This lineage too, or rather this mesh that stretches among individuals and across generations, we are systematically eradicating with antibiotics, antibacterial cleansers, and toxic, pesticide-contaminated food, a biological heritage that is now in danger of perishing before we have even plumbed its mysteries. SYMMETRIES The meshes, webs, networks of ecology and biology are more akin to the geometrical imagination of the Middle Ages than of now. There is a natural reality that seems magical in its ability to exceed our ken and to shame our simplistic views of nature. On the other hand, there’s nothing much more linear, and finite, than extinction. Evolution is portrayed as a branched line— but what happens when all branches stop? A thin black line is drawn across the lives of so many individuals and species during extinction. By contrast, consider the geometries found in living nature. Rarely is there a perfectly straight line, even more rarely rectilinear forms. Rather, there is spherical symmetry: planets, bubbles, atoms, streptococcus, the green algae Volvox. There are branched lines like fractal patterns, forming beautiful tree forms, frost on windowpanes, Romanesco broccoli, nerve cells in living organisms. Five-fold symmetry, a form of rotational symmetry, is seen in starfish, sea

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urchins, the medieval rose, and the pentagonal star that captures so well the golden mean. Six-fold rotational symmetry entrances with the intricate tracery of snowflakes. Fibonacci sequences underlay the whorls of sunflower seeds, the phyllotactic arrangement of leaves on a stem, the spiral growth of animal horns or mollusk shells. Logarithmic spirals govern the formation of cyclones and galaxies, and the approach of a hawk to its prey, in an angled descent keeping its target in sharp focus.30 Mathematicians work to formulate the principles behind the movement of a swarm of bees, a school of fish, a flock of geese, a murmuration of starlings, emergent behaviors that arise from simple rules followed by individuals in community. These symmetries may seem strange and remarkable to us now, surrounded on all sides by simple rectilinear symmetries of our own creation: writing, paper, books, computers, phones, rugs, furniture, windows, doors, walls, houses, skyscrapers, roads, maps. From the air, we see our roads and boundaries laid out in lines upon the Earth—lines imposed on what was once prairie, plain, marsh, and mountain—farmland apportioned into squares and rectangles, once hill and hollow, fen and forest, once arrayed over piedmont swells and along meandering lines. At night, the lines we have drawn on the Earth smolder with the burnt energy of a hundred million years, quietly poisoning us all. Hardly an acre is left untrammeled. It would be difficult to overstate how greatly we have imposed the straight line on our built environment in Western culture. While some few of our lines are yet bent to the sphere of the world—linear flight paths that curve around the Earth, for instance—our imaginations are possessed still by Cartesian geometries: abstract, displaced, reductive, intangible, and linear—rather than the various geometries, the symmetrical asymmetries of nature: embodied, physical, varied, particular, actual.31 In nature, geometry functions, but in relations as various as spheres, spirals, pentagons, hexagons, icosohedrons, dodecahedrons: more similar, in fact, to complex Euclidian geometries, more like the compounded geometry of spherical motion than its component, linear forces. I think here, too, of Thoreau’s sandy bank melting in the Spring sun, with its liver-like lobes and “sandy overflow . . . something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. . . . You here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed. . . . What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” (1854, 242–43), the inorganic mimicking the organic. “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf,” Thoreau assures us, laying out the analogous symmetries between palm leaves and palms of hands, insisting that “the earth is not a mere fragment of dead history . . . but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, not a fossil earth, but a living earth” (1854, 244).32 And while there are these underlying symmetries, nevertheless, the contingency of life and the infinite generative capacity of nature mean that the reality is more complex still: no two snowflakes are alike, no two fingerprints are

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the same, even among identical twins. Very early in embryonic development, almost as soon as the zygote divides, individuation begins, and the irises of identical twins, though similar in color, are marked by tiny patterns formed by happenstance—chaotic morphogenesis in the womb—which allows iris identification to distinguish them (Daugman and Downing 2020). Symmetry breaking is an important natural process in generating the complexity and variety of life. We have tended to think of genetics and development as linear, inevitable, a predictable song unfolding according to an inalterable score and a strict tempo. Rather, development proceeds contingently, improvisation along certain themes, influenced by other players, surroundings, and chance. And we know now that interference at critical intervals—by slight temperature changes, by minute chemical influences, by delicate nudges of the environment—can cut off and silence the song of individual development or the symphony of communal life completely and irrevocably. We are at a point where so much is bound to die, to end, yet so much could still be saved. We are on a threshold, a boundary, a borderland, from which, once crossed, we will never return. From the imagined future, we call them back: bears, birds, butterflies, bacteria. . . . our best beloved. But they do not answer, and once extinct, they will never come again. The line of emissions curves upward, and indeed may never curve back. I am reminded of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Like the ghost of a dear friend dead Is Time long past. A tone which is now forever fled, A hope which is now forever past, A love so sweet it could not last, Was Time long past. . . . There is regret, almost remorse, For Time long past. ’Tis like a child’s beloved corse A father watches, till at last Beauty is like remembrance, cast From Time long past. (1820)

Where will all this end? Are you optimistic or pessimistic, my students ask? I cannot tell them. I hope we can avert worse catastrophe than we are already in for, and I intend to do all I can in that direction. What I do know, I tell them, is that it is in our hands, and that we will collectively decide our own fate in the next ten or fifteen years, according to the 2018 IPCC Special Report. I cannot say what will happen because it is not under my control alone, and because human behavior is so radically unpredictable, so often utterly irrational. What I do know is that we have had a colossal failure of

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collective imagination: not just that we have failed to imagine the consequences of our actions, but that we have imagined our way into this catastrophe as a result of our prevailing paradigms. And I do believe that in order to implement even the pragmatic solutions we have already onboard, we are going to have to imagine our way out of this dilemma: we need to radically rethink our assumptions and re-view the world. NOTES 1. For more on the Drake Equation, which estimates the probability of other intelligent life in the universe, and the Fermi paradox, which asks why we nevertheless have no confirmed signs of other intelligent life, see Jones (1985) and Webb (2015). 2. Frank et al. speculate that planets that have made the sapezoic transition in regard to planetary stewardship may operate very differently from us: “the demands of sustainability may require that the energy use and other planetary perturbations enacted by such a long-lived civilization are more subtle than those ‘super-civilizations’ imagined in the early days of SETI” (2022, 12). 3. I have written before about the capacity of fiction to facilitate the imagination of global environmental catastrophe (Kauth 2015), and there is a nascent Cli-Fi tradition, among which I particularly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, Capital Trilogy, and other works; Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy; David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks; and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. 4. Vandana Shiva describes three separate economies, the latter two of which are largely ignored in modern economics: the market economy, the sustenance economy, and nature’s economy (2015). Economists since Wilfred Beckerman (1976), responding to The Limits of Growth from The Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972), have argued that growth is essential to human prosperity. But Jason Hickel argues that we can enjoy radical abundance with a degrowth economy (2019). On growth, degrowth, and voluntary simplicity, see also John Cassidy (2020), Vaclav Smil (2019), Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2019), Tim Jackson (2017), Giorgos Kallis (2018), Juliet Schor (2011), and Bill McKibben (2008). As Kenneth Boulding argued long ago (1966), the linear growth of the economy cannot continue forever on a Spaceship Earth. Smil puts the dilemma of this discourse particularly well: “Most economists are either unaware or dismissive of the advances that took place in our understanding of the synergistic functioning of civilization and the biosphere—and yet they maintain a monopoly on supplying their physically impossible narratives of continuing growth that guide decisions made by national governments and companies” (2019, 507). 5. The CDC describes the continued contamination of humans, even of fetuses via the placenta, as well as the migration of this persistent pollutant globally: “This cycle of evaporation and deposition may be repeated many times. As a result, DDT, DDE, and DDD can be carried long distances in the atmosphere. These chemicals have been found in bogs, snow, and animals in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, far from where they were ever used” (CDC 2015).

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6. Much has been written on the long and arduous battle to get lead out of paint and gasoline, meantime leaving a long legacy of brain poison in soil, pipes, and housing. See Markowitz and Rosner (2013). 7. Perhaps the best book on this subject is Devra Davis’s devastating condemnation of those complicit in the deaths of millions by cancer: Secret History of the War on Cancer. Also excellent is Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2010). 8. NHANES data show that in 2003–2012, while 3.24 percent of children overall ages 1–5 had a BLL>5µg/dL, 7.8 percent of non-Hispanic Black children did (Jain 2016). In addition, lower income correlates to higher blood lead levels (Campbell 2016). See also CDC (2013). 9. Blood levels of cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine, have been reduced 70 percent in non-smokers over the last 15 years, a result of the public health campaign against smoking and laws that restrict smoking in public places (CDC 2009). 10. PFAS have increasingly been linked to health effects like decreased birth weight, reproductive effects, liver and thyroid effects, and cancer (Pelch et al. 2019; Deepika et al. 2022). 11. For more information on BPA and health effects, see Singh and Shoei-Lung Li (2012); Ma et al. (2019); and particularly, vom Saal and Vandenberg, who show “overwhelming evidence of harm” in thousands of studies as a result of an NIEHS-led CLARITY-BPA government-academic collaborative created in 2012. They openly critique the FDA’s rejection of low-dose data and dependence on monotonic (read linear) dose responses, identifying this as one of four incorrect assumptions, another of which is that “only toxicological guideline studies are valid.” They critique the FDA’s understanding of the basic principles of endocrinology and further argue that “CLARITY-BPA has shed light on why traditional methods of evaluating toxicity are insufficient to evaluate endocrine disrupting chemicals” (2020, 1). This recent study provides an illustration of how whole science disciplines, especially those dominated by industry and regulatory agencies, have imposed linear metaphors and assumptions on much more complex biological systems. 12. Read more on REACH at https:​//​ec​.europa​.eu​/environment​/chemicals​/reach​/ reach​_en​.htm and https:​//​ec​.europa​.eu​/environment​/integration​/research​/newsalert​/ pdf​/precautionary​_principle​_decision​_making​_under​_uncertainty​_FB18​_en​.pdf. 13. See the authoritative tome on this issue, Pediatric Environmental Health, edited by Ruth Etzel (2018). 14. Some studies have shown the fetal stage to be the most sensitive to pesticide exposure, with narrow, critical windows of development (Chance and Harmsen 1998, Infante-Rivard et al. 1999). 15. For more on Arctic contamination and grasshopper effects, see Berti et al. 1997; Vanderlinden 1997; Webster 2005; Silva and Gammon 2009; Hung et al. 2010; Rylander et al. 2011; Fredslund and Bonefeld-Jørgensen 2012; Odland and Nieboer 2012. 16. Read the exposé on the conflict between toxicologists and epidemiologists by Valerie Brown and Elizabeth Grossman (2015). Toxicologists, funded by industry, rely on physiological based pharmacokinetic (PBPK)—or computer—modeling of

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how toxic substances are expected to act in vivo, rather than actual data on how chemicals affect living beings. Brown and Grossman argue that the entire field of regulatory toxicology has been not only shaped by but in part created by the chemical industry to oppose regulation in the interest of human health. Dr. Linda Birnbaum, the world-renowned scientist who directs the NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NTP) has said that the PBPK model “tells you nothing about effects” (2015). 17. The first paper on coal-tar causing cancer when applied to the ears of rabbits dates back more than a hundred years (Yamagiwa 1918), and there have been thousands of such studies since. See also Devra Davis (2009) on occupational exposures and disease. 18. Strikingly, research shows that exposures to pesticides and other toxicants can cause both steps of cancer initiation: the initial mutation and the hit to the immune system that allows the cancer to emerge. Many pesticides, including organophosphates, carbamates, and pyrethroids, have been shown to cause direct DNA damage in lymphocytes, or white blood cells (Undeger and Basaran 2005; Metayer et al. 2016). Others, including DDT, pyrethroids, and chlorinated pesticides, affect the immune system, allowing for development of cancer (Hoffman 2006; Metayer et al. 2016). For childhood leukemia, a two-hit theory prevails, with in utero mutation by chance or on account of exposure occurring in many more babies than actually develop overt ALL. Then, in some cases, a second exposure initiates overt leukemia (Greaves 2018). 19. I highly recommend Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen (2013), who grew up in Rocky Flats, Colorado, one of the sites in the U.S. most contaminated with nuclear radiation. 20. The deep ecologists are best on this, particularly Arne Næss (1973). Charles S. Brown puts it this way: “the Radical Ecologists . . . claim that environmental destruction and crisis are caused by core beliefs within our worldview that sanction, legitimate, and even encourage the domination and technological control of nature” (2003, xiii). 21. See Elizabeth Kolbert’s article on the Anthropocene (2019). Also see Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (Butler 2015) at https:​//​populationspeakout​ .org​/the​-book​/view​-book​/. 22. See, especially, Michael Pollan (2007), Barbara Kingsolver (2007), Vandana Shiva (2015), and Dan Barber (2015). 23. This number has increased 17 percent over the past three decades, as impacts from land use and pre- and post-production processes like food processing, packaging, transportation, and household waste disposal increased (Tubiello et al. 2021). 24. Just for starters, visit the Biomimicry Institute at https:​//​biomimicry​.org​/stories​ -field​/, Stojanovic (2019), and Blok and Gremmen (2016). 25. Excellent resources on species extinction and loss of biodiversity include the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019) and WHO’s Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health (2015). 26. I will discuss rewilding further in chapter 6.

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27. For more on the acquisition and disruption of microbiome at birth, before, and after, see Dominguez-Bello et al. (2019). On vaginal seeding of C-section babies, see Mueller et al. (2019). 28. See Boddy et al. (2015) on fetal-maternal microchimerism. Also, very notably, see Lynn Margulis on chimeras and endosymbiosis or symbiogenesis (Sagan 1967; Margulis 1970; Margulis and Sagan 2003; Lane and Martin 2010: Margulis et al. 2011), the evolutionary origin of all eukaryotes. On the puzzle of male microchimerism in females, even in the absence of a male pregnancy, see Johnson et al. (2021). 29. For more on how microbiomes can influence reproduction pre- and post-copulation and even exert selective pressure on the host species, see Rowe et al. (2020). 30. The most commonly cited originator of studying these mathematical patterns in nature is D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1917). For a more recent exploration of symmetries, Tyler Volk (1995) applies the idea of “metapatterns,” or patterns of patterns, to symmetries in space, time, and mind, including spheres, border, binaries, layers, arrows, and cycles. 31. Phenomenologists see what is there—see and describe what is before their eyes. Thoreau describes it thus: “Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” (1964, “Ktaahdn”). Jungians describe how what is there pervades and shapes our imagination of the world and even our dreams so that we do indeed have collective culture, imagination, symbols, and dreams to one extent or another, various though our experiences may be. 32. Cat’s Paws and Catapults, by Steven Vogel (1998), offers a marvelous explanation for both the analogies and differing mechanics between human technology, which prizes right angles and sharp edges, and nature’s symmetries and solutions to similar problems.

Chapter 5

Paradigm Shifts

How have theorists imagined space and our human relationship to nature and cosmos? What metaphors undergird our understandings of time and place, and how does that alter how we behave in the world? These are questions that are at the base of the great scientific paradigm shifts, none more so than the shift that occurred from Copernicus to Newton. Perhaps it’s not surprising we cannot get all of it right. The human brain cannot perfectly encompass reality, nor can any one metaphor or paradigm perfectly capture it. But some cause more damage than others. And when there is a mismatch between governing paradigms and metaphors and correct action in the world, disaster can ensue—and is ensuing. In this chapter, I will pry at the essence of natural and physical metaphors within the context of eco-phenomenology and argue that there is a moral obligation to intentionally shape the metaphors and paradigms we use in ways that will help enable the survival of the physical world and the ecosystems on which we depend. METAPHORS, SPACE, AND PLACE The inability to find one paradigm that captures reality is understandable if, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue, “there is [no] such thing as objective (absolute and unconditional) truth, though it has been a long-standing theme in Western Culture . . . the idea that there is absolute objective truth is not only mistaken but socially and politically dangerous. . . . Truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined in large part by metaphor” (1980, 159). Lakoff and Johnson claim that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” and that “our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities” (1980, 3). Or, as Michael David Travers paraphrases in his work on metaphors in computer programming, “Metaphor in this sense is not a mere linguistic device used only for the figurative embellishment of 135

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otherwise straightforward language, but a fundamental way of learning and structuring conceptual systems, a part of everyday discourse” (1996). This is true even though we are not normally aware of our conceptual systems. I would suggest our ordinary conceptual systems are structured by several important metaphors discussed in this project: motion, time, thought, and action are naturally linear; people move through time and space singly along a line; humans are above, outside, and act upon nature; and solutions are technical and proceed from specialization and atomization. Lakoff and Johnson further claim that “The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another . . . will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept” (1980, 10). So, for instance, the systematic perception of motion, time, thought, and action as linear crowds out ways in which those things can be recursive or circular, or when motion, time, thought, and action are circular, they are seen as negative and regressive rather than positive and progressive. Finally, Lakoff and Johnson perceptively note how “Similarities based on conventional metaphors are nonetheless real in our culture, since conventional metaphors partly define what we find real” (1980, 153). This is fundamentally a phenomenological view of reality, a focus on the lived experience of human beings. So people act upon the Earth as object, as infinite material resource, dead and exploitable, because the metaphors we use tell us that is the case. Because our metaphors are askew from reality in this particular way, when we should instead be thinking of the Earth as organism, our mother and our sister, with recursive, cyclical life systems and intimate connections among all organisms including us, we think and act wrongly, based on our cosmology, and thereby create our own doom. Some might argue that metaphors are just words, simply ways of knowing with no inherent moral weight, but in their consequences, metaphors can be ethical or unethical, helpful in preserving life or the reverse. The problem is that certain metaphors enable different kinds of human behavior, which may be either productive or destructive. Ultimately, just like theorists in the Middle Ages, we still map the macrocosm of the universe onto the microcosm of our bodies and individual selves, as well as the geocosm of the world, and vice versa. And as the model for the macrocosm has changed, so have our actions in regard to the geocosm and our microcosms on Earth. We see in these parallels an occupation with scale, as thinkers, medieval and modern, grapple with concepts of nature that range from atoms to galaxies to multiverses. The imbrication of social, mental, and physical spaces indubitably affects scientific conceptualization.1 Perhaps it should seem obvious how much scientific theories and paradigm shifts affect the culture more generally, yet most are not aware of it, at least not in its subtler influences. Gaston Bachelard (1957) and Henri Lefebvre (1974), however, both theorize how the conception of space affects human

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perception of many other things, how we import its notions into our everyday and intimate lives and imaginations.2 Bachelard describes how we relate our domestic space to the larger imagined space of the universe: “We should therefore have to say how we inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialectics of life, how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world.’ For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (1964, 4).3 He goes on to detail how various spaces influence our imagination, down to drawers and corners, shells and nests and up to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. In his musings about how space affects identity, Bachelard recognizes that for many, the imagination of the universe has priority even over that of immediate surroundings: “There is no dearth of abstract, ‘world-conscious’ philosophers who discover a universe by means of the dialectical game of the I and the non-I. In fact, they know the universe before they know the house, the far horizon before the resting-place; whereas the real beginnings of images, if we study them phenomenologically, will give concrete evidence of the values of inhabited space, of the non-I that protects the I” (1964, 4–5).4 The relationship between house and universe is complex: “In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space” (1964, 47).5 The parallels made between cosmological and domestic space are striking. Consider notions of indoors and outdoors—the outdoors is often seen as the “real world,” but this only emphasizes how easily boxes that we construct, large or small, become our native habitat, habituate our senses to the nearby and enclosed. There is also the sense in which the enclosure serves as a comforting contrast to outside vicissitudes of weather: the warm house on a snowy day, the featherbed as tempests storm outside the window. Bachelard wonders if this equation between house and human values is merely an exaggerated metaphor or whether a psychologist would read the fear of the unknown—and he argues that the phenomenologist would not so reduce the image, but would consider it a part of lived experience. Our cosmological models directly affect how we conceptualize, shape, and move through the world, so it is no wonder that a dramatic paradigm shift in the former would transform how we behave in the latter. Lefebvre theorizes about the connection between the new mathematical understanding of space, the flaws in the paradigms, and the metaphorical fallout—between space and mental space, which is seen to be its equivalent: “thus mathematicians appropriated space, and time, and made them part of their domain, yet they did so in a rather paradoxical way. They invented spaces—an ‘indefinity,’ so to speak, of spaces. . . . But the relationship between mathematics and reality—physical or social reality—was not

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obvious, and indeed a deep rift had developed between these two realms” (1974, 2).6 He observes how even though there are a multiplicity of spaces within the universe, they are unified under the notion of cosmology, without which human society cannot be conceived (1974, 13–14). Building on the work of Marx and Engels, Lefebvre argues that nature as we now experience it is, like everything in this view, produced by being modified (1974, 68–70). In a sense, imaginatively, the entire cosmos could be seen as being produced by the human work of understanding it, similar to the way that colonists only saw land as complete once human hands had worked it. And the productions of the pre-Copernican and post-Newtonian scientific projects are entirely different because of their different assumptions, mathematics, and metaphors. The confusion of these constructions with an objective “nature” then results in some of its abuses, as physically built places are made to reproduce imagined space. Many people, when they talk of space or place, might conflate the terms, or at least struggle to distinguish them. I would argue this is in part our imaginative overlay of space, as conceptualized with cosmic metaphors and the Cartesian grid of measurement, onto place, the specific environments and places we can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, and traverse. Place—those particular landscapes and built environments filled with mountains, valleys, rivers, soils, trees, plants, houses, roads, insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, and people—becomes space, which becomes a mere framework for humans to shape to our tastes, exploiting materials extracted from elsewhere. Edward Casey, in his influential The Fate of Place, argues that gradually over centuries in the Western tradition, place was subsumed and assimilated to space: “place came to be considered a mere ‘modification’ of space (in Locke’s revealing term)—a modification that aptly can be called ‘site,’ that is, leveled-down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises” (1997, 10). Actual places on the Earth are razed and made mere blank slates for human endeavors. He associates this universalizing move with colonialism and shows how particular places were lost to universal space: The colonizing tendency of Christianity is echoed in the attempts of Galilean, Cartesian, and Newtonian physics to appropriate whole realms formerly consigned to alchemy and “natural philosophy,” not to mention local custom and history. In both instances, the power of place, uncontested in the ancient world (and still potently present in medieval times), was put into abeyance—indeed, often literally abolished, and with as much relentless force as that with which native peoples were subjected to Christian indoctrination. By the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal space came to be regarded as obtaining not just for the external world and for God but also for the mind of the knowing subject. (1997, 102–3)

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Casey poses this struggle as a triumph of universe over cosmos, the former indicating in its etymology “one totalized whole,” while cosmos has a sense of the particular, the experienced (1997, 103). Furthermore, he identifies this shift as originating in the growing possibility of infinite space, itself predicated on the potential for the Earth to move. Timothy Morton captures Casey’s argument about the increasing destabilization of place qua place: Casey’s The Fate of Place tells of how place went from being a fully fledged philosophical concept, wholly different from space, to a non-thing, an empty or arbitrary demarcation, at most a subjective experience rather than a concrete entity. It started with the idea of infinity, promoted in medieval Neoplatonic thinking on the nature of God. The evacuation of place reached its apex in the idea of space as a system of mathematical points (Newton, Descartes, and Locke). The rise of commercial capitalism, with its necessary abstractions of time and space, and the development of technologies such as mapping, transformed objective place into a pie in the sky, at best a dream to which Romantic poetry could longingly aspire. . . . (2009, 169–70)

It’s astonishing to think to what extent we have lost a sense of place, a sense of the sanctity of particular places. In our current imagination, informed by our cosmology, every thing, from a chair to a person to a natural landscape, is not its own self but matter molded momentarily into a particular form and therefore disposable, a mere shifting image on its linear journey to elsewhere. BODIES AND BUILDINGS There is a theory of the body that goes with all this, and in fact, much of my work has explored how human beings map architectural, cosmological, or other metaphors onto the body—and the body onto the world (Kauth 1995, 2010). These shifting ways of conceiving of reality and space find a parallel in efforts to see the human body, one that rejects Cartesian dualism.7 This is how we understand the world, the geocosm, as we are a macrocosm and a microcosm of it. The theory of the body in Plato’s Timaeus corresponds to the divine and cosmological model of the sphere. Here, the human beings would also be spheres to perfectly represent God and the universe, if it weren’t for our pesky need for features, bodies, and limbs. As Marjorie Nicolson observes of later correspondences between body and sphere, “Like the geocosm, the microcosmic body of man repeated the circle. . . . Indeed the surrealists of that day—who were the poets as well as the painters—drew their pictures

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of the human body not in a succession of cubes but in circles and cylinders, parabolas, arcs, and ellipses, striving—in the words of a seventeenth-century writer—for ‘that perfection which is found in the Spherical Figure . . . ’” (Nicolson 1960, 52). The human head was seen as like to the divine circle of the cosmos. Bachelard waxes poetic on how roundness functions as a metaphor, in reference to the cosmos and to being itself: When metaphysicians speak briefly, they can reach immediate truth, a truth that, in due course, would yield to proof. . . . Thus, without commentary, Van Gogh wrote: “Life is probably round.” And Joë Bousquet, with no knowledge of Van Gogh’s sentence, wrote: “He had been told that life was beautiful. No! Life is round. . . . ” [And] I believe that it would be advisable to reduce Jaspers’ formula by one word, in order to make it phenomenologically purer. I should say, therefore: das Dasein ist rund, being is round. (1964, 232, 234)8

Here, in post-Enlightenment texts, notions of roundness contend with dominant linear metaphors, their very rarity producing surprise. How we imagine the cosmos shapes the way we see nature and the self. Carolyn Merchant observes that “A view of nature can be seen as a projection of human perceptions of self and society onto the cosmos. Conversely, theories about nature have historically been interpreted as containing implications about the way individuals or social groups behave or ought to behave” (1980, 69). The medieval imagination of the basic underlying ideal shape, the round form, distorts the body in ways that are very different from what we imagine now. In the post-Newtonian period, we seem fixated on lines, especially for women. Classical ballet, established as a standard form in the seventeenth century, is about the line of the body. Michel Foucault argues that the materiality of power exerts itself on the bodies of individuals to shape them according to the needs and desires of societies (1977; 1978); many feminists argue that female bodies, and increasingly male, are literally shaped according to the desires of culture (Coffey 2016). We seem to wish models and even normal women to be as thin as possible, with the lines of arms and legs the dominant silhouette, contrasting with fashion in the European Middle Ages and in other cultures, where dresses often made women seem more voluminous and sphere-like. In the Middle Ages, we see the body literally and visually mapped onto the world in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Figure I.2) and the Vitruvian man (Figure I.4). This is an understanding of the human body as not only analogous to but part and parcel with the world in one entire whole, microcosm to geocosm to macrocosm. What happens when we are broken out of the older model, as occurred during the seventeenth century? Humans are seen as not only on a linear trajectory, not only as more linear themselves, but also as somehow entirely above and beyond the world

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of linear processes, acting upon their own bodies as if they are objects like any others. Thinking about a theory of the body and how we transpose that onto place and larger schematics and vice versa, I realized that when I read fiction, I understand and visualize the described details of locations in a novel at the moment I read it, as one would expect. Later, however, I discern that in my deep memory of the text, I have unintentionally mapped each fiction onto an actual place I know. This is not unlike how medieval people built memory cathedrals or palaces, though this was a deliberate mnemonic device, or method of loci, rather than an involuntary trick of the mind. One’s own house could be used, or another familiar place, or an imagined structure. This is a well-established technique of memorization in part because it allows a person to use other parts of the brain responsible for the vestibular and proprioceptive sensations, or sensations related to position of the body, as well as parts of the brain responsible for location and directions. The brain maps our tools as extensions of the part of the body that uses them.9 It is perhaps not surprising that people would then map various mental processes and understandings not just onto the body (think counting on fingers) but onto our larger capsules: the house, the town, the world, the cosmos. With its lower literacy rates and rare, priceless books, memorization was, obviously, much more important in the Middle Ages than now, and students would remember concepts by visualizing the pews and structure of a cathedral, already so emblematic of the divine unity in the whole of creation. They would imaginatively pace up and down, each pew representing one theme or subject to remember. This technique may be memorialized in vestigial verbal tics like “in the first place, in the second place, etc.” In 1943, Winston Churchill, arguing for rebuilding the Commons Chamber after it was bombed, said, “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” (UK Parliament 2022). Not only our literal buildings but our imagined spaces shape us far more than commonly considered. So the way the cosmos is understood, its shape and direction and motion and laws, are deeply influential on myriad unrelated concepts. The medieval cathedral was built to represent the cosmos.10 The rose window, west or east facing, mimics the Great Chain of Being and the communion of saints in its intricacy, with the West symbolizing worldly community and the East symbolizing the Divine. Each direction of the church had a particular meaning, with the East being in the direction of Jerusalem and the sunrise, and the North associated with death, cold, and the devil; the cemetery is typically located on the north side of the church. Each direction conveys meaning quite like the quadripartite structure of the four elements, the four humors, the four qualities—often shown in diagrams of the cosmos. Nave and transepts are also laid out in the shape of a cross, onto which Christ’s body is superimposed. The cross stands in as a metonymy for Christ’s crucified

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body. The ringed cross can represent the nimbus around Christ’s head over the cross on which he was nailed; it can also represent the cosmos underlying the cross, as with the cosmological cross of Ravenna: body, church, cosmos, all understood as simultaneous layers of signification imprinted upon a particular place. By contrast, modern city planning and architecture reveal a new understanding of the world, one that privileges fragmentation and imaginative discord. We are locked in individual units of cars, in apartments Tennessee Williams called “vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres” (1999, 3), and increasingly magnificent single-family houses, while public, community architecture like the cathedral languishes. We do not see ourselves as part of the whole. Major modern schematics in architecture might be the skyscraper, a line up to the sky, and the mall, a line with stores to each side appealing to individual tastes and goods. In any case, when our underlying structures so influence our perceptions of reality, they are bound to distort in some way, often without us being at all conscious of the distortion. These big shapes and signs (semiotics) structure thinking within a whole culture more than we likely know or acknowledge. And part of remaking the world in a more sustainable and humane shape would involve urban planning that incorporates environmental sustainability, green open spaces, preserved cultural heritage, and human-centered cityscapes.11 What would be the more fitting imagined shape for our world, the geocosm? What metaphors would be more in keeping with the complexity of the Earth and Earth processes? James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis argue that Gaia circles back, moderates itself as an organism with order, homeostasis, and self-regulation; it is life and the atmosphere life has created that do this. Following on the Gaia hypothesis, Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, argues that the most important characteristic of the Earth, what makes it most a cell or an organism, is its atmosphere, or membrane: “It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in Biology” (1974, 145). This argument about what makes an organism finds its psychological kindred spirit in Freud’s ideas about individualism and the bounded body, with consciousness poised on the boundary between inner and outer (1922).12 Additionally, Thomas argues that we should feel gratitude for even something so inorganic as the atmosphere: “It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine or bread. . . . We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature” (1974, 148). Whether the Earth is cell or organism, it is life, possibly intelligent life—far from the random assemblage of raw materials post-industrial culture is wont to consider it—and we are an inherent,

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inseparable part of that organized and organizing life, enmeshed in its web, not ensconced in the cosmos as we imagine it, far above and detached from the life of the world. Reading the work of generations of ecocritics grasping beyond current destructive paradigms, it is easy to wonder: what does a metaphor matter? What does it matter that we properly imagine a verifiable scientific truth that we cannot see? That we be grateful for it? In this book, I am arguing that there is a utility to metaphors and paradigms and imaginings that more closely fit the complexity of reality, that are more consistent with ecological processes. It is not just the inadequacies of any one metaphor to express reality, but the exclusions entailed by them that can be most damaging.13 How we imagine governs how we behave, and wrong imaginings cause people to act entirely wrongly in regard to nature. Though some destructive metaphors contain elements of truth, and though they do not themselves ensure environmental destruction, they justify and facilitate it. They make available a rationale for exploitation—and for acquiescence to exploitation. In some cases, this is intentionally done, as with coal companies advertising their products as “natural.”14 Other times, this occurs because of what sociologist Harry Collins calls “collective tacit knowledge” encoded in metaphors, norms, and practices (2006) so that destructive behaviors come to seem the obvious, default way to proceed.15 If we do not more correctly envision things that are true yet unseen, like climate change, virulent microorganisms, contaminating chemicals, or the jeopardies of nuclear weapons, we are apt not to behave in a way that will preserve ourselves, nor to construct laws and policies and institutions that will do so. While some might argue that figurative language just is, that it is value neutral, I would argue that humans have some metacognitive control over culture and that there is an ethical dimension to the aesthetics and paradigms we choose. Beauty, gratitude, truth: these values are integrally tied together. We are connected to the Earth and to all other organisms in ways that we did not imagine with our more rudimentary and reductive sciences. When we shifted from the medieval paradigm, we decided the truth was that we are radically separate from the world. The next important paradigm shift, one that I hope we are in the midst of, shows that we are radically connected, one part of a whole. The better science now includes a more sophisticated understanding of how microorganisms connect us to the Earth; to our mothers, to other people, even to our pets; to our food, to our locale, to human and microbial communities in our remote past as we and our microorganisms co-evolve. From current science we might extrapolate out to further reaches where ancient traditions and values converge with newer scientific explanations. Gaians like Margulis and Lovelock believed that organisms had agency and choice, even at the level of single-celled organisms involved in

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endosymbiosis. They did not dismiss teleology, or purposiveness. And they were clear that humans, at least, had a choice in how they acted in the world. Now, we order in a way that steps outside of circular processes, an order that will experience entropy—but not into the original state. Plastic pieces in the ocean photodegrade and become smaller pieces but never return to origins via biodegradation. We could choose to order our world differently, in a way that integrates biological systems rather than ignoring them. The noosphere as imagined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959) or Vladimir Vernadsky (1926)—or Frank et al.’s proposed intelligent network of geosphere with biosphere with technosphere (2022)—could enmesh a deep understanding and adaptiveness into our ecosystems. In other words, cultural work like ecocriticism can be seen as part of the planetary autopoietic self-maintenance that may allow our complex civilization to survive its own pressures on biosphere and geosphere systems. We humans are often not aware of our governing patterns, metaphors, and paradigms, but we tend to operate according to them nonetheless. Anyone who has suddenly become attentive to gender dynamics, racial discrimination, implicit bias, or other cultural constructs has had that experience, which some describe as being “woke,” though others have attempted to appropriate and debase the term via semantic bleaching. Thoreau uses the metaphor best, perhaps: “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” (1854, 72). That feeling proceeds from suddenly becoming cognizant of reasons for believing what we believe, or even realizing we believe what we believe and have previously been utterly unconscious about. The sudden recognition of the origins of an inherited idea or word is part of the beauty of medieval literature; there is a sense of both recognition and alterity that fits some pieces together and springs others apart.16 This is an important element of metacognition, or the cognitive dissonance that sometimes spurs it. It is the work of cultural critics to help people become more sensitive to these underlying patterns and systems—often, learners buck back against it, but gradually, these ideas, if true, gain acceptance. PARADIGM SHIFTS AND ETHICS My work takes for granted the answer to this question, thoughtfully posed by Casey Rentmeester in his book on Heidegger and the environment: “do we continue to exploit the natural world in accordance with the calculative and ordering tendencies of natural science and industry as we have done since

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the Industrial Revolution or are we able to open up a new relation between humans and nature that is not built upon a conqueror—conquered model?” (Rentmeester 2016, 2–3). We answer yes—of course we must change—but we must also build the new relationship. It will not come as a matter of course. Heidegger’s work to understand “the conceptual underpinnings in the Western world that have sanctioned environmental destruction,” enabling “a proper human-environment relationship” (Rentmeester 2016, 3) is a strong buttress to this work, yet more specific aspects of those underpinnings need still to be identified. One assumption is that we inherit so much from previous generations that we’re thrust into a set of metaphors and values that we cannot simply slough off. Heidegger’s Dasein, “there-being,” or “existence,” envisions humans as born into a set of given circumstances, paradoxically alone but also conditioned by humans past and present, a view that does not see human and world as Cartesian subject-object but as agent immersed in the world. The other assumption is that we can, to some extent, question, reshape, and manipulate our governing metaphors. While perhaps we must work within a given palette, we can both expand that palette by investigating other cultures and times and also choose and assemble the pieces differently than we have done before, performing thereby active imaginative work, intentionally refiguring the culture and the stuff of life itself. According to Heidegger, we are given certain material environments and intellectual constructs—the pen versus the typewriter, for example—but we can remake not only our metaphors but the things that are based on those assumptions and metaphors. Heidegger believed that “the desolation of the earth [comes] from metaphysics” (1954, 86). Perhaps it is possible to transform our imaginations and our metaphysics so that they are not so entirely dependent on the paradigm of straight-line motion and human agency separate from nature. It is essential to understand our relationship to nature, and to consciously choose within our embeddedness an ethical approach. As Rentmeester points out, “One of the early voices of environmentalism, Arne Næss, once argued that a proper environmentalism must ‘move from ontology to ethics.’ For Næss, this means that one cannot have an appropriate relationship with the world ethically unless one has an appropriate understanding of what the world is” (2016, xxiii). And as Rentmeester further suggests, we should then move, perhaps, from normative ethics to an all-encompassing ethos, or habit (2016, 95). Rentmeester argues that Heidegger is an appropriate philosopher for theorizing the environment,17 despite his infamous Nazi associations, precisely because he recognizes clearly that humans differ from non-human animals in their ability to alter the environment: they are exceptional, though not beneficial, in that regard. Citing Garrett Hardin (1968, 1245), Rentmeester shows how environmental ethics must be recognized as situational, and that

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ultimately, we must move from environmental ethics to an environmental philosophy that examines our cultural assumptions to penetrate to the roots of modern ecological disaster (2016, 8–9). Ernst Cassirer argues likewise that during the Renaissance, “the idea of the microcosm not only permits but even calls for such a . . . transition from physics to ethics” (1963, 112). In other words, the consonance between humans and the cosmos requires an ethical approach to the cosmos. Heidegger often returns to the idea of place—of inhabiting or dwelling –as being more fundamental than space. Heidegger would agree with Bachelard that our sense of space is derivative from our sense of place, from our familiar, tangible home, rather than the other way around. It is only in actual, everyday connection to things and places that people can truly understand their real meaning and value. For Heidegger, dwelling (wohnen) has ontological implications for what people are, not just what they do. Existence is composed of being and dwelling, building and thinking—and buildings, art, and architecture, rooted in particular places, fundamentally shape that being. Heidegger shows the etymological connection between to build (bauen) and to dwell (buan) in Old High German, heard even in English in the etymology of neigh-bour (eOE neahgeburas, “nigh dweller”). The verb for being (bin) springs from the same roots (1971, 145). Dwelling and being—and freedom and peace—share roots in German: “The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye, and fry means protected from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free really means to spare. . . . The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving” (1971, 147). He later clarifies that “mortals dwell in that they save the earth . . . dwelling itself is always a staying with things” (1971, 148, 149).18 Space can only be an abstract derivative of place. Place for Heidegger might be better imagined as an opening or, as he often says, a clearing (Lichtung), like a forest clearing, that allows for meaning to present itself. Heidegger considers clearings as in some way greater than things because of their potentiality (1971, 51). Sometimes he also speaks of dwelling in this regard. Place, or nature as we perceive it, is or should be at the root of how we perceive the cosmos; or perhaps in our Earthly dealings, it should at least have priority over the cosmological, Newtonian imagination. Humans are unique in the degree to which they make over their places using technology, even simple technologies, and this building is unavoidable, inherent, and potentially benign if it preserves nature. Heidegger’s understanding of what technology is in relation to nature is key. He defines technology as a challenging of nature, “What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. . . . The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (Herausfordern), which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such”

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(1977, 14).19 Technology “sets upon (stellt) nature,” unlocking and exposing it (1977, 15), resulting in Enframing (Ge-stell), “the essence of modern technology . . . the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of Enframing” (1977, 23–24).20 Enframing, as Heidegger defines it, sees technology as not just a tool in service to humanity but as a mode of ordering, an all-encompassing of human reality and being. The world of nature is captured and subordinated to the Enframing as the standing-reserve. Enframing, however, creates an order and logic that is problematic: “But Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing” (1977, 27).21 And this is precisely what happens when one paradigm reigns over all: it crowds out other ways of knowing, other ways in which truth can be called forth and revealed. So it is not the science and technology called forth by paradigms that is itself problematic: it is the locking into one schema, one world, that thwarts further understanding of the whole and real. After Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum, everything, every thing, all of reality, comes to be understood according to a subject/object model, where humans are the only subjects and nature reduced to only objects, standing in opposition to humans. And as Heidegger himself predicted, this crowding out of all other Enframings, or views of reality, has resulted in unimaginable exploitation and ruination of the natural world. Those qualities of extension that can be measured are what seem to matter in assessing being; Descartes honed in on the mathematical to the exclusion of any other quality, elevating math and physics over biology and ecology as the primary sciences: “Just as the natural world of Descartes is the world as represented to the knowing subject, the natural world of modern science is the world as already conceived by the modern scientist, which is a coherence of extended, quantifiable bodies in motion that can be known in advance via the use of the scientific methods” (Rentmeester 2016, 42). Here, again, we can see how essential motion and its laws were and are to an understanding of reality, and why a change in the nature of motion could shift the ground under everything else. This is part and parcel with the modern view that all of nature is for human beings, springing from the workings of human hands and the imagination of human minds. The deep ecologists and eco-phenomenologists are clear that accurate views of the world as it exists are essential to ethical behavior in relation to that world. So for instance, Iain Thompson states that though there are competing ethical principles at work in eco-phenomenology, most

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approaches share a core: “this ethical principle, stated broadly, holds that phenomenological approaches undercut the fact/value dichotomy, enabling eco-phenomenologists to recognize the non-subjective reality of environmental ‘values’” (2004, 385). However, Thompson critiques a contradiction in naturalistic ethics, pointing out, via Freud, that there is no need to prohibit what no one wants to do: fraud, rape, murder, etc. (2004, 390). He lands on a solution that sounds a great deal like Aldo Leopold’s land ethic: that what is right is right for ecosystems as a whole, treating the entire planet Earth as the outermost of nested systems (2004, 393). He acknowledges that we could argue for an ethic for the solar system and galaxy and on out ad infinitum, but I would argue that with our present state of knowledge, there is a bright demarcation between Earth and non-Earth, often described by astronauts as the overview effect.22 Ecosystems as we know them are limited to the Earth. Thompson advocates for a transcendental ethical realism, “a more humanistic perfectionism” based on Heidegger, that avoids speciesism by allotting Dasein to animals who possess the richest experience of the world and greatest sense of selfhood (2004, 405).23 Viewing humans as in community with other organisms is essential. It may seem obvious, but seeing ourselves as enmeshed in a real, particular environment is essential to saving it. In their ground-breaking essay collection Eco-Phenomenology, Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine describe how phenomenology examines the “process of abstraction by which the world as we experience it is gradually transformed into the naturalistic conception of the world taken for granted by contemporary science” and how it “is set apart from other theoretical methods by its unique capacity for bringing to expression, rather than silencing, our relation with nature and the experience of value rooted in this relation” (2003, xi, xii). They suggest that eco-phenomenology, in its inherent interdisciplinarity, “hold[s] the promise of bringing about a dramatic shift in our current understanding of ourselves and of our place in the natural world” (2003, xxi).24 This shift is needed more desperately now than ever. Thomas Kuhn, in his foundational work on paradigm shifts, postulated not only the fact that there are paradigm shifts but that scientific revolutions follow a pattern, comprising definite steps: normal science, puzzle-solving, paradigm, anomaly, crisis, and revolution. Kuhn argued that paradigm shifts are profound shifts at all layers of meaning; for example, one word, like “planet,” can mean something completely different in one paradigm compared to another. He argued that these changes lead away from certain errors but that they still only approximate truth, and that the changes often are prompted by a change in worldview (1962). Echoing Heidegger’s account of Enframing and Lakoff’s and Johnson’s description of metaphoric conceptual

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systems, Kuhn shows how paradigms both set a precedent along which subsequent normal science proceeds and exclude knowledge that falls outside that precedent. Kuhn argues that “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others” (1962, 24). This exclusion from consideration of problems and phenomena that exist outside of current paradigms helps account for some of the lack of unwillingness to solve our environmental problems, not only on the part of scientists, of course, but by society at large. Solution of the puzzles of the current paradigm often crowd out solutions of the really important problems of humankind and seem to prevent commonsense discernment of which are the really important problems. Kuhn puts it this way: “Other problems, including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies” (1962, 37). Puzzles presume solutions, but many of our greatest problems do not possess one clear, uncomplicated solution—climate change, for instance, or cancer. This sort of paradigmatic thinking is in its nature linear, rather than complex, tangential, open, and recursive. It is currently very difficult to envision a solution to our ongoing environmental catastrophes, which is very likely due in part to our existing paradigms. As Hardin (1968) made clear, some problems do not possess technical solutions at all. Within the framework of certain paradigms, moreover, both problems and solutions—and objective reality—may be obscured by redefinition of previously clear terms and concepts. As Kuhn points out, after Descartes, the new metaphysics “told scientists what sorts of entities the universe did and did not contain: there was only shaped matter in motion” and likewise, prevailing methods dictated that all natural phenomena were reducible to such motion (1962, 41). The new model also excluded much that had previously been taken for granted. Kuhn recognizes how “creative philosophy,” usually “held at arm’s length” during periods of normal science, has historically been employed during paradigm shifts in part to elucidate the original paradigm, whose assumptions and blind spots may not have been observed, even while its methods were applied (1962, 88). Ecocriticism, eco-phenomenology, and environmental humanities may be today’s creative philosophies and are increasingly applied not only by humanists and philosophers, but by the scientists themselves. Increasingly, we are “debat[ing] over fundamentals” (1962, 91) in hopes of finding a paradigm that will fit current evidence. Kuhn describes how what

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is seen, or at least what is perceived, changes with the paradigm, even when the physical reality remains unchanged. Perhaps once we collectively see the most important problems to be solved, our vision of nature will flip like the duck-rabbit illusion Kuhn references. Kuhn also shows how science tends, in its histories and textbooks, to hide its vagaries, its wandering along the way, in favor of one straight paradigmatic story of cumulative knowledge: “The result is a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research” (1962, 138). So the very shape of scientific pursuit, and rationality itself, is seen as mimetic of the dominant metaphor of the laws of motion: a line. Perhaps we are in the midst of a terrestrial paradigm shift toward biology and ecology, a recognition that systems and conditions here on Earth and on our timescale are fundamentally different than in the cosmos, just as Newtonian physics can be seen as a special case of Einstein’s special relativity, operant only when velocities of bodies interacting with each other are small compared to the speed of light. And after all, even space-time in Einsteinian physics is curved, not linear:25 “the laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could not be ‘curved’—it was not that sort of thing—were not simply wrong or mistaken. . . . What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogeneous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter” (Kuhn 1962, 148). One very suggestive connection between Kuhn and Heidegger—and perhaps also Lakoff and Johnson—is that core concepts in a paradigm/worldview would need to change drastically to the point of near unrecognizability to make a revolutionary shift. Heidegger seems to think that this would be at a deep ontological level, while Kuhn suggests that one scientific field—like ecology—could have a revolutionary shift, while others—like chemistry—could be largely unchanged. I would argue that the shift needs to occur not just at the level of one field—ecology and biology are moving toward a richer understanding of reality relatively quickly—but in the larger cultural and scientific project. Indeed, it seems essential and possibly unavoidable that the fields of ecology and biology gain in prestige and imaginative dominance. Fundamental shifts in ecology will entail shifts in the understanding of chemistry as well. Here, I am thinking particularly of green chemistry and biomimicry, subjects in which biological discoveries have greatly influenced investigations in chemistry. Kuhn says paradigm shifts are rare and occur only when the current paradigm no longer solves the most important problems: “So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that

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demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived” (1962, 76). Surely, that is true now. We are in need of a retooling of our entire system: paradigm, theory, culture; aims, materials, methods; tools, production, consumption. Kuhn also claims that an old paradigm is not rejected until a new one is already in place and can be compared to the old, and when the old one is already in crisis; perhaps that is the work we are involved in now: reimagining, reconceptualizing, reshaping—lashing together a raft of ideas and practices that can provide some escape from the sinking ship of our current system. How would we reconceptualize the entire world system to better preserve it? While on the one hand, Alexandre Koyré (1957) showed how our cosmology proceeded from a closed world to an infinite universe, Kenneth Boulding, in his often-anthologized essay on “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” suggests that, in contrast to an open and illimitable cowboy economics, our planet is essentially a closed system, or at least one with limited inputs: “Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the open to the closed Earth. One hesitates to use the terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ in this connection, as they have been used with so many different shades of meaning” (1966, 335). Except for massive inputs of energy from the sun, the Earth is still, for all intents and purposes, a closed system: we simply do not treat it as such. Perhaps our new paradigm needs to be fitted to an Earthly scale, the geocosm, and focused not so much on progress and linear motion in a set direction as on stasis, stability, circles, and a return to ecosystems of the past, all the while learning more, perhaps to the point where our science and technologies more closely understand and match the limits of our living planet. Kuhn points out that while it is commonly thought that the process of science proceeds in a certain direction, designated ahead of time by nature, instead, “nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything” (1962, 169–70). We need to point the scientific process inductively toward the point we must go—drawdown from climate catastrophe, reversal of disastrous and absurd applications of chemistry and physics in the modern world—and shift paradigms again. Perhaps nature does not have a teleology, but we do—or should. PARADIGM SHIFTS GOING FORWARD Besides the Copernican Revolution, major paradigm shifts that generally make the list include Evolution, Germ Theory, DNA, Special and General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Atom Bomb, Genetic Engineering, and CO2 emissions. I have already discussed as additions to the list more recent

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paradigm shifts like Epigenetics, Body Burden, the Microbiome, the Mother Tree, Degrowth, and Rewilding. Particularly in the arena of the environment, ecocritics are working hard to reimagine and reconceptualize, to shift our paradigms enough to solve otherwise intractable problems. When we consider current paradigm shifts, the disruptions of COVID-19 might spring to mind. In common parlance, there have been quite a few paradigm shifts with COVID-19, in employment, work habits, and supply chains (Howe et al. 2021). There have been many shifts in attitude, but regarding true paradigm shifts in the environmental imagination, we saw with undeniable clarity and in real time what we could do collectively to change habits and halt pollution in its tracks. Skies cleared, wildlife thrived and took back spaces (Stokstad 2020; Silva-Rodríguez et al. 2021), and rates of heart attacks (Aung, Vittinghoff, and Marcus 2022) and pre-term birth (Been et al. 2020; Bergella, Boelig, and Roman 2020; Perera et al. 2021) declined precipitously as we collectively stopped driving, traveling, shipping, and manufacturing during the great anthropause. At least, this discovery, that air pollution and our modern way of living need not be defaults, should have provoked a paradigm shift. Instead, this shift in our normal way of doing things was resisted, dismissed, and rejected as anomalous, perhaps even as a disease not just on human bodies but on the modern way of living; and the return to “health” entailed not merely combatting a virulent microorganism, but restoring to full activity our cities and economies, traffic and flight schedules. If only we could see our endlessly consumptive way of living as pathological instead. Sadly, despite a brief moment of consciousness-raising, it seems that prevailing metaphors and Enframed narratives dominated during and after the pandemic. Cli-Fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, in an article with the hopeful subtitle, “Spring 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change as a civilization,” situated the COVID crisis alongside the climate crisis as imagined in his fictions and captured the feeling of the moment: “It’s meaningful to notice that, all together, we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon. Amid the tragedy and death, this is one source of pleasure. . . . To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs” (2020). Unfortunately, this article, written in May of 2020, did not, and probably could not have predicted the extent to which one political party politicized COVID-19 for selfish gain, massively shifting the semiotics of mask-wearing, just for instance (Kahn 2022). What a lost opportunity this was, though perhaps not all imaginative potential was squandered. Perhaps on some level, humanity did test-drive the greater crises to come.

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RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD If it’s true that one of the most crucial traits of human beings is their “amazing capacity to believe contradictory things” and that “the story in which you believe shapes the society that you create,” as historian Yuval Noah Harari has said (Gabbai 2015), then we should be able to stop believing the particular contradictory things we believe now—like that a finite world can absorb infinite consumption—and shape new beliefs and a new world instead. Harari further contends that humans require some sort of belief system—religion or some ‘ism—to stabilize institutions and society. Most world religions already consider the created world sacrosanct—and a new system could be based on those beliefs. That leaves us considering what belief system is available for those without religion. But because environmental impacts are reaching limits that look a lot like natural laws, and because science increasingly shows us that this world, which surely most of us must regard as sacred, has a life integral to itself, this project should be completely possible, though necessitating effort. What can we put in the place of the consumerism, technology idolatry, and loss of purpose much of Western society is currently undergoing? I will discuss selected alternate models further in chapter 6. But I would propose that in whatever way possible within the bounds of rationality, we must re-enchant the world and reintegrate it at the (metaphorical) center of the cosmos.26 In a debate on the nature of reality at Dartmouth, physicist Sean Carroll disagrees with Buddhist monk and scholar Alan Wallace, who posits a cosmic mind that precedes humanity and into which humanity can tap, instead arguing that human intelligence is an emergent accident of the cosmos. Carroll sees the ideas Wallace proposes as the “last gasp of anti-Copernicanism” (Gleiser 2017, 48:22).27 While that may be true in the sense meant, this is not the anti-Copernicanism I propose, if I do so at all, though that statement does argue for the very power of the Copernican Revolution on our conception of the world. Rather, I would argue for being ready to step outside the assumptions of our current science. Furthermore, both these great thinkers seem to prioritize human intelligence above all and see it as in some way separate and apart from the world, which is short-sighted. They do raise an important question: what is the role of spiritual versus scientific approaches to understanding reality? At times, spiritual versus scientific seems a false dichotomy, like the false dichotomy between local knowledge making and big-picture history. Mark Sagoff describes how the roots of this dichotomy run deep. He describes how community and systems ecologists invoke universal principles based on The Great Chain of Being, like complexity, equilibrium, stability, orderly

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succession, and hierarchy, but shorn of their religious context and demystified for scientific legitimacy, rendering them thereby mere mathematical tools for controlling and exploiting nature for human ends. By contrast, naturalists like Steven J. Gould and E.O. Wilson, basing their empirical science on a tradition dating from Aristotle of minute descriptions of particular creatures, bring an almost religious zeal and sense of wonder to their work that “turn this tradition into a spiritual quest” (Sagoff 1993, 380). Sagoff urges people to preserve nature as a common commitment: “for the sake of our own identities we must maintain the identities of the places where we live . . . to attach ourselves to what becomes safe and secure because it retains its aesthetic and cultural characteristics in the midst of change” (1993, 379). In other words, religion is not required to see the wonder and sanctity in any particular organism or place: “a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower” (Blake 1803). And even formerly religious beliefs can lose contact with the value of the particular. Carroll dismisses the importance of mind to reality by referencing the vastness of the universe. While this may be true in reference to cosmological mind, in reference to psychology and Gaia, I’m not sure he will turn out to be correct.28 What does it mean to say the Earth is not special? It is special to us, the only known life in the universe. This is one of the best examples I have found of cosmologists saying something cannot be true on Earth because it is not true of the universe as a whole. Perhaps mind is somehow bound up in life, in the biological life of this planet, of this organism called Gaia, even if that does not extend to the cosmos. Biology finds connections between body and mind every day: consider gut-brain signaling via microorganisms, intimate foreigners who live in our gut and influence our very thoughts (Sampson and Mazmanian 2015; Silva et al. 2020). Carroll’s opponent, Wallace, may also err in trying to extrapolate from the nature of mind on Earth to the cosmos. Perhaps we cannot extrapolate one way or the other. That appears to assume a unified theory. Earth is a place and not just a locus in homogenous space. What I am pondering is how much cosmological views and notions about the basics of reality apply in the biological and ecological description of life. What seems to be true in those realms is that we should operate as if the world is a particular and beautiful organism upon which we are dependent. Very good scientists do now believe that is true, and if that is in opposition to notions of trillions of galaxies, then perhaps we should let the latter fact go for now. We should not misapply cosmological paradigms and conjectures to life here on Earth when it is so clearly detrimental. We need life on Earth to persist for the next hundred, the next thousand years; that will give time for physicists and philosophers to work out more of the details. It is crucial to note that not just cosmologists misapply erroneous assumptions of infinitude: there are other planets that are potentially habitable, so

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why not use this one up and throw it away? People in general are listening and behaving as if this planet is disposable. Because we know so much more through science than once we did, and because of the way our brains operate, we have an illusion that our knowledge compared to reality is fuller and more complete than it is. Our science and practices right now are clearly dysfunctional in that they are destroying the ecosystems on which we depend, and we continue to learn more about the unintended consequences of our technologies every day. While it is true that many ancient human societies also made choices that caused their civilizations to collapse, collapse appears to be looming closer than ever now, and now on a global scale, largely due to the intense power and interconnectedness of our technologies. In the past, protections of natural resources once based on religious or traditional or Indigenous values have functioned better than some of our current empirically based practices. I would argue that we must act as if the world is a living organism full of sacred meaning because in doing so we may keep it alive and ourselves in the process; one test of the truth of science and technology is whether it is working. Our current technology worked to put humans on the moon and perform open heart surgery and sequence the human genome. But it is not working to preserve all life on Earth at this moment. Some part of the way we are operating in the world right now is not true. How tragic and terrible that we should have come around again to an understanding of the world as animate, as Gaia, though perhaps only in time to anticipate her death, as well as our own. And how much more too we regard as true that we are the microcosm to geocosm and macrocosm as now, when we learn that we are composed of myriad cells, most not human, an ecosystem unto ourselves? It is very interesting when what passes for mystical or religious thought is latterly acknowledged by science as actual, real. We need a new shift, a new paradigm, not only for our concept of nature but for our theory of body: an understanding of ourselves as open to the world, like jellyfish, as Robinson recently said in a conversation with Ezra Klein (2020), one in unity with all the rest of life, especially those other organisms without which we cannot live, like our skin flora and gut bacteria. We need to appreciate and know particular places. We need to stop eradicating whole ecosystems, paving or burning paradise, wiping out what seem “empty” pieces of land in favor of a new road, a new parking lot, or a new mall, temple to capitalism. We need to stop altering our atmosphere and the chemical composition of the Earth and reducing the entire globe to nothing but raw material for our working. We need to stop despoiling other organisms and ecosystems, severing ourselves from all the rest of life, because if we do not, we too will perish.

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Let us not argue for irrationality, but rather an approach to biology and ecology that is not constrained by these astronomical and physics-driven metaphors, by a limiting mathematical construct that is devoid of properties and meaning.29 Rather, let us observe what is there, Edmund Husserl’s “the things themselves,” and derive models from what we see (1900, 168). After all, Lovelock and Margulis were accused of mysticism when they developed their theory of Gaia. It is not religion to say that the world is an organism entire, with a membrane (Thomas 1974) and a self-regulatory system (Vernadsky 1926; Boulding 1966). It is not belief but fact to say that we cannot continue in our unsustainable, linear models of production much longer. Popes Benedict and Francis, among many other religious leaders, have seen climate change and ecological catastrophe as a point of natural law—natural limits meeting with spiritual and religious limits. And perhaps we can learn something from religion and belief and mysticism. Humans do believe in ethics, generally, and that framework shares some assumptions in aiming for the common good and having the humility to understand that we do not always know what we do not know. Can we preserve nature and life on Earth without love (biophilia) as a driving motivation? Without beauty as an appeal to better behavior? I am not sure that we can. In many ways, we have been lost in a Cartesian grid composed of lines compounded, without complexity or weight, form, or qualities to the bodies that move through that grid. Humanity as a whole has suffered tremendously because of these assumptions and sadly, is destined to suffer much more as we plunge into the consequence stage of climate change and toxic contamination. But we could possibly launch a parachute to soften the speed of our descent, to cushion the impact of the blow, and much of the work to do that must be in the realm of imagination: rethinking, refiguring, reshaping the way that we do work and meet needs in the world. It is difficult to even imagine what that would look like, as I will address in the conclusion, but many are laboring to do that work and meet those needs. This requires a deep understanding of how we arrived at this point, why we have chosen certain paradigms and rejected others, and where we should go now. As Albert Einstein has said, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking” (1946). Before envisioning a new beginning, however, we must first look at the crisis, witness the loss, the world shorn of mystery, a world lovelorn and stricken, the dross, the dregs of all we have ruined, sere and ashen in the lacerating twilight of our culture, “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. . . . ” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73). We must acknowledge the sequelae of all our sins against the Earth. Then perhaps we can see the much that remains and

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seek—in the past, in non-Western cultures, and in current ecocriticism—signs of life, revival, a pale green sprout nudging up through the ashes. Rather than wallowing in denial, we must embrace the peril we are in, fully comprehend all that is at stake. Perhaps it is the sharpness of this peril that can awaken us to the irreplaceable preciousness of all we still have, all we still can save, if we reshape the ways we think and live. All the rich beauties of the Earth, not only the symmetries of living nature but the symmetries of humankind, are in danger of being lost forever, never to “be made right again,” as Cormac McCarthy imagines in his post-apocalyptic masterpiece, The Road: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery (2006, 286–87).

NOTES 1. For more on the importance of scale to imagining nature and social, mental, and physical spaces, see Levins and Lewontin (1985), David Harvey (1993), and Richard Janzen (2002). 2. For more recent theory on what is now often called “the spatial turn,” see Warf and Arias (2014) and the eponymous journal put out by the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space, and Place (IASESP). 3. The original French conveys the meaning more delicately: “Il faut donc dire comment nous habitons notre espace vital en accord avec toutes les dialectiques de la vie, comment nous nous enracinons, jour par jour, dan un ‘coin du monde.’ Car la maison est notre coin du monde. Elle est—on l’a souvent dit—notre premier univers. Elle est vraiment un cosmos. Un cosmos dans toute l’acception du terme” (1957, 24). 4. “Les philosophes ne manquent pas qui ‘mondifient’ abstraitement, qui trouvent un univers par le jeu dialectique du moi et du non-moi. Précisement, ils connaissent l’univers avant la maison, l’horizon avant le gîte. Au contraire, les véritables departs d’image, si nous les étudions phénoménologiquement, nous diront concrètement les valeurs de l’espace habité, le non-moi qui protège le moi” (1957, 24). 5. “Dans cette communauté dynamique de l’homme et de la maison, dans cette rivalité dynamique de la maison et de l’univers, nous sommes loin de toute reference aux simples forms géométriques. La maison vécue n’est pas une boite inerte. L’espace habité transcende l’espace géométrique” (1957, 58). 6. “Alors vinrent les mathématiciens au sense modern, tenants d’une science (et d’une scientificité) détachée de la philosophie, se considérant comme necessaire et suffisante. Ces mathématiciens s’emparèrent de l’espace (et du temps); ils en firent

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leur domaine, mais d’une façon paradoxale: ils inventèrent des espaces, une indéfinité. . . . La relation entre le mathématique et le réel (physique, social) n’allait pas de soi, un abîme se creusant entre eux” (1974, 8–9). 7. Casey credits Kant with the idea “that the most intimate as well as the most consequential inroad to place is through the body” because its bilateral lack of symmetry orients humans to the world (1997, 251). 8. “Quand les métaphysiciens parlent bref, ils peuvent atteindre à la verité immediate, à une verité qui s’userait par les preuves. . . . Ainsi, sans commentaire, Van Gogh a écrit: Et Joë Bousquet, sans avoir connu la phrase de Van Goph, écrit: . . . . [Et] il convient, croyons-nous, de réduire d’un terme la formule de Jaspers pour la render plus phénoménologiquement pure. Nous dirions alors: das Dasein ist rund, l’être est rond” (1957, 208, 209). 9. Research has shown that the brain changes in its representation of the body when we use tools, demonstrating that body representation is essentially plastic and depends on multiple senses (Haggard and Longo 2010). More recent studies have shown how people can even learn to adapt to using an extra thumb quite dexterously (Stix 2021). 10. For more on the cosmic significance of church architecture, see von Simson (1952), Hegel (1975), Hendrix (2003), and Ramzy (2021). 11. This subject is too vast to do more than touch upon, but two good places to start are UNESCO’s work on urban development (https:​//​unesdoc​.unesco​.org​/ark:​​/48223​/ pf0000245999; 2016) or Masdar City, UAE’s website at https:​//​masdar​.ae​/en​/masdar​ -city​/the​-city​/sustainability (2022). 12. Casey refers us to Aristotle and Heidegger on boundaries as a distinction between space and place: “Not only is a place [in Aristotle] two-sided in the manner of a boundary—insofar as it is inclusive and exclusive at once—but it is also like a boundary in the special signification that Heidegger detects in the ancient Greek conception of horismos, ‘horizon,’ itself derived from horos (boundary): ‘that from which something begins its presencing.’ For a place is indeed an active source of presencing: within its close embrace, things get located and begin to happen” (1997, 88–89). 13. Cf. Nietzsche: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (1873, 117). 14. Cf. Kauth (2015, Windmills). 15. Thinkers from Newton and Milton on also do not always recognize the limits of human comprehension, or even the limits of the senses. There is a whole world for a dog’s nose that goes unperceived by humans. Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt describes this world that any given animal can sense and perceive—and it is very different for different creatures (2010). Ed Yong argues that “As the only species that can come close to understanding other Umwelten, but also the species most

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responsible for destroying those sensory realms, it falls on us to marshal all of our empathy and ingenuity to protect other creatures, and their unique ways of experiencing our shared world” (2022). 16. Matt Edgeworth argues that the idea of archeological excavation was important to Husserl, and later to Heidegger in his notion of existential clearings that make way for meaning making (2006). 17. Many have noted the allure of Heidegger for environmentalists (Thompson 2004, 396). 18. The German supplies subtleties lost in translation: “Das Wort Friede meint das Freie, das Frye, und fry bedeutet: bewahrt vor Schaden und Bedrohung, bewahrt— vor . . . d. h. geschont. Freien bedeutet eigentlich schonen. . . . Der Grundzug des Wohnens ist dieses Schonen. . . . Die Sterblichen wohnen, insofern sie die Erde retten. . . . Das Wohnen ist vielmehr immer schon ein Au fenthalt bei den Dingen” (150–51, 152). 19. “Was ist die moderne Technik? Auch sie ist ein Entbergen. . . . Das in der modernen Technik waltende Entbergen ist ein Herausfordern, das an die Natur das Ansinnen stellt, Energie zu liefern, die als solche herausgefördert und gespeichert werden kann” (1953, 15). 20. “Das Ge-stell ist das Versammelnde jenes Stellens, das den Menschen stellt, das Wirkliche in der Weise des Bestellens als Bestand zu entbergen. Als der so Herausgeforderte steht der Mensch im Wesensbereich des Ge-stells” 1953, 16, 24–25). 21. “Allein, das Ge-stell gefährdet nicht nur den Menschen in seinem Verhältnis zu sich selbst und zu allem, was ist. Als Geschick verweist es in das Entbergen von der Art des Bestellens. Wo dieses herrscht, vertreibt es jede andere Möglichkeit der Entbergung” (1953, 28). 22. This was most recently described by—of all people—William Shatner: “Everybody in the world needs . . . to see the blue color go whip by, and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. The covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around. We think, ‘Oh, that’s just blue sky.’ And there’s something you shoot through, and all of a sudden, as though you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into . . . black ugliness. And you look down. There’s the blue down there and the black up there. And there is Mother Earth and comfort. And up there. . . . Is that death? Is that the way death is?” (Sheetz 2022). Like many before him, he describes the world, with its thin, precious atmosphere, as being “fragile.” How striking that the actor who intoned “space, the final frontier” finds first-hand that it is nothing of the sort. 23. Heidegger uses Dasein not just as “there being,” or being as commonly understood, but also to designate “the being that has an understanding of being” and “the being for which being is an issue.” This understanding avoids falling into subject/ object or mind/body dualisms; while not restricting himself to the being of humans, Dasein does capture the kind of being that a person is. Non-human animals can potentially be Dasein and humans can potentially not be. 24. See also Eco-Phenomenology: Life, Human life, Post-Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos (Smith, Smith, and Verducci 2018) for an exploration of how eco-phenomenology intersects with “the ontopoesis of life,” which the authors see as

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the basis for “all theorizations on Ecology, Environmental Studies, and Ethics, as well as for innocent trust in science and in technological innovation in the field of human life and of the natural environment” (2018, vii). It is beyond the scope of this project to summarize or evaluate all the claims made therein, but I refer the reader to it for further reading on the subject. 25. There is a distinction between linearity as a geometrical concept and as a concept to describe systems in terms of their motivating forces and predictability. Most orbits of planetary bodies subject to Newton’s laws of motion and law of universal gravitation are elliptical—but there are three-body systems using purely Newtonian physics whose movements are non-linear, and usually non-repeating, yet mathematically predictable. However, still, the forces acting upon the bodies that produce the motion are linear. 26. For more on disenchantment and re-enchantment, see Max Weber (1917), Morris Berman (1981), Silvia Federici (2018), and Albrecht Classen (2020). 27. Anti-Copernican seems in this conversation shorthand for anti-Scientific Revolution. 28. Frank et al. (2022) argue for a consideration of intelligence on a planetary scale. 29. I agree with John Bellamy Foster’s critique of a dualistic rational/irrational perspective in contemporary Green theory, which has led in some cases to “a crude rejection, at times, of nearly all of modern science, together with the Enlightenment and most revolutionary movements—a tendency that has fed into the anti-rationalism of much of contemporary postmodern thought” (2000, 11).

Chapter 6

Alternate Metaphors

The environmental crisis demands much more than lists of ten things individuals can do for the environment, more than superficial changes in environmental practices by companies, more than new green technologies properly implemented, more even than changes to laws, regulations, tax codes, and other structural causes of environmental degradation; all such solutions are necessary but not sufficient. It is also not enough simply to theorize about the roots of our current disaster. Iain Thompson discusses how eco-phenomenology extends in its purposes beyond mere theorizing: Eco-phenomenology’s guiding idea, put simply, is that uprooting and replacing some of our deeply-entrenched but environmentally-destructive ethical and metaphysical presuppositions can help us heal the Earth, combating environmental devastation at its conceptual roots, as it were. . . . The phenomenological critique of modernity . . . remains controversial, of course, but eco-phenomenology is not primarily a critical movement, content to uncover environmental devastation’s conceptual roots; its more important, positive aim is to undercut and replace them. (2004, 381, 382)

Thompson also makes the point that “because modernity’s definitive divorce of mind from world creates a number of pseudo-problems (including most species of skepticism) . . . we tend to ignore the conceptual connections between our modern worldview and the environmental crisis” (2004, 382). It is the work of this chapter to combine advocacy and analysis and to offer example alternatives, possible correctives, multiple models for envisioning the world, the cosmos, and ourselves, glancing though these suggestions must be, given the scope of the project. It is easy to lapse into despair when considering the layers and depths of antienvironment ontologies and epistemologies and the difficulty of turning the enormous battleship of culture in an intentional way toward normative ends, if that is even possible. Casey Rentmeester, in his examination of Heidegger as an environmental philosopher, argues that “from an eco-phenomenological 161

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perspective, a massive change in our understanding of what it means to be must take place in order for us to usher in a sustainable future for the natural world and the human place within it” (2016, 56). Past, Indigenous, and non-Western cultures offer innumerable alternatives to the Enlightenment understanding of nature and being, and eco-critics are increasingly exploring these to redirect our imaginations along healthier paths. Rentmeester argues that in order to advance beyond a distorted modern Western metaphysics, we should seek a new beginning by employing Heideggerian concepts like “freedom [Freiheit], letting things be [Gelassenheit], and dwelling [Wohnen]” and “continually broaden[ing] one’s perspective in order to be open to the different truths that adhere in any given entity” (2016, 62, 65). So while no one model is proposed as a conclusive truth or reality, I will focus here on alternatives that counter some of the tendencies to linearity and human domination I have discussed so far. Can we re-frame our imaginations and discover the Earth anew? In some cases, concepts that were formerly framed as religious belief or myth have been ratified by hard science. As we think of stepping outside the box or outside of the frame, a box or frame composed of lines and angles, what do we think we are stepping into? How would we think metaphorically in circular, spiral, spherical terms? How would we imagine the world organically, holistically, symbiotically, with a spiritual, imaginative, emotional appreciation gained from the complex, homely beauties of terrestrial ecology and biology, rather than just the abstract, austere physics of space? We need to see “the things themselves” through different lenses. Holistic views of the cosmos abound: from medieval labyrinths to Native American cosmologies to mandalas in diverse times and cultures, the more frequent view of nature, the world, and the cosmos has been as interlocking symmetries—spherical, circular, spiral, square, complex, layered, intricate, beautiful, mysterious. Part of what we need to do is not just understand and explore alternate metaphors; we also need to change what we actually see of circular processes in the world. After all, as Annie Leonard says in her much-viewed Story of Stuff video (2009), we tend to hide both ends of the arrow: the destruction of the production and the wanton pollution of the waste. So there is an aesthetic problem here too: on the one hand, we too readily disguise the ugliness of what we are actually doing to the world, hiding behind beautiful images on our screens; and on the other, we fail to see the quality of actual, not necessarily pretty and scenic, nature that promotes health and happiness.1 As with the rest of this project, I think it is important to look for alternate models very broadly, not only in literature and history but in material reality, scientific paradigms, and human practices. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin,

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in their book Postcolonial Ecocriticism, channel Jennifer Wenzel (2011), who in turn was influenced by Edward Said (1983): We share Wenzel’s Said-inspired view of the capacity of writing and reading as ‘worldly’ critical activities, as modes of engagement that may not necessarily lead to direct action but raise consciousness of its possibilities and draw attention to the urgency of the causes they seek, however obliquely or even ambivalently, to present. Perhaps it . . . requires a more pluriform conception of environmental consciousness and acting-in-the-world than that contained in works of imaginative literature. (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, ix)

Theory is important, but action matters more. In a project of this sort, there is also a danger of exoticizing “the other” in search of alternate modes of imagining world and cosmos. Huggan and Tiffin thoroughly outline the tensions between ecocriticism and postcolonial discourse and the various ways intersectional work can go astray (2015, 1–5).2 Yet given the hegemonic influence of Western scientific thought and industrial practice, arguably the dominant culture of modernity, it is still worthwhile to unpack its antecedents and assumptions. As Alfred Crosby has described, colonists transplanted not only themselves and many invasive plant and animal species, but also invasive cultures that put Indigenous cultures and worldviews at risk (1986). Vandana Shiva not only cautions against the colonialism of imported genetically modified seeds that crowd out or bankrupt Indian producers and against the arrogant multinational corporations weaponizing intellectual property laws and patenting the agricultural inheritance of hundreds of generations of Indian farmers. She also argues against infectious modern Western attitudes toward nature and humankind that neglect nature’s economy and the sustenance economy in favor of the market economy, undoing centuries of community and culture that have, pace Hardin, maintained productive commons time immemorial (2015). Huggan and Tiffin argue further that “such destructive changes were premised on ontological and epistemological differences between European and Indian ideas of human and animal being-in-the-world” (2015, 11). The destruction of ecosystems globally has derived from modern Western views of the world and cosmos so ingrained as to be thoroughly taken for granted and not normally seen at all. Cognitive dissonance, whether from ancient, medieval, Indigenous, or non-Western comparisons, is one spur to seeing more clearly.

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LABYRINTHS, SAND PAINTINGS, MANDALAS A prejudice against medieval beliefs, culture, and science persists.3 As Dennis Danielson notes, “Very few critics succeed in transcending the persistent progressivist binary that portrays individual characters on the stage of history as playing roles that are either backward looking or forward looking (the former . . . of course being bad and the latter being good). . . . ” (Danielson 2014, xviii). The understanding of medieval science as risible and ignorant is too common to require more examples than I have laid out previously. A similar dismissiveness is often found toward medieval emblems and metaphors, C.S. Lewis’s Discarded Image, but I would argue some deserve reconsideration. Recently, Albrecht Classen and others have devoted serious effort to building a body of medieval eco-criticism.4 Medieval labyrinths, with roots in ancient and pagan traditions, not only express in their structure and practice many of the shapes and principles of the medieval cosmos: circular movement, stasis in motion, wholeness, centeredness—but they also encourage a practice whereby people embody that movement of the planet around an orbit, microcosm to macrocosm, maintaining a prayerful stability even as they move on a path emblematic of a journey through world or cosmos. Labyrinths are “linear, but–Since many ancient and medieval labyrinths are round—their pattern may be circular, cyclical; they describe both the linearity and the architecture of space and time” (Doob 1990, 1). Labyrinths are “a path that guides movement . . . a place where one confronts oneself—a moralistic worldview, or the correlation between the circumference of a circle and its center.” Medieval labyrinths are sometimes conscious mimics of Dante’s journey (Kern 1983, 187). The path outlined and then traced with footsteps is a kind of contemplative sigil, a figure limned then enacted to manifest not just an action but an idea or intention.5 The labyrinth at Chartres (Figure 6.1), for example, is one of the oldest and largest extant in Europe, and a good representation of how medieval pilgrims and parishioners would be invited to enter it after walking through the western doors, advancing to the center as a preparation for their further devotions (Kern 1983, 153). The labyrinth occupies a symbolic and geometrically central place in the cathedral, betokening an entrance into sacred space through a twisting, still secular journey. The Cathedral of Chartres, with little documentation on the construction or use of their particular labyrinth besides an early-thirteenth-century date, compares Christ to Theseus, slaying the Minotaur (Satan) in the labyrinth, and invites worshippers to follow in the footsteps of Christ: “Tous les hommes et femmes, au fil de l’année, sont invités à le suivre. A vivre le même parcours. A faire du labyrinthe une image de leur vie entière: longue, exigeante,

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Figure 6.1. Medieval Labyrinth at Chartres. Source: Used with permission, Rectorat, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de  Chartres. https:​ //​ www​ .cathedrale​ -chartres​.org.

traversant les épreuves. Une vie confiante, qui s’avance, par delà la mort, vers une réconciliation définitive avec le Dieu-Amour” (Cathédrale Notre-Dame Chartres 2022, Que Signifie). [All men and women, through the thread of the year, are invited to follow it. To live the same path. To make out of the labyrinth an image of their whole life: long, exigent, crossed with trials. One confident life that advances beyond death toward a definitive reconciliation with God-Love.] The Labyrinth is a practice that is encouraged still: a metaphorical, spiritual journey of sin and redemption through history and cosmos, a ritual dance of twisting, circular rhythms culminating in a reunion with God and community. It embodies the labor of expiation as the penitent winds her way up the mount of Purgatory, the arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and also

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the Resurrection of Easter. As with meditation, the physical pacing, the gestural enactment are part of the process, precluding the treatment of labyrinth as object, encouraging instead labyrinth as verb. It is of course significant that the pattern of the Chartres labyrinth also delineates a cross, a four-fold symmetry seen pervasively, and not only in Christian symbolism. The eleven concentric circles summarize and perfectly balance the number of terrestrial and celestial spheres: one Earth plus the Pythagorean number of perfection and dimension: ten, the number of spheres in the Ptolemaic universe (Cathédrale Notre-Dame Chartres 2022, Le Labyrinthe). The clerestory windows of medieval cathedrals draw the eye up toward the light of God; a labyrinth grounds the participant to the Earth. Many labyrinths are constructed from shrubs or stones in the open, or carved into the turf itself, their intricate windings connecting followers with nature; it is this mythological, emblematic, syncretic character of the labyrinth that allows for its non-religious or deist contemporary practice. The labyrinth embodies both movement and stability. Some now utilize the labyrinth as a cognitive, therapeutic practice of selfacceptance (Kern 1983, 305); and some even view labyrinths as chief nodes of “telluric” currents, tied into the natural energy of the Earth, and associated with restoration of physical order (Cathédrale Notre-Dame Chartres 2022, Le Labyrinthe). This last does not seem within the realm of fact but may be metaphorically important in the way body is physically aligned with Earth, microcosm to geocosm. Labyrinths are not the only visual or metaphoric manifestation of the balanced and stable medieval cosmos by any means. Hildegard of Bingen’s cosmic egg, portrayed in several of her illuminations—a mandorla, or shape of two intersecting circles used to frame God or saints—has been used as a sort of mandala or meditation instrument. Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut, an emblem of the fragile smallness, not only of the world but of the whole created universe, nestles in the palm of her hand: “Also in this He shewed a littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt in the palme of my hand, and it was as round as a balle. . . . What may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is all that is made. I mervellid how it might lesten, for methowte it might suddenly have fallen to nowte for littil. And I was answered in my understondying. It lesteth and ever shall, for God loveth it; and so all thing hath the being be the love of God” (1994, 148–54). [And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. . . . “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus, “It is all that is made.” I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it, and so all things have their being through the love of God.] Travelers to

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Julian’s shrine in Norwich can still find a small cache of hazelnuts, placed there by pilgrims and readers. In the medieval idea of the communion of saints, we are all linked in a mesh of relationships with people past, present and future, portrayed in the fourteenth-century manuscript illumination of the Divine Comedy as circles within circles within circles, heads of saints all haloed by the circular nimbus (Figure 1.8). The communion of saints—individuals in community—stands in opposition to Descartes’s singular “I,” the abstracted, detached intellect that regards itself alone as the force on the world, the homo movum. Perhaps linearity implies singularity, one point moving through space and time. We need a different understanding of persons in community—a different symmetry of self to others—which we see both in the medieval communion of saints and in Indigenous ideas of a people.6 This notion resonates with a modern eco-critical understanding of all humans, organisms, and ecosystems as interconnected across generations. It is not individual choice that governs cancer, stroke, asthma, or autism caused by air pollution, after all. Bioaccumulation and epigenetic change cross generations. We are a whole, and part of cyclical processes. And the effects of one person’s actions, or one person’s trauma, ripple out like rings in a pond. Community or communion require particular places, whether physical, spiritual, or virtual, in which to be joined. The medieval idea of the communion of saints also addresses the important issue of intergenerational justice by uniting different generations into one whole. In previous chapters, I have spoken about stability as an ideal in Shakespeare and of stabilitas as an important Benedictine value, one that pairs naturally with the value of stewardship. Surely, I am not arguing for ossified institutions or a return to inequalities and blind spots of the past, nor am I promoting New Age “woo”; instead, I advocate for dynamic equilibrium between the biosphere and the noosphere: the best of human wisdom literature and the most sophisticated of our sciences combined. In Chaucer, the idea of stability is contrasted with the often-tragic instability of temporal Earthly life.7 In laments throughout his work, he compares the “brotelnesse” or brittleness of this Earth to the stability of the unmoved mover. One example occurs when Arcite dies in the Knight’s Tale: “‘That same prince and that same moevere,’ quod he, / ‘Hath stablissed in this wrecched world adoun / Certeyne days and duracioun / To al that is engendred in this place. . . . / Thanne may men by this ordre wel discerne / That thilke Moevere stable is and eterne. . . . / For nature hath not taken his bigynnyng / Of no partie nor cantel of a thing, / But of a thing that parfit is and stable. . . . ’” (KnT, I.2136–50). [“That same prince and First Mover,” said he, “has established in this wretched world down here certain days and durations to all that is engendered in this place. . . . Then may men by this orderliness well discern that this Mover is stable and eternal. For nature has not taken its

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beginning from a part or portion of a thing, but from a thing that is perfect and stable.”] To be stable is to be essentially like the Prime Mover, eternal; but to live in this world is to fall prey constantly to fickle fate and cruel happenstance. In The Book of the Duchess, which mourns the untimely death of Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt, Chaucer blames the erratic goddess Fortuna: “So turneth she hir false wheel / Aboute, for it is nothing stable, / Now by the fyre, now at table; / Ful many oon hath she thus yblent. . . . ” (BD, 643–47). [“Thus she turns her false wheel about, for it is not stable, now by the fire, now at the table; full many a one has she thus blinded.”] Unlike the orbit of the Empyrean, Fortune’s wheel is the emblem of instability, able to turn at Fate’s whim, toppling the king and moving the pauper upwards toward prosperity. The quality of stability can apply—or not—to humans as well. In the Clerk’s Tale, Griselda is “stable” in her endurance of Walter’s tortures: “Discreet and pridelees, ay honurable, / And to hire housbonde evere meke and stable” (ClT, IV.930–31). [Discreet and prideless, unceasingly honorable, and to her husband always meek and stable], while a capricious public referenced in the Prioress’s Tale are unstable: “Preye eek for us, we synful folk unstable” (PrT, VII.235). [Pray also for us, we sinful folk unstable.] In Chaucer, then, stability is a God-like quality, to be unmoved and unchanged, however much the world twists and turns around one. Stability or lack of it may be a medieval preoccupation, but stability is also a chief quality of many traditional societies: the ability to pass traditions and practices and relationships to the land down through generations. Shiva talks about the importance of stability in Indian and other societies: Sustainable societies move in a stable state—with, not against, the cycles of life. To be in a stable state is not to be motionless; it involves movement and progression within an orbit, like an electron around the atom or the moon around the Earth. The ecological consciousness of ancient civilizations allowed them to progress in an ecologically stable way. But just as classical physics is incapable of explaining or understanding the motion of the electron, conventional market economics interpret stability as stagnation and not as movement at all. Indigenous cultures of the Amazon, of the Andes, or the Himalayas are examples of living cultures that have been sustainable over millennia and, where not destroyed by the globalized economy, are sustainable even today. (2015, 45)

This is a vision of the kind of society we need to build, the kinds of aesthetics and symmetries we need to cultivate in order to foster environmental sustainability and prosperity over time: dynamic equilibrium, a steady state. While these exempla may seem countercultural, modern ways of thinking are counternatural.

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Wangari Maathai, in her book Unbowed, also captures a sense of environmental stability lost to colonial incursions. She describes how the fig tree that had stood near her village for generations physically maintained a relationship to the land and to groundwater as the fig’s roots penetrated through cracks in the bedrock to bring up the water below (2007, 44–46). It was only when that stability was disrupted and the tree cut down, while non-native species were planted in its place, that the sustainability of that ecosystem broke down. From these lessons came her passion for founding the Green Belt movement, with activists, many of them women, planting more than 51 million trees, working to prevent and reverse desertification in Kenya (Green Belt Movement 2022). The notion of environmental stability is fundamental to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which, like most ethics, hinges on the importance of community: “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (1953, 239). In medieval European and many non-Western and Indigenous cultures, there is a sense of continuity and community with the land, one that seems painfully obvious now—but that has not been during the formative years of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Indigenous cultures in the Americas also offer abundant models of a cosmos that is holistic, dynamically stable, and round. The Mayan calendar bears some resemblance to a mandala, labyrinth, or medieval vision of the cosmos: circles inscribed within circles with ornate markings and geometric shapes engraved inside.8 The Aztec Sun Stone (Figure 6.2) counts time and is thought to represent the entire universe. The Sun Stone may have geographical significance, and much like the anatomical man in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, which depicts elements and qualities in four corners, it may convey the four corners of the Earth. And as the name suggests, the sun is often figured as at the center—resembling more a Copernican conception of the universe than a Ptolemaic one in that regard. Native Americans and Meso-Americans from many peoples and traditions share a view of the universe as whole and connected, of people as integral to nature and vice versa. In the introduction, I discussed how Robin Wall Kimmerer describes time as a circle or a spiral and expresses gratitude for our interconnected world and all the creatures in it in a way that recalls St. Francis’s Laudes Creaturarum. Likewise, Leroy Little Bear, writing about Plains Indian beliefs, says, “The idea of all things being in constant motion or flux leads to a holistic and cyclical view of the world. It results in a concept of time that is dynamic but without motion. Time is part of the constant flux,

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Figure 6.2. Native American Cosmos: c. 1502, Sun stone, National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, Mexico. Source: By Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata—Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:​//​commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​ .php​?curid​=80020016 Creative Commons.

but goes nowhere. Time just is” (2000, 78). Sámi culture also sees time as primarily circular, though that has changed under European influence. Still, cyclical views of time are preserved in language, in the traditional singing called Yoik, and in storytelling digressions similar to the interlace structure of Anglo-Saxon poetry (Weinstock 2022). Time in particular is imagined as circular in many Indigenous cultures, as in medieval Europe. The passing beat of the now intersects with duration and eternity in varying ways in various cultures.9 This is captured even in Indigenous languages, which tend to conceptualize ideas in verbs, in action and process, rather than nominalizing them (Kimmerer 2013; Little Bear 2000). As a biologist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer insists on the importance of a counterhegemonic understanding of community and nature: “All flourishing is mutual” (2013, 24). Noticing the appeal of purple asters and goldenrod growing together, Kimmerer waxed eloquent to her advisor about their beauty and synchronicity. He told her that

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that wasn’t science and that if she wanted to study beauty, she should “go to art school.” She accepted this as a rebuke to her whole culture, way of seeing the world, and abundant local knowledge—and strove to learn the botany she was taught, “reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective” (2013, 56). But she eventually “circled back . . . to the question of beauty,” finding through scientific inquiry that the complementary colors appeal more to pollinators in combination than singly (2013, 60–61). This example is important in at least two respects: first, in the way that Western science tends to dismiss other ways of seeing the world that are excluded by its own paradigms, often those of women or minorities; second, in the way that people informed by Indigenous cultures are more likely to see the gestalt, the relationships, the interpenetrations, the interacting whole ecology, and thereby a fuller view of reality. The power of this way of apprehending the cosmos emerges with even greater clarity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. The protagonist, Tayo, has been severely damaged during World War II by terrible violence, personal loss, separation from the Earth, and estrangement from his culture resulting from white colonization. Like the structure of the novel itself, and like the tangled knots of Tayo’s mind, the envisioned cosmos is as intricately connected as a spiderweb, filled with patterns and life—even to the bare veined rocks of the mountain.10 “But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.” The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. . . . The old man only made him certain of something he had feared all along, something in the old stories. It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured. (1977, 35–36, 38)

Here, both the natural world and the created world of humans, brought into being by language, are intermingled and placed into an ethical context. The world here is both strong and delicate, and great attention is needed to care for it properly. Natural world and human are intimately connected, and those who curse rain clouds damage the actual landscape. We learn later in the novel that the sand, the earth, injured by the sun once the webs are torn away

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and the rain is cursed, is nevertheless part of life and meant to be honored. And Ts’its’tsi’nako–Thought-Woman, Spider Woman—who spins the spiral webs, thinks the stories into being, and traces the patterns in the sand—is one of the animal protagonists who helps people get back the rain clouds to end the drought. In the end, it is a sand painting, an emblematic assembly of essential elements of the Earth—sand and corn and branches of different trees—that creates the ceremony that heals and redeems Tayo. The ceremony very pointedly is not simply a static preservation from the past, but a living ceremony adjusted to that time and place. It is essential that, as with a labyrinth, Tayo not simply regard the sand painting as a relic, but pace through the ceremony and complete bodily penance, spiritual reflection, a symbolic and real journey. The sand painting is somehow coterminous with the world around them all: “He took a deep breath of cold mountain air; there were no boundaries; the world below and the sand paintings inside became the same that night. The mountains from all the directions had been gathered there that night” (1977, 145). The entire plot is mapped by the sand painting, all part of a careful design. Even Tayo’s mystical lover Ts’eh, or Tse-pi’na,—Mount Taylor, the Woman Veiled in Clouds; the Earth Goddess, a sacred figure in Laguna cosmology; the home of Spider Woman; and a sandy cliff painted by the ancients—is described as like sand: “he felt her body, and it was as warm as the sand, and he couldn’t feel where her body ended and the sand began” (1977, 222). Many times throughout the novel, Ts’eh is associated with warm wet sand, an earthiness that consecrates their union in Pueblo culture and metaphysics. In Ceremony, the sky and sun and moon and stars are also mapped in sand paintings, but they have local meaning and influence, more like the medieval imagination than the contemporary Western one. They, too, are part of the living story of humans and nature together: “Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes almost imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky” (1977, 95). As in the European Middle Ages, the stars could be read for transcendent significance: “the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars. . . . He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. . . . They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth; but always there were these stars” (1977, 247, 254). Tayo regains health as he begins to connect again to his people, to the Earth, and to the stars that are the map to his journey. Readers learn too, that white people see even the animals as dead things, the whole as dead rather than alive. As she weaves Laguna stories and music into the narrative, Silko writes of a time before Europeans, when Indigenous witches summoned evil. When the witches competitively display their

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horrors, the worst comes last, as white people are summoned from nothing: “white skin people / like the belly of a fish / covered with hair. / Then they grow away from the earth / then they grow away from the sun / then they grow away from the plants and animals. / They see no life / When they look / they see only objects. / The world is a dead thing for them / the trees and rivers are not alive / the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects / They see no life” (1977, 133–35). These are important counterpoints for Westernized readers: do we see stones and mountains as alive? Do we treat animals as objects? What is the outcome of these attitudes? Often, students reading Ceremony are jarred out of an ingrained mindset by these, for them, dissonant questions. The white people are described as coming from over the sea, poisoning the water, causing drought, killing the people, bringing plague and destruction, and stealing rivers, mountains, and all the land. Finally, they take the rocks “with veins of green and yellow and black” and “lay the final pattern . . . across the world and explode everything” (1977, 136–37). So in the end, while it is the “white skin people” who destroy the world—ultimately with nuclear weapons that exploit the patterns in veins of rocks (uranium)—it was native witchery that set events in motion. In some ways, this seems like victim blaming, yet it does have the effect of providing Native American protagonists with order and agency, a pattern that is potentially reversible with thoughtful action. Silko has been criticized by some members of the Laguna Pueblo because of how much she revealed of sacred ceremonies and stories.11 Despite this, and despite its explicit concern with cultural hybridity, this book provides an important alternate view to modern Western ideas of nature, cosmos, and community. One of its greatest pieces of wisdom is how the stories we tell—myths and legends, scientific explanations, curses meant for others, or personal narratives—become the reality we have imagined: “I will tell you something about stories. / They aren’t just entertainment. / Don’t be fooled. / They are all we have, you see, / all we have to fight off / illness and death. . . . / There is life here for the people” (1977, 2). In arguing for the power of stories, Silko makes a larger point about the nature of reality, one that amplifies the argument I am making here: the stories we spin, the legends we weave, the scientific explanations we employ, the Enframings we inherit, and the cultural narratives we act upon shape the world we occupy. Once Tayo expels the lies told him and takes the time to construct a more authentic story, both he and the natural world are restored to health. In talking about the intelligence of trees and the power of oral tradition, Suzanne Simard describes how discoveries, new to her, were long known to the native people of the Pacific Northwest: “‘The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth. . . . [They] say

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that the trees also teach about their symbiotic nature. That under the forest floor, there are fungi that keep the trees connected and strong” (2021, 66). A member of the Mi’kmaq people describes it as “trees hold[ing] hands beneath the forest floor” (Redvers 2019, 164). Beliefs that were labeled myths—the intelligence and interconnection of trees and other plants—have come to be confirmed by empirical science. The sense of community as circle is seen elsewhere as well. In the Aboriginal view, the circle embodies a sense of the whole: “Holism relates to the inherent interconnection with the earth and all the spirits of the Creation. ‘The centred and quartered circle is a sign of wholeness, of inclusiveness of all reality, of life, of balance and harmony between man and nature’” (Hill, quoted in Redvers 2019, 8). Nicole Redvers, a naturopathic doctor who is a member of the Deninu K’ue First Nation Band in Northern Canada, emphasizes the importance of circular thinking among Indigenous peoples: The circle is an important concept in Indigenous traditions, with the cycle of life turning round and round in a pattern of regeneration. The circle, being primary, influences how we as Aboriginal peoples view the world. In the process of how life evolves, how the natural world grows and works together, how all things are connected, and how all things move toward their destiny. Aboriginal peoples see and respond to the world in a circular fashion and are influenced by the examples of the circles of creation in our environment. (2019, 193–94)

She connects this circular worldview to Indigenous cosmology, which is cyclical and also includes a four-fold symmetry inscribed within “the Indigenous medicine wheel or sacred circle, with the four directions and with the four states (mind, body, spirit, and emotions). We have four key building blocks, or elements. . . . ” (2019, 194). Redvers is clear that these symmetries structure not only the cosmos, but the Indigenous way of being. Jack D. Forbes, of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent, phrases it this way: “I am a point of awareness, a circle of consciousness, in the midst of a series of circles. One circle is that which we call ‘the body.’ It is a universe itself, full of millions of little living creatures living their own ‘separate’ but dependent lives. . . . But all of these ‘circles’ are not really separate—they are all mutually dependent upon each other . . . ” (2001, 291). Perhaps it is in the nature of a circle to seem to embrace all things, as Plato might have said. In contrast to an infinite line, a circle seems inherently to include. Forbes points out the boundary-lessness of human nature and existence generally, as well as our connection to the universe and everything around us. He joins Silko— and Kimmerer too—in insisting, against the testimony of traditional modern Western chemistry, that rocks are alive. Recent work in geology points out that many rocks are the product of life (coral, limestone, coal, sedimentary

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rocks of all kinds), and many of our minerals only form in the presence of life. Furthermore, rocks are occupied by endoliths, extremophile bacteria, archaea, fungi, and other organisms that may inhabit stone miles beneath the Earth’s surface. Here is another example where Indigenous “myth” is confirmed as reality by newer scientific models that more holistically regard ecosystems and the blurred and blended border between alive and inert, biotic and nonbiotic.12 Unlike the Western placeless, empty Cartesian grid, Indigenous cosmologies are deeply rooted in particular landscapes. Upon moving into a new place, as Mircea Eliade recounts, many native peoples perform ceremonies that amount to a reenactment of a cosmogony. For example, the nomadic Australians of the Achilpa tribe carry with them a kauwa-auwa, a sacred pole that they implant in each new campsite. By this act, they at once consecrate the site and connect—by means of a situated axis mundi—with the cosmic force of their mythic ancestor Numbakula, who first fashioned a kauwa-auwa from the trunk of a gum tree. As a result, “the world of the Achilpa really becomes their world only in proportion as it reproduces the cosmos organized and sanctified by Numbakula.” (Casey 1997, 21)

Despite the many differences within and among cultures, many Indigenous cultures, like medieval European ones, tend to show a deep reverence for particular places; they cycle through the seasons in a spiral motion, returning always to the very spot on Earth they began, moving more through time than through space. And by preserving that stasis and stability, and in some sense preserving time and tradition as well, generations dead, alive, and unborn exist in one interconnected community. These cultures see humans existing among many other beautiful creatures, all unique and interdependent; they prize humility, gratitude, and generosity. As Kimmerer says, “In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us.” It seems significant that both medieval European and Native American cultures “dance in a circle, not in a line” (2013, 458, 456). In Buddhist and Hindu practice, mandalas convey both the orderliness of the cosmos and the mind as a microcosm of that cosmos via layers of geometric shapes compounded, expanding and contracting—much like the shapes compounded, squares inscribed inside of circles, of Euclid and the medieval tradition (Figure 6.3). Manda means “center” or “circle” in Sanskrit, coinciding with the mandala’s generally circular symmetry (Hasegawa 2017). Mandalas can also represent God, the Universe, or the self. The aphorism that “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Quinn 2019)—attributed originally to Hermes Trismegistus—can be an

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Figure 6.3. Mandala: Manjuvajramandala with 43 deities, from Tibet. Tempera on cotton. Measures 71 by 85 centimeters (28 in × 33 in). Held at the Museo d’Arte Orientale. Source: In the Common Domain. By Unknown author—Google Cultural Institute, Public Domain, https:​//​ commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​.php​?curid​=35352478.

inspiration for the timeless, global practice of mandala-making. There is a search for order and symmetry embodied in these images. Often, the devotee follows the shapes on a spiritual journey, from outside to inside, through the layers of the image, much as medieval people could trace a metaphorical journey and contemplation of the cosmos by following the circles and orbits, twists and turns of a labyrinth—or go on pilgrimage, treading ancient vias

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across Europe and the Middle East—and much as Tayo must enact and follow the route of the sand painting that extends itself symbolically out into the cosmos. There is a sense that in covering physical space or representational paths, mental and spiritual progress can be gained as well. In each of these cases, the center holds.13 Recent research on mandalas has shown that they activate mirror neurons in the brain, helping to foster empathic connections between humans. Psychologists, artists, healthcare practitioners, and others see mandala making as a way to access the subconscious and possibly even to affect epigenetic switching in individuals—and in populations, as people in interdependent relationships affect one another (Quinn 2019). Mandalas, with their curved lines that direct the eye to the center, appear to reduce the fight or flight response, alleviate anxiety and depression, and activate emotional centers of the brain (Quinn 2019; Liu 2020). Mandala making—individually or in groups, paired with reflective journaling—raises self-awareness, which in turn enables healthy communication with others (Quinn 2019). What is to be gained from these kinds of icons and emblems across cultures and time? Jung is well known for using mandalas in his practice—he argued that mandalas were emblematic of an integrated self, reflecting union with the world: “The mandala serves a conservative purpose—namely, to restore a previously existing order. . . . The process is that of the ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point” (Jung 1968, 225). This is Dante’s universe, not our own. Perhaps a sense that the universe still has order and wholeness, as vast and chaotic as it may be, is psychologically necessary, a helpful narrative. Societies ranging from ancient Chinese to Native American envision the universe as a cosmic egg or round, bounded whole (Casey 1997, 27). And beyond the universe— before the universe—our terrestrial reality—our biology and ecology—is indeed composed of intrinsically whole and circular systems and patterns, a balance that we disrupt at our own peril. Many deep ecologists have turned to Eastern traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism to try to reinvent our environmental ethic, though a full exploration of this is outside the scope of this project.14 Rentmeester, recognizing how entrenched our metaphysics are and how difficult to change, points out that Heidegger helps lay a foundation for an environmental ethic outside of Western metaphysics, one akin to Daoism in particular (2016). Dào, or the way, is conceived of as a vitality that pervades everything and that comes to be on its own, spontaneously, without any moving by an Unmoved Mover. There is a sense of energy flow through the whole in dào that is suggestive of the energy flow through trophic levels in an ecosystem. Also recognized in Daoism is the uniqueness of particular entities, captured in the word dé, which means power or virtue and connotes the flourishing of each unique

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entity (Rentmeester 2016, 90). It is this attention to the particular, and letting entities be themselves, that is most similar between Daoism and Heidegger’s thought, and may indeed be an inspiration to further environmental ethics and metaphysics. In stillness, contemplation, letting be, and dwelling, perhaps we see the dynamic stasis and circularity of earlier times and other cultures. The circularity is of a rotating sphere, in motion but also in stillness. We see this notion in Daoist philosophy in the concept of yin-yang, emblemized by the famous image of dark and light chasing each other within a circle. The two are seen as opposed, equal, and bound together, a mutual whole. These opposing qualities are linked to many other dichotomies: dark-light, moon-sun, female-male, winter-summer, cold-hot, death-growth, destruction-creation. The figure represents the cosmos as a whole, circling round in a continual series of cycles in one continual exchange of life. Refiguring the imagined shape of the world is not impossible. Gandhi captured the idea of living economies and interactions between humans and nature by reimagining the shape of reality: Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance, but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units. Therefore, the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle, but will give strength to all within and will derive its own strength from it. (1946, 236)

This coming to the center seems essential to mandalas as well. In the medieval model, the center of the cosmos is the Earth, the lowest, humblest point. At the center of the labyrinth is the successful defeat of the Minotaur, of sin and weakness, and a symbol of resurrection. At the center and summit of Purgatory is the stepping off place to Heaven, once Dante is “puro e disposto a salire a le stelle” (Purg., xxxiii.144) [pure and ready to mount unto the stars], but it is not Heaven itself. Satan occupies the frozen center of Hell, and God both the outermost circle of Heaven and center of all that is. It is interesting to consider the symbolism of the center, which perhaps can be heard even in the adjective “centered.” Here too, according to Gandhi, the center is self, humbled before but also in union with the outermost circle of other. This circular symbolism recurs in the Hindu celebratory dance form of Garba, whose etymology is based on the Sanskrit word for “womb.” These circular dances revolve around a clay lantern, symbolizing the womb of the mother Goddess Amba or Ambika, whose burning light represents the fetus (Garlough 2008). As my friend and colleague Jayashree Sarathy has described,

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“Garba is performed in a circle as a symbol of how we view time—cyclical” (2022). The rings of dancers circle the center, often both clockwise and counter-clockwise, symbolizing the cycle of time from birth, to life, to death, and back to birth. In this infinite and unending cycling, the only constant is the Goddess, an idea not so dissimilar from the medieval idea of God, who alone remains unchanging in a constantly changing and circularly revolving universe. The movement of the body through space and time is another kind of knowing, another kind of intelligence. And dancing in a line or other form, as is common in classical ballet and modern dance, is metaphorically and kinesthetically quite different from medieval, Native American, or Indian dance, more commonly formed in a circle. Dance, like the harmonia mundi or music of the celestial spheres, like Dante’s verse form, is also an artful motion through time and space, much like poetry composed according to meter and rhyme, counted out to a rhythm. There is something essentially corporeal about dance; dance is usually choreographed around numbers and counting, yet it requires bodies moving in unison, not just the abstracted mind of the Cartesian universe. This real, particular, embodied, incarnate something is found not only in the deep recesses of European medieval history but also in Native American and contemporary Indian practice, mimetic of a mindset that revolves in time and space around an unmoving center. Even the symbolism and symmetries in science are changing here and there, as in the redoing of phylogenetic trees into phylogeny mandalas, which more accurately represent the richness and intricacy of relationships among species and change over time (Figure 6.4). Based on recent molecular phylogenetic technology, these mandalas vividly portray the biodiversity of life (Hasegawa 2017). It also is not surprising to learn that a schematic mandala has been used to characterize the health and resilience of the microbiome of the Great Barrier Reef: a system of interrelated organisms of tremendous complexity and diversity whose optimality in turn was able to partially predict the health and resilience of the ecosystems as a whole in different locations within the Reef (Galbraith and Convertino 2021). ECO-CRITICAL THINKING IN THE ROUND There are more examples than can be mentioned of people who are already enacting circular thinking and cradle-to-cradle design—a resonant phrase describing biomimetic approaches that replaces cradle-to-grave design and that reminds us that everything we put into the world, the destructive CO2, the toxic chemicals, the venomous culture, will be inherited cradle to cradle, a spiral pattern down through the generations who inherit these noxious

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Figure 6.4. Phylogenetic Tree of Life: Ivica Letunic: Iletunic. 2008. Retraced by Mariana Ruiz Villarreal: LadyofHats—The image was generated using iTOL: Interactive Tree Of Life, an online phylogenetic tree viewer and Tree of Life resource. SVG retraced image from ITOL Tree of life.jpg. Source: Public Domain, https:​//​commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​.php​?curid​=3633804.

legacies in utero, whether we like it or not. This is a contrast with the timeline of life as we usually conceive it, birth to death, a linear and finite pattern. Change is coming by working as diverse communities; Van Jones (2008), Carolyn Finney (2014), Ron Finley (2013), and many others are expanding environmental education and environmental justice efforts so that everyone believes that they can play a role in preserving the Earth. Seeing the world afresh depends in part on seeing beyond the estrangement, alienation, and linearity of the dominant model and finding antidotes not only in various cultures and diverse communities but in recent scientific innovations. An example of our radical interconnectedness can be seen in gene transfer, not only within species but among them. Bacteria are especially adept at this,

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exchanging not only genes but basically inherited knowledge and experience. “There is no wall between species. We are truly connected” (Redvers, 2019, 36). Epigenetic changes connect us to our environment and our experiences; commensal bacteria connect us to the land and organisms around us, protecting us from infection, modulating our immune systems, attuning our endocrine and neurological systems. Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe discuss how rewilding innovates on restoration, allowing ecosystems to move on through plant and animal successions that may include novelty rather than being returned artificially to some past baseline. Rewilding’s emphasis on functionalism does not necessarily imply that the compositional approach more common to conservation is wrong, as implied in the mnemonic “protect the best; rewild the rest” (2020, 81); rather, rewilding is an additive or synergistic approach. Another catchphrase for rewilding is cores, corridors, and carnivores: core protected areas connected by traversable corridors and inhabited by top predators or large herbivores (functional species). While not rejecting conservation, rewilding may amount to a paradigm shift. In general, rewilding focuses on holistic systems thinking rather than linear standards. Two key concepts are especially pertinent in the way that rewilding remakes the symmetries of previous conceptualizations of nature: trophic cascade and ecospace. Trophic cascades of energies through ecosystems, the interactions among trophic levels, or the familiar levels of the pyramidal food chain, are much more complex than usually understood: “By complicating the traditional pyramidal representation of trophic hierarchy, scientists have given form to the idea of interacting trophic webs with functional species creating cascading effects in different directions through the networks” (Jepson and Blythe 2020, 73). This pattern enables an unprecedented level of community cohesion. Ecospace attempts to show how local abiotic conditions help determine the “identity and diversity of organisms and interactions in ecosystems” (Jepson and Blythe 2020, 75). Ecospace expresses the negotiation between spaces and the particular places and ecosystems they will become, though already, those “spaces” are more particular and inhabited than any Cartesian grid could be. It is also interesting that, as with Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia and endosymbiosis, there is room for agency and teleology in nature: while restoration ecology is focused on continuous, intensive intervention, rewilding lets the ecosystem take the lead, even allowing for “self-willed ecosystems” (Jepson and Blythe 2020, 83). Like the symmetry breaking and chaotic morphogenesis I referenced toward the end of chapter 4, rewilding depends not just on order but on stochastic disruption and dispersal to enrich and enliven resilient ecosystems. Rewilding can be both literal and metaphorical. It brings with it a new language and new concepts, just as one would expect with a paradigm shift.

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And it recommends changes not only in nature but in humans, disrupting the subject/object dichotomy. George Monbiot (aptly named “one common life”) diagnoses contemporary people with ecological boredom and prescribes rewilding, not only of large tracts of land but of ourselves (2017; Sahn 2014). It’s important to see humans as part of nature, co-species among many other organisms, and to recognize how human damage to landscapes has impoverished human experience, without most people even being aware of this. Here I think of how things that are outside of Enframings, paradigms, or metaphoric conceptual systems, including vanished ecosystems, fall outside of human awareness, as I discussed in the previous chapter.15 There is a parallel between what I am arguing—that we should return to the past and delve for natural and holistic metaphors and concepts that can be recuperated, but with a difference—and rewilding—which returns to past essentials of ecosystem functioning without trying to artificially restore a certain given set of species. We must “rewild” our culture. This is not a religious or mystical argument, though perhaps some mythology would do us good. It’s an argument about the symmetries and semiotics and stories with which we think, consciously or unconsciously. The symmetries of the heavens are not the symmetries of our living Earth. And some of those symmetries and semiotics and stories are—and have always been—drawn from the best science of the day. But which science? I would argue that we should choose more terrestrial sciences—biology and ecology—for our more terrestrial problems, electing to be true to the being of entities themselves rather than imposing an artificial and ill-fitting framework. In our larger cultural imaginations, we should pursue biomimicry and regenerative agriculture more than traditional chemistry and physics, the more abstract and abstracting sciences. In looking at the world through multiple perspectives and attempting to regard nature and other organisms and entities with the respect they inherently deserve, perhaps we also allow humans to be their full selves and accord them the respect they inherently deserve at the same time. It is no accident that in reducing natural beings to mere objects to serve human intentions, we have simultaneously reduced human beings to mere objects in many ways, even to the extent of self-objectification. Heidegger makes this point about nature versus technology: “The birch tree never oversteps its possibility. The colony of bees dwells in its possibility. It is first the will which arranges itself everywhere in technology that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and change of what is artificial. Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility” (1954, 109). So often, we drive nature beyond the “sphere of its possibility.” So often our culture chooses synthetic poisonous “perfection” over the truly healthy options of the past: giant hybrid strawberries encased in

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plastic grown with toxic doses of methyl bromide that cannot be washed off versus the homegrown organic strawberries that are smaller, sweeter, needing the dirt brushed off them, just for example. The stories we tell about the cosmos, based on the best science of the day, are nevertheless stories—and origin stories at that. They have tremendous power over how we envision not just the space around us but everyday reality on Earth. We need, perhaps, more contact with nature, and less screen time, so that we can connect more to individual places, unspoiled and contaminated alike, rather than to the placeless, abstract sense of space currently preoccupying our minds, a space not unlike the placeless abstraction of virtual space. We should perhaps shiver at the placeless, timeless, nothingness of Meta and its ilk, so often imagined in post-apocalyptic fictions and now here in fact. As Edward Casey has said, technology is part and parcel with our dis-place-ment: “the massive spread of electronic technology . . . makes irrelevant where you are so long as you can link up with other users of the same technology. Each of these phenomena is truly ‘cosmic,’ that is, literally worldwide, and each exhibits a dromocentrism [race, speeded up] that amounts to temporocentrism writ large. . . . It is as if the acceleration discovered by Galileo to be inherent in falling bodies has come to pervade the Earth . . . , rendering the planet a ‘global village’ not in a positive sense but as a placeless place indeed” (1997, 13). Perhaps more of us need to put down our phones and laptops, look around ourselves, settle in for the long haul, and bloom where we are planted, comfortable as dandelions sprouting up in a crack of the sidewalk, transplanted but at home. From my retreat in Wisconsin, I gaze up at the dark night sky, and I realize: most of us—certainly most of my students—never see this: a full sky of brilliant, intricate stars—the Big Dipper, the Milky Way, unobstructed by buildings and nightglow. It is alien, unbuilt, and yet familiar. To the naïve and wondering eye, it looks indeed like a protective crystal shell, like the heavens, like an enframing. . . . So in some ways, we need this cosmological view, but from a more terrestrial perspective. Here we are, enclosed in our ecosystems, gazing out with unaided eye at myriad stars, myriad galaxies, that still make us feel both homely and alone. Perhaps we don’t yet have our imagination of the cosmos right; perhaps it is not the abstraction we think it is—perhaps it is our home, though otherworldly, just as our gut bacteria cannot conceptualize us as beings—and yet belong. And what is essential is that we look back from whatever cosmological view we have toward our own Earth, humble and remote in the universe as it is. We are all that we have, so far as we know, and we must care for each other in community. We must view the world as a whole, whatever is going on in the abstract envisioning of the universe. We must care for the Earth as we care for our own bodies, as we

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should, microcosmos to geocosmos, part of the larger whole and inextricably in communion with others. The moon was rising above the last mesa he had crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. . . . The pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. (Silko 1977, 247)

NOTES 1. I am thinking here of Aldo Leopold’s admonition that we must go beyond the merely beautiful in nature: “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words” (1953, 102). 2. There is not space to do justice to the topic, but see also Karen Thornber (2016) and the entire issue of Humanities on Environmental Studies and Global Indigeneities. 3. See John Ganim for a discussion of the “twinned association of medievalism and Orientalism,” the similar treatment of distance in both space and time (2016, 3). 4. Classen analyzes the metaphoric significance of water and the forest in the Middle Ages in two very fine books as part of Lexington’s Ecocritical Theory and Practice series (2015; 2017). 5. Penelope Reed Doob is exceptionally good not only on actual labyrinths but also their metaphorical valences, as well as labyrinthine characteristics of texts, or labyrinthicity, as she calls it (1990). For more on the cultural and theoretical significance of following pathways through time and space, see Albrecht Classen (2021). 6. Much as with the communion of saints, the Sámi saw the dead as in community with the living: “the living and the departed were regarded as two halves of the same family” (Holloway 2022). 7. Cf. Seb Falk (2021). 8. See Anthony F. Aveni (1989) for more on the Mayan calendar. 9. For more on conceptions of time, see Eva Brann (1999). 10. Jude Todd describes how the web metaphors tie into Laguna culture. He also highlights the power of the spiral in these mythologies: “Since Spider woman, the Creatrix, spins her web in a spiral, the spiral symbolizes creative power in Pueblo cultures. However, this power can be used for evil as well as for good. Thus Emo cuts off fingertip pads to use the fingerprint whorls in future witchcraft” (1995, n1). Alanna Kathleen Brown discusses how reading Silko helped her understand

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“concentric knowing, that it is the relation between things, between others, that is of critical importance. From the middle of the web, linear thinking can look selfabsorbed, immature, and contrived. It also is easily manipulated and has been profoundly destructive as one sees when one reviews Euroamerican / Native American history” (1995, 174). 11. Paula Gunn Allen critiques Silko’s use of sacred myth because Pueblo peoples believe words and narratives are private and not only report reality but create it: “the story . . . is a clan story, and is not to be told outside of the clan” (1990, 385). She recounts how most Native American storytellers refuse to share sacred stories with writers who hope to profit from them—or even simply preserve them. She describes how while in the Western tradition, information is considered transcendent, in the Native American tradition, stories and knowledge are emplaced and contextual; they “have meaning within the traditional, day to day context of the people who live within it” (1990, 383). 12. One exploration of the boundaries around and definition of life is Carl Zimmer’s Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (2021). 13. The opposite motion occurs in Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. . . . ” (1989, 1–3). 14. Buddhist Alan Wallace argues that we don’t know that Asians don’t know more about consciousness because science has ignored Asian philosophy for its entire history. He alleges that it is a remnant of colonialism to say that if we don’t know, no one knows (Gleiser 2017, 1:08:22). 15. For more on rewilding, I highly recommend Isabella’s Tree’s book Wilding, or the website at https:​//​knepp​.co​.uk​/rewildingkneppvideo that describes her and her husband Charles Burrell’s transformation of Knepp Estate in the south of England into a 3500-acre wilderness of re-domesticated wild oxen, ponies, and pigs; it’s become a refuge for turtledoves, nightingales, and purple emperor butterflies. See also https:​//​ rewilding​.org (2022) and rewilding projects in Argentina (Fundacion 2022) at https:​ //​rewildingargentina​.org​/ibera​-project​/ and in Europe at https:​//​rewildingeurope​.com and in Yellowstone National Park (2022) at https:​//​www​.yellowstonepark​.com​/things​ -to​-do​/wildlife​/wolf​-reintroduction​-changes​-ecosystem​/ This topic is vast, but see also Pereira and Navarro (2015), Carey (2016), and Pettorelli (2019).

Conclusion

In these final thoughts, I hope to offer readers some insights, including the practical: how can we use our understanding of the power of metaphor and the compulsion of culture in order to choose to succeed, not fail, paraphrasing Jared Diamond in Collapse? We face existential environmental threats and must solve them within a few decades, at most. How can we wrest control over our own mindsets and influence those of friends, family, students, patients, colleagues, and others beneficially?1 And how would the world look if we did our best to understand and return to the circles and cycles of nature? Sandra Steingraber (2010) is among those who propose a new experiment: let’s take toxic chemicals out of our environment, stop systematically poisoning ourselves, and see what happens. Do rates of cancer and other environmental illnesses decline? Some researchers are increasingly using these methods, which are inherently ethical, as opposed to the enormous uncontrolled experiment we are currently doing on ourselves and on every other species in the world without any sort of informed consent or scientific method. The lesson of this kind of research is that we can change our practices; we have almost nothing to lose and so much to gain.2 So let’s do that first. Or rather, let’s do that first and at the same time, address climate change. Environmental solutions, like nature and the problems that beset it, are intertwined and overlapping—one cloth; and though there is a temptation to subdivide and fragment solutions, like problems, to solve them, we should think of the whole rather than succumbing to reductionism. Rampant use of fossil fuels is the number one contributor both to climate change and, less directly through pesticides and other pollution, to childhood cancer and widespread illness. We would need to revisit the past for the best of the past at the same time we look to a hybrid dynamic future that incorporates diverse natural metaphors and practices, in hopes of making people aware of their own assumptions and in hopes of shifting culture. Looking to the past for solutions to our gravest environmental problems is a move that should appeal to both conservative and progressive impulses. After all, there is nothing conservative about eliminating the ecosystems on which all creatures, including humans, 187

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depend. Any defender of civilization, every lover of past literature, culture, music, history—as well as every forward thinker in improving society, diminishing inequality, and promoting justice—in short, every person who loves anything on Earth must work on preventing ecocide first. Does that sound dramatic? Sadly, I don’t think it is overstated during our unprecedented times. Civilization has fallen many times before, but never before has the entire global civilization collapsed. With globalization, we are more vulnerable to collapse than ever, and the effects of environmental devastation would be much longer lasting. It will take thousands of years, even now, for the climate to return to anything resembling baseline. Some of our solutions will need to address our in-built shortsightedness, our almost unavoidable cognitive biases—like confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, future discounting, normalcy bias, groupthink, landscape amnesia, and many more—evolved in us over eons of prioritizing short-term problems like large toothy predators over longer-term problems like destroying the environment.3 Persuading the resistant can be very difficult not only because of these inbuilt tendencies but also because of human stubbornness. Perversely, particularly on issues related to individual or tribal identity, facts are unlikely to persuade the decided; instead, they can experience a cognitive bias called the backfire or boomerang effect, whereby they assert their individual freedom by believing more in an idea when presented with even strong evidence to the contrary. We can all think of people who, when presented with solid evidence that they are wrong, simply double down on their mistaken belief, whether about climate change, vaccinations, or lost elections. The pitfalls that mire direct communication about environmental problems seem sometimes to undermine the firm ground of effective strategies: there is the overkill backfire effect, which occurs when too much or too technical information is presented, as well as the familiarity backfire effect, which occurs when people just hear falsities repeated often enough to find them true. Others will react against any facts that threaten their basic worldview. There is a vast body of research on how best to communicate difficult messages about the environment.4 Debiasing is a process that reduces cognitive biases.5 What also seems to work well is listening to personal stories, preferably from people who are familiar and therefore credible. We should exhibit (or at least feign) patience, though not too much patience, with climate deniers; we must listen with the ear of the heart, as my Benedictine friends advise. Lisa Leombruni has described how climate change has been so effectively politicized by the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they sponsor that now, people feel it is almost rude to talk about it (2015). We must find ways to communicate, however, sometimes through fiction and art. During the pandemic, what has worked best for the vaccine hesitant is to ask

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what their concerns are and refer them to reliable information (Gagneur and Tamerius 2021). So, while some solutions are inherently cultural and social in nature, many are practical, and here too, an eye to the past is beneficial; after all, the Dutch had windmills centuries ago, and we still find them not only effective but also beautiful. Medieval cathedrals were built to last a thousand years, and have. They are still almost unsurpassed in the graceful strength of their flying buttresses and waterspout gargoyles, the capitals of the columns engraved with living histories of the culture’s sacred texts. There are fields in Europe that have been sustainably farmed for centuries, some perhaps back to Roman times, and even possibly the Bronze Age, surrounded by hedgerows that house hedgehogs, hares, dormice, birds, bats, beetles, and butterflies—all the life and beauty of Darwin’s tangled bank. And in those hedgerows, each woody species in a 30-yard length is thought to count as a century in the age of the hedge (Pollard, Hooper, and Moore 1974). Unfortunately, many have been removed to enlarge fields, but the hedgerows that remain not only shelter wildlife and increase populations of native species; they also provide a barrier against wind, erosion, pesticide drift, and noise pollution. Here, as in many cases, the practical and ancient solution is also beautiful, at least when seen with a knowing eye. We need to do a great deal of cultural labor to retrain our imaginations in ways we are just beginning to understand, ways that allow us to better see the whole. When a large proportion of Americans see dangerously poisoned green lawns as clean and beautiful, unspotted by dandelions, but healthy soil with robust microbial life that grows nutritious food—or even anything that touches soil or creeps and crawls on the ground—as dirty and polluted, to be radically cleansed by often toxic cleansers—we know we have a badly diseased cultural imagination.6 We need not only critical work but creative innovations that reach the masses. The Martian was one movie that was a benediction of botany, a paean to plants, a gush of gratitude for gut bacteria, as Matt Damon harvested the crew’s feces to grow potatoes (2015). On the other hand, it promoted the illusion that Mars or another planet is some escape from our problems here on Earth. Avatar, while also promoting that fallacy, has allowed many to envision a society in union with nature, where animals and humanoids communicate, literally plugging into each other and into the Tree of Souls. Amazingly, the Mother Tree idea of Avatar has basis in the hard science of Suzanne Simard, who consulted on the movie, sharing aspects of her research showing that trees communicate underground with each other via fungal extensions, or mycorrhizae, that they support each other by exchanging nutrients, that they recognize each other as individuals and family members, that they remember the past and have agency over the future, and that these underground neural networks function as nothing so

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much as a brain, a sophisticated intelligence (2021). Trees are indeed part of a complicated interdependent circle or mesh of life. We also need to shift our culture with major changes to policy, changes that properly understand the planet, its people, and other creatures as one whole organism. As with the public health victories in smoking prevention, the science showing harm undergirds new laws that attempt to prevent that harm, which recursively change the culture around practices like smoking or polluting. This lends greater support to laws and policies, in a virtuous cycle. Where once it was considered rude to ask people not to smoke nearby, now it is the health impacts from smokers that are presumed offensive. Default assumptions have switched; the importance of these unstated social rules, what is done and what is beyond the pale, cannot be overstated. As with the public health victories in smoking prevention, however, the related industries have been fighting back dirty and hard (Oreskes and Conway 2011). Many have laid out the practical solutions to our climate disaster, most notably, perhaps, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, out of Stanford, who have created concrete, detailed plans to go 100 percent renewable energy within 20 years for 139 countries (Jacobson and Delucchi 2009; Jacobson et al. 2017). These plans differ dramatically by country. Iceland, predictably, already depends on its massive natural geothermal power, but the plan advises they diversify with on- and off-shore wind and hydroelectric. Countries without access to the ocean, like Botswana or Belarus, can scarcely use off-shore wind power and will depend more on photovoltaic or on-shore wind, respectively. In many ways, solutions to our environmental crises will be local and particular. Most people do not realize how well established and budget-neutral many solutions are. Jacobson and Delucchi perform the cost analysis and find that 100 percent renewable energy globally is not more expensive, but that the obstacle is “primarily social and political, not technological or economic” (2011). Superstar climate scientist Jim Hansen calls this situation “tragic” since “we may be approaching a point of no return,” causing “irreparable harm” to our children and grandchildren even though “it is unnecessary . . . if only we stopped allowing the fossil fuel industry to use the atmosphere as a free dumping ground for their waste” (2016). We could choose to change. We now have advanced and inexpensive technology for harvesting energy; solar panels really are something new under the sun if seen through the lens of history. There is a need to anticipate ways to reconnect the circle on renewable energy, which also has its impacts. Solar panels and windmills must be constructed cradle to cradle, with materials and components that are as reusable and recyclable as possible. In the past, many of our solutions have simply spawned different, and sometimes greater, problems. Pesticides were created

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to solve a real problem, but pesticides do not work with the cycles of nature. Not only do they progressively contaminate soil, water, air, humans, and other creatures; they also generate genetic evolution among exposed insects and weeds, another kind of bioaccumulation than the kind first widely revealed by Rachel Carson. Likewise, disposing of old solar panels will someday present problems we should anticipate now. Another recent standout plan, which attempts to encompass even more than just renewable energy as solutions to the climate crisis, is Project Drawdown (Hawken 2017). These 100 solutions—80 existing technologies and 20 still on the drawing board—are ranked according to greatest impact on climate change. Educating girls, which places second in Scenario 1, is one of my favorite examples; I ask my students why this ranks so high.7 Rarely do they get it on their own. Guesses range from women’s dedication to personal care products and fast fashion to toxic masculinity. The answer? It’s the single greatest contributor to reducing fertility rate per woman. Is it so novel to focus on educating girls globally? Like many solutions to climate change, the co-benefits are enormous. Other solutions more clearly hearken to the past and relink broken cycles, like silvopasture, an ancient method incorporating trees, pasture, and forage back into a single system, remedying many of the ills of modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Pasture that includes trees sequesters more carbon and makes the soil healthier, as does the natural fertilization from livestock. It also helps farmers adapt to current and near-future impacts of climate change. Abandoned farmland restoration, an important solution listed under Project Drawdown, not only brings the approximately billion acres of deserted, exhausted farmland back into the circles and cycles of nature; in some ways, it could turn back the clock, both by restoring fertility to the land and by recapturing and sequestering some of the carbon spewed into the atmosphere by abusive agricultural practices (Hawken 2017). Ideally, our use of land for food should be able to reach equilibrium with the atmosphere, even if it cannot be a net sink. Another cycle that should be reconnected is food. Currently, a third of the world’s food is never eaten, wastage that was much less likely to happen in previous times; formerly, food scraps would go to livestock or pets, or at the very least, be composted rather than producing methane in a landfill. Hungry societies are much less wasteful of food. Project Drawdown ranks Reduced Food Waste as the number one most effective way to reduce emissions under Scenario 1 and estimates that “if 50–75 percent of food waste is reduced by 2050, avoided emissions could be equal to 10.3–18.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide” (Hawken 2017). Many of the climate and environmental solutions are simply returning to older ways of doing things; after all, virtually all food was organic before the chemical industry metastasized into the dominant force in agriculture after World War II, retrofitting chemicals

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like organophosphates from nerve gas into insecticides, preventing farmers from saving their own seed, and bullying scientists who study pernicious health effects.8 Regeneration>Nexus at https:​//​regeneration​.org​/nexus is one of the most exciting new efforts to address all the environmental crises together. Part of its excellence is identifying what people can do at all levels: individual, community, institution, government. Like many of the best plans out there, it emphasizes the incredible co-benefits of addressing climate change and environmental degradation: walkable cities, healthier people, breathable air, and drinkable water. Jonathan Foley (2022) draws an analogy between climate action and disease treatment: it’s not like you go to the doctor and she prescribes treatment but there are terrible side effects. The treatment for this problem will make us healthier, wealthier, happier, and better off in many other ways. Aldo Leopold’s idea of the round river, taken from Paul Bunyan mythology, makes plain the theme of connecting loops and cycles that exist in nature, even if not prominent in our imaginations: “Wisconsin not only had a round river, Wisconsin is one. The current is the stream of energy which flows out of the soil into plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never-ending circuit of life. ‘Dust unto dust’ is a desiccated version of the Round River concept” (1953, 188). What would a future that reconnects to the metaphor of Leopold’s Round River look like? Individuals as well as governments and corporations would need to cultivate a new ethic, very similar to Leopold’s Land Ethic: “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1953, 239, 262). This ethic is at the base of sustainability, and it coalesces with the theme of this book in seeing the Earthly whole. Why are we not more conscious of the round river that flows through all of life, or our place in the “dust unto dust” cycle? Perhaps it is because we have fixated instead on a linear, extractive model, and for ourselves, we hope for “ever onward,” a new frontier, a journey into the pristine heavens, not a return to the humble dust of the Earth. In practical terms, it is not that hard to visualize a steady-state future where humans live lighter on the Earth, nor must it be a future of deprivations, nor must it be a future that resembles increasingly popular post-apocalyptic fictions, revealing what we worry about (Kauth 2015a). Economist Paul Krugman writes persuasively that “in a world of limited resources and major environmental problems, there’s something to be said for a reduction in population pressure. But we need to think about policy differently in a flat-population economy. . . . For what we’re looking at here is a world awash

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in savings with nowhere to go. . . . Well, why not put the money to work for the public good . . . and use the funds to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, invest in the health and education of our children, and more?” (2021). This kind of investing in ourselves and in our planet provides an alternate kind of growth compared to the kind we had with booming population in the past. After all, medical treatment for preventable cancers, in addition to the pesticides and industrial chemicals that cause those cancers, has contributed significantly to the GDP in the past. And while many of the solutions discussed so far focus on efficiency without conservation, saving without sacrifice, both are necessary. But a future with less material growth, some pruning back of excesses and wastefulness, need not be a future of scarcity and struggle. Our material lives could actually improve while our impact declines through mindful consumption and higher-quality, longer-lasting possessions. Saul Griffith argues that “it doesn’t mean we have a higher volume of things in our life. We will have more things that last longer and far, far fewer disposable things. But that doesn’t mean you have an empty house and a boring life. It probably means you have beautiful objects that you have a lot better relationship with. We have concepts like the Polynesian mana, in which the value of the object comes from its age and its history, not because of its shininess and newness” (Klein 2021). Perhaps we return to passing cherished dinnerware down through the generations rather than relying on take-out containers and plastic forks. Why do we so often choose to drink coffee from toxic Styrofoam cups rather than beautiful porcelain, our own grandmother’s or someone else’s, commonly found for a pittance at estate sales? The Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, much like the Polynesian concept of mana, captures the beauty of the transient and imperfect, the everyday, valuing the repaired and patched, and appreciating what is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete” in nature (Koren 1994, 7). From my great-grandmother, I have inherited a beautiful bowl with cabbage roses that shows how even Americans in past generations understood a notion similar to wabi-sabi: one of its delicately fluted edges broke off, but rather than throw it away, my great-grandfather had it mended—with gold. I will treasure it always and hope to pass it and the story down through the generations, as my mother passed story and dish to me. Now, we so vaguely grasp the understanding that goods that are worn and used reflect the passage of time and the intimacy of our daily experience that some try to purchase the aesthetic artificially by paying outrageous prices for jeans that are first constructed, then distressed and torn at the factory, to the detriment of workers who must inhale the sand dust that does the work of time, while wasting all that useful wear. The wastefulness of goods with a significant carbon footprint pales in comparison to the waste of whole human lives destroyed by the resulting silicosis and early deaths (Hebblethwaite

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and Ethirajan 2011). We manufacture new shiplap with the look of old barn boards and tear down and send to the landfill the authentic beautiful old barns of the Midwest. We would likely be happier with slow food, slow fashion, slow reading, slow living, slow planet than we are fattened by fast food, glutted by fast fashion, zombified by a blur of fast social media, dizzied by fast frenetic lives, and deprived of a fast world that has withered under our abusive grasp. Many solutions can occur in our literal backyards; here I am thinking of Doug Tallamy, who advocates planting native flowers, shrubs, and trees in our own little patches of green. A yard planted with oak and prairie plants might be expected to host 500 species of caterpillars—compared to a yard planted in Kentucky Bluegrass and Ginkgo trees, which host only five species—caterpillars that are essential to native songbird populations since raising one hatching of chickadees takes more than 6,000 of them (2009). Children raised in such yards, digging in the dirt, are less likely to be disconnected from nature, to see themselves as separate from the Earth, and to experience Nature Deficit Disorder, as described by Richard Louv (2008). During the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we changed everything, almost overnight. Air pollution plummeted as we changed our habits and limited travel in ways that were sometimes a hardship, sometimes a quiet pleasure. We know we are causing tremendous damage with our fossil-fuel powered travel—increased lung problems, yes, but also heart disease, strokes, cancer, respiratory infections, pre-term birth, and myriad other ailments. The WHO estimates that globally, at least 7 million people die because of outdoor and indoor air pollution annually (WHO 2018). The 2019–2022 pandemic showed how much of this we might just stop, scheduling a Zoom call instead, dramatically alleviating contamination in skies and waters all over the world. Utopian thinking is in order, in fact is urgently needed—innovative, inventive, inspirational re-imaginings. Through fictional utopias and dystopias like Plato’s, St. Thomas More’s, all the way through to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we can envisage what we do and do not want in this civilization and world that we construct, for which we increasingly have assumed responsibility. Gradually, we are coming to understand that we must extend our compassion and our ethics to include future generations, as maintained by thinkers ranging from Pope Francis (2015) to William MacAskill, who, in What We Owe the Future (2022), proposes longtermism and effective altruism, maintaining that our obligations to future generations are among the most important we can fulfill. Equally, we need to put ourselves into communion with other minds by reading and teaching literatures of the past. After more than thirty years as a student and professor of medieval literature, I am more convinced than ever that our stories help shape reality and that one

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way to stretch the limits of our own bubbles is to explore past, Indigenous, and non-Western cultures and recapture the differing symmetries at work in diverse views of nature and the world. Not only can this be done by immersing ourselves and our students in medieval and Renaissance literature; it can also be attempted with authentic medievalisms that extend into popular culture: books, movies, even video games. Likewise, fiction that carefully paraphrases Indigenous and non-Western thinking may also be helpful, in addition to exploring the literatures and histories of these cultures per se. To a greater degree than we had envisioned for centuries, we do live in a closed and circular system, and we need to search the varied cultures of the world for alternate metaphors that can nourish creativity and support solutions. We may need to experience significant cognitive dissonance to move beyond received opinions and entrenched habits and create a new narrative architecture for modern civilization. Imagine a hopeful twenty-first-century inverse of Rachel Carson’s celebrated Fable for Tomorrow: There once was a beautiful town in the heart of America where a blight had fallen. It was not just that the factory was shuttered and burned; the strip mines outside of town were exhausted, leaving acidic, infertile land where once tall-grass prairie had flourished. The river ran barren, contaminated, bereft of the fish that had once fed many and the freshwater mussels that had supplied delicate food and shells for buttons. No one was left alive who remembered its richness. Only invasive Asian carp remained, and they were known to outcompete all native fish, disturbing the fragile river bottom, ravaging plants and snails and mussels, and sometimes leaping right out of the water, injuring those fishing by thwacking them violently in the head. The native wildlife had mostly gone with the prairie, and only deer and Canada geese and mangy squirrels managed to eke out an existence on the margins. Even in the open country, the air was choked with the emissions of industry, known and furtive, the dioxin from the incinerators, the drift of pesticides from farm fields. The hogs, confined to huge buildings, issued noxious miasmas of asthma-inducing stink that permeated the whole area when the wind blew the wrong way. The chickens were never seen, crammed in dark, airless houses nearly the size of football fields, slaughtered before they had seen the light of day. Sterile-looking, genetically altered, chemically saturated corn and soy stretched for miles along roads where all beauty had long since been obliterated. There were whispers about the towns along the river, that it was not just the animals that were stricken, but the people too. The people wondered about the strange clusters of cancer, among the adults and even among the children. Mysterious autoimmune diseases afflicted young and old alike. And

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why did so many children grow up hobbled by autism, ADHD, and learning disabilities? The doctors couldn’t say. Was it the coal-burning power plants spewing mercury, soot, and assorted carcinogens? The nuclear power plant not far away? The old industrial polluters along the river? The farm chemicals or coal-ash pond leaching into the lake from whence the town drew its water? Then too, the farmers had begun to acknowledge—the uncanny weather had never before so baulked their plans and destroyed their labors. Food shortages threatened global political disruption, starvation, and malnutrition. Even the most entrenched doubters came to read the alternating floods, droughts, and heat waves as the initial onslaughts of climate change. What was going to happen, not only there but everywhere? The hearts of the people were riddled with uncertainty and worry, and suicide and depression crept steadily higher. But this town was part of a state and country that was beginning to wake up to its responsibility for a changing climate and widespread environmental degradation. They began to think globally and act locally. The people saw the obvious need for change and finally elected leaders who put into place the plans scientists had developed over decades—to heal the climate, clean the air, supply all energy needs from renewables, and more. The rest of the countries of the world, already out ahead of the United States, were inspired by the rapid progress and competed to outdo each other in eliminating fossil fuels, improving standards of green living, preserving lands for nature to rebound unfettered, and offering hospitality to the inevitable climate refugees from low-lying lands, both within and among countries. Despite profound challenges, a new sense of goodwill and international solidarity prevailed. Renascent nature blooms even in the cities; new green spaces spring up where asphalt had been. With fewer acres dedicated to parking lots and roads, space opens for walkers, runners, bikers, bike racks and bike lanes, discreet solar panels, and whimsical windmills sprouting from the tops of buildings, structures built from carbon-capturing wood or clad in growing green things themselves. In the suburbs and small towns, clothes hang on lines; electric or rotary lawnmowers purr over smaller lawns; native gardens nurture pollinators; kitchen gardens burgeon forth, rich with compost; parents experiment cooking delicious vegetarian dishes straight from the soil. Roadsides are again clothed in milkweed and coneflowers, switchgrass and bluestem, butterflies and bees. Farmers switch to organic, responding to increasing demand and efficiencies of scale; they experiment with regenerative agriculture, food forests, and carbon sequestration: biochar, prairie grasses, wetland restoration, rewilding. Stately windmills march across the landscape, generating inexpensive and abundant energy. Skies everywhere clear like sudden magic, and the people grow healthy and strong again, fortified by fresh food and more frequent exercise. Families are on the whole smaller, but among the

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children, there is much less illness, and it again becomes unthinkable for a child to die of cancer. Reduced agricultural antibiotic use helps ensure protection from communicable diseases, made more frequent because of climate change, and prevention lessens the cost of healthcare. Children witness every day the circles and cycles of nature as their vegetable scraps become dirt, caterpillars feed abundant songbirds, chickens snatch up Japanese Beetles like popcorn and turn them along with garden weeds into delectable eggs with orangey yolks. The children play outside long hours until sunset in all seasons and come to know outdoor vistas and vignettes first-hand, not from screensavers on their computers. They are raised to pick up litter, but there is less of it because of zero waste, cradle-to-cradle design, and a near elimination of disposables. In school, they compost lunch scraps, learn the science needed to regenerate nature, devour the literatures of many cultures, and read the history of a benighted age when humans nearly succeeded in annihilating themselves and every other creature on the planet with their profligate destruction. They subdue their own selfish impulses in order to reduce inequality, enrich relationships, and foster peace. They treasure values like thrift and hospitality and stewardship, and refuse to squander the second chance they have been given. The people learn to see the order in nature, understand the interconnections among living things, and find the beauty in talking trees, living rocks, worlds of soil microbia, and the gut microbiome without which they could not live and flourish. In the third of the planet set aside as a nature preserve, wildlife resurges, forests spring back, reverdant, as human population steadily declines and some smaller towns are abandoned to nature. More is invested in each person, and the economy is buoyed by investment in lasting renewable energy and wise infrastructure. Ecosystem services are properly valued, and environmental costs are no longer externalized. Recycling is seen as part of the lovely circular dance of life. At sea, islands of plastic refuse in the gyres are gradually removed, as the world weans itself off single-use plastic. A concerted effort is made to prevent the pollution of the oceans; fish and marine populations gain ground, and small patches of brilliant coral are saved and cherished in hopes of better times and cooler climes in the future. The people themselves make the decision to improve their lot, to heal their world, to reshape their culture, but they do not do it all themselves. They foster enough humility and respect for things they do not yet understand to recognize the limits of their wisdom and the potential fallout of their technologies. As they choose the better path and live lighter on the land, nature assists, re-growing faster than hoped, seeded from remnants, showing resilience in the face of the climate change impacts that were unavoidable, with the buoyant prospect of further recoveries in the future.

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We are terrestrial stardust living on this small shared planet we call Earth, our common home, our Sister, our Mother, this great globe that is also a pale blue dot almost lost in the immensity of the cosmos.9 We must choose life and each other because we are part of one community across time, one entire, interconnected organism much more than we suppose; we must work hard for the common good now, before it is too late, and before we each of us return to the dust of the whole planet from which we come. The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (Tempest 4.1.153–58)

NOTES 1. For syllabi, resources, and more, visit my blog at https:​//​www​.poisoningchildren​ .com​/ (Kauth 2022). 2. One group of researchers at Columbia who found high levels of pesticides in pregnant women and lower birth weights with higher levels of chlorpyrifos decided to stage a direct intervention; by introducing integrated pest management (IPM), they were able to reduce levels of pesticides (Perera et al. 2005; Williams et al. 2006). This resulted in less infestation and no insecticides detected in the blood of the mothers who had gotten the cleanup. Rising rates of child and adult cancers, along with many other ailments, could be reversed with the societal will to do so. 3. For more on how cognitive biases affect our behaviors in counter-intuitive and unhelpful ways, see the amusing and perspicacious article “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” by Daniel Gilbert (2006). A great deal of work has been done in evolutionary psychology on the way seemingly counter-productive cognitive biases evolved. See Haselton, Nettle, and Murray (2016, 968–87); Ariely (2009); and Korteling, Brouwer, and Toet (2018). Especially useful are sources that help people understand and harness psychological biases to encourage environmental behavior (van Vugt, Griskevicius, and Schultz 2014; Frank 2020). 4. Per Espen Stoknes’s TED Talk, “How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming” (2017) provides a valuable introduction. See also Lewandowsky et al. (2012), Lewandowsky et al. (2013), Cook and Lewandowsky (2016), Cook et al. (2017), Solomon et al. (2017), Nai et al. (2017), and Kauth (2020). 5. Daniel Kahneman (2011) is helpful, as are Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2015). 6. For discussions of the cultural dimensions and ecological impacts of lawns, refer to Pollan (1998), Steinberg (2006), Robbins (2007), Kolbert (2008), and Kauth (2015b).

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7. See Hawken (2017) for details about the two major scenarios for which they calculate impacts from the 100 different solutions: Drawdown Scenario 1 is premised on a 2ºC temperature rise by 2100, Drawdown Scenario 2, with a 1.5ºC rise by 2100, https:​//​drawdown​.org​/solutions​/table​-of​-solutions. 8. For more on the systematic bullying of farmers and scientists by corporate behemoths, see the excellent documentary Food, Inc (2008); an investigative article in the New Yorker on the harassment of eminent atrazine researcher Tyrone Hayes (Aviv 2014); and the Union of Concerned Scientists (Halpern 2015). 9. Cf. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015) and Carl Sagan (1997).

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized active hope, xv, xviin3 Adorno, Theodor, 24n6 agouti mouse, 17 agriculture: capitalist, 97; industrial, 15n22, 125–26, 191; organic, 125, 183, 191, 196; regenerative/ restorative, 107, 182, 191, 196. See also permaculture Alaimo, Stacy, 18 Alain de Lille, 8, 29, 32, 44, 45n6, 48nn33,36 albatrosses, 1, 23n1. See also Jordan, Chris Albertus Magnus, 25n16 alienation, xvi, xviin5, 8, 100, 105n19, 180 Alzheimer’s disease, 117 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), 25n17, 118 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), 119 Ancrene Wisse, 39 androcentric, 18 angel(s), 8, 21, 30 anthropause, 152 anthropocene, 85, 103n5, 125, 133n21

Antikythera Mechanism, 103n10, 105n14 Apiani, Petri, 5, 78n12 apocalypse: environmental, 3, 198n4; fictional, xv, 108, 157, 183, 192; religious, 84 Aquinas, Thomas, 24n8, 45n4 Arctic, 11, 115, 131, 132n15 Aristotle, 24n10, 28, 33–35, 40, 45n4, 47nn20–21,24, 52, 57, 73, 76n2, 78n12, 84, 85, 93, 95, 104n16, 154, 158n12 arrow of time, 12, 14, 18, 98, 102n1. See also time arsenic, 113 asbestos, 111, 114 asthma, 118, 167, 195 astrolabe, 48n28, 52, 87 astronomy, 4, 7; ancient to medieval, 4, 32, 42, 45n4, 47n24, 49n37, 76n2; Donne and, 68–70, 75, 79n22; Enlightenment, 47n26, 48n35; Hardy and, 81n32; heliocentric, 86; modern, 28, 80n22; Ptolemaic, 40; and verse form, 49n39 atomization, 94, 100, 103n8, 136 245

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attention–deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 115–16, 119, 195 Atwood, Margaret, 131n3, 194 Augustine, 34, 55 autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 115– 116, 119, 127, 167, 195 autoimmune disease, 115, 118, 195 automata, 79n17, 91, 104n14 Avatar, 189 Aztec Sun Stone, 169, 170

Brague, Rémi, 23n2 Brahe, Tycho, 53 breast milk, 115, 123 Brooks, Arthur C., xviin8 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 24n7 Bruno, Giordano, 57, 59, 78n10 Buddhist/Buddhism, 19, 153, 175, 177, 185n14 Buell, Lawrence, 25n14 butterflies, 125, 130, 185n15, 189, 196

Bachelard, Gaston, 136–7, 140, 146 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24n6, 36–37, 48n27, 51–62, 64, 66–68, 70, 75, 76n1, 79n17, 89–90, 95–96 bacteria, 130, 180; humans as, 108; microbiome, 125–28, 155, 181, 183, 189; soil, 3, 175 Benedict (Pope), 156 Benedictine: Rule, 8, 101, 167, 188; University, 245 Berry, Wendell, 15 Berssenbrugge, Mei–mei, 17 bestiaries, 21 bioaccumulation, 16, 112, 123, 124, 167, 191 biocides, 11 biodiversity. See diversity biology, 25n20, 67, 84, 90, 99, 101, 128, 147, 150, 156, 162, 177, 182 biomagnification. See bioaccumulation biomass, 125–26 biomimicry, 125, 133n24, 150, 182 biosphere, 97, 105n22, 131n4, 144, 167 birth defects, 117 bisphenol A (BPA), 17, 114, 132n11 Black, Jack, 108 Blake, William, 154 Bodley Library Oxford, 43 body burden, 18, 122–23, 133n19, 152. See also bioaccumulation; toxic chemicals Boethius, 46n8, 49n37, 55 Bosch, Hieronymus, 21 Boulding, Kenneth, 131n4, 151, 156

cadmium, 113 calendar, 83, 94, 103nn9–10; International, 102n1; Julian, 86; Mayan, 169, 184n8; medieval, 12, 25n18, 86–87, 92, 104n15 cancer, xv, 17, 25n17, 110, 112, 114–18, 119, 120–122, 133nn7, 133n10, 133n17–18, 167, 187, 193–96, 198n2 capitalism, xviin5, 3, 14, 22, 58, 96–97, 101, 139, 155 carcinogens, 10, 114, 116, 120, 121, 196. See also environmental chemicals, toxic chemicals Carroll, Sean, 14, 77n6, 153–54 Carson, Rachel, 112, 191, 195. See also Silent Spring Casey, Edward, 78, 138–39, 158nn7,12, 183 Cassirer, Ernst, 76, 77n8, 103n6, 146 Cartesian: dualism, 127, 139; geometries, 129; grid, 138, 156, 175, 181; model/view, 105n20, 120–21; physics, 138; subject–object, 145; universe, 179. See also Descartes cathedrals, 21, 30, 38, 141–42, 166, 189 celestial spheres, 6, 43, 49n37, 87, 166. See also music of the celestial spheres; harmonia mundi The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 113–114, 117, 131n5 Ceremony, 19, 26n27, 171–73, 184, 184n10, 185n11

Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 21, 38, 48n29, 78n9, 87, 89, 92, 167–68 chemicals. See toxic chemicals Chemical Safety Act. See Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act chemistry, 96, 111, 150, 151, 174, 182 Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative (CCPI), 116, 245 children, xv, xvi, 16, 107, 108, 124, 130, 152, 193, 194, 196–97, 145; cancer and, 112, 115–16, 119, 120–122, 133n18, 187, 195, 196, 198n2; climate change and, 190; death of, 110, 115–120, 119; disease and disability and, xvii, 23, 112–120, 119, 123, 132n8, 195, 198n2; immune systems and, 127–28 The Children of Men, 120 chimeras, 1, 134n28 circadian rhythm, 92, 104nn11,17, 124 circles/cycles: Aristotle and, 78n12; Bacon and, 59–60; Boethius and, 46n8; broken, 1, 3–5, 15, 112, 118; carbon, 109; communion of saints and, 167; consciousness and, 174; Dante’s, 27–30, 32, 32–34, 38–44, 43, 45n3, 46n13, 178; Daoism and, 178; Descartes and, 61; Donne and, 68–70, 79n20; ecological/ natural, 14, 19, 67, 76, 187, 191, 197; epicycles, 14, 27, 35, 38, 42, 43, 71, 73, 85; epigenetics and, 18; Euclid and, 30–31, 31, 32, 175; Gaia’s, 142; Gandhi and, 178; Garba and, 178–79; history as, 14; Hobbes and, 64; humans as, 139–140; Joachim da Fiore and, 32; labyrinths and, 164–66; of life, 3, 110; mandala and, 175, 176; Mayan calendar and, 169; Milton and, 72–74; motion in cosmos, 6–7, 14, 34–36, 37, 110; Native American/ Aboriginal/Indigenous, 19–20, 169, 170, 175; Plato and, 32, 46n8, 174;

247

Shakespeare and, 76n2; Stability and, 151; time/clock as, 2, 12, 20, 83–87, 88, 89–90, 92, 102, 169; trees and, 190 civilization, 23, 58, 80n27, 100–101, 131nn2,4, 188; ancient, 168; change of, 144, 152, 105n22; collapse/ decline of, xvi, 23, 97, 100, 107, 108, 155, 188; imagination of future, 97, 194–95 Classen, Albrecht, 160n26, 164, 184n4 cli–fi, 131n3, 152 climate change, 108–111, 196; co– benefits of action, xvi, 191–92; denial of, xv, xviin2, 100, 188; effects of, 108–111, 125, 126, 197; human causes of, 112, 187; perceptions of, 143, 149, 152, 156; runaway, 110; solutions to, 151, 187, 190–92. See also Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clock, 53, 87–92, 94, 101, 103nn7– 8,11,13–17; Wells Cathedral clock, 88. See also watch; time The Closing Circle, 3 coal, 108, 174, 196; coal–tar, 120, 133n17; false advertising and, 143 Coast Salish people, 173 cognitive/cognition, 166; biases, 107, 188, 198n3; changes/deficits/damage, 17, 112, 116–118; dissonance, 15, 22, 76n2, 144, 163, 195; meta–, 143, 144 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 97, 108, 187. See also environmental collapse Collins, Suzanne, 194 colonialism/post–colonialism, 69, 75, 95, 100–101, 102n1, 138, 163, 169, 171, 185n14 Commoner, Barry, 3–4, 15, 19 communication, 44; biological, 19, 126, 189; human, 177; scientific, 18, 23, 188 communion of saints, 44, 65, 141, 167, 184n6

248

composting, 4, 124, 19, 196, 197 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), 15, 191 Conrad, Sebastian, 18 conservation, 24n5, 107, 126, 181 Convention on Climate Change (COP26), 108 Conway, Erik, 132n7, 190 Copernican universe, 7, 12, 14, 22, 24n11, 29, 35, 52–57, 59, 70, 72; anti–Copernicanism, 153, 160n27 Copernican Revolution, 42, 57, 135, 151, 153; motion in, 35–38, 59–67, 83; post–Copernican views, 27, 72, 80n25, 126, 169; pre–Copernicans, 71, 88, 138; progress and, 95–97; time and, 85–86 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 2, 4, 6–8, 12, 24n9, 35, 47n24, 51, 53, 70, 83, 86, 95, 135 coral, 110, 125, 174, 179, 197 Corpus Christi plays/cycles, 21, 86 Cosmographia, 5 COVID–19, 152, 194; climate change and, 152; emissions during, 108; paradigms shifts and, 152 cradle–to–cradle, 179, 190, 197 Crosby, Alfred W., 48n28, 103nn7–8, 163 Crowe, Michael J., 24n11, 42 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 103n6 dance, 7, 34, 73, 165, 175, 179 Dante Alighieri, 4–8, 22, 27–35, 28, 38–49, 66, 70, 74, 84, 93, 99, 164, 177, 178, 179 Daoism, 177–78 Darwin, Charles, 14, 17, 18, 95, 98–99, 105n20, 189; social Darwinism, 95, 98 Dasein, 140, 145, 148, 159n23 Davis, Devra, 132n7, 133n17 DDT, 112, 131n5, 133n18 The Death of Nature, 23n5. See also Merchant, Carolyn

Index

degrowth, 131n4 denial, 157; of climate change, xv, xviin2, 100, 188 Deninu K’ue First Nation Band, 174 Delucchi, Mark, 190 Demaray, John G., 27–28, 38, 45nn3,5, 46n7, 71, 80n28 Descartes, René, 6, 24n10, 36, 51, 54, 60–61, 64, 67, 71, 77n6, 79n19, 90, 95, 103n8, 139, 147, 149, 167. See also Cartesian desertification, 169 devil(s), 21, 141 Dhuoda, 48n34 diabetes, 17, 118, 119 Diamond, Jared, 97, 108, 187 dinosaur, 108 dioxins, 1, 111, 113, 115, 123, 195 diversity: biodiversity, 25, 126, 133n24, 179, 181; human, 19, 162, 180, 187, 195; microbiome and, 127; technological, 190 DNA, 2, 17, 128, 133n18, 151. See also epigenetics; genetics dodecahedron, 31, 129 dolphins, 123 Domenico di Michelino, 28 Donne, John, 7, 68–71, 73, 75, 79nn20,22, 80n29 drawdown. See Project Drawdown Dubos, René, 3 Duomo, Florence, 28 Eastern Star, 30 eco–anxiety, xviin2 ecocide, 100, 110, 188 ecocriticism, 18, 21, 85, 143, 144, 149, 152, 157, 163, 184n4 ecological, xviin8, 111, 131n4, 151, 163, 168, 178, 192, 197; climate change and, 190; health and, 113. See environmental ecological degradation. See environmental degradation

Index

ecology, 1–2, 19, 23n5, 24n8, 25n16,23, 26n26, 67, 84, 90, 101, 110, 125, 128, 147, 150, 156, 160n24, 162, 171, 177, 181, 182. See also resilience economics, 12, 22, 65, 102n3, 109, 152 eco–phenomenology, 19, 135, 147–48, 159n24, 161 ecospace, 181 ecosystem: corruption/destruction of, 11, 22, 94, 110, 112, 123–24, 126, 155, 163, 182, 187; humans and, 107, 155, 183; interdependence of, 103n8, 125–28, 133n25, 167, 169, 179; land ethic and, 148; metaphors and, 14, 16, 19, 175, 177; survival of, 75, 135, 144, 151, 181, 185n15, 197 Egginton, William, 22, 44–45 Einstein, Albert, 77n6, 104n16, 150, 156 Eiseley, Loren, 96 elements: Elements of Euclid, 30, 31, 32; medieval, 8, 25n16, 30, 31, 34, 47nn21,24, 67, 78n8, 141, 169; modern, 112, 113; Native American, 172, 174 Eliade, Mircea, 175 Eliot, T.S., xvi, xviin7 Empyrean, 4, 44, 55, 168 Encyclical. See Francis (Pope), Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ endocrine: disruptors/disruption, 10, 17, 23, 112, 114, 118, 120, 132n11; endocrine–disrupting chemicals (EDCs), 112, 116, 119; The Endocrine Society Statement, 119; endocrinologists, 120; system, 181 endosymbiosis/symbiogenesis, 134n28, 144, 181 Enframing, 16, 147–48, 173, 182, 183. See also Heidegger, Martin Engels, Friedrich, 105nn21, 138. See also Mark, Karl Enlightenment, 4–5, 7, 18, 24n6, 37, 51–76, 76n2, 77n6, 87, 94, 126, 140, 160n29, 162

249

entropy, 16, 102n1, 144 environmental: apocalypse; chemicals, 111–23. See also toxic chemicals; collapse, xvi, 3, 97, 100, 107–8, 155, 188; degradation, 22, 26n24, 96, 97, 103, 107, 161, 192, 196; justice, 112, 167, 180; regulation, 107–8, 113–15, 121, 133n16, 161, 196; solutions, 83, 107, 131, 149, 161, 187–95, 198n7 environmentalism, 145 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 111, 114, 117, 121, 124, 245 Environmental Working Group (EWG), 114 epidemiology/epidemiologists, 114, 118, 120–22, 132n16, 245 epigenetics, 17–18, 122, 124, 152, 167, 177, 181. See also DNA; genetics ethology, 23n1 Etzel, Ruth, 132n13 Euclid, 30–31, 31, 32, 38, 47n17, 90, 129, 175 European Union (EU), 114–15 evolution, 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, 84, 95–99, 104n17, 128, 151, 191; The Evolution of Man, 13; evolutionary selection, 16 exegesis, 39, 41 extinction: human, xv, 25n21, 75, 108, 111; mass, 108, 125, 128; species, 111, 133n25 fast fashion, 191, 193–94 fecal microbiome transplant (FMT), 127 Fermi paradox, 108, 131n1 fertility, 191. See also infertility Finney, Carolyn, 180 Finley, Ron, 180 fish, 1, 20, 111–12, 129, 173, 195, 197; jellyfish, 155; starfish, 128 Flight Behavior, 131n3 flooding, 110 Fludd, Robert, 10, 11 Foley, Jonathan, 192 food, 124–5, 191; waste, 124–5, 191

250

Index

Forbes, Jack D., 174 forest, 101, 109, 126, 128–29, 146, 173– 74, 184n4, 196, 197; ecosystem, 19 forest bathing, xviin2 Fortune/Fortuna, 41, 168 fossil fuels, 100, 108, 111, 112, 187, 188, 190, 194, 196 Foster, John Bellamy, 105n19 Foucault, Michel, 140 fractal patterns, 128 Francis (Pope), 156, 194, 199n9. See also Laudato Si’ Francis (St.), 20, 169 Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, 111, 114 Freud, Sigmund, 142, 148 Frye, Northrup, 38 fungus/fungal, 26n25, 126, 127, 174, 175, 189 Gaia, 8, 16, 110, 123, 142–43, 154–56, 181. See also Lovelock, James Galileo Galilei, 6–8, 35, 51, 55–57, 59, 61, 70, 72, 77n6, 80n26, 86, 95, 103n4, 183 Gandhi, 178 Garba, 178–79 garbage, 1, 14, 85 garbage patch/gyre, 1, 15, 16, 197 GDP, 109, 193 general public, 17, 58 genetics, 11, 17–18, 99, 115, 128, 130, 191; alteration/manipulation of, 12, 67, 98, 104n14, 151, 163, 195; and disease, 116, 120–24; phylogenetic trees, 12, 13, 18, 25n20, 179, 180. See also DNA, epigenetics geocosm, 68, 136, 139–40, 142, 151, 155, 166, 184. See also microcosm/macrocosm geology/geological, 85, 103n5, 123, 174–75 Gibran, Kahlil, 101–2 Gilbert, Daniel, 198n3 Giotto, 24n7

giraffes, 16–17 Global Environmental Health, 107 globalization, 26n29, 188 global warming. See climate change golden age, 96, 97 Google, 16 Gould, Steven J., 14, 17, 154 Great Chain of Being, 5, 8, 10, 12, 20, 24n8, 30m 76n2, 141, 153 Green Belt movement, 169 greenhouse gases, emissions of, 108 Griffith, Saul, 193 habitat, 137; loss/destruction of, 23, 126 Hadza, 124. See also Native American/ Aboriginal/Indigenous Haekel, Ernst, 13 The Handmaid’s Tale, 120 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 19 Hansen, James, 190 happiness research, xvi, xviin8, 162 Hardin, Garrett, 145, 149, 163 harmonia mundi, 34, 49n37, 179. See also music of the celestial spheres Hawking, Stephen, 102n4 heart: circulation, 62, 90; disease, 17, 152, 194; Harvey and, 90; Hobbes and, 62, 65, 91 hedgerows, 189 Heidegger, Martin, 16, 77nn6–7, 144–48, 150, 158n12, 159nn16–17, 159n23, 161–62, 177–78, 182. See also Enframing; Dasein herbicides. See pesticides Hermes Trismegistus, 175 Hickel, Jason, 131n4 Hildegard of Bingen, 48n34, 166 Hindu/Indian, 175, 177–79 Hobbes, Thomas, 24n10, 37, 51, 52, 54–57, 59, 61–67, 66, 70, 75, 76n1, 79n19, 91–92 hockey–stick graph, 109 Holkham misc. 48, 43 homeostasis, 110, 142 homo movens, 58–59, 70, 74, 91

Index

Horkheimer, Max, 24n6 hubris, 8, 70, 118. See also pride Huggan, Graham, 162–63 human rights, 24n6, 100 Hume, Angela, 17 humility, 8, 25n16, 74, 156, 175, 197 humors, medieval, 7, 8, 30, 44, 141 The Hunger Games, 194 hurricanes, 110 Husserl, Edmund, 156, 159n16 hypersphere, 15, 22, 44–45 hypothalamus, 104n17 ice core data, 109 India/Indian, 108, 163, 168, 179 Industrial Revolution, 12, 22, 51, 67, 83, 96, 99, 104n11, 145, 169. See also Scientific Revolution industry, 3, 97, 144, 195; chemical, 113–16, 191, 195; corruption in, 113–14, 132nn11,16, 195; fossil fuel, 188, 190, 195; gasoline, 113, 116; paint, 113, 116; tobacco, 113, 116. See also smoking/smokers Inferno, 8, 28 infertility, 117–18, 120, 122 insecticides. See pesticides insects, 126, 138, 191, 198n2 intelligence quotient (IQ): deficit/ loss, 117, 119 interdependence, 19, 79n17, 125–28, 169, 175, 177, 190 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 109, 130. See also climate change internet, 19 Inuit, 124. See also Native American/ Aboriginal/Indigenous IPCC. See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Iversen, Kristen, 133n19 Jacobson, Mark, 190 James Webb Space Telescope, 45 Jesus, 44

251

Joachim da Fiore, 30, 32, 42, 55, 84, 86 Johnson, Mark, 16, 23n3, 84, 135– 36, 148, 150 Jones, Van, 180 Jordan, Chris, 1 justice, 188; environmental, 112, 132n8, 180; intergenerational, 167. See also environmental justice Kant, Immanuel, 158n7 Kauth, Jean–Marie, xviin1, 2, 39, 45, 89, 131n3, 139, 158, 192, 198n1, 4, 6, 245 Kepler, Johannes, 6, 12, 31, 35, 47n25, 49n36, 53, 56, 70 Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 19–22, 169– 170, 174, 175 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 105n23 Kingsolver, Barbara, xv, 131n3, King133n22 Klein, Ezra, 155 Klein, Naomi, 99 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 125, 133n21, 198n6 Koyré, Alexandre, 4, 46n10, 151 Krugman, Paul, 192–93 Kuhn, Thomas, 16, 46n10, 100, 148–51 labyrinths, 38, 162, 164–66; medieval labyrinth at Chartres, 165 Laguna Pueblo, 172–73, 184n10, 185n11 Lakoff, George, 16, 23n3, 84, 135– 36, 148, 150 Lamarck, Jean–Baptiste, 16–17 land ethic, 148, 169, 192 Landrigan, Philip, 116 lapidaries, 21 Laudato Si’ 199n9. See also Francis (Pope) lawn, 21, 189, 196, 198n6 lead (Pb), 112–13, 116, 117, 132nn6,8 Lefebvre, Henri, 24n7, 136–38 Le Goff, Jacques, 102n3 Lenape, 174 Lennon, John, 81n34

252

Index

Leonard, Annie, 162 Leonardo da Vinci, 8, 41, 104n14 Leopold, Aldo, 7, 25n12, 25n22, 97, 148, 169, 184n1, 192. See also land ethic; round river Leviathan, 56, 63, 65, 66, 91 Lewis, C.S., 74, 164 Limbourg Brothers, 9 limits: ecological or biological, 23n1, 85, 109, 151, 153, 156; economic, 12, 24n5, 99, 131n4; of efficiency, xvi; human, 85, 156, 158n15, 194, 197 line/linear, 3, 19, 59–60, 110, 122, 136; architectural, 142; assembly, 3, 94; in astronomy, 47n26, 72, 95, 110; of the body, 140; cultural dividing, 70; dance, 175, 179; of emissions, 108–9, 112, 130; of evolution, 128; finite, 33, 34; geological, 123; germ, 18, 122; hierarchy, 21; infinite, 12, 33, 74, 83–84, 107, 174; movement/ motion, 52, 60, 145, 150; of poetry, 33, 46n13, 47nn17, 23; progress, 44, 59, 66, 75, 95–97, 100; rectilinear, 6, 22, 34, 36, 37, 42, 47n24, 61, 126, 128–29; serpentine/spiral, 44, 60, 69; straight, 2, 4, 6, 12, 15–16, 18, 33, 37, 60, 63–64, 73, 75, 83, 94, 128– 29; time, 20, 83–95, 103n7, 123; of travel, 36; vanishing, 24n7 Linnaean Classification System, 12 Little Bear, Leroy, 169–70 Locke, John, 93, 138, 139 Lockwood, Alan, 121 Louv, Richard, xviin2, 194 Lovejoy, Arthur, 24n8, 80n25 Lovelock, James, 8, 19, 26, 108, 110, 142–44, 156, 181. See also Gaia Maathai, Wangari, 169 MacAskill, William, 194 Machiavelli/Machiavellian, 58, 96 MaddAddam, 194 Malthus, Thomas, 95

mammals, 123, 125, 138 mana, 193 mandala, 166, 169, 175–179, 176 Manjuvajramandala with 43 deities, 176 Mappaemundi, 30 Margulis, Lynn, 8, 19, 134n28, 142– 44, 156, 181 marine, 1, 125, 197. See also ocean Mars, 35, 43, 75, 81n33, 110, 131n3, 189 Marx, Karl, xviin5, 26n29, 95–100, 105nn19,21, 138. See also Engels, Friedrich math/mathematics, 4–7, 22, 24n7, 28, 30–37, 39–42, 47n17, 48nn28,34, 51–54, 61,71–72, 76n2, 87, 94, 129, 134n30, 137–39, 147, 154, 156, 160n25 Marx, Leo, 77n3 Massumi, Brian, 23n1 Mayans, 97; calendar, 169, 184n8 McCarthy, Cormac, 157, 194 McKibben, Bill, xviin8, 11, 131n4 media, social, 194 memory cathedral/palace, 141 Merchant, Carolyn, 23n5, 26n24, 64, 77n5, 79nn16–17, 87, 140 Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway), 132n7 mercury, 4, 113, 196 metabolic rift, 105n19 method of loci, 141 microbiome. See bacteria microchimerism, 128, 134n28. See also chimerism; endosymbiosis/ symbiogenesis microcosm/macrocosm, 2, 8, 11, 25n13, 39, 48n35, 68, 76n2, 90, 136, 139–40, 146, 155, 164, 166, 184. See also geocosm middeneard/Middle Earth, 20 Midway: Message from the Gyre, 1. See also Chris Jordan Mi’kmaq people, 174

Index

Milky Way, 101, 183 Milton, 7, 45n5, 59, 68, 70–74, 75, 79n22, 80nn24–26,29, 92–93, 99, 103n4, 104n13, 158n15 Minotaur, 164, 178 Mitchell, David, 131n3 Monbiot, George, 181–82 Moore, Captain Charles, 1 Morton, Timothy, 19, 25n23, 139 mother, 17, 117, 123, 128, 143, 178, 193, 198n2; Earth as, 136; grandmother, xvi, 20, 193; trees, 126 Mumford, Lewis, 87 music, 42, 48n28, 49n37, 85, 188; of automata, 104n14; of the celestial spheres, 34, 49n37, 179. See also harmonia mundi; medieval, 103n7; Native American, 172 mutagens, 10, 114 Næss, Arne, 26n26, 133n20, 145 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 114, 132n8 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), 118, 132n11, 133n16 Native American/Aboriginal/Indigenous, 19–23, 124, 162, 169, 170, 170–75, 177, 179, 185nn10–11 Nature, 3, 7–12, 14, 16, 29, 38, 53, 75, 85, 94–95, 97–101, 102n3, 105nn18–19, 123, 126–27, 135–36, 138, 143, 154–56, 162, 181–83, 187, 189, 191–92, 195–97; Bacon and, 58–64, 79n17, 89–90; biodegradation and, 1; as book, 41, 48n30, 71; Chaucer and, 167–68; control of, 133n20; vs. culture, 17; cycles of, 111; Death of Nature, 23nn5, 140. See also Merchant, Carolyn; –deficit disorder, xv, xviin2, 194; Ecology without Nature, 25n23. See also Morton, Tim; economy of, 131n4, 163; end of, 11. See also McKibben,

253

Bill; Enlightenment view of, 162; Gandhi and, 178; God and, 41, 52, 58; goddess, 44; health and happiness and, xviin2, xviinn2,8, 162, 166; Heidegger and, 145–48; Hobbes and, 64–67, 79n19, 91–92; human, 79n19, 95, 174, 194; Kuhn and, 150–51; Leopold and, 184n1; metaphors, 20; Native American views of, 169–74; Plaint of Nature, 8, 48n36; Plato and, 33; Shakespeare and, 76n2; symmetries and, 128–29, 134nn30–32, 157, 162 neurology, 116, 181; neurocognitive/ neurobehavioral disability/damage, 17, 112, 116, 118, 120; neurotoxins, 10, 114; neurotransmitters, 126, 245. See also cognitive New Testament, 30, 84 Newitz, Annalee, 25n21, 125 Newton, Sir Isaac, 6, 12, 14, 22, 36, 37, 51, 53–54, 57, 59–61, 67, 71, 78n11, 93, 103n4, 104n13, 135, 138–40, 146, 150, 158n15, 160n25 Nicolson, Marjorie, 68, 79n20, 90, 139–40 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 158 Noosphere, 144, 167 nuclear: power, 196; weapons/radiation, 67, 133n19, 173 nunc stans (standing now), 52, 55–56, 74, 84–85, 91 obesity, 17, 18, 118, 119, 127 obesogens, 18, 118. See also endocrine disruptors ocean, 1, 111–12, 114, 178, 190, 197. See also marine Old Testament, 30, 39, 47n19, 84 On the Origin of Species, 98 Onondaga Thanksgiving Address, 20 Oreskes, Naomi, 132n7, 190 organophosphates, 116–17, 122–23, 133n18, 191 Osserman, Robert, 22

254

Index

overpopulation, 23n5; Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, 133n21 overview effect, 148 Pacific Garbage Patch/Gyre. See garbage patch/gyre Paracelsus, 48n35 paradigm shifts, 2, 7–8, 15–18, 21–23, 24n8, 26n28, 53, 73, 74, 80n22, 100, 125, 127, 131, 135–37, 143–56, 162, 171, 181–82 paradise, 155 Paradise, California, 109 Paradiso, 27–28, 39, 48n32 Paradise Lost, 71, 74, 103n4 Paris Agreement, 108 Parkinson’s Disease, 114, 117 Pascal, Blaise, 7, 74, 78n8, 104n13 Paul III (Pope), 6 pentagon, 30, 31, 46n17, 129 permaculture, 125 Pesticide Action Network (PAN), 115, 119 pesticides, vii, 1, 4, 112–118, 121–23, 126, 128, 132n13, 133n18, 187, 189, 190, 193, 195, 198n2. See also bioaccumulation; environmental chemicals, toxic chemicals per– and polyfluroalkyl substances (PFAS), 111, 113–14, 123, 132n10 perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), 114 perspective, in art, 24n7 phallic symbolism, 18 Plaint of Nature, 8, 48n36 phenomenology, 134n31, 136– 37, 140, 148, 149. See also eco–phenomenology phthalates, 111 Pinker, Steven, 97 Plains Indians, 169–70 plastic: micro, 111; in the ocean/ garbage patch/gyre, 1, 15, 16, 111–12, 144, 197; toxic chemicals and, 17, 111–12, 123; water bottles/ packaging, 1, 182

Plato, 4, 28, 30–34, 40, 42, 45n4,47n24, 49n26, 72, 76n2, 84–85, 139, 174, 194 plenitude, 24n8 polar bears, 125 politics: destabilization of, 96; environment and, 108, 114, 188, 190; theory of, 53, 55, 61, 64–67, 75 Pollan, Michael, xvi, 15, 133n22, 198n6 polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), 113 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), 1, 111, 113, 115–16 Pope, Alexander, 7 Pope Benedict. See Benedict (Pope) Pope Francis. See Francis (Pope); Laudato Si’ Pope Paul III. See Paul III (Pope) population, human, 3–4, 23n5, 95, 133n21, 177, 192–93, 197. See also overpopulation post–apocalypse. See apocalypse Potawatomi Nation, 19, 170 poverty, 108 Powhatan–Renapé, 174 prairie, 101, 129, 194, 195, 196 Precautionary Principle, 114, 132n12 President’s Cancer Panel, 25n17, 115–16 pride, 8, 70, 71, 110, 168. See also hubris primum movens (Prime Mover), 52, 57–60, 70, 74, 95 Project Drawdown, 151, 191, 198n7 psychology, xv, xviin2, 102n3, 107, 137, 142, 154, 177, 198n3 Ptolemaic universe, 2, 4, 5, 7–8, 24n11, 27, 29–35, 38, 40–43, 42, 47n24, 51–53, 68, 70, 76n2, 80n25, 166, 169 Ptolemy, 27, 35, 38, 45n4 public, general. See general public public health, 245; victories, 113, 132n9, 190 puberty, early/precocious, 118

Index

Purgatorio, 28, 28, 46n7, 70, 74, 165, 178 Pythagorean: number, 166; tetrad, 30, 46n15; theories of music, 34, 49n37 quadrivium, 29, 38, 49n37. See also trivium recycling/recyclers, 14, 24n5, 197 Redvers, Nicole, 174, 180 Regeneration>Nexus, 192 renewable energy, 107, 190–91, 197 reproductive/reproduction: acts, 8; cycles, 123; effects/dysfunction, 17, 114, 119, 132n10; the microbiome and, 134n29 retrograde motion, 27, 38, 43–44, 73 The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, 6, 35. See also Copernicus resilience, 179, 197. See also ecology rewilding, 125, 126, 133n26, 152, 181– 82, 185n15, 196 Ristoro di Arezzo, 45 The Road, 157, 194 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 81n33, 131n3, 152, 155 Romantic poets, 139 rose, 41, 62, 129, 193; Heavenly White Rose, 30, 43, 43–44; windows, 30, 38, 43, 141 round river, 192 Sacasas, L.M., 101 Sagan, Dorion, 6, 23n1 Sagoff, Mark, 153–54 Said, Edward, 95, 163 Saint Catherine, 41 Sámi culture, 170, 184n6 Satan, 74, 81n30, 164, 178 Schor, Juliet, xviin8, 15, 131n4 Scientific Revolution, 22, 51–53, 58, 67, 68, 71, 72, 77n5, 79n17, 83–84, 93, 96, 99–100, 104n12, 148, 160n27, 169. See also Industrial Revolution Sebeok, Thomas A., 23n1

255

semiotics, 23n1, 71, 142, 152, 182 Shakespeare, William, 7, 24n11, 51–52, 55, 68, 76nn2–3, 79n20, 86, 87, 93, 156, 167, 198 Shatner, William, 159n22 Shiva, Vandana, 131n4, 133n22, 163, 168 Silent Spring, 112, 195. See also Carson, Rachel Silko, Leslie Marmon, 19, 171–74, 184 Simard, Suzanne, 126, 173, 189 Simple Gifts, xvi, xviin7 Slow Food Movement, xvi, xviin6, 194 Smith, Kiki, 17 smoking/smokers, 132n9, 190. See also industry, tobacco social justice. See environmental justice; justice soil, 84, 138, 189, 196; contamination, 16, 111–12, 121–24, 132, 191; depletion, 101; fertility, 97; healthy, 189, 191; land ethic and, 169, 192; microbiome, 3, 124, 127–28, 197 solar, xvi, 190–91, 196 solastalgia, xv, xviin2 solutions, environmental, 83, 107, 131, 149, 161, 187–95, 198n7 sonnets, 33; Shakespeare’s, 51–52, 68, 77n4, 156 space travel, 107 Spencer, Herbert, 95 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty, 8 square, 30, 31, 41, 60, 74, 76n2, 129, 162, 175 stabilitas, 101, 167 Steingraber, Sandra, 15n17, 116, 187 stewardship, 101, 131n2, 167, 197 The Story of Stuff, 162 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 100 Sun Stone. See Aztec Sun Stone superchiasmatic nuclei (SCN), 104n17 sustainability, 75, 100, 131n2, 142, 168–9, 192 syllabi, 198n1 symbiogenesis, 134n28

256

Index

symmetries, 15, 19, 43, 46n15, 83, 86, 126, 128–30, 134nn30,32, 157, 162, 168, 174, 179, 181, 182, 195 T and O maps, 30 Taliban, 100–101 Tallamy, Doug, 194 technology: dominating influence of, 16, 87, 101, 103; green, 97, 105, 134, 179, 190; risks of, 3–4, 108, 153, 155, 182–83; science and, 95, 146–47 technosphere, 97, 105n22, 144 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 144 teleology, 2, 23, 98, 144, 151, 181 telescope, 25, 79n20, 102n4 TENDR Consensus Statement, 116 terza rima, 42–44, 47n19, 49nn38–39, 84 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas, Thomas. Thomas, Lewis, 142, 156 Thompson, Iain, 147–48, 159n17, 161 Thoreau, Henry David, 94–95, 129, 134n31, 144 Thunberg, Greta, xv, 118 Tiffin, Helen, 162–63 Timaeus, 4, 30, 40, 45n4, 46nn8–9, 85, 139 time, 83–95, 109, 121, 123, 127, 152, 163, 177, 198; Big Bang and, 44; change over, 12, 54, 179; Christian, 34, 42, 47n19; circular, 2, 14, 20, 43; critical for exposure, 118; cultures and, 177–78; Dante and, 40, 45; deep, 14–15; Descartes and, 103n8; Donne and, 79n20; end of, 52; evolution and, 98–99; Hindu/Indian, 175, 178–79; historical, 4, 20, 22, 30, 145, 162, 189; horizon, 152; lifetime/lifespan, 14, 114; linear, 2, 20, 29; medieval, 20, 30; motion and, 47n23, 53–57, 77n6, 99; music and, 103n7; Native American/aboriginal/ indigenous 20, 169–75; passage of, 193; progress and, 29, 32, 95–97,

105n23; screen, 183; sense of, 12, 52, 99–102, 102nn3–4, 103nn6–10, 104nn11–17, 105n21, 184nn5–9; space and, 15, 29, 42, 59, 102, 109, 135–37, 139, 150, 164, 167, 179, 184nn3–4; symmetries and, 134; temporocentrism, 183; timeless, 76n2, 92, 102, 175, 183; times, xvi, 188, 191, 197; timescale, 15–16, 107, 150; timekeeping, 48n28, 104nn14,16, 169; timeline, 12, 55, 83, 85, 94, 99, 179; verse form and, 34, 47n23, 49n39. See also arrow of time; zeitgebers Tinbergen, Niko, 23n1 tip sheets, 198n1 toxic chemicals/toxicants, 4, 16, 111–23, 133n18, 179, 187; regulation of, 107, 113–15, 121, 133n16, 161, 196; synergistic effects of, 114, 120, 131n4. See also bioaccumulation; environmental chemicals toxicology/toxicologists, 120–21, 132nn11,16 Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), 114 tragic commons, 12. See also Garrett Hardin tragic optimism, xv, xviin3 trans–corporeality, 18 trash. See garbage Travers, David Michael, 135–36 Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 8, 9, 86, 140, 169 triangle, 30 31, 36, 36, 41 the Trinity, 15, 30, 42–43, 49n38; Liber Figurarum, Trinitarian Circles, by Joachim of Fiore, 32, 86 trivium, 29, 38. See also quadrivium trophic cascade, 181 trust in science, 160 Umwelt, 23n1, 158n15 unconscious, 18, 66, 75, 144, 182

Index

United Nations: Climate Change Convention, 108; Educational, Scientific, and Cultural (UNESCO), 158 United States (US): climate catastrophe, 110; culture, 124; disease rates in, 115–18; ecosystems in, 101; industrialization, 97; politics, 100, 108; regulation/government, 107–8, 111, 113–15, 124, 196 urban, 87, 125, 142 utopian imagination, 194 vector, 12, 29, 36, 44, 47n26 Venus, 27, 30, 110 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 144, 156 Virgin Mary, 43, 44 Vitruvius, Pollio, 41; Vitruvian man, 8, 11, 41, 140 Volk, Tyler, 98, 102nn1, 3, 134n30 von Baer’s Laws of Embryology, 12 von Uexküll, Jakob, 23n1, 158n15 wabi–sabi, 193 Wallace, Alan, 153–54, 185n14 watch, 87, 91–92, 100. See also clock; time weather events, 124, 196; connection with climate change, 110

257

Weinstein, Josh A., 19, 25n16 Weisman, Alan, 11, 112 Wells Cathedral clock, 88 Wenzel, Jennifer, 163 Western culture/contexts, 2, 12, 18–20, 21, 23, 48n28, 51, 84, 103n8, 124, 129, 135, 138, 145, 153, 162–63, 171–75, 177, 185n11; non–Western culture/frameworks, 18, 157, 162–63, 169, 173–75, 195 Westernization, 173 What We Owe the Future, 194 wheel, 25n12, 38, 39, 41, 46n16, 72, 87, 89, 90–91, 93, 105n23, 168, 174 White, Lynn, Jr., 3, 55 wildfire, 109–10 Wilson, E.O., 154 wind turbines, windmills, 189, 190, 196 World Health Organization (WHO), 126–27, 133n25, 194 World Without Us. See Weisman, Alan yin–yang, 178 zeitgebers, 104n17 zero waste, 197 zodiac, 8, 9, 30, 31, 86, 104n15; Zodiac Man (and Woman), 9, 86 zooplankton, 111

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Jean-Marie Kauth worked four years in a neurobiology lab microinjecting neurotransmitters into the brainstems of rats; at the same time, a required course in medieval literature enticed her to major in English. In a tough last-minute decision between medical school and graduate school, she ultimately chose to earn a PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at University of Michigan and has since become Professor of Languages and Literature at Benedictine University. The urgency of increasing degradation of ecosystems and human health has called her back toward science, and continued development in ecocriticism has allowed her to teach interdisciplinary courses in environmental science and literature for nearly twenty years. She has worked as an activist in Children’s Environmental Health since 2000, and in 2018, earned a Master’s in Public Health with certificates in Epidemiology and Health Education to support work as a regional environmental activist. She is a member of APHA’s Children’s Environmental Health Committee of the Environment Section, UCSF’s Science Action Network (SAN), and the Childhood Cancer Prevention Initiative (CCPI), and was recently appointed to the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC), a Federal Advisory Committee to the EPA. Her aim is to protect children’s health by educating students, scholars, parents, policymakers, and healthcare providers on the perils of the environmental crises. For syllabi, tip sheets, and other resources, visit https://www.poisoningchildren.com/.

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