Religion, Materialism and Ecology [1 ed.] 9781003320722, 9781032341415, 9781032341408

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‘This provocative collection of essays frmly establishes the vital importance of religion and ecology to broader conversations in the environmental humanities. Religion and spirituality are key sites and sources of material and bodily practices that, for better and for worse, shape human interaction with the natural world. Deploying a range of methodological lenses and narrative forms, these essays demonstrate that an inexorable thingness pervades religion, and that matter matters, religiously and ethically.’ Lisa H. Sideris, Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA ‘This timely publication provides the feld of environmental humanities with the essential contribution studies in religion and ecology can bring to the critical conversation that addresses the healing of our planet. Its diverse authors provide the reader with important new insights into the nature of matter, materiality, and materialism. Together, they articulate the relational ontology necessary for human engagement with the more than human world to ensure a viable future for all planetary existence.’ Roberto Chiotti, Founding Principal, Larkin Architect Limited, Toronto, Canada ‘The editors of this volume, all key fgures in the feld, have given readers an excellent introduction to the intersection of religion and ecology, as well as the more recent developments in new materialism. The book gathers contributions from authors writing from the Northern hemisphere, from US and European contexts. The essays engage a variety of approaches to religion, nature and spirituality, and give examples on how to develop material practices for religious and spiritual retraditioning. Through case studies, poetics and narratives, readers learn of ways to engage new materialism to reconnect to the sacred stories, places and beings around them. This volume comes at a time when we most crucially need to take these teachings and practices to heart, mind and body.’ Marion Grau, Professor of Constructive Theology, Missiology and Ecumenism, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society

‘In the past there was a dual temptation to subsume matter under spirit or to reduce spirit to mere matter. By recognising that there is a religious dimension to materialism and by exploring this in novel ways, this volume breaks new ground—both for discourse on new materialism in the humanities and for discourse on religion and ecology.’ Ernst M. Conradie, Senior Professor, Department of Religion and Theology, University of the Western Cape, South Africa ‘In times of planetary sufering, one wonders why religions have not raised their voices louder and more prominently so far. This book fnally addresses the intersection of religion and ecology, politics, ethics, epistemologies and ontologies—not just from a multi-religious and multi-ethnic but also global perspective. A must-read for all of us who see or seek the relevance of religion for a planet in peril.’ Julia Enxing, Professor of Systematic Theology, TU Dresden, Germany ‘Important subject matter creatively handled. Solid contributions from a stellar group of thinkers. Valuable reading for anyone seeking cutting edge refections on what the environmental crisis demands of philosophy, religious studies or environmental humanities.’ Roger S. Gottlieb, William B. Smith Dean’s Professor of Philosophy, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA ‘Religion, Materialism and Ecology provides an important contribution to the felds of religion and ecology, and its partnerships with the transdisciplinary felds within Environmental Humanities. Seasoned and well-respected scholars present a range of “material entanglements disclosed by ecological unravelling” in this collection. The book addresses ecological degradations related to material, philosophical and religious dimensions, with both theoretical approaches and illustrative case studies. It is rich with new and relevant insights. This is a most welcomed collaborative contribution by scholars trying to address various ecological crises in their many dimensions.’ Heather Eaton, Full Professor/Professeure titulaire in the School of Ethics, Social Justice and Public Service, Saint Paul University, Canada

RELIGION, MATERIALISM AND ECOLOGY

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies. Sigurd Bergmann is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology,Trondheim. Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany. Peter Manley Scott is Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester, UK.

Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Scott Slovic (University of Idaho, USA), Joni Adamson (Arizona State University, USA) and Yuki Masami (Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan)

Towards an Ecocritical Theatre Playing the Anthropocene Mohebat Ahmadi Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa Poetics and Politics of Exploitation Edited by James Ogude and Tafadzwa Mushonga African Americans and the Mississippi River Race, History, and the Environment Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted Environing Media Edited by Adam Wickberg and Johan Gärdebo The Environmental Apocalypse Interdisciplinary Refections on the Climate Crisis Edited by Jakub Kowalewski Exploring Interstitiality with Mangroves Semiotic Materialism and the Environmental Humanities Kate Judith God and Gaia Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet Michael S. Northcott Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US Courtney B. Ryan Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic Anthropocenic Climate and Shapeshifting Watery Lifeworlds Edited by Dan Smyer Yü and Jelle J.P. Wouters Religion, Materialism and Ecology Edited by Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby and Peter Manley Scott

RELIGION, MATERIALISM AND ECOLOGY

Edited by Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby and Peter Manley Scott

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby and Peter Manley Scott; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby and Peter Manley Scott to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-34141-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-34140-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-32072-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722 Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

In memory of Bruno Latour

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Introduction Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby and Peter Manley Scott

xi 1

1 Developing a Critical Planetary Romanticism: Re-attuning to the Earth Whitney A. Bauman

13

2 Architecting Zoë: On Haunting Homes and Sacred Ecomateriality Rachel Armstrong

29

3 Planetary Technics, Earthly Spirits Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski 4 Panexperiential Materialism? On Latour, Whitehead and Laudato Si’ Ivo Frankenreiter 5 Binding the Wounds of Mother Earth: Christian Animism, New Materialism and the Politics of Nonhuman Personhood Today Mark I. Wallace

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66

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Contents

6 Spirit Possession as Focal Point in the Constellation of Religion, Materialism and Ecology Mary L. Keller

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7 Autothanatography and Terminal Relationality in the Time of the Anthropocene Yianna Liatsos

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8 A Poetics of Nature: Religious Naturalism, Multiplicities and Afnities Carol Wayne White

133

9 Queering Stories of Religious Materialism: Plural Practices of (Earth) Care and Repair Todd LeVasseur, Paul M. Pulé and Alfonso Merlini

151

10 The Matter of Oil: Extraction Vitalisms and Enchantment Terra Schwerin Rowe 11 Fiction’s Double-Helix: Incarnate Process and the Capacity for Transformation in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Jessica Brown Afterword Catherine Keller Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Armstrong is ZAP Professor of Design-Driven Construction for Regenerative Architecture at the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven, Belgium. Whitney A. Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida

International University, Miami, FL, USA. Sigurd Bergmann is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the Norwegian

University of Science and Technology,Trondheim. Jessica Brown has completed a doctoral degree in creative writing and narrative studies from the University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland. Nigel Clark teaches human geography at the Lancaster Environment Centre,

Lancaster University, UK. Ivo Frankenreiter is Research Assistant in Christian Social Ethics at the Faculty for Catholic Theology of LMU Munich, Germany. Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University, USA. Mary L. Keller teaches in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department and

African American and Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Wyoming, USA. Todd LeVasseur is a senior instructor in environmental and sustainability studies at

the College of Charleston, SC, USA and a visiting senior lecturer in Environmental Studies at Yale National University Singapore College (2022–2024).

xii Contributors

Yianna Liatsos is Lecturer in English in the School of English, Irish and Communication at the University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland. Alfonso Merlini is a storyteller based in the USA. Paul M. Pulé is a freelance social and environmental justice scholar and activist and

an Honorary Research Fellow at Coventry University, UK. Kate Rigby is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany. Terra Schwerin Rowe is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas, USA. Peter Manley Scott is Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. Bronislaw Szerszynski is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. Mark I. Wallace is the James Hormel Professor of Social Justice in the Department

of Religion at Swarthmore College, USA. Carol Wayne White is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Bucknell University,

USA.

INTRODUCTION Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby and Peter Manley Scott

The research feld of ‘religion and ecology’, which is also called ‘religion and the environment’ or ‘religion, nature and culture’, ofers, due to its short but highly dynamic history, a thrilling success story. Emerging from theology and religious studies, and in cooperation with other disciplines such as philosophy, history, anthropology, biology and more, it has gradually developed since the 1970s and mobilised a large number of scholars on all continents in an exciting transdisciplinary process of refection and exchange. The event behind this book also arose within this new and fourishing research landscape. An impressive number of handbooks and book series1 serve as introductions to the feld and the number of both overarching and thematic studies is constantly increasing.2 Three international societies are ofering a creative arena for communication and research development.3 As the notion of ‘nature’ is essential for the self-understanding of Western ‘civilization’, religions have also, in their long history, contributed to the development of the concept of nature. ‘Nature’ in the three Abrahamic religions is interpreted as ‘creation’ which exists out of its relation to God. ‘Nature’ is less central in African and Asian cultures, where ‘Life’ and ‘Earth’ play more important roles. ‘Land’ is the analogous category in indigenous traditions and other spiritualities that grow out of and within relations to specifc bioregional spaces. Beliefs in Creation, Life and Land are changing as ‘nature’ turns into ‘the environment’—that is, as nature is afected radically by human social and technical activities. Religions ofer substantial cultural skills. Besides the skills of meaning making, ritualising, mapping and tracing, religion enables the human activity of ‘making-oneself-at-home’ (German: Beheimatung). It locates believers in a world and at a place that is inhabited by the Divine. Humans do not land on Earth as travelling strangers; our history is fully entangled with the evolution of material, DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-1

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bodily life on Earth. Humans, including believers and scholars, are earthlings. Religious practices therefore certainly ‘refect the natural environments and ways of life in which they emerged’.4 Natural environments embed, carry and nurture human life and thereby also faith. Faith, religion, belief and spirituality appear in such a view as deeply natural forces. Analyses of religion, therefore, must respect not only the subjective, sociocultural and historical dimensions of religious traditions, but also the ecological functions of faith. Expressions of faith appear in new territories and symbolic systems, and the strong transgressive capacity of religion—transgressive in the sense of being capable of widening, deepening and transforming borders of our perception, thinking and acting— becomes manifest. Refecting on the spiritual and religious driving forces in all their manifold diferences therefore ofers a specifc contribution to the wider feld of the Environmental Humanities. This volume emerges from the long-standing feld of environmental religious studies, but is also situated within the emerging transdisciplinary terrain that has come to be known as the ‘environmental humanities’. In their introduction to the inaugural issue of the journal Environmental Humanities, the editors frame this fast-growing arena of debate and enquiry as engaging ‘with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose in a time of rapid, and escalating, change … At the core of this approach’, they go on to explain, ‘is a focus on the underlying cultural and philosophical frameworks that are entangled with the ways in which diverse human cultures have made themselves at home in a more than human world’.5 For most people throughout human history, and still today for some 84 per cent of the world’s population,6 these questions and frameworks have been informed, to a greater or lesser extent, by religious worldviews, narratives and practices. In naming the various environmentally oriented sub-disciplines that were now being brought ‘into conversation with each other in numerous and diverse ways’, Deborah Bird Rose and her co-editors nonetheless omit to mention environmental religious studies, pointing only to ‘environmental history, environmental philosophy, environmental anthropology and sociology, political ecology, posthuman geographies and ecocriticism’, whilst nonetheless signalling that this list was by no means exhaustive by adding ‘(among others)’.7 Rose, an eminent environmental anthropologist and ecocultural theorist, played a leading role in the establishment of the environmental humanities globally in her co-curation with environmental historian, Libby Robin, of the Australian National Working Group on the Ecological Humanities. First proposed by environmental historian Tom Grifths and environmental lawyer and art historian Tim Bonyhady in the late 1990s, this initiative is now widely recognised as one of the cradles of the environmental humanities worldwide.8 Rose and other members of this group (including co-editor of this volume, Kate Rigby), also had links with Australian initiatives in the area of religion and ecology, such as the Earth Bible project, led by biblical scholar Norman Habel, which also got underway in the late 1990s, leading to the publication of the frst of a

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series of ecologically oriented biblical commentaries in 2000.9 The omission of any express mention of religion in the inaugural editorial for what remains the peak journal in the feld is all the more striking. Yet it is by no means unusual: until very recently, the vital contribution of research in religion and ecology, stretching back over some 50 years, has generally been under-recognised within the environmental humanities, as this feld has been framed and named over the past decade or so. Book-length introductions to the environmental humanities began to appear in 2015, and of the major introductory anthologies published over the next three years,10 only one includes a chapter dedicated to religion and ecology.11 Robert Emmett and David Nye’s landmark ‘critical introduction’ to the feld (2017) includes several listings under ‘Religion’ in the Index, including references to Christianity (5), Buddhism (4), Hinduism (1), First Peoples (3), sacred places (8) and spiritual values (7), but there is no discussion of religion and ecology as a research area, as there is, for example, for ecocriticism and environmental history; nor is any of the relevant scholarship included in the bibliography.12 Only recently has consideration of religion begun to feature more centrally in the environmental humanities, notably in Andrew Hubbell and John Ryan’s textbook Introduction to the Environmental Humanities, which features an excellent chapter on ‘Ecological religious studies: faith in nature’.13 Recognition nonetheless remains patchy. Jefrey Cohen and Stephanie Foote’s 2021 Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, for example, lacks a section on religion, whilst Matthias Schmidt and Hubert Zapf ’s introductory German-language anthology, Environmental Humanities, references religion only in association with classical antiquity.14 With this volume, then, we seek to highlight and extend the contribution of studies of religion and ecology to the environmental humanities, with a particular focus on questions related to matter, materiality and materialism. Such questions are increasingly forcing themselves upon even those of us whose privileged existence has hitherto veiled our vulnerability to those Earth system changes to which our fossil-fuelled consumerist lifestyles have contributed, shattering the illusion of separation from a Nature deemed to lie somewhere over yonder, whether as scenery or resource, and disclosing our complex entanglements with diverse more-than-human others. As we write this introduction from our varied locations in northern Europe, 60 per cent of the landmass of the European Union and (weather systems being impervious to political boundaries) the UK has just been declared in drought, rivers are running dry, water restrictions are mooted, heat-related fatalities are on the rise, and fres have been blazing, not only across the Mediterranean, but also in parts of England’s no longer quite so ‘green and pleasant land’.15 The growing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events constitute a material signal in which all but the most determined climate change denialists are beginning to discern the trace of human actions, and the consequences of our inaction. This ominous evidence of anthropogenic ecosystem disruption is fnally

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bringing the natural world out of the background, into which it has been cast within the dominant mindset of modernity, cracking open the walls of human self-enclosure that have shielded the primary benefciaries of fossil-fuelled industrialism from the recognition of their material dependence on other-than-human entities and processes and of their impacts upon them.16 Such evidence is showing up elsewhere: for example, in the health impacts of toxic pollution and zoonotic pathogens; in the growing silence of the countryside, where ever fewer birds now sing; in the paucity of insects that once got splattered across car bonnets; and in the shocking spectacle of mass wildlife mortality events, such as the thousands of dead crabs and lobsters that have been washing up along the Yorkshire coast over the past two years. Globally, of course, such evidence has been mounting for some time, appearing also in rising sea levels, failed harvests and the disappearance of familiar species, valued not only as resources, but for some peoples also as kin, disproportionately impacting the lives, livelihoods and lifeways of those who have contributed least to the problem. Partly in response to the growing realisation that the material entanglements disclosed by ecological unravelling, climate disruption, toxic pollution and the manifold injustices these entail, have not only ethico-political but also ontoepistemological implications, scholars across the humanities and social sciences have set about challenging prevailing assumptions regarding matter, materiality and materialism. Informed also by current research in the natural sciences (especially in the weirder reaches of physics and biology), as well as in science studies, the ‘new materialisms’ are many and varied, and have generated a range of new concepts and theories, such as ‘trans-corporeality’ (Stacy Alaimo), ‘sympoiesis’ (Donna Haraway), ‘agential realism’ (Karen Barad), ‘vital materialism’ ( Jane Bennett), ‘posthumanism’ (Rosi Braidotti), ‘biosemiotics’ ( Jesper Hofmeyer), ‘Actor-Network-Theory’ (Bruno Latour) and ‘object-oriented ontology’ (Graham Harman), among many others.17 For all their diferences, these varied approaches put pressure on the cultural and linguistic constructivism that had become prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, which efectively reduced the non-human world to a blank screen, upon which humans, and only humans, inscribed their historically contingent meanings. This is not to say that such new materialisms deny the crucial role played by cultural practices and perspectives, including language, in shaping human understandings of, and engagements with, the worlds they co-create. It is nonetheless to afrm that these worlds are co-created with more-than-human others, and that otherthan-human entities and processes, individuals and collectives, matter, not only materially but also morally. Long before the 2010 anthology co-edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost brought several of these lines of enquiry together under the rubric of ‘New Materialisms’, scholars working across the ecologically oriented sub-disciplines of the humanities, and humanities-leaning social sciences, had been hard at work critiquing human exceptionalism, mainly in the guise of the critique of anthropocentrism (or, more precisely, ‘anthroparchy’, human domination of nature/

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non-humans18); disclosing other-than-human agency, interests and communicative capacities; and querying reductive notions of material reality along with exaggerated accounts of cultural construction. Among them was Lynn White Jnr., whose slim article on ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, published in Science in 1967, has enjoyed a wide resonance across the environmental humanities in general, being republished, for example, in the inaugural reader in ecocriticism,19 and of environmental religious studies in particular. White’s assertion in this article that ‘Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’,20 has frequently been quoted out of context as a blanket condemnation. In fact, his argument was considerably more nuanced, and far more interesting. For a start, this sentence begins with the qualifer, ‘Especially in its Western form’. White takes care to highlight that ‘Christianity is a complex faith, and its consequences difer in difering contexts’, noting that there are salient diferences, for example, between the predominantly Western development that he critiques and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Moreover, he attributes this diference, at least in part, to environmental contingencies that infuenced Western Christian culture and society. Inspired by the historiography of the long durée pioneered by the Annales School in the 1930s, and pre-empting subsequent work in environmental history, White accords non-human entities the status of players in the history he sketches here: specifcally, the thick, sticky, clayey soils of northern Europe, which resisted being worked by the light scratch-plough, drawn by a single beast of burden, which originated in the Fertile Crescent and had been adopted throughout the Mediterranean region as agriculture spread north and westwards; and the heavy iron plough, which was invented towards the end of the seventh century, in order to work such resistant soils more efectively. This innovative technology reshaped northwestern European farmers’ relations with one another, their domesticated animals and the land. White sees the impact of these changes in the altered depiction of the seasons in early mediaeval illustrated calendars, the imagery of which implies that ‘Man and nature are two things, and man is master’ (White 1967: 1205). In his account, then, it was the materiality of the soil and of the contraption invented to plough it, that contributed to the aggressively anthropocentric interpretation of the biblical injunction to humans to ‘have dominion’ over other creatures and ‘subdue the earth’ (Gen. 1.26–1.28), which emerged during the Middle Ages and decisively informed the modern Western wedding of science and technology to the end of gaining mastery over the natural world. Among the various lines of materialist enquiry across the environmental humanities that White foreshadows here, including ecocriticism and ecophilosophy, as well as environmental history, the most signifcant is undoubtedly studies in religion and ecology. For, as White observes, ‘Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion’,21 even in those contexts (including much of the Global North today) where religious belief and practice have waned, but where underlying assumptions originally derived from religion remain in force (such as the notion of human dominion that lurks

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in the secular construction of nature as ‘resource’, that is, intended preferentially for human use). As it has grown and diversifed over the past 50 years, research in religion and ecology has cross-pollinated with other areas in the environmental humanities, becoming a locus of lively multi-disciplinary exchange, connecting historical, hermeneutical, theological, comparative, anthropological and sociological approaches to religion and spirituality in the horizon of ongoing environmental damage and injustice. Importantly, such research engages with religion and spirituality not only as a matter of mentalities but also of material practices: even the most esoteric and other-worldly of faiths entail forms of situated bodily activity, and all have implications, not only for how people perceive but also interact with the more-than-human world. Indeed, the role of religion in shaping human responses to ecological and climate crisis has now been recognised by the United Nations Environment Programme, which launched its Faith for Earth initiative in 2017, building on decades of work by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (1995–2019), and other such organisations at national and local level, to foster links between faith groups and environmental NGOs around the world. Study of the material dimensions of religion has never been absent, of course. The relationship between religious power and political power identifes one aspect of this issue. Arguments over ritual and the organisation of religious communities indicate a further dimension. Nonetheless, there has recently been a broader engagement with the materiality of faith—partly as an extension of the discussion of politics but also as part of a turn to spatiality in religious studies.22 So now the scope of the enquiry is extended from ritual to religious artefacts, journeys and buildings: the material infrastructure of religious practices. Religions make as well as worship. These themes recur in the essays presented here and so it is to those essays that we now turn. This volume is divided into two parts. Part 1, comprising fve chapters, provides a theoretical context for the consideration of materialisms from a range of religious perspectives; the six chapters of Part 2 evidence a similar methodological variety but with a focus on case studies, poetics and narratives (including autobiography). First, Whitney A. Bauman starts our enquiry by ‘Developing a Critical Planetary Romanticism: Re-attuning to the Earth’, in which he calls into question some of the dominant meanings of our current era (Bauman dislikes the description ‘Anthropocene’) around notions of time, the backgrounding of nature and the construction of nature through industrial processes of the factory and the laboratory. He proposes what he calls a ‘re-attuning’ in which religion is implicated as a resource towards a revisioning of Romanticism that turns upon a fresh understanding of our planetary community. The emphasis, then, is on the making of new meanings in a planetary context. Next, Rachel Armstrong introduces a conceptual and material framework for a sacred materiality using the concept of continual electron fow as a strategy for changing human impacts of inhabitation towards enlivening—rather than the devitalising

Introduction

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status quo. This resacralisation of matter is positioned in relationship to religious naturalism and its realisation through the concept of uncertain technologies. The title of her chapter, ‘Architecting Zoë: On Haunting Homes and Sacred Ecomateriality’, identifes a practice of transforming our waste ‘into vital exchanges’, so our “living” homes can express characteristics such as sensitivity, metabolism and even intelligence, raising ethical considerations through new protocols of care and coinhabitation, enacted through sacred ecomaterialist rituals that transform the impacts of human inhabitation into life promoting actions. In our third contribution, ‘Planetary Technics, Earthly Spirits’ by Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, analysis extends further into the consideration of technology, by developing what they call ‘a critical account of human “technics”—understood broadly as the “bringing forth” of the properties and potentialities of physical reality—as an enfolding of planetary and cosmic powers into the social world’. Joining the philosophical critiques of Western technology, Clark and Szerszynski press beyond these analyses to explore resources for the reintegration of technics with the Earth or cosmos. They conclude by considering ‘the prospects for a “spiritualized” or cosmological reimagining of technology in the contemporary world, with an eye to the insights of both western science and other knowledge formations’. From technology we move in our fourth chapter to the philosophical interpretation of matter. Ivo Frankenreiter, in ‘Panexperiential Materialism? On Latour, Whitehead and Laudato Si’, challenges common understandings in which matter is taken to be the substrate the physical world consists of; as such it forms the objective counterpart for human subjectivity, can be manipulated with the help of insight into its deterministic laws, but remains in itself entirely neutral with regard to human concerns or interests. Instead, he argues that some of the crucial insights of the papal encyclical can be consolidated by reference to aspects of Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory in his Facing Gaia once these have in turn been critically interrogated from the perspective of Whitehead’s process thought. Frankenreiter concludes that in this way key claims regarding intrinsic value made in Laudato Si’ can be substantiated and rendered more persuasive. Part 1 concludes with ‘Binding the Wounds of Mother Earth: Christian Animism, New Materialism and the Politics of Nonhuman Personhood Today’, in which Mark I. Wallace proposes the idea of Christian animism in order to return to the Johannine vision of a divinised material world. Noting that animism is a contested term with academic roots in Anglo-American white supremacy, Wallace proposes ‘a nuanced recovery of “animism”, in dialogue with the Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, in order to set forth the afnity between biblical religion and Indigenous lifeways’. The chapter makes ‘the case for Christian animism (in dialogue with new Indigenous, biblical and juridical scholarship) to empower the healing of Mother Earth as the essential and ennobling political work of our time’.

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Part 2 opens with ‘Spirit Possession as Focal Point in the Constellation of Religion, Materialism and Ecology’ by Mary L. Keller, in which she ‘proposes a contribution to comparative studies of agential ontologies by focusing on the practice of spirit possession as a circumcenter between the terms “religion”, “materialism” and “ecology” (RME)’. Her argument in Chapter 6 culminates in ‘a narrative wager by naming the Spirit of Climate Change as a novel spirit that possesses and excites all matter’ and calls for the restoration of ‘myriad indigenous ontologies’ as part of ‘work towards a viable world’. In chapter 7, ‘Autothanatography and Terminal Relationality in the Time of the Anthropocene’, Yianna Liatsos turns to terminal illness memoirs to consider ‘the contribution of illness writing to two dominant storylines associated with the Anthropocene discourse and its discussions around extinction—those of demise and of relationality’ as a way of exploring ‘a language for enduring “terminal relationality”’. This exploration is secured, she argues, in that ‘these memoirs nonetheless adopt an auto(thanato) graphical voice to signify an uncertain but persistent presence and sociality in the face of demise’. In Chapter 8, ‘A Poetics of Nature: Religious Naturalism, Multiplicities and Afnities’, Carol Wayne White introduces a poetics of nature grounded in the tenets of religious naturalism, which explores other narratives often made invisible by an overarching concern for the human and activity by the human. As a capacious, ecological religious worldview, religious naturalism reframes humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature. It also features a materialist, relational ontology, encouraging humans’ processes of transformative engagement with the more-thanhuman worlds that constitute our existence. Next, Todd LeVasseur, Paul M. Pulé and Alfonso Merlini, in a chapter titled ‘Queering Stories of Religious Materialism: Plural Practices of (Earth) Care and Repair’, co-create ‘a story of climate change materialisms and how these may impact religious stories and ways of being in ecologies of place’. Employing ‘a queer ecologies lens to analyze masculinist traditions that have onto-epistemologically shaped worldviews and human behaviors’, they critique a ‘key inherited binary of logos/eros’. In response, they propose a ‘prioritizing [of ] an eros-centered story of multispecies belonging grounded within a spirituality of connection to wider Nature’. In Chapter 10, Terra Schwerin Rowe argues that ‘[e]nvironmental degradation has been commonly linked to a modern loss of meaning, the sacred or enchantment in nature, spurring a variety of re-enchantment strategies’. Yet ‘What [these] predominant disenchantment approaches miss are the ways extraction, early oil narratives and energy have consistently been received as animated, enchanted and sacralized, often toward colonizing and environmentally destructive ends.’ The chapter ‘The Matter of Oil: Extraction Vitalisms and Enchantment’ ‘explores several historical examples—some ancient, some as recent as 21st-century climate denialisms’. ‘[A] commonly assumed link between re-enchantment and environmental ethics’, Schwerin argues, ‘needs to

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be re-theorized so that enchantment, material animation and vitalism remains expected, but ethically ambiguous’. In the fnal chapter, ‘Fiction’s Double-Helix: Incarnate Process and the Capacity for Transformation in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol’, Jessica Brown enters ‘the intersections between ecology, materialism and religion through a literary and imaginative approach’ by examining the fctional storyworld of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. After establishing three categories of this storyworld that allow for narrative transformation—tactilities, atmospherics, and spiritual dynamics—the chapter proceeds to investigate the relationship between these categories, arriving at an incarnational relationality with a special emphasis on the afective and processual nature of incarnation, to see that it profoundly enables capacities for transformation. Finally, in a profound Afterword, Catherine Keller interacts with these essays and with her usual acumen explores some of the ambiguities around discourse on materialisms. As she powerfully notes, ‘With disarming creativity, this transdisciplinary thinking works to mobilize the dissident energies of religious thought and practice, the Earth-tuned energies that demand of earthlings responsibility for our material practices’. As editors, we would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their hard work and the staf at Routledge, especially Matthew Shawbrook, Bharath Selvamani and Caroline Harrison, for their initial encouragement and ongoing support, along with series editors Scott Slovic, Joni Adamson, and Yuki Masami. We would also like to acknowledge the interest and support of the European Forum for the Study of Religion and Environment. Finally, we note that Bruno Latour gave a keynote address at the conference from which this collection originates. He also readily, and with characteristic generosity, agreed to write a Preface for this volume. Sadly, this was not to be as he died before he was able to complete this task. So, as editors, we dedicate this volume to his memory, and with thanks for his profound contribution to the conversation on religion, materialism and ecology that is being taken forward in these essays.

Notes 1 Laura Hobgood and Whitney Bauman, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Nature: The Elements (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). Willis J. Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, eds., Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann, eds., Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Sufering, Values, Lifestyles (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). Hilda P. Koster and Ernst M. Conradie, eds., T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change (London: T&T Clark, 2019). Cf. also the Religions of the World and Ecology Book Series, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, https://fore.yale.edu/Publications/Books/Religions-World-and-Ecology -Book-Series; the series Studies in Religion and the Environment, https://www.lit-verlag .de/Publikationen/Reihen/Studies-in-Religion-and-the-EnvironmentStudien-zur -Religion-und-Umwelt/; the series Studies in Environmental Humanities, https://brill .com/view/serial/SEH; the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology,

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3 4 5 6 7 8

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https://brill.com/view/journals/wo/wo-overview.xml; and The Journal of Religion, Nature and Culture, https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JSRNC. Mentioning just a few: Catherine Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2021); Celia E. Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann and Markus Vogt, eds., Religion in the Anthropocene (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017); Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislaw Szerszynski, eds., Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Sigurd Bergmann, Religion, Space, and the Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Peter M. Scott, Theology of Postnatural Right (Berlin: LIT, 2019). European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment; Forum on Religion and Ecology; International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. Ann Buttimer, ‘Afterword: Refections on Geography, Religion, and Belief Systems’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 1 (2006): 197–202, 200. Deborah Bird Rose et al. ‘Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities‘, Environmental Humanities 1 no. 1 (2012): 1, 2. ‘The Changing Global Religious Landscape,’ PEW Research. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/ (accessed 19/7/2022). Rose et al., ‘Thinking Through the Environment,’ 2, 1. See, e.g., Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 3. On the Australian environmental humanities, see also Kate Rigby, ‘Weaving the Environmental Humanities: Australian Strands, Confgurations, and Provocations’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 23 no. 1 (2019): 5–18. Norman C. Habel, Readings from the Perspective of Earth, The Earth Bible 1 (Shefeld: Shefeld University Press, 2000). See also A. Elvey’s eco-materialist reading of the Gospel of Luke, The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses (Shefeld: Shefeld Phoenix, 2011). Rigby subsequently became the inaugural convenor of the Australia-Pacifc Forum on Religion and Ecology, which launched at Monash University in 2011. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan, eds., Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2015); Joni Adamson and Michael Davis, eds., Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice (London: Routledge, 2016); Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, eds., Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (London: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2016); Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, eds., The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017); Hannes Bergthaller and Peter Mortensen, eds., Framing the Environmental Humanities (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Kate Rigby, ‘Religion and Ecology. Towards a Communion of Creatures’, in Oppermann and Iovino, Environmental Humanities, 273–294. George Handley’s chapter on Derek Walcott in DeLoughrey, Didur and Carrigan, Global Ecologies, does, nonetheless, discuss religious themes, whilst Bergthaller and Mortensen, Framing the Environmental Humanities, includes a contribution by Ott Heinapuu on ‘natural sacred sites’ in Estonia. Emmett and Nye, Environmental Humanities. Andrew J. Hubbell and John Ryan, Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (London: Routledge, 2021), 129–146. See also Matthew Newcomb, Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities (London: Routledge, 2023), which brings a rhetorical analysis to bear on Evangelical Christianity and the environment, while noting that this type of analysis has been present within religion and ecology scholarship for quite some time. See, e.g., Laurel Kearns, ‘Cooking the Truth: Faith, the Market, and the Science of Global Warming’, in Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller, eds., Eco-Spirit:

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14 15 16

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Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 97–123; and Robin Veldman, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). Christoph Schliephake, ‘Historische Ökologie(n) der Antike – Theorien, Fallbeispiele, Perspektiven’, in M. Schmidt und H. Zapf, eds., Environmental Humanities. Beiträge zur geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Umweltforschung (Göttingen: V&R unipress), 19–38. Bergmann, Weather, Religion and Climate Change. ‘Backgrounding’ is one of the salient features of what material feminist ecophilosopher Val Plumwood identifies as the ‘logic of centrism’, which endorses human domination of nature and contributes to the condition of ‘human self-enclosure’. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 97–122. A number of these concepts and approaches are brought together in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). The term ‘anthroparchy’ was coined by Erica Cudworth in Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 3–14. Lynn White, Jnr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1205. White, ‘Historical Roots’, 1205. Bergmann, ‘Theology in Its Spatial Turn’. See also the new monograph by feminist ecocritical biblical scholar Anne Elvey, Reading with Earth: Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutic (London: T&T Clark, 2022).

Bibliography Adamson, Joni and Micha el Davis (eds), Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice. London: Routledge, 2016. Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Bergmann, Sigurd, ‘Theology in Its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Challenging and Changing the Images of God’ Religion Compass 1.3 (2007): 353–379. Bergmann, Sigurd, Weather, Religion and Climate Change. London: Routledge, 2020. Bergthaller, Hannes and Peter Mortensen (eds), Framing the Environmental Humanities. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Cohen, Jeffrey. and Stephanie Foote (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Coole, Diane and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Cudworth, Erica, Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan, A. Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2015. Elvey, Anne. The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements Between Luke and the Five Senses. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011.

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Elvey, Anne. Reading with Earth: Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutic. London: T&T Clark, 2022. Emmett, Robert S. and Nye, David E., The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Glotfelty, Cheryl and Harold Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Habel, Norman C., Readings from the Perspective of Earth, The Earth Bible 1. Shefeld: Shefeld University Press, 2000. Heise, Ursula K., Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. London: Taylor & Francis, 2017. Hofmeyer, Jesper, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, trans. J. Hofmeyer and D. Favareau. Chicago: University of Scranton Press, 2008. Hubbell, J. Andrew and Ryan, John C., Introduction to the Environmental Humanities. London: Routledge, 2021. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann (eds), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. London: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2016. Kearns, L., ‘Cooking the Truth: Faith, the Market, and the Science of Global Warming’ In L. Kearns and C. Keller (eds), Eco-Spirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, 97–123. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Newcomb, Matthew, Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities: Bridging the Rhetoric Gap. London: Routledge, 2023. Plumwood, Val, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. Rigby, Kate, ‘Religion and Ecology. Towards a Communion of Creatures’ In S. Oppermann and S. Iovino (eds), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, 273–294. London: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2016. Rigby, Kate, ‘Weaving the Environmental Humanities: Australian Strands, Confgurations, and Provocations’ Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 23.1 (2019): 5–18. Rose, Deborah Bird, Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew, Stuart Cooke, Matthew Kearnes and Emily O'Gorman, ‘Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities’ Environmental Humanities 1.1 (2012): 1–5. Schmidt, Matthias and Zapf, Hubert (eds), Environmental Humanities. Beiträge zur geistesund sozialwissenschaftlichen Umweltforschung. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2021. Veldman, R., The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. White, L. ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’ Science 155.3767 (1967): 1203–1207.

1 DEVELOPING A CRITICAL PLANETARY ROMANTICISM Re-attuning to the Earth Whitney A. Bauman

With keen awareness of how deeply embedded we are with myriad nature, and how our destiny is entangled with other natural processes, humans continually revise, correct, or even forfeit older perspectives as newer forms of knowledge become available.1 As Carol Wayne White’s opening quote suggests, life is an ongoing process of responding to the reality of evolving, embodied embeddedness. Being alive means being responsive, the ability to respond. In some species, and in most humans, this has evolved into response-ability: the ability to choose between multiple possible ways of becoming. Thus, at the heart of life is the possibility for change, newness and something diferent. These possibilities emerge in the context of deeply entangled becoming: we exist as earthlings in deep, evolving relationships with all other life and non-life on the planet. For too long, industrialised modern Western peoples have, through a series of materialisations that mimic an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing monotheistic god (in whose image some humans were made), created the world in their own image. This set of materialisations through the processes of colonisation, the Industrial Revolution and globalisation has created violence towards many earth bodies,2 and has led to the phenomenon known commonly as climate change (with all its problems).3 From this dominant Western modern perspective (which has never been realised),4 humans claim to be separate from nature and are the locus of agency and value, nature is in service to (some) human ends, time is linear and progressive, and humans are seen as discreet individuals for whom relationship is secondary. Though the current era is commonly called ‘The Anthropocene’, for many reasons I think this is inadequate.5 I also fnd the ‘capitalocene’ problematic: not all humans created these problems equally and communism hasn’t fared much DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-2

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better in terms of environmental issues. There very well may be green forms of communism, capitalism and socialism, so I’m not sure we can reduce everything to the economic structure. Instead, following some in the energy humanities and those studying petrocultures, I refer to this as the fossil-fuelled era.6 It is primarily the speed at which modern life moves, thanks to fossil fuels, that is the culprit of many social and ecological ills. Paul Virilio (among others) has described this speed revolution as ‘The Great Acceleration’.7 In the case of our planetary community, sadly, speed kills.8 This chapter argues that the fallout from the two greatest phenomena that challenge our planetary community—globalisation and climate weirding both fuelled by fossils—requires us to re-attune to the planetary community. Due to the accelerated, connected and ‘glocal’ phenomena that mark our daily lives, we can no longer think like modern westerners: rather, we need to re-attune to our various planetary contexts. Religions as well as other justice and environmental movements can provide us with resources for such re-attunement. Such re-attunements should be couched in what I call a Critical Planetary Romanticism, or CPR for the Earth. In this chapter, I frst examine some of the materialisations of the modern Western mindset: progressive, linear time; the backgrounding of nature for humans; and the transformation of nature through the factory and the laboratory. I then argue that religion and meaningmaking might best be understood as a process of ‘re-attuning’ to the needs of our entangled earth bodies and the community of bodies that enable us life. Finally, such re-attunement requires an ‘epistem-ontology’ that I call Critical Planetary Romanticism.

The modern Western mindset The ways in which religions materialise in the world are manifold. Various religions (or meaning-making practices) shape our bodies through providing us with rules about what we can wear and eat and with whom we can sleep and when. Other material ideas are a bit harder to trace, but no less powerful in shaping earth bodies (both human and non). Furthermore, the efects of many concepts or ideas take centuries or even millennia to emerge in the process of ongoing planetary evolution. I look at religions here as emergent, collective meaningmaking practices, ideas, habits and rituals.9 From an emergent perspective, these meaning-making practices are not constructed ex nihilo nor by any one individual, but in an ongoing and collective process of co-construction (over generations of human and nonhuman life), religions emerge as powerful and very real levels of reality that afect the becoming of planetary bodies in various ways. What we might call broadly ‘the modern Western mindset’ has its roots in several strands of meaning-making practices: including the Ancient Near East (ANE) and Ancient Greece, monotheisms and the ways in which this emerging mindset and way of being in the world defned itself in relationship to the many ‘others’ it came into contact with during periods of colonisation, and in particular European colonisation. As many have pointed out, both understandings

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of ‘religion’ and understandings of ‘science’ were formed during the colonial era and are a product of the colonising mindset.10 Religion became associated with those components of other cultures that accounted for their ‘belief systems’, modelled after the focus in monotheism on theological ideas and belief in a single god. In other words, the idea of ‘religion’ was partitioned of from the rest of the culture encountered in a way that didn’t accurately refect the role of meaning-making practices in that given culture. And, of course, these other religious beliefs and practices were ranked hierarchically from monotheism at the top to animism at the bottom during the 18th and 19th centuries, as the attempt to classify religious beliefs by the emerging modern Western mind was being codifed into a so-called ‘science of religion’.11 At the same time ‘science’ was being defned over and against what the modern Western mind considered to be ‘religion’ on the one hand and ‘magic’ on the other.12 The guide for both theological (religious) and scientifc (study of the mechanical world in search of laws and towards eforts to control/tame nature) was the objective reason found in the ancient Greeks, then in monotheistic traditions, and then in what would become modern Western science. The modern Western idea of reason has several distinct components that were already codifed by monotheisms (and in particular Christian and Islamic Monotheisms): viz. that there is one, universal reality that can be discovered through human reason: either through study of scripture and revelation in nature or through the study of nature by ‘detached observation’ and experimentation that lead us to facts about ultimate reality. Modern Western science adopts the monotheistic notion of a single world, discoverable by reason and the idea of linear, progressive time. Obviously there are diferences among modern Western theologians, philosophers and later scientists about what that one reality looks like, but the underwritten idea that reality and the universe must be ‘one’ is a dominant feature that carries through these diferences. Thus, the oneness of reality and better and worse interpretations of that one reality hold steady. It is through these ideas that we see how three of the major ways in which monotheism turned modern Western science materialised in the world: progressive time and the 24-hour clock; the imago Dei and the separation of humans and nature; and the duty to transform nature in the factory and the laboratory. It is hard to think about these three things apart from one another and apart from the boost they all received from fossil-fuelled speed. The argument here is not that there is a 1:1 correlation between clocks, anthropocentrism/androcentrism and reductive and productive approaches to the rest of the natural world; rather that ideas about what time, human nature and the rest of the natural world are, helped to create knowledge and technologies that constructed the worlds into certain ways, and the very belief that there is a single interpretation of the world that is more accurate than all others. Let’s start, then, with a look at time.13 Time/clock/fossil-fuelled speed/progress. If we broaden ‘theology’ to mean something like ‘meaning-making practices’, then I tend to agree with the assertion by Mary-Jane Rubenstein that all technology is materialised theology. The three

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‘technologies’ I am examining here in relationship to the dominant modern Western mindset are, indeed, theologically based, and specifcally within a certain type of Christian theology. The frst such technology I examine is that of progressive, linear time. The idea of progress in history, that things build upon one another and that things will ‘improve’ or become more ‘complex’ or somehow ‘better’ over time, is somewhat of an anomaly if we consider most human cultures, religions, ideas and civilisations. There have, of course, been declensionist narratives of time, such as many environmentalists and creationists (strange bed fellows) hold to. This is the idea that there was some sort of pure and perfect creation ‘in the beginning’, and that a long, linear process of deterioration has occurred that will lead to the end or lead to the need for something to save us and re-set the time clock.14 The point here, in either case, is that there is a single linear time. Time has been for many, especially what the modern Western mind identifes as indigenous communities, cyclical. Buddhism has both understandings of time as epochal, and as illusory: there is only now. For Jainism, time is eternal rotation of the wheel of time. And for Hinduism, time is cycli-linear. These are just some of the multiple notions of time. There are many diferent calendars that refect diferent understandings of time, still in use today. Indeed, up to 40 calendars are in use today, and each is wrapped up in its own cosmology and meaningmaking practices. They fall into four basic types: solar, lunar, luni-solar and sidereal.15 Many communities follow multiple calendars. On the island of Java, for instance, the ofcial calendar often has the diferent days and dates of: a) the Javanese calendar, b) the Muslim calendar, c) the Chinese calendar and d) the Gregorian calendar. In addition to the variety of times found in calendars throughout histories and in the contemporary world, many meaning-making practices and rituals point to the constructed nature of time in everyday human life. The eternal now of meditation practices, the embodied time of yoga, the Dreaming of Australian Aboriginals (among others), the time of prayer, of song, or the blurring of the boundaries of time past/present/future found in many shamanistic traditions. All of these are tools used to help us get out of the constructed notion of daily human time.16 The idea of a linear time and a single time for the planet emerges hand in hand with the era of colonisation, eforts to navigate naval shipping routes and then later the Industrial Revolution. Monotheism, whatever else it might imply, means that there is one reality, one time and one truth. If the interpretation of monotheism is of one god (source of all reality, truth, time) that transcends the physical world, then all physical reality must ft into this monotheistic structure. Monotheism, in other words, lends itself to monological ways of thinking and universalism. Furthermore, if god is working for us and we can work towards salvation in this life, then, at least by many accounts, we must be able to argue that we are progressing towards something: a new creation, salvation, life after death, the second coming. Salvation history, in other words, is also creation

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history. As Christianity spread throughout Europe and the Roman Empire, and then later to many parts of the world through the process of European colonisation, this time and its corresponding reality and truth were also imposed on the places and peoples colonised. This earlier imposition of a ‘tunnel of time’ over the face of the globe, which also had its geographical manifestations (the eastern world was the past, the western ‘frontier’ was the future, and this placed the European colonisers in the present as the acting agents), made it much easier to impose common time during the Industrial Revolution and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) time in the late 19th and 20th centuries. This single accounting of time was needed in a world whose business and industry was being sped up by fossil fuels. A single time means that workers know when to get to work, one can plan things in diferent locales more efciently and each second can be accounted for.17 In other words, time becomes money: the workersʼ time becomes the money of the factory owners in the Industrial Revolution, and each individual’s time could either be spent progressing towards some goal, remaining in stasis or regressing. This time, then, has implications for: personal growth, the ‘progress’ of science and humanity in general and the ‘development’ of peoples and places (out of a cyclical stasis understanding of time and into the treadmill of chronological time). It is, in part, this chronological time that also helps to produce the second set of technologies I want to discuss: humans as over nature. Humans over nature (the enclosure of bodies). The technologies of progressive time are also important for and go hand in hand with the enclosure of human bodies from the rest of the natural world. If most of life on the planet abides by recurring cyclical times, including most human life throughout human history, then this notion of progressive time that builds on the past had to be learned and materialised in the world. It is not that there is no progression from youth to old age, for instance, or from the last moment to the next, but rather that marking this as ‘progress’ and as more specifcally ‘universal progress’ is problematic. The idea of progress for some has meant regress for others, and the marking of time does not necessarily need to be linear alone. Agricultural and nomadic lifestyles operate from diferent perspectives. Being late or running out of time only really makes sense from an abstract notion of linear time.18 As European colonisation spread, so did its methods of production and construction: the enclosure of the commons brings land under the control of individual humans who transform the land into the needs of human production. Forests became resources for constructing homes and buildings that seal humans of from the rest of the planetary community, and that fuel the energy needs of such a transformation. During the Industrial Revolution, resource extraction from the mountains, forests and waters sped up this process and sped up the pace of the tunnel of time. Humans began to live into the abstract linear time of chronos, and ‘as if ’ the rest of the natural world was just a resource for this objective time. All of this was couched under the name of progress and development (which was formally known as Christianisation, civilisation and colonisation). The faster the pace one can move

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from point a to point b, the faster the progress possible, the more human lives seem to live outside of the seasonal and cyclical paces of planetary time. One might even argue that this fundamentally shifts our human meaning-making, hopes, desires and dreams out of this world. In our contemporary world of fossil-fuelled transportation, communication and production, many of us humans can be around the world at the click of a mouse or the tap of a fnger in just seconds. We modern Western types can sit in the privacy of our homes and ofces and bring resources from around the world to us in a matter of days. Some modern Western types can also fy around the world in a period of 24 hours. This great acceleration has sped up chronological time and increased the possibilities for how much one can ‘progress’ in one’s own lifetime, exponentially. The power of our ability to transform the planet into this modern Western chronological time of progress depends greatly on the ability to transform nature, which is reduced to the laboratory and the factory. Transforming nature (reduction, factory, laboratory). If the monotheistic and (later) scientifc tools of progressive time and anthropocentrism have been destructive to humans and the rest of the natural world, then the fnal tool leading to the transformation of nature really materialises a certain type of monotheism at the expense of much life. The idea that humans are made in god’s image alone, and that we are somehow ‘above’ the rest of the natural world, bolstered Descartes’ cogito and Locke’s ideas of tabula rasa and private property. It supports the idea that nature is mere stuf to be used towards human ends.19 The eforts to convert people to monotheism on the part of colonisers are part of what is necessary to make ‘industrialisation’ and ‘development’ ok. For many cultures, especially indigenous cultures, nature is full of value, spirits and meaning beyond the human. For some it is even sacred. The style of monotheism associated with colonisation teaches that the source of value and meaning is outside of nature, that humans are above nature and that we can manage or transform nature towards something ‘better’. This paves the way for the factory and the laboratory. The efcient transformation of the world towards some version of progress relies on the reduction of nonhuman nature (and who counts as human even shifts) to things for use by humans in the continuation of linear progress. This is the process of enframing that Heidegger speaks of.20 The fossil-fuelled factory and laboratory, along with their agricultural, communication and transportation technologies, have materialised the modern Western understanding of progress to the extent that we have now changed the climate of the planet. It is in this period of destabilisation of climate and corresponding pandemics and social injustice that we might fnd space for re-attuning to our planetary community.

Re-attuning to the planet: religion as re-attunement If, as I argue, the materialisation of the dominant modern Western thought habits in the planet has led to the problems of climate weirding, species extinction and gross economic and environmental injustice, then perhaps the processes

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of globalisation and climate weirding are calling us to re-attune to the bodies within and around us that make up the evolving planetary community of which we are a part. In other words, the smoothing over of reality into a progressive, linear time in which humans transform nature in progressive ways has materialised in the world as climate weirding. If we deem this co-construction of the worlds we live in to be problematic, then it is time to listen to and re-attune to the voices and bodies within the planetary community. Religious rituals, ideas and ethics might play an important role in this shift towards planetarity. At its etymological root, religion means either collecting and/or binding together. As such, I interpret religion as a process of making meaning out of oneʼs changing life: collecting information together in a meaningful (bound together) way. All humans, though not only humans, make meaning out of life in some way (whether atheist, agnostic or religious). One can fnd meaning in gardening, biking, hikes in nature, or in prayer, ritual, texts or meditations. When people lose meaning in life, or fall into meaninglessness, we often identify them as having some sort of mental problem or disorder. Whatever else religion might be, it involves meaning-making practices that help us to re-read and re-orient ourselves within the evolving contexts we fnd ourselves in. This doesn’t mean there is meaning ‘out there’, nor does it mean that we create meaning by ourselves ex nihilo; rather, we co-construct meanings with and within languages, histories, communities (of humans and other than humans), ecologies, biologies, narratives, technologies and imaginations. Religions and religious practices and rituals often help us focus on the need to re-attune to our contexts in ways that pay attention to sufering bodies. Aesthetic re-attunements, such as the images of the Kingdom of God in Christianity or Paradise in Islam, can help us to focus on present sufering, while imagining a diferent more ecologically sound and just future. Many founding religious fgures—Jesus, The Prophet, Moses, the Buddha—founded their communities based upon ethical re-attunements: current ways of relating cause too much violence and sufering, thus we must act in diferent ways to mitigate that sufering. Many religious rituals—yoga, meditation, dancing, drumming, singing—help us to re-attune to our bodies and the earth. Religions often involve apophatic, negative and deconstructive strands of thought, such as the many trickster fgures in indigenous communities. The roles of these fgures are to help us re-attune our thinking away from categories that reify life into strict boundaries such as: living/dead, male/female, human/animal. Hermeneutics are a form of textual re-attunement,21 keeping sacred texts alive and relevant to contemporary life. In all of these ways and more, we might think of religion as re-attunement to the planetary community in ways that promote justice and planetary fourishing. 22 The most recent Covid pandemic has, of course, provided us much space to re-attune to the worlds in which we live. Many have experienced psychological and physical stress, and have turned to meaning-making practices in order to re-attune to life in new ways. Several such practices have shed light on the modern technologies of time, anthropocentrism and ideas of progress through

20 Whitney A. Bauman

transformation. In particular, many people have expressed a sense of time that is both sped up and slowed down all at once. Not to mention, many have taken up practices that take more time. For essential workers, time has sped up; for those left unemployed time has slowed down. For many people in between, working from home on Zoom, there was also opportunity to ‘take back’ some time. I turned to gardening, bird watching and baking. Cliché though it may be, the time of sourdough bread is not the time of chronos, nor is the time of gardening or the time of bird watching. These are activities that take their own time, and don’t follow GMT; you can’t get there faster by speeding up, and you can’t always expect you’ll arrive at the same destination, so to speak. These re-attunements have not just been about leisure either. Baking bread can re-attune one to the ethics of agriculture, harvesting and eating. Furthermore, baking forces one to take time, and give over agency to the elements that go into baking (including the ingredients, the humidity and the temperature). Time here is more like a palaver,23 or spatzieren, a walk about without an end goal. Gardening also takes its own time, but it also tunes one’s body into the seasons and weather. In a world of climate weirding, having a garden, however large or small, forces us to pay attention to the changing weather in the places we live. It also breaks down the barriers between humans and plants in a way: one can recognise just how dependent we are on the elements and the plants doing their own things. Furthermore, at least in the US, there has been a huge increase in urban gardening communities. These urban gardening communities create space and time for people to come together in community and discuss community issues. They help re-attune bodies to the collective that is a neighbourhood, town or city. In this sense, urban gardening raises awareness about issues of justice and the environment. Bird watching also has the potential to re-attune humans to the more-thanhuman world. There were many reports during the pandemic about people hearing more bird song and seeing more birds and other animals. Our ears and eyes were being re-attuned to the sounds and sights of the nonhuman world because the sounds of the morning commute were nearly silenced. Many urban people began to notice the other life forms that inhabit urban space together with them. Bird watching in particular became a fash point in Black Lives Matter as Amy Cooper (a white woman) called the police on Christian Cooper (a black man) because she felt threatened by him. His crime? Bird watching in New York’s Central Park. At least for those familiar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, bird watching will always be tied up with issues of racial justice from now on. Finally, the Covid pandemic itself is a reminder that our fossil-fuelled reality is fragile and out of control. Our bodies are porous and relational: which means also deadly pandemics are possible. The pandemic, one might argue, provides space for some people to think about the interrelated issues of globalisation and climate weirding. One might even relate the violence of fossil-fuelled modern reality to the ‘I can’t breathe’ of Black Lives Matter, to the lack of breathing space

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women experience in the workplace and world highlighted by the MeToo movement, to the gasping for air by Covid victims, to the death of phytoplankton in the oceans, which generate a lot of the earth’s oxygen at any given time, due to warming waters. Indeed, it seems that our fossil-fuelled era is ending in a great sufocation: of black bodies, of sick bodies, of women’s bodies, of earth bodies. If the fossil-fuelled modern Western world is the culprit, perhaps we need a new framework within which to re-attune. One such framework I have been developing is a Critical Planetary Romanticism, or CPR for the Earth.

Critical Planetary Romanticism Other species, as well as nonliving things, make it possible to be human. That this statement is not obvious to many humans at this moment in time is only because of habits of thought that have become powerful over the last few hundred years. In this modernist mode of thinking, humans presume to transcend and master nature, rather than forming worlds together with nonhumans. One signifcance of recent discussion of the Anthropocene as a time of human-sponsored environmental crisis is that it urges us away from those powerful habits of thought. The imagined mastery of humans no longer looks so successful; we are asked to reconsider the ways in which human and nonhuman histories are inextricably intertwined. The Anthropocene, like every other trajectory in which humans have been involved, is more-than-human.24 There will never be a single framework to ‘rule them all’. That desire is just a repetition of the modern Western tendency towards universalisation. As Spivak, who frst coined the term planetarity (as I intend it), noted: the planetary is opposed to the global view from above.25 The planetary is simply a collection of the plurality of worlds that make up the earth at any one moment in time, both human and non. The planetary at any given moment is, as Anna Tsing suggests, what makes being human possible. It should not be thought of as an overarching container into which worlds ft, but rather its shape takes on all the evolving relationships and bodies that make it up at any given moment. With a slight modifcation to Walter Mignolo’s decolonial ideas, there are many worlds, at any given time, that can link together to make up the planetary. Practising a critical planetary romanticism means listening to as many perspectives as possible within the planetary community: from this perspective the more perspectives we listen to and account for, the better understanding we have of the planetary at any given time. Here at the end of this chapter, I want to describe each of the terms of CPR, and I begin with romanticism. Romanticism. As some have argued, the Romantic movement in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries was in response to the fallout of industrialisation: the beginnings of the fossil-fuelled era. Perhaps more interesting, some argue that European romanticism contains the vestiges of what was left over in

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the indigenous ‘pagan’ traditions stamped out by the spread of Christianity.26 Indeed romanticism then and now does have many similarities with older indigenous traditions worldwide. According to most animistic traditions, humans are interrelated with other animals and the earth, which is often considered sacred. Various indigenous peoples interpolate their culture, language and cosmology with features of the local landscape. In Jogjakarta, Indonesia, for instance, the Javanese cosmology is tied up with the volcano Mirapi (the god) on one side of the region and the Indian Ocean (goddess) on the other side. Located right in the middle is the Kraton, or Sultan’s palace, and the reigning Sultan is considered to be married to the goddess. There are several sacred places lined up between Mirapi and the ocean, some of which are marked by obelisks, others are sacred water spots or trees. In order to learn about Javanese philosophy and cosmology, then, one must walk through the geography of the place. This is one vision of what it looks like to re-attune our bodies to the earth. There are romantic strands in most mystical traditions of monotheism as well. And plenty of earth-afrming/worshipping traditions in just about every religion we might categorise as a ‘world religion’. Perhaps it is high time we highlight these non-dominant strands as we reinterpret ourselves as part of planet earth. Science too has its romantic traditions and proponents. Ernst Haeckel understood humans as part of evolutionary theory and thought the study of nature produced wonder and awe. This particularly comes through in his artwork, and in one collection entitled Art Forms in Nature.27 Wilhelm Bölsche wrote a book entitled Love Life in Nature, and Gustav Fechner on The Soul of Plants.28 These 19th-century scientists argued that a non-reductive understanding of nature should be the basis for the sciences. Of course, there are plenty of scientists and other scholars today who take romantic readings of nature as scientifc.29 New materialisms, emergence theories, animisms and other philosophies and theories have all more recently called us to a form of neo-romanticism that gives agency and value back to the more-than-human planet. Perhaps it is time we re-attune our thinking to these ways of thinking. Some form of romanticism could help re-embed the fossil-fuelled humans (and all things human) into the mineral, plant and animal worlds. However, this romanticism cannot be local, parochial or national, hence the need for planetary thinking. Planetary. One critical diference between earlier romanticisms and perhaps animisms as well, is that there is no cutting localities of from the planetary fows of materials, energy and information. We live in a globalised world, for better and worse, and I don’t see a ‘return’ to localism, parochialism or nationalism as good options. Indeed, we are experiencing a return to localism across the globe with rising nationalisms across the US, Europe, India, Russia, China and other places. Making romanticism local provides too much of an opportunity for ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking. Keeping out ‘illegal’ immigrants and ‘non-native, invasive’ species results in much violence to earth bodies and doesn’t refect the worlds in which we live.30 I’m not necessarily arguing for complete open borders and allowing all non-native species in, this would create its own violence.

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I’m arguing for a re-attunement to our planetary contexts, which even before fossil-fuelled globalisation experienced exchanges between ecotones, oceans and the atmosphere. Even when one stays ‘local’, one’s life is crisscrossed daily by global fows of energy, materials and information. Thus, I have called elsewhere for a polyamory of place: the love of many places that we can link and connect through planetary fows.31 The planetary is also a term meant to remind humans of our creatureliness. We are frst and foremost creatures among creatures, sharing the ‘common grounds’ of earth, air, fre and water.32 Humans are nothing without the planet. This may seem obvious, but the hopes and dreams of leaving this planet on the part of some people such as Elon Musk and Jef Bezos means that the human anthropology suggesting we are not part of nature is still quite active and persuasive.33 A focus on the planetary means also realising that whatever we think of as ‘the best’ of humans is a result of our entanglement and relationality with the rest of the natural world rather than in spite of it. Finally, the focus on the planet cannot be singular because we are multiply embodied and experience the world diferently. Therefore we need the critical part of CPR. Critical. CPR for the Earth must be critical. There is no one experience of the planet, and there are multiple worlds at any given time of the planetary process that make up the planet. Diferent embodiments in diferent worlds experience the planet in multiple ways. We need critical theories of race, gender, queer studies, disability studies, class, post- and de-colonial studies, animal studies and afect in order to map out the ways in which certain worlds privilege certain bodies at the expense of others. These ‘multiple maps’34 provide us with better understandings of any current construction of the planetary. In this case, the more critical perspectives we can listen to, the more ‘objective’ understanding we have of the planet at any given moment. Pluralism, multiperspectivalism and diversity do not need ranking from this perspective; they are each in their own right diferent, valid perspectives on the planetary moment. Of course, we must also contend with ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ in the ever fuid and shifting world of the internet and 24-hour news and information. Critical perspectives do not mean ‘anything goes’. In fact, the more critical perspectives the better. Uncertainty and multiperspectivalism are better judges of knowledge than certainty and monological thinking. One might think of a scatter plot of perspectives: there will be many that make up a core plotted along a certain side of the graph, with a few outliers, and some completely of the chart. In co-constructing worlds and knowledge, and the actions based upon them, from a critical perspective we should listen to them all, but the extreme outliers might be especially scrutinised. I would argue that conspiracy theories, fake news and alternative facts are based on ‘certain’ knowledge to the exclusion of all others. The inability to change one’s mind or consider alternatives is a sure sign of one’s self-certainty, and in a Planetary Critical Perspective such monological, dogmatic thinking is dangerous. Rather, contextual, critical thinking enables us to consider ‘others’’ perspectives (human and non), to re-attune to the needs of

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neglected and abjected bodies and to come to some sort of collective decision making. At any given time, we live in multiple co-constructed worlds that, when linked together, make up the planetary. Rather than there being a single narrative or line of history and progress, I would ofer that CPR suggests the planetary is more like a starling murmuration. There is beautiful order and patterns to be found, but ultimately reality is more rhizomatic and meandering: it fows together from one place to the next, making up a given manifestation of the planetary community. From this perspective we can perform ‘cartographies of violence’,35 taking note of how a given construction of a world creates violence for some assemblages and privileges others. Given this data, we can work to coconstruct new worlds that take into account more bodies and more perspectives in a way that promotes greater planetary fourishing.

Notes 1 Carol Wayne White, ‘Planetary Thinking, Agency, and Relationality: Religious Naturalismʼs Plea’, in Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking’, ed. Karen Bray, Heather Eaton and Whitney Bauman (New York: Fordham University Press, Forthcoming 2023). 2 Glen Mazis, Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 3 There are critiques to the language of climate ‘change’ for various reasons. I prefer Hunter Lovinsʼ term ‘climate weirding’ as that is more descriptive of the unpredictable shifts in weather patterns we experience from our human perspectives. ‘Weirding’ adds a more accurate description to the types of ‘changes’ we are experiencing, in other words. It gained some traction with an article by Thomas Friedman titled ‘Global Weirding Is Here’, New York Times, 17 February 2010. Sigurd Bergmann prefers the term ‘climate alterationʼ. As he notes, ‘Weather is not just simply there, it does not simply change from one state to another, but it alternates’ (31). We might pay more attention to the shifts of the climate by paying more attention to the process of alteration itself. See: Sigurd Bergmann, Weather, Religion and Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2021). 4 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 5 See, e.g.: Lisa Sideris, ‘The Human as World-Maker: An Anthropocene Dogma’, in T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, ed. John. P. Slattery (New York: T&T Clark, 2020), 223–236. 6 See, e.g.: Terra Schwerin Rowe, Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2022); and Marion Grau, ‘The Revelation of Global Climate Change: A Petro-Eschatology’, in Eschatology as Imagining the End: Faith between Hope and Despair, ed. Sigurd Bergmann (New York: Routledge, 2018), 45–60. 7 Paul Virilio, The Great Accelerator (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012). 8 Sigurd Bergmann articulates well the problem with speed (and its immobilising efect) in: Sigurd Bergmann and Tore Sager, eds, The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2008), 17: ‘Hypermobility threatens social systems of planning and democracy. The increasing acceleration of fnancial speculation threatens the general usefulness of monetarism. Technical and social processes of acceleration become more and more insensitive and therefore destructive of ecological processes, where the

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11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

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speed of biological life cycles and development do not follow the principle of constant acceleration.’ Ibid. See, e.g.: Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. Lisa Stenmark, ‘The Benefts of an Entire Civilization: Religion, Science and Colonialism’, in Bloomsbury Religion, Science and Technology in North America, ed. Lisa Stenmark and Whitney Bauman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). Theology and Religion Online. Web. 7 March 2022. . I discuss this as ‘theoforming’ in: Whitney A. Bauman, ‘Theoforming Earth Community Meaning-Full Creations’, in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, ed. John Hart (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2017), 427–438. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). Alan Longstaf, ‘Calendars from Around the World’ (London, UK: The National Maritime Museum, 2005). Online Resource: https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/ fles/Calendars-from-around-the-world.pdf. Anindita N. Balslev and J.N. Mohanty, Religion and Time (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1993). See, for example, the classic text: Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientifc Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911). Or for a more recent analysis of global time: Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). For an excellent read pointing out how time management is harming us in physical and emotional ways: Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientifc Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland, 1977). Forrest Clingerman, ‘Memory, Imagination, and the Hermeneutics of Place’, in Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, ed. Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen and David Utsler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 245–263. Thomas Tweed’s understanding of religion as ‘crossing and dwelling’ is helpful here. See: Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Isabel Stengers, ‘The Cosmological Proposal’, in Making Things Public, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 994–1003. Anna Tsing, Feral Atlas, https://feralatlas.org/. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See, e.g.: Kocku von Stuckrad, A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022); and Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). I’ve written about this elsewhere, see: Whitney Bauman, ‘Wonder and Ernst Haeckel’s Aesthetics of Nature’, in Arts, Religion, and the Environment, ed. Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 61–83. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Nanna oder über das Seelenleben Der Pfanzen (Leipzig, Germany: Leopold Voss, 1848); Willhelm Bölche, Love Life in Nature, 2 vols (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926).

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29 Dalia Nassar argues, along similar lines that I hope to argue, that the way in which romanticism and empiricism have been juxtaposed in the history of science and philosophy of science is not accurate or helpful, but rather that a ‘romantic empiricism’ exists and has a long history. See: Dalia Nassar, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). 30 Peter Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 31 Whitney Bauman, Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 32 The practice of ‘creaturely eco-poetics’ that Kate Rigby articulates is helpful here. It is a poetics that ‘highlights human entanglements, at once material and moral, with other living beings. These entanglements entail shared, if unevenly distributed, vulnerabilities as well as shared, if variegated, communicative capacities. They harbour the ever-present risk of conflict and harm but also opportunities to cocreate emergent multi-species worlds no longer constrained by the colonizing logic of human-nonhuman hyperseparation, and hence conducive to more felicitous forms of coexistence and “sympoiesis” (a term coined by Friedrich Schlegel) in our own perilous times.’ (Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism, 38). 33 Mary Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 34 Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2001). 35 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Bibliography Balslev, Anindita and J. N. Mohanty eds. 1993. Religion and Time. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Bauman, Whitney. 2014. Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2017. ‘Theoforming Earth Community: Meaning-Full Creations,’ in WileyBlackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, 427–438. Edited by John Hart. Malden: Blackwell. ———. 2018. ‘Wonder and Ernst Haeckel’s Aesthetics of Nature,’ in Arts, Religion, and the Environment, 61–83. Edited by Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Bergmann, Sigurd. 2021. Weather, Religion, and Climate Change. New York: Routledge. Bergmann, Sigurd and Tore Sager, eds. 2008. The Ethics of Mobilities: Rethinking Place, Exclusion, Freedom and the Environment. New York: Routledge. Bölche, Willhelm. 1926. Love Life in Nature, 2 Vols. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. Burkeman, Oliver. 2021. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Clingerman, Forrest. 2013. ‘Memory, Imagination and the Hermeneutics of Place,’ in Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, 245–263. Edited by Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen and David Utsler. New York: Fordham University Press. Coates, Peter. 2006. American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fechner, Gustav Theodor. 1848. Nanna oder Uber das Seelenleben Der Pflanzen. Leipzig, Germany: Leopold Vo.

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Friedman, Thomas. 2010. ‘Global Weirding is Here,’ in The New York Times. February 17. Grau, Marion. 2018. ‘The Revelation of Global Climate Change: A Petro-Eschatology,’ In Eschatology as Imagining the End: Faith Between Hope and Despair, 45–60. Edited by Sigurd Bergmann. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York, NY: Garland. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Longstaf, Alan. 2005. ‘Calendars from Around the World.’ London, UK: National Maritime Museum. Online: https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/fles/Calendars -from-around-the-world.pdf. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mazis, Glen. 2022. Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientifc Revolution. New York, NY: Harper and Row. ———. 2003. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge. Midgley, Mary. 2001. Science and Poetry. New York: Routledge. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nassar, Dalia. 2022. Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt. New York: Oxford University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence: And the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ogle, Vanessa. 2015. The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rigby, Kate. 2021. Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. New York: Bloomsbury. Rubenstein, Mary Jane. 2022. Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schwerin Rowe, Terra. 2022. Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-Theology. New York: T&T Clark. Sideris, Lisa. 2000. ‘The Human as World-Maker: An Anthropocene Dogma,’ in T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, 223–236. Edited by John P. Slattery. New York: T&T Clark. Spivak, Gayatri. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Stengers, Isabel. 2005. ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal,’ in Making Things Public. Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Stenmark, Lisa. 2021. ‘The Benefts of an Entire Civilization: Religion, Science and Colonialism,’ in Bloomsbury Religion, Science and Technology in North America. Edited by Lisa Stenmark and Whitney Bauman. Theology and Religion Online. Web. 7 Mar. 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350934986.005. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. 1911. The Principles of Scientifc Management. New York: Harper and Brothers. Tweed, Thomas. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Virilio, Paul. 2012. The Great Accelerator. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

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Von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2022. A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present. New York: Columbia University Press. Wayne White, Carol. Forthcoming 2023. ‘Planetary Thinking, Agency, and Relationality: Religious Naturalism’s Plea,’ in Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms and Planetary Thinking. Edited by Karen Bray, Heather Eaton and Whitney Bauman. New York: Fordham University Press.

2 ARCHITECTING ZOË On Haunting Homes and Sacred Ecomateriality Rachel Armstrong

Introduction Having lost sight of the sacred nature of the material realm by rendering it a ‘brute’, soulless entity, modern society has shed itself of ethical concerns in its unfettered pursuit of the exploitation of nature and natural resources. Regarding the living world as an endless ‘standing reserve’,1 it is rationally devitalised to become ‘mere’ matter, where biological entities are simply more complex versions of chemistry. With no innate vitality, there is neither moral obligation nor duty of care to the objects and fabrics that are sacrifced on the altar of resource capitalism. Consequently, our consumption of natural systems is indulged without limits, concern and with impunity. The damaging environmental behaviours that typify this Anthropocene are inficted on such a scale they are measurably altering the dynamics and vitality of our world, leading to global, ecosystemscale collapse.2

What is sacred ecomaterialism? This critical secular moment, in the sense of nature as a standing reserve, calls for a new way of living and being in the world.3 Providing a pertinent value system and approach, sacred ecomaterialism recognises the transformational potential within matter as the fundamental force that can turn around the negative impacts of human development towards life-promoting outcomes, as a sacred relationship with the living realm. In the mainstay, this is achieved through material relationships, specifcally through the life-promoting fow of elemental cycles (like the water cycle) and nutrient cycles (like the carbon, phosphorous and nitrogen cycles) that sustain life on this planet. Additionally, this sacred ecomaterialism invites an inclusive and special relationship between the body DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-3

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and environment whereby the incorporation of these fundamental ingredients into an entity or system is not the end of a journey but an immanent stage in the ongoing cycling of matter on the planet. Possessing a regenerative and even transcendent quality, sacred ecomaterialism is more than an up-cycling practice that re-values discards,4 or non-specifc notion of fow,5 but also embraces more-than-human (embracing all the bodies that are entangled these fows) and geostorical perspectives (appreciating the contributions of these materials in deep time before the advent of humans). Such an expanded perspective of human experience within specifc contexts explores what it means to be human and how our contributions can be extended to establish a renewed relationship, and communion, with nature.6 By setting life-promoting matter apart from the mundane and base aspects of living that end in its consumption by humans, sacred ecomaterialism aims to enliven our living spaces and, ultimately, beneft natural systems.7,8,9 Moreover, the sacred aspects of ecomaterialism uphold natural and supernatural associations with materiality—i.e., the vital ‘spark’ of life10,11 and notions of haunting (see p. 34 in this essay), to provide an ongoing connection with a transcendent divine creative force, without losing a tangible connection to the living realm. Maintaining the immanent reality of ecological interdependence in our daily rituals,12,13 they do not terminate in consumption of matter but ensure the ongoing journey of matter into the living world through its re-entry into the cycles of life. Specifcally, a sacred ecomaterialist perspective rejects the incineration of household organic waste, which results in low-value biological compounds that are not readily incorporated into metabolic networks, and instead promotes composting, which produces a rich range of molecules that are readily returned to the lifeworld. Such radical circularity holds many entanglements, collapsing the simple enlightenment dualities—between mind and body, subject and environment, nature and culture—enabling appropriate shifts to occur in how we live.14 Informed by a twenty-frst-century understanding of physics, chemistry and biology, the specifcs of these material exchanges can be explored through the continual, regulated fow of massless electrons15 between lively agents. Characterised by a plethora of performative particles and ions, this irreducibly complex bioelectrical platform provides a material basis that embodies the fundamental life-force within vital matter. As further characterisation of the subatomic realm of matter is still unfolding,16 this knowledge is not absolute but indicative that alternative models of understanding reality exist and is, therefore, used both in literal and metaphorical contexts. Capable of initiating a broad range of observable activities including membrane modulation, change in protein structure, colour change, charge, metabolism and many more vitalising actions, a sacred ecomaterialist view of matter exceeds established explanations of complexity ofered by ‘systems’ thinking,17 and the mechanistic feedback loops characteristic of cybernetics.18 Detectable at the human scale through the apparent liveliness of a material, electron fow can be both empirically measured and tested as electricity, while also confguring our material experiences in a living world.

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This electron relay between atoms, molecules (ions) and complex material domains, extends beyond the limits of any metabolising body. This enlivening process and resacralisation of matter is assisted by uncertain technologies, which provide a counterpoint to the machine,19 without reducing matter to its ‘brute’ (inert) characteristics or geometrical forms.20 Leaking out into our surroundings, free electrons travel through various kinds of electron transfer chains—both by human design, and natural—facilitating their journey between living and even non-living entities like rocks and metals. Collectively comprising a continuous, sacred ‘Gaian’ entity, this unevenly distributed fow of electrons is the fundamental characteristic of a sacred, lively world.21,22

Introducing uncertain technologies A twenty-frst-century understanding of microbes can actualise a sacred ecomaterialist perspective. Providing fresh insights into the nature of microorganisms, biotechnological advances position microbes as a novel technical platform, which, through its ‘living’ characteristics, can be regarded as an uncertain technology. Both conceptual framework and means of working to develop an appropriate toolset and value system, microbial actions are based on regenerative environmental exchanges that simultaneously uphold classical and non-classical material views of ‘life’. Generous in their legacy, the world’s frst organisms were microbial ancestors whose life-promoting metabolisms combined matter and technology to change the chemical nature of a site. Signifcantly, through the novel metabolic power of photosynthesis, ancient cyanobacteria turned the reducing atmosphere of early earth that was saturated by greenhouse gases, into an oxygen rich one— ultimately enabling the evolution of multicellular life.23 Even today, microbes continue to render the world a livelier, more diverse place through their active recycling and complexifcation of matter. Converging the characteristics of vital (eco)materiality (their dynamic substance) and a natural technological platform (their cell components), today’s microbes enjoy a synergistic and predominantly bioremediating relationship with nature. It would also be naive not to acknowledge the opportunistic potential of less than 1% of microbes, which are destructive pathogens that must be dealt with tactically and sternly.24 Establishing an ethics as the basis for sacred ecomaterialist practices is therefore essential for fruitfully engaging microbes. Contrasting starkly to modernity’s Reign of Hygiene,25 which sets itself in a condition of war against microbes, a sacred approach towards the microbial realm involves a better understanding of, and even care for, our microbes,26 establishing a transactional system for the exchange of our ‘waste’27 in return for microbial ‘goods’. Such diplomacy can be achieved by constructing spaces that set microbes apart from ordinary ‘waste’ processing called bioprocessors, whose environmental design invites them to perform specifc functions. This synthesis of both naturalistic ideas and designed, technical interventions is grounded on

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a scientifc understanding of matter, where environmental programmability in combination with molecular biological toolsets increases the participative range for mutual engagement, while the technical environment enables ‘us’ to ‘speak’ with microbes on their own terms—i.e., chemically and electrically. Aligning with the religious naturalism proposed by Baumann and White28 in this volume that afrms the natural world as the centre of humans’ most signifcant experiences and understandings (see Baumann and White—this volume), the following exploration of electron fow within microbial metabolisms as an example of innovation via uncertain technologies aims to reconcile a non-reductive, scientifc view of the material realm with an everyday practice of sacred ecomaterialism that is fundamentally life-promoting.

PART ONE

Life as a material paradox From a material viewpoint, ‘life’ is paradoxical. At the macroscale it appears essentially classical in its overall behaviour, but at the molecular scale it also exhibits fundamentally quantum characteristics.29 Previously thought to be too hot, wet and noisy to make use of quantum weirdness, quantum phenomena play a non-trivial role in biology where: biomolecules tunnel through energetic barriers to carry out incredible chemical transformations; photosynthesis captures and stores the energy carried from the sun by photons; and optically induced chemical reactions enable us to visualise the world.30 Both predictable and strange, ‘life’ is impossible to describe solely in classical materialist terms and our attempts to do so have led to two main (and broad) theses: the frst establishes a structural principle of ‘brute’ matter that is enlivened by an animating force (this principle does not account for material change with time); while the second is a material system in state of constant fow (which does not account for the formation of structure). Comprising the oldest systems of ‘life’, geochemically produced assemblages comprising oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions freed themselves from the solid structures of the rocks during the Hadean period. Becoming portable in solution (acid/base couplings) and in the air (e.g., ions/free electrons) these energyharnessing systems enabled the enlivened reactivity of the living realm. Resisting reaching the ‘brute’ ground state of relative equilibrium, these electron transfer chains were essential for the persistence of the earliest cells and became enfolded within their internal milieu. Forming attractions, tensions and repulsions, chemist Ben McFarland describes the importance of these physical forces in chemical terms: when molecules ft together, they only care about two things: shape and charge. Shape is familiar—all atoms are spheres that can stack together like

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a supermarket display of oranges—but charge is unusual. Unless you work with wires or rub your feet across shag carpeting, you don’t normally see charge imbalances at our macro-level. But at the nanometre level, charge moves things around. Each atom is made of heavy protons with a positive charge and light electrons with a negative charge. When these charges are symmetric and balanced, the overall charge is neutral, but when they fall askew, a chain of domino efects can start, and chemistry can happen.31

Electron metabolism: life stripped down Over aeons, bacteria have made metabolism their speciality, at the expense of structural organisation, and have developed remarkable abilities that keep their electron transfer chains going in many kinds of environment—even in the most inhospitable places. The most minimal kind of metabolism is produced by a continual fow of electrons, which can be observed in the bacterial species Shewanella and Geobacter, which directly harvest electrons from rocks and metals to make the universal energy storage molecule called ATP. This pared-down process is quite alien to all other life forms as these species don’t need a carbon source (or sugar) for respiration. This means these microbes can thrive indefnitely by eating electrons from an electrode, use them as a source of energy and then discard them to another electrode as a kind of simple ‘currency’.32

Action beyond the body Electron transfer is not a solipsistic activity and can connect bodies at a distance from each other. Ofering a medium that enables microbes—and other organisms like ourselves—to use action-potential mechanisms to communicate at a distance, waves of potassium-driven electrical activity can travel with constant strength to enable communities of microbes to propagate signals at around 3 mm/h in tissue-like formations called bioflms.33 In all species, these electrical signals enable the synchronisation of activities across large expanses and are much more powerful than their chemical counterparts as communications systems—which may be likened to ‘the diference between shouting from a mountaintop and making an international phone call’.34 The ability to operate at a distance from a locus of metabolism introduces notions of time, space, memory and anticipation/imagination—the foundations of all complex thought.

Nature of electricity We have harvested electron fow in a technological context since the nineteenth century. How we think about and use electricity today is encapsulated by two very diferent approaches. ‘Life’ became equated with electricity through Luigi Galvani’s (1737–1798) ‘animal electric fuid’ experiments, where he demonstrated the presence of

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bioelectricity in frog dissections. Regarding this force as responsible for the vitalisation of tissues, his fndings were largely enfolded into the life sciences to begin the neurobiological revolution. Responding to Galvani’s experiments, Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) found other ways of producing electricity using metal electrodes and chemical sources which generated high voltages. The catalyst for the electronics revolution, Volta’s research provided the power and intelligence that underpins the modern industrial age, around which we have imagined and design our relationship with electricity.

The long latency of the bioelectrical revolution Galvani’s organic electricity, or ‘bio-electricity’, operates through a very different quality of electron fow than Volta’s. It is slower, more agile, less forceful and can be handled by atomic jugglers, so bioelectrical transactions occur that perform metabolic work, thus inviting a new set of imaginaries than modern industrialisation. As ‘life’, not top-down control, or consumption, is at the heart of these principles, these electron currencies are constrained by biological principles, establishing the possibility of a new thermoeconomics as the foundation for a regenerative society.35 When produced metabolically, the natural bioavailability of electrons establishes limits for production systems so that matter and energy are coupled (not cleaved) and exchanged within a circular, yet evolving, context. This means that every material ecology can be strategically metabolised using bioelectrical systems to perform all kinds of useful work, without ‘borrowing’ unlimited resources from next generations, or elsewhere.36 The passage of electrons between atoms confgures matter, produces physical space and, as such, generates the basis for a changing environmental experience—not as a psychic phenomenon but as a material thing. The potency of this transformational capacity cannot be overstated. Signifcantly, bioelectricity can cross the mechanical and organic divide, haunting both platforms, but operating at much lower power levels than generated by fossil fuels or renewables. What it lacks in quantity, however, it makes up for in the quality of its operations, inviting an era of low power (bio)electronics that share some of the principles of living things.

On haunting spaces Nature’s specifc details are being made and unmade every day by the collective forces of many lively actors. In this sense, nature is ‘haunted’ by its inhabitants. A haunt is a place that is shaped by the daily routines of a specifc body so that site is tailor-made to that creature. Diferent haunts may overlap at diferent scales and places within a haunt, where the specifc arrangements are constantly negotiated. Performed with diligent repetition, the iterations that are typical of the daily rituals (physical activities and rearrangements of the site) and metabolic traces (urine, faeces, breath, heat) enabled through electron fow by

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the creature-that-haunts, carve out its specifc niche, constantly transforming it towards an increasingly compatible environment. Observed by Charles Darwin as ‘natural selection’, niche and organism ‘act on’ each other during these negotiations.37 A haunted site, therefore, expresses the arrangements and metabolic traces of a body—even when that organism itself is no longer present. While other agents arrive to haunt the vacated space in their own ways, old haunting rituals can still be active (e.g., preferred spatial confgurations persist, and excrements provide nutrients for microbial fourishing) and physically experienced for a while. Haunting difers from Haraway’s notion of multispecies sympoiesis38 in that it details the specifc role of an actor within a place, noting its entire movements that contribute to the co-constitution of a broader ecosystem. Making reference to M. Beth Dempster’s Master of Environmental Studies thesis written in 1998, Donna Haraway adopts the term sympoiesis for ‘collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defned spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change’.39 While haunting acknowledges that all actions in a lifeworld are co-produced (as in sympoiesis), and that no creature stands alone, it focuses on the specifc contributions made by certain actors, so that necessary actions can be taken to generate desired efects. By contrast, sympoiesis produces descriptive approximations for exchanges between diferent species that imply coordinated exchange but do not provide specifc details. Articulating the spatial contexts where an organism has the opportunity, or power, to infuence events, haunting denotes the agency and contributions of an actor to a place, without reducing it to a bounded cypher, so new materialist theories such as Barad’s agential realism and intra-action40 are transformed from descriptions of co-constitutive potential to becoming realisable, tangible and implementable actions. By involving actors in the act of place making (which is not confned to interactions between species), the concept of haunting advances the project of co-becoming more sustainably with more-than-human others in the domestic sphere through the specifcs of individual transactions. Enabling coordinated decisions, or negotiations that raise the thresholds for making a diference as a given exchange between bodies, the character of living spaces can be designed,41 even when the actors operate within an irreducibly complex context that does not obey linear causes and efects. Importantly, haunting possesses a sacred quality where the actor’s impacts produce an intangible dimension to the experience of a place, which I will refer to as a shadow lifeworld,42 that draws attention to the contributions of a broader, richer set of relations that characterise sacred ecomaterialism. More than a function of the psyche, the physical changes and metabolic traces that are catalysed by haunting are bequeathed through values, rituals and attitudes that can trigger a quality of experience or encounter with aspects of the entity itself—even in the absence of that body. Such qualities underpin the design and construction of sacred spaces (e.g., the selection of a quality of stone, conjuring atmospheres and

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establishing a condition of reverence). These more-than-material entanglements in the making of a place enable a habitat to turn a house into a home through understanding how the constructed spaces are haunted by the bodies within it— even when not all those bodies are human. The importance of this for design is to empower organisms to transform their living spaces towards a rich lifeworld and shadow lifeworld beyond their physical design according to their beliefs, values and preferences.

Synergising natural and artifcial worlds In 1911, Michael Cressé Potter brought the worlds of electricity and biology together on a single technical platform using the incredible metabolic powers of microbes. The resultant ‘living’ battery, or microbial fuel cell (MFC), produced several hundred millivolts of energy through a technical choreography of the vital processes of Saccharomyces bacteria.43 Acting as biocatalysts, the microbes converted the chemical energy of organic matter from waste streams into electrons that fowed into an external circuit to provide electrical power for as long as they continued to be fed. This highly mediated relationship established a powersharing relationship across mechanical and natural bodies that is neither entirely biological nor exclusively mechanical. The resultant cyborg ‘being’—part microbial bioflm, part electromechanical system—thrives on diferent types of organic fuel to perform a range of metabolic tasks at room temperature such as cleaning wastewater, generating bioelectricity and detoxifying pollutants. While bioelectrical systems (BES) like the MFC cannot compete with the sheer power of other electricity-generating systems (renewables, fossil fuels), their (material) circularity is unsurpassed providing essential natural limits to our consumption. The MFC is one example of a larger group of BES that represent a wide range of diferent bioflm-based bioreactors that also include microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) and microbial desalination cells (MDCs).44 The importance of the MFC is that it is the only type of BES that produces harvestable amounts of electricity. Potentially, then, it can support aspects of modern lifestyles while simultaneously incorporating the life-promoting impacts of microbial systems. Enabled by these uncertain technologies, a sacred ecomaterialist design practice becomes possible that can change the impacts of human inhabitation by engaging vitalising fows of electrons within our living spaces, instead of consuming fossil fuels.

PART TWO

On building a lively apparatus using metabolic electron fow [the aim is] … to start again, from the bottom up, the description of dwelling places …45

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The ultimate proof of a principle is to demonstrate its validity in the material world. This section explores the specifcs of how uncertain technologies can be deployed within our living spaces as vitalising microbial systems that enable sacred materialist design practices—which I call ‘architecting zoëʼ.

Living architecture The Living Architecture project46 is a regenerative circular economy prototype based on the exchange of household waste for microbial resources. It proved the principle that the strategic choreography of ‘living’ microbial metabolisms could provide an alternative utilities system to support everyday or ‘domestic’ activities of daily living within the ‘oikos’—that are typical of ‘zoë’.47 By designing the possibility of zoë into the apparatus,48 this uncertain technology extended metabolic power relations to agents that were conventionally excluded from the human household—i.e., curated microbial communities. Within the household, new values and ethical actions could explore how an economy of electrons fow, and with it, change the way we imagine, execute and sustain our daily lives using the principles of sacred ecomaterialism. The frst step in producing the Living Architecture prototype was to consider the types of resources that could be extracted from household waste, and then design the homes for microbes that were needed to form the foundations for its circular economy (see Figure 2.1). Invoking the iterative, vital exchanges performed between human and soil, Living Architecture embodied the ancient relationship between a person and the land, whose designed metabolism carried out regenerative transactions that re-integrated household inhabitants into the

FIGURE 2.1

Fully microbially inoculated Living Architecture ‘wall’ and apparatus installed at the University of the West of England, Bristol, photograph courtesy of the Living Architecture project, 2019.

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fows of natural systems. Combining the bioelectrical properties of microbes with the principles of ‘animal economy’, ‘metabolism’ and ‘ecology’, special houses or bioprocessors, were made for diferent microbial populations that used cues from their environment to carry out metabolic tasks, where the fow of electrons demonstrates the potency of ‘life’ itself as a technology that actively performs ‘work’. Through the careful design of their surroundings, three basic types of ‘homes’ for microbes were sequentially confgured within an apparatus about the size of a large bookcase, providing a unique kind of inter-species work environment—an apparatus haunted by its microbes. Through meaningful acts of exchange with household inhabitants, human household waste is transformed through the choreographed fows of electrons necessary for microbial life such as feeding, metabolising, excreting and reproducing. End-stage metabolic products then become food for adjacent communities of microbes, whose own unwanted products could feed their neighbours, and so on until, fnally, the waste is turned into a range of useful resources. In the longer term, it is anticipated that such microbial systems could wean us from our dependency on fossil fuels. The sacred dimension of Living Architecture sets the daily acts of living apart from mundane chores by providing a mode of empowerment for inhabitants via access to an uncertain technology that transforms base materials into valued resources. Founded on vital exchanges, this radical design action of Architecting Zoë confers our living spaces with the potential for a new quality of ‘living’, and sacred expression of ‘haunting’ a household that sustains its community of life.49 Experienced as new rituals for living, a transactional relationship with the uncertain technology and tangible evidence of the consequences of these actions (lower household bills, less waste, healthier environments, independence from fossil fuels, etc.) help us re-assemble and re-imagine the world in new ways.50 As a living being possessing zoë, Living Architecture has a will and force of its own that works in alignment with human desires if it is treated correctly, for example by regular feeding and emptying. If these contractual agreements of living together are breached, then there are consequences. Should an inhabitant go on holiday and the microbial populations are not fed, then these colonies go to sleep and can be woken up again on the return of familiar domestic rituals and can do so after years to no ill efect. If the apparatus is not maintained, then the microbes will search for other spaces to inhabit and escape into the domestic living space dedicated to humans via leaks. Being already comprised of our microbiomes that are incorporated into the apparatus via our ablutions, such blooms would not be a grave risk to our health but would be unpleasant. To ensure the optimum expression of coinhabitation, the Living Architecture apparatus requires ongoing socialised engagement, training the microbial communities through the structuring of their environments—from the nutrients they receive to the optimisation of their bioprocessor environments. By empowering us to act diferently with life-promoting impacts, our lifestyles are transformed from impartial notions of occupying, or inhabiting our homes, to haunting them. Ofering a spiritual quality of domestic existence, the act of haunting enacts sacred ecomaterialist

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values and preferences with attentiveness, devotion and reverence to daily rituals, particularly concerning notions of hygiene. Ofering a counterpoint to the Reign of Hygiene, the curated presence of microbes is encouraged as part of a healthy home. Additionally, the shadow lifeworld produced by these domestic rituals shapes the character of our home while, ultimately, increasing the overall potency of the natural lifeworld. Some inhabitants will foreground this apparatus within their living spaces as an explicit homage to nature, while others will quietly adopt new ways of using resources into their daily routines. In this way, the home becomes a sacred space and a place for directly communing with, contemplating and ratifying our broader relationship with the living realm, in ways that are best suited to the occupant.

Active living infrastructure: controlled environment While Living Architecture created the context for meaningful relationships to be established through daily rituals of care, attention and concern, there was no direct system of communication between human and nonhuman entities, creating challenges in relatability. Microbes possess an intelligence that reveals a great deal about the environmental health of a place, and a system for understanding microbes is needed if we are to properly appreciate what they’re saying. In a laboratory setting, the performance of microbes is usually deciphered by measuring their biochemistry—specifcally through the expression of their nucleic acids and metabolites—but, in human terms, this process is quite slow. Tapping into the electron fows within bioflms, however, provides a direct, real-time way of understanding the behaviour of a microbial population at any given moment and creates the possibility of developing a communications platform between human and microbe in the most basic manner. The Active Living Infrastructure: Controlled Environment, or ALICE51 prototype, aimed to develop another dimension of architecting zoë by visualising the exchange between humans and microbes via a direct connection between the electron fows generated by microbial metabolism and the digital realm (see Figure 2.2). Using conventional electronics systems to detect and respond to microbial ‘data’—i.e., electrons—the metabolic activity in the bioflm was translated by software into pedagogically compelling animations that graphically depicted the overall status of the bioflm in relatable terms. This world of ‘Mobes’—a characterful term coined for the data-based representations of microbes—revealed the incredible electron-rich microbial world inside the bioprocessor enabling people to step inside the highly situated realm of microbes for a moment and learn along with them by being in conversation with translations of their clear and direct data. A person observing that microbes are ‘unhappy’ could feed them through a remote-controlled valve, or gently warm them with an LED array to speed up their metabolism to generate more bioelectricity. Enabling audiences to observe microbial behaviour through the appearance of appealing animations on a familiar screen-based interface, enabled people to

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FIGURE 2.2

The ALICE installation, microbially powered electronics demonstrated at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the Digital Design Weekend, London, September 2021, photograph courtesy of the ALICE project.

FIGURE 2.3

‘Mobes’, from the ALICE website (http://alice-interface.eu), showing dynamic, interactive, graphical representations of microbes, photograph courtesy of ALICE, 2021.

overlook the ‘slimy’ embodiment of bioflms and engage meaningfully with the microbial realm in an exploratory exchange through data and performance—as if they were a pot plant, or even a pet (see Figure 2.3). With ALICE, there is no planned ‘end’ to its experiment, as it marks the start of an ongoing conversation where the conditions for mutuality between microbe and human are negotiated. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, ALICE currently ‘lives’ online as an interactive interface52 that can be remotely accessed through the

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many layers and options presented. Remote visitors can access real-time data to observe how a stable bioflm population is performing and interact with them by selecting options (stains, parameters, data complexity) from the project website.

Haunting our homes By providing a readable, relatable and actionable interface between human and microbe, ALICE in combination with Living Architecture makes possible deeper relations between humans and other living natures. While enabling direct realtime exchanges with microbes, data is represented in appealing ways, and it is possible to become aware of the important contribution that microbes make to our lifeworld. Ultimately, new hygiene rituals will emerge that treat microbes with care and respect according to sacred ecomaterialist principles, so that we do not go to ‘war’ with them. Perhaps we will wipe down surfaces with biodegradable soap rather than sloshing large volumes of environmental poisons down the sink. We will also treat microbes with respect, while understanding their opportunistic potential, so that specifc ethics and value systems are established to ensure the appropriate responses and rituals of (mutual) care in their handling are upheld according to varying circumstances. Transgressing the distinction between built environment and natural environment, uncertain technologies like Living Architecture immerse inhabitants into a novel lifeworld where the inhabitants are empowered and their actions matter. Being aware of our negative environmental efects is no longer enough to combat environmental degradation and lessons from this immersive personal encounter empower household occupants to better co-exist with nature by establishing everyday transactions, which maintain their relationship with shadow lifeworlds. Visualising the connections between the diferent scales of our actions, ALICE raises awareness of the importance of our individual actions, while enabling us to access, design and ethically engage human-microbial relationships.53,54 Collapsing some of the distinctions between natural and unnatural, ALICE also extends our sphere of infuence to the scale of the microworld, where the transactional nature of electron fow reveals new spaces for negotiation, and resource consumption is not an innate right but something we must negotiate. Through the simple exchanges between human and microbe, further interaction is invited that expands our understanding of our rituals of living beyond the human realm, where our homes are not just ‘vitalised’ spaces but can also communicate with us to help us live better together. By establishing a collective vision through the interrogation of sacred ecomaterialist principles, it becomes possible to establish what changes in the way we live are possible and sustainable. Ultimately, these lessons summate to bring about a transition in our environmental impacts through collective actions and shared ecological responsibilities to infuence our nature cultures and bring about a step-change in the impacts of human development.55

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Synchronising our habits through everyday actions (urination, washing hands, cleaning) and rituals of haunting spaces, the nurturing work performed by the community of life is manifest within uncertain technologies through a choreography of electron fows, which link the performative aspects of our personal habits with our needs. By consciously designing and caring for their metabolisms, the day-to-day interfaces and nuanced intuitions about the character of living architectures possessing zoë, residents will understand diferently the character of their homes, what they can do and establish responsibilities towards them—and can expect their nonhuman communities to reciprocate accordingly such as by providing valued materials like medicines, edible biomass or generating liveable amounts of electricity and heat. Beyond the conservationist notions of reducing consumption, such necessary activities of survival are transformed into regenerative acts where the materiality of metabolism (enlivened by continuous electron fow) becomes the arbiter of zoë, establishing what activities we can perform— previously called our carrying capacity. Within these exchanges, sacred rituals of recognition, appreciation and exchange occur, shaping the habits that form our everyday activities. Setting such natural limits to our daily routines is not about reducing our quality of engagement with the world but establishes new rituals of care where we do not just consume our surroundings but, in every living act, can give something priceless back to our incredible, vibrant world. Subverting the modern expectations of what a ‘good’ home may be, the design of metabolic electron fow is, therefore, valued through its contributions to zoë by increasing the liveliness of its communities and transforming our behaviour into invisible acts of environmental care, which is fundamental for sustaining worlds. In this sense, residents are more than inhabitants but vitalising actors that prime their living environments through their invisible (metabolic) traces, routines and residues. The ‘living architectures’ facilitating these activities will wake up with us, go to sleep when we do, will cope with our intimate habits and will even be re-enlivened by our return after a holiday break—being ‘pleased’ to see us on our return. No matter how living architectures are deployed, we are accountable for them through the mutuality of everyday relationships, and to behave in convivial ways, they will require our socialised engagement with them (Latour 2012). Through the maintenance of day-to-day interfaces, metabolic choreographies and myriad acts of care, the zoë expressed by our homes may even acquire a unique character and inner ‘life’—perhaps even a unique vitality, or spiritual dimension. In this sense, our notions of sacred exchanges with the fow of life will change our view of the natural world from ‘brute’ matter to vital companion, being worthy of an appropriate status, with fundamental rights and the kind of respect appropriate for sacred entities.

Scaling up The next steps for Living Architecture and ALICE are to scale the microbial systems so they can provide public utilities by re-activating the commons to

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transform notions of ‘waste’ into useable ‘goods’ that are available to all through the electron fow economy—which can be accessed through bioelectrical systems. Imagine, for example, if public wastewater gardens were quite literally power ‘plants’ where people could go to charge their mobile phones, have free access to online services and beneft from LED lighting at night that was all powered by efuent.56 ALICE is one among a range of bioelectrical system technologies that may be incorporated into our everyday lives by research conducted by the PHOENIX Cost Action network of scientists and urbanists.57 Applications range from remediating brownfeld sites using ‘smart’ self-powered sensors and robots, to providing public utilities from urinals that charge your phone or enable you to play computer games—which is already available at Glastonbury Festival—and in the near term, whole settlements may also draw on waste to provide alternative, mobile circular infrastructures that leave almost no footprint behind. Technologies like Living Architecture, ALICE and bioelectrical systems are poised to enable us, in the near term, to establish a truly circular (electron) economy for ecological lifestyles that enable regenerative cities to be founded.

Summary Care for the world starts with how we act within the home. With an appropriate material and technical platform framed by an economy of electron fow based on shared human and microbial concerns, the foundational rituals that establish these protocols of care can be developed and refned so they are ultimately transferrable to the political realm of public spaces and the city. Adopting a sacred ecomaterialist worldview, enabled by uncertain technologies, empowers us to haunt our living spaces and domestic architectures to possess zoë. Negotiating these new vital relationships takes place through the interfaces of a transactional system designed to accommodate the actions of life-promoting microbes to facilitate a mutually respectful relationship between human and microbe. By regarding the nonhuman elements of our world (from microbes to nutrient fows) as sacred, our expectations and collective attitude towards the natural world change, from treating it as a standing reserve58 to a nature-compatible transactional system that transforms human development into countless life-promoting actions.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 329. Bauman, ‘Introduction’, 1. Cobb, Spiritual Bankruptcy, 175. McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 182. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, 100. Latour, ‘Once out of Nature’. Vallendy, ‘Quarantined, Set Apart, Sacred’. Evans, ‘The Sacred’, 32–47. Bauman, Bohannon and O’Brien, Grounding Religion, 15. Miller, ‘Production of Amino Acids’, 528.

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43 44 45 46

47 48

Deamer, ‘The First Spark’, 302. Bauman, Bohannon and O’Brien, Grounding Religion, 2. Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 2. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 3. McFarland, A World from Dust, 25. Vianez et al., ‘Observing Separate Spin and Charge’, 1. Kaufman, Reinventing the Sacred, 123. Armstrong and Hughes, ‘Cyberneticisation as a Theory and Practice of Matter’, 31. Bauman, ‘Returning Faith to Knowledge’, 169. Newton, ‘Original Letter from Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley’. Latour, Facing Gaia, 4. Latour, Down to Earth, 5. Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 6. Nature Editorial, ‘Microbiology by Numbers’. Lahiji and Friedman, Plumbing, 37. Bellacasa, Matters of Care, 129. In material terms, ‘waste’ is a value judgement on resources that we do not know how to use, e.g., urine, dust, organic scraps. ISSRNC Admin, ‘Religious Naturalism’. Al-Khalili and McFadden, Life on the Edge, 7. Fleming et al., ‘Quantum Efects in Biology’, 55. McFarland, A World from Dust, 3. Brahic, ‘Meet the Electric Life Forms’. By comparison, the human brain (which is insulated against electron loss by a layer of fatty tissue called myelin), conducts action potentials much faster than microbes at 100 m/s. Popkin, ‘Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate’. Garrett, Grasselli and Keen, ‘Past World Economic Production Constrains Current Energy Demands’, 1. For example, through their combustion, fossil fuel–based systems overwhelm contemporary ecosystems with ‘old’ sources of carbon. Darwin, The Origin of the Species, 9. Haraway, ‘Sympoiesis:  Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble’, Chapter 3. Haraway, ‘Sympoiesis:  Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble’, 33. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33. In this context, design does not imply top-down control but establishing the specifc conditions in which desired outcomes are most likely. I use the term shadow lifeworld to draw attention to those qualities of sacred materialism that arise from material expressions but are difcult to account for by limiting their existence to material cause and efects. Shadow lifeworlds include, for example, atmospheres, moods and supernatural phenomena. Potter, ‘Electrical Efects Accompanying the Decomposition of Organic Compounds’, 260. Greenman et al., ‘Microbial Fuel Cells and Their Electrifed Bioflms’, 1. Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, 97. The Living Architecture project (2016–2019) was a collaboration between six different organisations, including Newcastle University, the University of the West of England, University of Trento, The Spanish National Research Council, Liquefer Systems Group and Explora Biotech. It was funded by the EU’s Future Emerging Technologies Open Horizon 2020 programme to the sum of €3.2 million under grant agreement no. 686585. Armstrong et al., ‘Living Architecture’, 170 Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, 8, 21.

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49 Boldt and Muller, ‘Newtons of the Leaves of Grass’, 387. 50 Bauman, ‘Returning Faith to Knowledge: Earthlings after the Anthropocene’, 169. 51 The Active Living Infrastructure: Controlled Environment (ALICE) is a collaboration between the University of Newcastle, University of the West of England and Translating Nature. This EU-funded Innovation Award prototypes the construction of a novel bio-digital interface using microbial fuel cells and augmented reality experience for ‘living’ bricks developed in the Living Architecture project. 52 https://alice-interface.eu, scroll down to Biodigital Interface, click on Launch Artwork. 53 Fuentes, ‘Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali,’ 600–624. 54 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 5. 55 Natureculture is a synthesis of nature and culture that recognises their inseparability in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed. 56 The project proposal was entitled Microbial Urbanism: Prototyping the Bio-digital City via a Circular BioEconomy Pilot (MU). It was an Innovation Action proposal for the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme and a collaboration between Newcastle University, the University of the West of England, KU Leuven, Studio TAMassociati, Tallinn Technical University, Organica Inc., Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Translating Nature Tallinna Linn, City Facilitators, Stichting Metabolic Institute, Valga Municipality, Personal Improvement Ltd., Municipality of Sithonia, Municipality of Polygyros and Municipality of Propontida, which proposed to make a step-change in value of wastewater and bio-waste-based systems based on the convergence of two established microbial technologies— the microbial fuel cell (MFC) and the root microbiomes of functional wastewater gardens. Aiming to build an efective technological platform underpinning a sustained Circular BioEconomy, a pilot project was proposed in the city of Tallinn. Unfortunately, it was not funded. 57 The PHOENIX Cost Action Network demonstrates the efectiveness of bioelectrical systems (BES). While the development, validation and cost-efciency improvement of energy-aware and limited-complexity solutions are becoming increasingly timeconsuming, microorganisms represent one realistic hope. For millennia, microbes have tirelessly been shaping the Earth’s ecosystems and with the right approach, they can help re-introduce environmental equilibrium. PHOENIX demonstrates that BES are low-environmental impact systems that exploit the biological activity of live organisms for pollutant reduction, recycling of useful elements, synthesis of new products and production of electricity, in the case of microbial fuel cells (MFCs). Recent advances in the feld of low power electronics enable the exploitation of these sustainable and environmentally friendly technologies. The activities of PHOENIX will be related to the characterisation of BES technologies and their implementation as bio-remediators, bio-sensors and bio-reactors connected to sustainable urban planning, educational and socio-economic aspects. The integration of biotechnologies in the urban context  is a key priority for appropriate rational urban planning and minimum environmental impact (www. https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA19123/). 58 Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 329.

Bibliography Al-Khalili, Jim, and Johnjoe McFadden. Life on the Edge: The Coming Age of Quantum Biology. London: Bantam Press, 2014. Armstrong, Rachel, and Rolf Hughes, “Cyberneticisation as a Theory and Practice of Matter,” Footprint 15, no.1, issue 28 (August 2021): 29–44. Armstrong, Rachel, Simone Ferracina, Gary Caldwell, Ioannis Ieropoulos, Gimi Rimbu, Andrew Adamatzky, Neil Phillips, Davide De Lucrezia, Barbara Imhof, Martin M. Hanczyc, Juan Nogales. and Jose Garcia. ‘Living Architecture (LIAR): Metabolically Engineered Building Units,’ in Cultivated Building Materials: Industrialized Natural

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Resources for Architecture and Construction, edited by Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel, 170–177. Berlin: Birkhauser, 2017. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers, Volume 1. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Bauman, Whitney. ‘Introduction,’ in Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (2nd ed), edited by Richard Bohannon and Kevin J. O’Brien, 1–8. London and New York: Routledge, 2017a. Bauman, Whitney. ‘Ecology: What Is It, Who Gets to Descide, and Why Does It Matter?‘ in Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (2nd ed), edited by Richard Bohannon and Kevin J. O’Brien, 34–50. London and New York: Routledge, 2017b. Bauman, Whitney. ‘Returning Faith to Knowledge: Earthlings after the Anthropocene,’ Religions 11, no.4 (2020): 169. Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Boldt, Joachim, and Oliver Müller. ‘Newtons of the Leaves of Grass,’ Nature Biotechnology 26, no. 4 (2008): 387–389. Brahic, Catherine. ‘Meet the Electric Life Forms that Live on Pure Energy,’ New Scientist, Last modifed July 16, 2014. https://institutions.newscientist.com/article/dn25894 -meet-the-electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy/. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti Gender and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Cobb, John B. Jr. Spiritual Bankruptcy: A Prophetic Call to Action. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species: By Means of Natural Selection. Seattle: Senate, 2010. Deamer, David. ‘Origin of Life: The First Spark,’ Nature 514 (2014): 302–303. Evans, Matthew T. ‘The Sacred: Diferentiating, Clarifying and Extending Concept,’ Review of Religious Research 45, no.1 (2003): 32–47. Fleming, Graham R., Gregory D. Scholes and Yuan-Chung Cheng. ‘Quantum Efects in Biology,’ 22nd Solvay Conference on Chemistry, Procedia Chemistry 3 (2011): 38–57. Fuentes, Augustin. ‘Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethno- primatology,’ Cultural Anthropology 25 (2010): 600–624. Garrett, Timothy J., Matheus Grasselli, and Stephen Keen. ‘Past World Economic Production Constrains Current Energy Demands: Persistent Scaling with Implications for Economic Growth and Climate Change Mitigation,’ PLoS ONE 15, no.8 (2020): e0237672. Greenman, John, Iwona Gajda, Jiseon You, Buddhi Arjuna Mendis, Oluwatosin Obata, Grzegorz Pasternak and Ioannis Ieropoulos. ‘Microbial Fuel Cells and Their Electrifed Bioflms,’ Bioflm 3 (2021): 100057. Haraway, Donna. ‘Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble,’ in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, edited by Donna Haraway, 58–98. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Haraway, Donna J., The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, translated by William Lovitt, 311–41. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.

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Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. ISSRNC Admin. ‘Religious Naturalism, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity – Interview with Professor Carol Wayne White,’ Last modifed March 30, 2020. https://www .issrnc.org/2020/03/30/religious-naturalism-carol-wayne-white/ Kaufman, Stuart. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Lahiji, Nadir, and Virginia Friedman. Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture. New York: Princeton Academic Press, 1997. Latour, Bruno. ‘Love your monsters: Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children,’ The Breakthrough Institute, Last modifed February 14, 2012. https:// thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-2/love-your-monsters. Latour, Bruno. ‘Once Out of Nature: Natural Religion as a Pleonasm,’ Giford Lecture Series, University of Edinburgh. Last modifed February 26, 2013. http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=MC3E6vdQEzk. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998. McDonough, William and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002. McFarland, Ben J. A World from Dust: How the Periodic Table Shaped Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Miller, Stanley L. ‘A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,’ Science 117, no. 3046 (1953): 528–9. Newton, Isaac. ‘Original Letter from Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley,’ The Newton Project, 2007. http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM 00258. Popkin, Gabriel. ‘Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate,’ Quanta Magazine. Last modifed September 5, 2017. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ bacteria-use-brainlike-bursts-of-electricity-to-communicate-20170905/. Potter, Michael C. ‘Electrical Efects Accompanying the Decomposition of Organic Compounds,’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B 571, no. 84 (1911): 260–276. Vallendy, Jason. ‘Quarantined, Set Apart, Sacred,’ United Methodist Insight. Last modifed March 23, 2020. https://um-insight.net/perspectives/quarantined-set-apart-sacred/. Vianez, Pedro M. T., Yiqing, Yin, Maria Moreno, Ankita S. Anirban, Anne Anthore, Wooi Kiat Tan, Jonathan P. Grifths, Ian Farrer, David A. Ritchie, Andrew J. Schofeld, Oleksandr Tsyplyatyev, Christopher J.B. Ford. ‘Observing Separate Spin and Charge Fermi Seas in a Strongly Correlated One-dimensional Conductor,’ Science Advances 8, no. 24 (2022). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2781

3 PLANETARY TECHNICS, EARTHLY SPIRITS Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski

Introduction: technology on an Earth ‘out of step’ As the cumulative impact of multitudinous, dispersed acts, anthropogenic c­ limate change demonstrates how technics is now impacting on the entirety of our planet. At the same time, the presence of persistent organic pollutants in human and other living bodies the world over is a reminder of the extent to which technical activities impinge upon our lives at a very different scale. Technology—more precisely, modern western technology—has long been arraigned by critical commentators both within and beyond the West for its deleterious impacts on self and world. What has become increasingly apparent in recent decades is the way that modern technology’s unintended consequences spread across space, time and scale. As sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: ‘the “accident” loses its (spatio-temporal) limitations … it becomes an “event” that is forever beginning, an “open-ended festival” of creeping, galloping, and overlapping despoliation’.1 Harmful human-made chemicals that ceased being manufactured 50 years ago are still being accumulated in human tissues, often having drifted across oceans and continents,2 while the atmospheric impact of combusting fossil hydrocarbons at current rates is likely to last thousands of years. As the concept of a new, human-induced geological epoch—the Anthropocene— highlights, many of the traces of technical activity currently being left in the rocky fabric of the Earth are likely to be effectively permanent.3 By the same logic, Anthropocene geoscience warns, cascading, runaway shifts in the operating state of vital Earth systems threatens to bring about planetary conditions that our species and many of the organisms we rely upon have never before experienced.4 In this context, some theorists now speak of an emerging technosphere whose global reach and cumulative impact on Earth processes is on its way to joining

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-4

Planetary Technics, Earthly Spirits  49

that of the major components of the Earth system: the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere.5 While many different actors and interest groups are rallying to reduce the impact of human technical and economic activities on Earth systems, others are proposing planet-scaled engineering works to mask the effects of anthropogenic climate change.6 The globalisation of technical systems and their related environmental impact has prompted philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler to write of ‘planetary industrial technics’,7 a formulation that both builds upon and seeks to move beyond Heidegger’s sense of a planetarisation of technology consummated by the ungrounded, extra-terrestrial image of the Earth taken from the moon.8 Likewise reckoning with Heidegger’s legacy, philosopher Andrew Feenberg reads the global crisis of the environment as symptomatic of the failure of modern capitalist societies to integrate technics into the social fabric. Confronting ‘the decisive role of technology in the destruction of the biosphere and in the future of humanity’,9 fellow philosopher Yuk Hui introduces the notion ‘cosmotechnics’ as a way of reopening the possibility of moral relation between technological activity and nature or the cosmos.10 The sense of ‘planetary technics’ we advance in this chapter inherits these perspectives, while offering a different inflection. While alert to the global extra-terrestrial reach of modern technology and to the risk of technical activities nudging Earth systems into alternative operating states, we set out from the more fundamental question of what it means to inhabit a planet that is not restricted to a single state. As we have documented elsewhere, the last five or six decades have seen a succession of developments in the geosciences that have gradually pieced together a view of the Earth as a single, densely interconnected set of systems.11 But out of this unity and integration, scientists now recognise, comes a potential for the components of the Earth (or any other planet) to reconfigure themselves into a new arrangement or operating state—an insight closely associated with the field of Earth system science and the Anthropocene hypothesis. By this logic, it is only possible for human technical agency, or any other driving force, to fundamentally reorganise Earth processes because the planet is already capable of becoming other to itself. For, as the Earth sciences remind us, our planet has changed dramatically many times over the last 4.6 billion years, such that ‘(t)he lost worlds of Earth were often so different from our current world that the present is not always a reliable key to the past’.12 Our take on a more-than-singular, self-othering planet already draws upon philosophies of technology. In his writings from the 1950s and 1960s, philosopher Georg Simondon developed a theory of technology that hinged on the inherent capacity of matter to ‘pass out of phase’ or ‘out of step’ with itself.13 Skilled technological operators, Simondon insisted, do not simply impress form upon a passive materiality; they work with and through the propensity of the material world to self-organise. In effect, we

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would add, what recent geoscience has done is to extend this ‘falling out of step’ tendency to other sites and scales—all the way up to the level of the planet (and beyond). For us, then, human technics has not just ascended into planetarity lately; it has always already been planetary by virtue of the fact that technological activity constitutively taps into the self-organising dynamics of Earth. Or, as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz puts it, human creative powers are always, to some degree ‘extracted from the fluctuating, selfdiffering structure of the universe itself ’.14 If modern technology frequently oversteps its limits, then, as Beck and many others have lamented, this in part reflects the fact that it is channelling planetary forces with the power to transgress their own spatio-temporal limitations. The current conjunction between a ‘planetary industrial technics’ that has been accumulating potentialities it cannot contain and an Earth system that seems to be approaching a significant threshold, we would insist, is one that generates immense challenges for any reimagining of the modern technological apparatus. But it is also a problem that overflows the remit of technics and thinking that convenes around technology. As Hui proposes, the realm of the cosmos stretches far beyond the technological system—indeed, beyond the domain of any human activity—and in this sense opens onto ‘the unknown and the mysterious’.15 Along similar lines, we conceive of technics—no matter what powers it enfolds—as nested within, or subtended by, planetary and cosmic forces. And this means that critical discourses on technology need something else. Where do we look for a supplement: a medium or a vehicle to help in the reintegration of technics with an Earth or cosmos that dramatically exceeds any measure of the human? Together with the practice of coaxing matter across threshold into new forms, the spectre of Earth systems passing over a transitional point draws us into consideration of thresholds: the passage from a familiar world to one that is strange or unknown. In the case of a planet undergoing phaseshifting or self-differentiation, we are dealing with a very distinctive version of the other-worldly—not in the sense of the supernatural but in the manner of an Earth becoming other to itself in the secular register of western science. An immanent other-worlding, that is, rather than a transcendent one. But what kinds of stories, concepts, devices, rituals or agents might prepare us for the end of one world and the coming of another—or help us negotiate the juncture between radically different modes of existence? At a time when scientists, cultural producers and activists who are still predominantly based in the West increasingly speak of passage across a planetary threshold expressed in ‘end of the world’ tropes, many formerly colonised or enslaved peoples offer the rejoinder that world-endings have already been inflicted upon them, often on multiple occasions.16 So too should we be mindful of long, rich histories of resisting the aggressive secularity of modern western epistemes, even or especially in colonised regions. Entities associated with the traffic between the human and more-than-human worlds—spirits,

Planetary Technics, Earthly Spirits  51

deities, agential ancestors, sapient animals, sentient geological formations—have maintained an active presence. Many such beings have proved fully capable of cohabiting with or actively taking advantage of modern technological objects in performing their communicative or intercessional roles.17 They are also increasingly being drawn into political arenas, in the course of assertions of local sovereignty, environmental protection and related struggles. These resurgent ‘Earth beings’, as anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena refers to them, not only disrupt the premises of modern politics; they also rattle the assumption of ‘a single scientifically knowable nature’ that has been at the core of western knowledge formations.18 Wary of the risks of borrowing figures or ideas from other cultural contexts—especially those that are constitutively placebound—we nonetheless find much that is inspirational in these challenges to western political, epistemological and ontological hegemony. But the idea we have been discussing of an Earth capable of becoming other to itself is also indicative for us that ‘modern’ science is unsettling—from within—its own sense of a single, knowable nature. And it is this that prompts us to consider how the matter of navigating ‘between worlds’ arises within western or globalising science, as well as or beyond its margins. In the following section, we look more closely at the problems raised by technics in the modern world, in ways that bring together technology’s implication with contemporary environmental crises and in the more encompassing multiplicity of the Earth. We then turn to the longer history of human intervention in dynamic Earth processes, and the magico-mythical and ritualised ways in which potentially dangerous technical activities have been modulated. In the final section, we step back and consider the prospects for a ‘spiritualised’ or cosmological reimagining of technology in the contemporary world, with an eye to the insights of both western science and other knowledge formations.

The challenge of planetary technics There is an extensive critical tradition in modern western thought that identifies a pathological side to the rise of technological capabilities and its epistemic accompaniments. For Rousseau, it is technics that leads humankind down a troubling path from the original unity or presence with nature.19 According to Max Weber, modern social life has witnessed the growing prevalence of a kind of scientific and technical rationality characterised by a narrow means-to-an-end orientation—which displaces other ways of valuing the world and ultimately strips it of meaning.20 In a related sense for Heidegger, and those influenced by his thinking, under conditions of modernity, technological or calculative thinking has become the predominant way of understanding and ‘framing’ the world,21 culminating in the final alienation from an earthly home inaugurated by the view from space.22

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The common thread here is a deep distrust of the way that technological control over nature has a rebounding effect on human freedom or autonomy. As Stiegler expresses the paradox at the heart of technical modernity, ‘[t]echnics, which appears to be a power in the service of humanity, becomes autonomous from the instance it empowers’.23 By the later 20th century, it had become increasingly apparent to critical thinkers that stripping nature of meaning was also implicated in its physical degradation 24 —though there is no shortage of earlier intuitions that disenchantment and despoliation went hand in hand. In the West, and in much of the rest of the world, there is now a widespread sense that an underlying cause of global environmental crisis is the separation of the human subject from nature effected by modern science and technology: a conviction that perseveres in spite of the role of science in bringing climate change and related problems into visibility. It is dissatisfaction with the kind of wholesale disavowal of modern technology in so many western critical narratives that prompted Andrew Feenberg25 to take a closer look at how technics actually operates in the world. While readily admitting that modern forms of rationality have eroded many of the traditional codes that protected humans and nature from excessive exploitation, Feenberg contends that there are common functions in technological activity wherever and whenever it takes place. As he proposes: there is nothing unprecedented about our technology. Its chief features, such as the reduction of objects to raw materials, the use of precise measurement and plans, the management of some human beings by others, large scales of operation, are commonplace throughout history.26 Feenberg analyses technical action as first requiring what he calls primary instrumentalisation—the unbinding of materials from their originary locus and all the natural interconnectivity this implies. Though modern technicity does an extreme version of this by reducing extracted matter to all but the most abstract qualities, all technological operations wherever and whenever they occur require a degree of ‘de-worlding’.27 Anthropologists Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold make a similar point, using an example that helpfully extends deep into the planetary dimension of decontextualisation: The story of clay does not begin with the potter, since the material he throws on the wheel has already had to be dug out from the ground and kneaded so that it is sufficiently pure and of the right consistency. Before that, it was sedimented through the deposition of water-borne particles, over eons of geological time.28 As Feenberg adds, converting the stuff of nature into objects of technical manipulation also involves making use of the ‘inherent properties’ of the­

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materials in question.29 We can push this further by returning to Georg Simondon’s emphasis on the inherent capacity of matter to self-organise and become out of step with itself. 30 When technicians perform transformative operations, they generally take advantage of potentials for change that are immanent to the materials in question, tapping into and channelling what philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as ‘a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such’. 31 Through operations such as combining different elements, heating, adding catalysts and applying pressure, skilled technical operators are able to coax matter over its transitional points into desired states or forms. In the words of Ingold and Hallam: ‘makers of every profession appear to stand at the threshold, in amongst the stuff and tackle of their trade, easing the way for their ever-varying, protean material to pass from one form of life to another’. 32 Foregrounding this aspect of technics helps us to see why critical approaches to technological modernity that stress separation from nature miss something crucial. In the process of tapping into the dynamic changeability of the natural world—wherever this occurs—something of the Earth’s own power to become otherwise is imported into the heart of the human technological system. What is undertaken, as Grosz puts it, is ‘an exploration of the excessiveness of nature …. The territorialization of the uncontrollable forces of the Earth’. 33 So, rather than simply establishing an alienating, unbridgeable rift between the human lifeworld and the domain of nature, what is taking place in technical activity—and with particular intensity in the regimes of modern technology—is the deep, intimate enfolding of an immensely potent and volatile exteriority. We can see this, for example, when human agents make use of fire to render living landscapes more productive, to transform organic matter in an oven or to metamorphosise clay in a kiln. The case of metallurgy is even more telling. For when ancient artisans learned to fire their furnaces up to and past 1,300 degrees, as we now know, they were actually reproducing both the temperatures and the transmutational power of volcanoes—and in this way, enfolding the igneous power of the inner Earth into the very heart of their villages and towns.34 A similar point can be made about the technical setting-to-work of fossil hydrocarbons, which envelopes the condensed energy of distant geological epochs into the appliances and vehicles that some of us use each day.35 This brings us to the second half of Feenberg’s account of the technological process. Following primary instrumentalisation, he goes on to describe a phase of secondary instrumentalisation that must occur if the outputs of technical activity are to perform their worldly role. To be effective, Feenberg argues, materials that have undergone transformation into novel compounds, objects or devices must be reintroduced into the world: ‘technique must be integrated with the natural, technical, and social environments that support its functioning’.36 In this regard, the challenge of secondary instrumentalisation is to partially reverse

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the extractive, unworlding moment inherent in primary instrumentalisation through a kind of re-worlding. This integrative process involves the incorporation of transformative actions and the objects they produce into an effective sociotechnical system—so that technical objects are able to function as socially useful devices.37 It also entails assimilating these objects meaning fully into their milieu. This is further related to the way that human agents doing the technical work understand where they fit into the system and the wider world, and to how users or users of the resultant objects come to feel like significant and effective participants in the overall technological process.38 Again, while these are requirements of the technological endeavour in all times and places, Feenberg argues, the way these functions are performed and the efforts they call forth are historically widely variant. Whereas ‘traditional’ (or what we might call a-modern) societies are often deeply committed to the symbolic and ethical assimilation of technical objects into their socioecological milieu, he attests, much of this is lost with the breakdown of artisanal traditions and the erosion of religious sensibilities in the transition to modernity. On the other hand, modern technological societies, with their increasingly complex and extensive sociotechnical networks, invest comparatively more in the practical systematisation process than their a-modern counterparts.39 While analyses like Heidegger’s may foreground modernity’s failures to both meaningfully unworld or re-world technical objects, Feenberg argues that they too-readily foreclose on the potential of contemporary technological objects and systems to gather new subjective associations and communal affiliations (he gives examples of computer-mediated support groups and well-designed ­architecture).40 More helpful in this regard, Feenberg affirms, is the attention that Bruno Latour and fellow science and technology studies theorists have devoted to the real-world practices through which objects are enrolled into complex relational networks, wherever these may be found.41 From our perspective, what is vital to layer into this discussion is the challenge of re-integrating the Earth and cosmic forces that technical activities have enfolded. In each of Feenberg’s strands of secondary instrumentalisation—creating viable systems, establishing meaningful relations, incorporating producers and consumers—what must also be assimilated is a substantial trace of the planet’s own powers of self-differentiation. As we saw above, with every act of incorporation, something enters the sociotechnical milieu that exceeds the measure of the human. By this logic, the loss of containment that Beck evokes— the technological accident that overflows its spatio-temporal limitation—occurs not just as an effect of the unruly complexity of contemporary sociotechnical systems, but by way of the inherent self-overcoming potential of the materiality that these systems have ingested, intensified and elaborated upon. Or as Grosz expresses it: ‘[w]e live the world in a manner much more complex and integrated with matter than our conceptual apparatus is able to comprehend’.42

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Just how unthinkably demanding any secondary re-integrative project will be comes into relief when we recall that the planetary milieu into which we attempt to re-assimilate our technical objects (and their remainders) is prone to falling out of phase with itself. To put it another way, we seek to safely reconcile the things we have made with a world that is open to being unworlded by us precisely because it is quite capable of becoming other-worldly to itself. Consider, for example, the fate of the 2,000 to 3,000 new synthetic chemicals that are currently developed each year. Many of these novel compounds are long-lived and known to accumulate in living organisms, with damaging impacts on development, reproduction and immunological functions.43 These persistent organic pollutants are also likely to be transported very long distances by atmospheric and oceanic currents, in which they ‘migrate, rest, and migrate again in tune with seasonal temperature changes’.44 All of this means that there are immense challenges to keeping track of the estimated 200 billion tonnes of synthetic chemicals that are produced each year.45 Regardless of the precise chemical species, environmental scientist Kevin Jones concludes that ‘these figures point to an enormous consumption of the earth’s resources and a huge demand on its “carrying capacity” and ability to cleanse itself ’.46 In the case of mineral extraction, vast amounts of subterranean rock are brought to the surface each year. By definition, this entails the reintroduction of materials deposited and transformed over deep geological time into radically different ecological or geophysical contexts. Many ores generate acids when exposed to air and water, while others are frequently associated with acid-generating minerals and heavy metals—which can be highly toxic to ecosystems and organisms that have not evolved to tolerate such exposure. As with synthetic chemicals, these toxins tend to migrate through food chains and accumulate in the tissues of living organisms.47 Because valuable ores usually comprise only a small (and declining) fraction of excavated material, vast piles of waste rock amass, along with huge quantities of particulate and liquid waste from mineral processing. Already spread over entire landscapes, and extremely dangerous where it is now pooled and stacked, this toxic debris is increasingly subject to remobilisation by meteorological, hydrological and topographical transitions associated with climate change.48 As geographer William Holden notes: ‘[t]ailing dams must now be constructed to accommodate worst case scenarios … Given the uncertainty surrounding the rapidity of climate change, determining worst case scenarios will be extremely difficult if not impossible’.49 Such convolutions of errant technical objects (and their remainders) with shifting Earth systems would seem to pose insurmountable problems for the task of worldly reintegration. Without diminishing the gravity of this predicament, we want to suggest that there are precedents for engaging with situations that are related to these problems. In the next section, we address some of the ways that different societies have dealt with the challenge of integrating technics into

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wider social and physical milieus. This draws us into closer engagement with the limits of technics, and the quest for forms of mediation between familiar and unknown worlds.

Ritual preparations, spiritual (re)mediations ‘In premodern societies’ observes Feenberg, ‘there may be no clear distinction between narrowly conceived technical ends, which flow from the mastery of natural causality, and such spiritual mediations as aesthetic or ethical values’.50 On this point there is much agreement from western commentators. Wherever there is conspicuous unbinding of elemental matter from its natural milieu, and especially where these materials are subjected to a palpable transmutation, many (outside) observers have noted, the activities of traditional ‘makers’ tend to be enmeshed in symbolic meaning, ritual and spiritual or divine superintendence. Such acknowledgement that the instrumental functions of technology were greatly tempered by its fealty to an encompassing cosmological order in these societies, Feenberg maintains, has been a key to the self-critique of technological modernity. The magico-mythical accoutrements of metallurgy have in particular attracted special attention. From the earliest days of working metal, says chemist-historian R.J. Forbes, ‘the smith grew to form a special social type encumbered with religious rites and rituals, endowed by popular feeling with magical potencies in many directions’.51 As historian Mircea Eliade52 underlines, it is the mastery of fire that links the smith to the magician and shaman. Above all, he observes, it is fire’s capacity to metamorphosise matter, to bring something new into the world, that imbued its use with special significance. ‘It was therefore the manifestation of a magico-religious power which could modify the world and which, consequently, did not belong to this world’.53 In bringing forth such transmutations, Eliade elaborates, metallurgists could be seen as partaking in their own version of cosmogenic action, recapitulating the primordial creativity of a demiurge.54 Other craftspeople also engaged in activities that reprised the world-making work of divine beings. Spinning, added Eliade, is ‘a perilous craft’, bound up with ‘the conception of the periodical creations of the world’.55 But the raw material required by working with metal involved the additional peril of prying beneath the Earth’s surface. As Eliade observed, ‘subterranean life and the spirits reigning there are … a domain which by rights does not belong to man’, noting the importance of rituals that prepared the way for both the mining expedition and metamorphic process of smelting.56 Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep57 and later Victor Turner58 analysed rites of passage as involving a ‘ritual process’ of three stages—first the separation of the person from their existing lifeworld and identity, then a culturally charged period of liminality, and finally their reincorporation into society, transformed and in a new role. This account of the ritual subject’s departure

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from and return to everyday life has suggestive parallels with Feenberg’s attention to the phases of primary disembedding and secondary reintegration in the trajectory of technological activity. And this resonance becomes even more pronounced in the work of anthropologist Mary Helms. Helms complements a focus on the extractive and transformational work of the craftsperson with attention to another set of material practices: the mobilisation of value-laden objects. As in the case of the metallurgical histories we have been looking at, she addresses the moral or symbolic challenges posed in the ancient world by the act of unbounding materials from their natural environs: ‘minerals (e.g., salt), precious stones and ores, plants, and other products derived from (brought up from) the interior of the earth and sea’. 59 But Helms is equally concerned with the cosmological and spiritual dimensions of another widespread practice in nonmodern societies: trade in products of skilled artisanship—especially between spatially distant societies. This latter movement, no less than the disembedding, extractive processes necessary for craft, involves a passage between a familiar, orderly realm and one that is less known and more mysterious—and for this reason of cosmological significance. And such traffic with ‘the outside as a mystically powerful place of sacred superiority’, as Helms documents, also called for careful ritual or spiritual mediation.60 It is important to keep in mind Feenberg’s intention to blur the hard-edged distinction drawn by critical scholars between modern and traditional technics. On the face of it, the inter-societal dimension of Helms’s account of long-distance trade seems incongruent with the intra-social focus of Feenberg’s secondary instrumentalisation. However, his allusion to environmental crises as symptomatic of contemporary failures to re-integrate technical objects in the lifeworld likewise points to the ethical-experiential quandaries posed by troublesome elements wandering far from home. And in the examples we touched upon in the last section, the mobilisation of toxic elements far and wide is indeed a critical aspect of the problem. But what is at stake here concerns more than just the ‘undelimitability’ of matter-out-of-place. It is also a question of the limitation of technics itself—of what exceeds or evades even the most responsible management of technical activity. In the case of persistent organic pollutants there have been some successful policy interventions banning certain compounds, and there is now an arsenal of advanced techniques for tracking synthetic chemicals. But even such promising approaches as ‘long-term time trend air monitoring’ and ‘physicochemically based multimedia fate models’61 fall far short of the task at hand. As Jones admits, ‘our scientific community is overwhelmed with the scale of the chemicals management challenges we are being asked to address’.62 And this is before scientists even begin to factor in the effects of global climate change. Where mineral extraction is concerned, expert witnesses now recognise that many kinds of mining waste need to be closely monitored and managed in perpetuity.63 Such timescales, it hardly needs to be said, present

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formidable technical, policy and legislative challenges, especially when climate change is factored into an already exceedingly complex situation.64 As geographer Jason Phillips concludes: ‘the potential increase in acid mine drainage and heavy metal pollution due to climate change, could very well be beyond any original, current or foreseeable design parameters of mining operations and infrastructure’.65 But how well does Feenberg’s call for a reflexive meta-technical practice 66 help us to address issues that so keenly defy environmental containment and remediation? Feinberg’s response to the modern dilemma of unworlding and unworlded technical activity is a reintegration of technics in the lifeworld, one that takes advantage of ‘political and social creativity’ already discernible in progressive sociotechnical initiatives to lever ‘a change in the form of technical rationality’.67 In this regard he is by no means uncongenial to the possibility of repurposing supressed and marginalised orientations towards practical activity. ‘A different type of social system that restored the role of the secondary instrumentalizations’ he concludes, would determine a different type of technical development in which traditional technical values might be expressed in new ways.68 Yes, to a degree. But we would amend that the issues we’ve been looking at have begun to overflow the ‘this-worldly’ orientation of technique, and even a revitalised sociopolitical framing of technics. For us, the spectre of toxic afterlives without end, crossed with the coming of an unknowable Earth, suggest a condition in relation to which even the most inclusive and generous rethinking of modern rationality struggles for traction. And it is the need to prepare for and negotiate such events that invites comparison with the rich field of a-modern ritual, spiritual and supernatural mediation. It’s worth recalling here the point made by Eliade about the cosmogenic associations of traditional artisanship, and its more immanent counterpart in Simondon’s depiction of the technical inducing of matter’s self-organising potential. It is by carving off and amplifying these earthly powers, as we have shown, that human technics unintentionally acquires the potential to react back upon Earth systems—including our participation in modes of mobilisation or dissemination that are proper to the planet itself. And we need to think this through the scientific disclosure of an Earth capable of becoming otherwise—which recasts ‘otherworldliness’ as an objective, if undeterminable, property of the Earth itself. Modern western science delivers us the edge of a threshold and speculates about what might be on the other side and can be good at fronting up to its own level of certainty and uncertainty. But scientists themselves are rarely disciplinarily inclined to reflect on the experience of passing through these thresholds or to ponder what its means to be claims-making from within this transitional moment.69 Historian-anthropologist Gabrielle Hecht70 has helpfully introduced the concept of ‘interscalar vehicles’, concepts, strategies and devices that help us to move practically and imaginatively between discordant levels of existence. In

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her reading, the Anthropocene hypothesis functions in this way, as it helps us to navigate between the scales of everyday experience and of deep, geological time.71 In a related way, we see the need for ideas, figures, entities that will help us to negotiate between worlds that are at least open to being known, and those across a threshold that severely compromises any meaningful accessibility. On the other side of this juncture lies the realm of formative but irrecuperable origins, the objects of interminable responsibility, and operating states that are still self-organising into being. Modern western science, in this way, has circuitously brought its audience back to the kind of challenges that many other peoples in close contact with Earth processes—including artisans, foragers and hunters, agrarian communities and those living in seismically or volcanically active regions—have been grappling with for centuries or millennia. But this trajectory cannot be a straightforward cosmological or spiritual homecoming. Here we are broadly in line with Hui’s insistence that to reimagine cosmology for the predicament into which modernity has drawn us, it is necessary to work with and through the condition of technical globality rather than simply resuscitating archaic or other-than-modern conceptions of nature or the cosmos.72 As he puts it: ‘any retreat from the question of the global will not give us a better solution than slow disintegration’.73 But the global and the planetary are not the same thing, for the former is of our own making and the latter only of our own disclosure. We thus need to supplement Hui’s concept of technical globality with the idea of a technics that is always already planetary. And this has profound implications for the way that those of us whose epistemic trajectory has taken a turn through recent Earth science might engage with different, mostly but not necessarily older, ways of negotiating between disparate worlds. It helps focus the question of what our own effective and fitting counterpart might be to agential spirits, deities, ancestors, lifeforms, landforms and other Earth-oriented beings that ply lively transitional zones elsewhere on the planet. In the final section, we look at some of the different aspects or contours of the task of assembling new vehicles for traversing between familiar and strange Earths, and sketch out some of the issues that this involves.

For Earth-oriented spirits to come Western geoscience and its popularisers have become adept at telling stories that make imaginative leaps between everyday life and vaster spatial and temporal scales. The idea that the looming transgression of Earth system thresholds or tipping points is the outcome of a myriad of mundane human actions frequently features in such narratives. But what scientists are much less likely to attempt, as we have noted, is the situating of their own working lives and research findings within these transitional moments. With their insistence on a social, cultural or historical positionality, social scientists and humanities scholars

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do a little better, but still fall far short of contextualising scientific activity with the structures and dynamics of the Earth.74 And it is here, in the midst of the passage to a new Earth, that we discern a role for mediating figures apposite to the troubles and opportunities of the contemporary world. Perhaps the nearest that many western or globalised scientists come to acknowledging their immersion in a fast-changing world is in their growing willingness to speak of anxiety and grief and loss, especially in the face of the irrecuperable losses associated with extinction and climate change,75 and to take on the role of issuing ‘warnings to humanity’.76 More needs to be known about the way that scientists and technical experts grapple with the affective demands of the perpetual vigilance that mining waste, persistent organic pollutants and related environmental problems now seem to require, though there has been some excellent work on the experience of dealing with long-term nuclear waste storage.77 This is not especially promising. In the 1980s, semiotician Thomas Seboek recommended that the 10,000-yearplus guardianship of nuclear facilities be entrusted to an ‘atomic priesthood’ whose authority over future generations might need to be propped up by ‘the veiled threat that to ignore the mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of supernatural retribution’.78 In a related way, geographers Matthew Kearnes and Lauren Rickards79 show how the intensifying use of the subsurface for the ‘techno-burial’ of hazardous materials often deploys religious imagery of cathedral-like voids, solemn monuments and ritualistic journeys to a final resting place. But ultimately, they observe, the sacred is being appropriated to legitimate profane practices of interring and forgetting about the undesired remainders of technical activity. When it comes to the convening of technical imaginaries around thresholds in the climate system, much of the imagery—especially Stuart Brand’s ‘we are as gods, we might as well get good at it’ storyline that frequently frames advocacy of geoengineering 80 —seems little more than a pastiche of the ancient theme of artisanal participation in primordial creativity. A more interesting question might be: if we were to be as gods, what kinds of gods would we be? One of the problems with the more grandiose—and widely disparaged—geoengineering proposals is that they problematically imagine acting on rather than with or through planetary dynamics. There are other versions of climate remediating technics, however, that envision more hands-on, participatory and ethically informed approaches.81 ‘Can there be a way of approaching geoengineering’, asks geographer Holly Jean Buck, ‘that considers the root causes of ecological degradation, and that weaves in accountability, reckoning, and reparation?’.82 The intentions may be admirable, but still leave unanswered the question of where to look for beliefs or figures powerful enough to hold together communities of adaptive Earth-oriented practice, not only across spatial and temporal distance, but across rifts opening in the Earth itself. And in this sense, it still seems hard to match Indigenous experience.

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In many parts of the world, skilled use of fire, or cultural burning, has been a means of managing ecological and climatic variability for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. In the Australian context, this includes negotiating the shift from the late Pleistocene glacial maximum to the very different conditions of the Holocene.83 In Indigenous Australian cosmologies, fire is regarded both as a mode of communicating with articulate and agential plants, animals, landforms and elements, and also as a means of sustaining connectivity between distant ancestors and generations to come. As Tagalaka man and cultural burning expert Victor Steffensen puts it, ‘[f ]ire is a commitment that goes on forever into the future’.84 While there is increasing collaboration between western and Indigenous fire practitioners across Australia and in many other parts of the world, however, it remains difficult to discern scientific counterparts of the rituals, ceremonies and the designations of sacred ground that are inseparable from Indigenous pyrotechnical practice. For all modernity’s enthrallment with futurity, then, we discern serious shortfalls in coupling conceptual excursions across time-space with emotionally or existentially convincing companions. Ancestors play a particularly significant role in this way in many a-modern belief systems, not simply because they are part of a continuous intergenerational chain but because they retain an active, interventionist presence. Such a presence is not necessarily incompatible with western scientific knowledge claims, however, and neither is it inconducive to thinking positively about breaks and transformations. In anthropologist Katerina Teaiwa’s85 account of the extraction of phosphate from the Pacific Island of Banaba, the element of phosphorus and its agronomic setting-to-work is indelibly linked to the spirits of all the ancestors who were ever laid to rest in the island soil. According to Banaban beliefs, the mining of mineral phosphate and its global export constitutes a tragic estrangement of ancestors from their homeland. But, as Teaiwa would have it, this dissemination of ancestral spirit is also a way of imagining new connections, inaugurating ‘literal cross-fertilisations’ between the land and people of Banaba and all those populations out across the world who have benefitted from enhanced soil fertility. As she writes: One can imagine the rock of Banaba split into twenty million tons of tiny particles … As the island fractures into pieces and moves across the ocean it creates and breaks countless relationships between peoples, places and products.86 The more generative strand that Teaiwa interweaves with the traumatic severance of spirit is a reminder that Earth-oriented beings in worlds beyond the modern West are often bearers of opportunity as well as danger. One of the things that has become clearer to us as we have sought glimpses of potential contemporary counterparts is that the pervasive environmental anxiety of our own era is more conducive to messengers or devices that track harmful events and substances.

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It is easy to overlook the pleasure and exhilaration that also attends ‘perilous’ technical activity. So it’s worth recalling that many deployments of fire both in the landscape and the workshop have been treated as joyous occasions. ‘They were beautiful fires’, recalls Steffensen of well-executed cultural burns, ‘each one lit up in the right place’.87 Likewise, as materials scientist and historian Cyril Stanley Smith observes, a great deal of technical knowhow seems to have arisen from ‘a rich and varied sensual experience of the kind that comes directly from play with minerals, fire, and colors’.88 Much artisanal work, he adds, has been suffused with ‘creative participatory joy’,89 a pervading mood that seems to have been carried over into many of the rituals and ceremonies associated with technical activity. If we are to imagine or convene some kind of spirit apposite to our current planetary predicament, then, we should not assume that it need involve the same dour and ascetic cosmological sensibilities that, as Weber would have it, accompanied the rise of modern technical orientations. Perhaps it is easier to imagine such moments of delight or elation if we can, to a degree, de-exceptionalise our transitional events. Although the ‘other-worlding’ shift between operating states of the Earth system has loomed large in our account, self-differentiation and phase-shifting occurs at every spatio-temporal scale. Indeed, while fluctuations and periodicities are ongoing aspects of the functioning of the Earth, planet-scaled reorganisation is relatively rare. The fact that technical activity generally engages only a small part of earthly or cosmic potentiality, and that this enfolding draws earthly forces into the everyday space of social worlds, is a reminder that the challenges we have been talking about have a mundaneness to them. To put it another way, the quotidian and the Earthshattering, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the this-worldly and the otherworldly, are mutually implicated. Most of the agential Earth-oriented beings we have been referring to seem to not only make their presence felt in moments of extremity, although this may be asked of them from time to time. They also tend to share lifeworlds more habitually. So too do we envision that the mediating planetary figures we are seeking out will be folded in and out of the social fabric, as well as summoned to its wrenching and unravelling. Finally, this question of how to imagine and assemble new vehicles for traversing between this Earth and Earths to come, is also, and inseparably, a matter of inquiring into the ways that our planet probes, explores and negotiates its own thresholds. It is an issue of how the Earth communicates between its different components and subsystems, and how it mediates across ruptures or rifts in its own continuity. So too might we ask: what kind of planet is this, that has not only generated an exceptional richness of geological formations and an unfathomable diversity of living creatures, but also convened a great multiplicity of Earth beings?

Notes 1 Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, translated by Amos Weisz (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 109.

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2 Kevin C. Jones, “Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Related Chemicals in the Global Environment: Some Personal Reflections,” Environmental Science & Technology 55, no. 14 (2021): 9400–9412. 3 Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Richard Fortey, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Angela L. Coe, Paul R. Bown, Peter F. Rawson, Andrew Gale, Philip Gibbard, F. John Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Water, John Marshall, Michael Oates, and Philip Stone, “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369, no. 1938 (2011): 1036–1055. 4 John W. Williams and Stephen T. Jackson, “Novel Climates, No-analog Communities, and Ecological Surprises,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5, no. 9 (2007): 475–482. 5 Peter K. Haff, “Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-being,” in A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene?, edited by Colin N. Waters, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Michael A. Ellis, and Andrea M. Snelling (London: Geological Society of London, 2014), 301–309. 6 Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (London: Granta Books, 2015). 7 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 31. 8 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings: From ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964) (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1977), 283–317. 9 Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd, 2016), 293. 10 Ibid.; see also Yuk Hui, “On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21, nos. 2–3 (2017): 4. 11 Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity, 2021); see also John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 12 Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39. 13 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Zone 6: Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, translated by Mark Cohen, and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urzone, 1992), 300–301. 14 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 19. 15 Hui, “On Cosmotechnics,” 336. 16 Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 224–242; Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 4 (2017): 761–780; see also Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Oxford: Polity, 2016). 17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Adam Bobbette, “Cosmological Reason on a Volcano,” in Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life, edited by Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan, 169–199 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 18 Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 359; see also Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 35–37. 19 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 115. 20 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’, edited by Peter Lassman, and Irving Velody, translated by Michael John (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 30. 21 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 283–317. 22 Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966),” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan (Chicago, IL: Precedent, 1981), 56. 23 Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 13.

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24 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1980). 25 Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London: Routledge, 1999). 26 Ibid., 223. 27 Ibid., 203–205. 28 Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam, “Making and Growing: An Introduction,” in Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1. 29 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 204–205. 30 Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 297–319; see also Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 71. 31 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 411. 32 Ingold and Hallam, “Making and Growing: An Introduction,” 2. 33 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 11. 34 Nigel Clark, “Earth, Fire, Art: Pyrotechnology and the Crafting of the Social,” in Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim, and Alex Wilkie (Manchester: Mattering Press, 2018), 173–194. 35 Clark and Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought, 41. 36 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 205. 37 Ibid., 205–206. 38 Ibid., 206–207. 39 Ibid., 206–207, 205–206. 40 Ibid., 203, 189–193, 199. 41 Ibid., 205–206. 42 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 43 Jones, “Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Related Chemicals in the Global Environment,” 9400–9412. 44 Frank Wania and Donald MacKay, “Tracking the Distribution of Persistent Organic Pollutants,” Environmental Science & Technology 30, no. 9 (1996): 391A. 45 Jones, “Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Related Chemicals in the Global Environment,” 9407. 46 Ibid., 9408. 47 Daniel M. Franks, David V. Boger, Claire M. Côte, and David R. Mulligan, “Sustainable Development Principles for the Disposal of Mining and Mineral Processing Wastes,” Resources Policy 36, no. 2 (2011): 114–122; Fernando P. Carvalho, “Mining Industry and Sustainable Development: Time for Change,” Food and Energy Security 6, no. 2 (2017): 61–77. 48 Nigel Clark and Lauren Rickards, “An Anthropocene Species of Trouble? Negative Synergies Between Earth System Change and Geological Destratification,” The Anthropocene Review 9, no. 3 (2022): 425–442. 49 William N. Holden, “Mining Amid Typhoons: Large-scale Mining and Typhoon Vulnerability in the Philippines,” The Extractive Industries and Society 2, no. 3 (2015): 455. 50 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 209. 51 R. J. Forbes, Metallurgy in Antiquity: A Notebook for Archaeologists and Technologists (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1950), 62. 52 Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, translated by Stephen Corrin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 53 Ibid., 79. 54 Ibid., 75. 55 Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 45–46. 56 Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, 56. 57 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, translated by Monika Vizedom, and Gebrielle Caffee (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 58 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Allen Lane, 1969). 59 Mary W. Helms, “Thoughts on Public Symbols and Distant Domains Relevant to the Chiefdoms of Lower Central America,” in Wealth and Hierarchy in the Intermediate Area: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 10th and 11th October 1987, edited by Frederick W. Lange (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1992), 319.

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60 Mary W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), 25. 61 Jones, “Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Related Chemicals in the Global Environment,” 9405; Wania and MacKay, “Tracking the Distribution of Persistent Organic Pollutants,” 390A–396A. 62 Jones, “Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and Related Chemicals in the Global Environment,” 9408. 63 Franks et al., “Sustainable Development Principles for the Disposal of Mining and Mineral Processing Wastes,” 114–122; Clark and Rickards, “An Anthropocene Species of Trouble? Negative Synergies Between Earth System Change and Geological Destratification,” 425–442. 64 Houston Kempton, Thomas A. Bloomfield, Jason L. Hanson, and Patty Limerick, “Policy Guidance for Identifying and Effectively Managing Perpetual Environmental Impacts from New Hardrock Mines,” Environmental Science & Policy 13, no. 6 (2010): 558–566. 65 Jason Phillips, “Climate Change and Surface Mining: A Review of Environment-Human Interactions & Their Spatial Dynamics,” Applied Geography 74 (2016): 96. 66 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 207. 67 Ibid., 224–225. 68 Ibid., 223. 69 Clark and Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought, 162. 70 Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–141. 71 Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Planetary Multiplicity, Earthly Multitudes: Interscalar Practices for a Volatile Planet,” in Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity, edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes, 78 (New York: Routledge, 2021). 72 Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China, 51, 296. 73 Ibid., 301. 74 Clark and Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought. 75 Lesley Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-Conceptualising Human-Nature Relations (London: Routledge, 2016). 76 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The Watchman’s Part: Earth Time, Human Time and the ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2020): 91–99. 77 Peter Van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 78 Ibid., 48. 79 Matthew Kearnes and Lauren Rickards, “Earthly Graves for Environmental Futures: Techno-Burial Practices,” Futures 92 (2017): 48–58. 80 Cited by Jack Stilgoe, Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering (London: Routledge, 2015), 72. 81 Maialen Galarraga and Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Making Climates: Solar Radiation Management and the Ethics of Fabrication,” in Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management, edited by Christopher Preston (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 2012), 211–225. 82 Holly Jean Buck, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (New York: Verso, 2019), 244. 83 Marcia Langton, ed., Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Northern Australia (Darwin: Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University, 1998), 48–50. 84 Victor Steffensen, Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia (Richmond: Hardie Grant Travel, 2020), 87, see also 62–63. 85 Katerina Martina Teaiwa, “Recovering Ocean Island,” Life Writing 8, no. 1 (2011): 87–100, Katerina Martina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015). 86 Teaiwa, “Recovering Ocean Island,” 87–100. 87 Steffensen, Fire Country, 81. 88 Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 203. 89 Ibid., 355.

4 PANEXPERIENTIAL MATERIALISM? ON LATOUR, WHITEHEAD AND LAUDATO SI’ Ivo Frankenreiter

With his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis set up a milestone within the tradition of Catholic social teaching. The political step to acknowledge the full extent of anthropogenic climate change is supported epistemologically by framing it as an ecological crisis which afects all levels of interaction between human beings, living organisms in general and their material surroundings. To battle the socio-political inactivity in fghting climate change and the exploitation of nature, Pope Francis presents his ‘integral ecology’ to both understand those relationships and guide how we engage in them. Among its founding claims is the move to extend the attribution of ‘intrinsic value’ beyond its exclusive restriction to human beings. While Laudato Si’ thereby strengthens the axiological status of all living organisms, ecosystems and the whole world, it also holds the traditional claim of humans being created in ‘God’s image’, putting them in a special role of responsible rule in the midst of creation. If those claims are supposed to orient practical decisions and their understanding is not to be carried simply by the Pope’s authority, this dual strategy raises questions, which the encyclical itself doesn’t answer. On a frst level, this concerns the relations between diferent intrinsic values and their distinction from human dignity. Additionally, if intrinsic values are not just to magically occur in the evolution of an otherwise valueless world as some sort of divine intervention, a second level of questions concerns our general understanding of the material world and what it means for an entity within it to have intrinsic value. The common, modern concept of matter ofers very limited help in that regard. Roughly sketched, it takes matter to be the substrate of which the physical world consists, which forms the objective counterpart for human subjectivity, and which can be manipulated with the help of insight into its deterministic laws, but remains in itself entirely neutral with regard to human concerns or interests. While the special role of human beings is supported here by their exclusive subjectivity, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-5

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dualism implied in this concept gets in the way of a more diferentiated assessment of the relations concerned by both levels of questions raised above. Where such an understanding of the material world implicitly governs ecological refection, its perspective remains decisively restricted. The intention of this chapter is to ofer a conceptual framework for the explicit discussion of such implicit assumptions, in order to contribute to our understanding of the threefold distinction between living human, living non-human and non-living matter, which is at stake in the encyclical’s approach to intrinsic values. In a frst step, the introductory look at Laudato Si’ will be expanded to get a better understanding of the document, its concerns and its challenges. The second step will focus on Bruno Latour’s distinction of matter and ‘materiality’, ofered in his 2017 volume Facing Gaia as an epistemological tool in the context of his Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). While Latour’s distribution of ‘agency’ as the fundamental quality of what is connected in such networks brings together ecological and ontological issues and thereby helps to ground the notion of nonhuman intrinsic values, it falls short of an adequate concept of specifcally human agents that could support the role of human responsibility envisaged by Laudato Si’. Therefore, the third step will move to the process ontology of Alfred N. Whitehead (1861–1947). His philosophical cosmology conceives of every actual entity as a becoming event of experience, making experience the fundamental mode of ontological relation. Since this concept of experience on the one hand characterises everything there is, but on the other hand introduces the inner graduation of such experience according to the intensity and contrast being experienced, this ‘panexperiential’ ontology reaches a diferentiated understanding of human agency without falling back to the reduction of all non-human agency to the level of purely passive matter. How this foundation can be applied to the encyclical and provide a conceptual framework for its axiological claims will be the fourth and fnal step of this chapter.

The encyclical Laudato Si’: intrinsic values for an integral ecology The year 2015 not only saw the enactment of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, but also the publication of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’.1 Given that religions, through their leaders as well as their adherents, still play a signifcant role in the politics of contemporary societies,2 this document can be considered one of the most prominent examples of postsecular public theology.3 As an encyclical, literally a ‘circular letter’ of in this case 246 paragraphs, it forms an essential part of papal teaching in the Catholic Church. Within the tradition of social encyclicals since the 19th century, Laudato Si’ stands out as the frst eco-social encyclical, focusing on the immediate relevance of anthropogenic climate change. With its choice of topic and perspective, Laudato Si’ efects a decisive realignment of Catholic social teaching.4 Francis not only shares the criticism of

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Christianity’s anthropocentric impact on Western history, but shifts away from the anthropocentric focus on ‘human ecology’ within Catholic teaching itself. The centre of this reorientation can be seen in his acknowledgement of nonhuman intrinsic values. The encyclical puts forth ‘the value proper to each creature’, which we are called to understand (LS 16), and that ‘every creature has its own value and signifcance’ in ‘God’s loving plan’ (LS 76). Beyond the individual being, Francis recognises the ‘value in themselves’ of diferent species, which are not to be thought of ‘merely as potential “resources” to be exploited’ (LS 33), and furthermore the ‘intrinsic value’ of ecosystems, which is ‘independent of their usefulness’ (LS 140). On an even more encompassing level, it is the ‘intrinsic dignity of the world’ as a whole that Laudato Si’ sees compromised by modern anthropocentrism (LS 115). Together with these diferent attributions of intrinsic value, Laudato Si’ upholds the special dignity and role of human responsibility as ‘every man and woman is created out of love and made in God’s image and likeness’ (LS 65). It is precisely ‘[b]y virtue of our unique dignity and our gift of intelligence that we are called to respect creation and its inherent laws’ (LS 69). The polarity between those axiological claims aims to withstand the tension between the extremes of a ‘misguided anthropocentrism’ on the one side and ‘biocentrism’ on the other (LS 118).5 To assume that Francis straightforwardly breaks with the tradition of Catholic anthropology would therefore be an unjustifed simplifcation.6 The framework to both understand the world where ‘everything is connected’ and orient our interactions with regard to its intrinsic values is built by his programme of ‘integral ecology’ (LS 91, 137–162).7 While human ecology keeps its relevance as one level of integral ecology, it is signifcantly relativised: it is the encompassing spectrum of ecological relations that has to be described and taken into account in order to normatively orient human life within them. As much as Laudato Si’ is to be welcomed for acknowledging the ecological crisis, there remain open questions with regard to its reasoning on the two levels mentioned above. The frst one concerns the notion of value applied to the intrinsic value8 of all creatures, ecosystems and the world on the one hand and the special position for humans on the other hand: are all of these entities equally intrinsically valuable? Is the special human dignity an intrinsic value as well, and if so, how does it difer? What is their practical relevance in cases of possible rivalry? As a result, the encyclical for example remains surprisingly silent with regard to the human treatment of animals in contemporary farming practices.9 So while questions along the distinction of human and non-human life as well as relations between living organisms and their environment are undoubtedly present in the normative horizon of Francis’s integral ecology, their systematic refection remains unsatisfactory.10 When the juxtaposition of unconnected value claims leaves the impression of a lack of coherence for the whole programme of integral ecology, it substantially weakens the persuasive power of the encyclical.11 Since the Pope explicitly addresses ‘every person living on this planet’ (LS 3), it would be unsatisfactory for the encyclical’s claims to simply rest on his authority

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for Catholic or even Christian believers. The occurrence of individual intrinsic values therefore on a second level asks for an axiological explanation embedded in a more general understanding of the natural world in order to bridge the apparent gap between valuable organisms and valueless matter.

Latour’s distribution of agency: remapping materiality The attribution of intrinsic values in Laudato Si’ afects the distinction between living human and living non-human as well as the general relation between life and matter. Restricting the scope to the diference of human and non-human organisms would leave open the question of how such a concept of value can be coherently grounded in a general understanding of the material world. The focus of this chapter therefore shifts to a revision of how materiality is understood, in order to gain a common foundation for the encyclical’s diferent claims. First, the general question of a relation between matter and value is considered. Second, a condensed look at Latour’s Facing Gaia will highlight his approach to materiality, which is, thirdly, diferentiated in terms of Latour’s distribution of agency throughout Gaia’s networks of actants.

On values in matter and the search for a New Materialism For the claim of a proper value intrinsic to all creatures or the intrinsic dignity of the world, the modern concept of matter sketched above can hardly ofer an adequate basis without the introduction of some kind of external foundation for those values. If the general understanding of the natural world is dominated by the notion of purely passive objects, then the activity assigned to human subjectivity marks a categorical exception. Consequently, these human beings form the only ends in themselves, while everything else assumes the role of a mean relative to those ends. The conceptual juncture of these clear-cut categories grounds the axiological emphasis of modern anthropocentrism. It is against this background that Laudato Si’ aims to change the way we think about ecological relations. In search for an alternative understanding of the material aspects of ecology, the encyclical can fnd a somewhat unexpected ally in the intention ‘to experience the relationship between persons and other materialities more horizontally’,12 which motivates discussions about the need for a New Materialism. One of the most prominent contributions in this feld is Jane Bennett’s 2010 book Vibrant Matter, in which she advances the concept of ‘vital materialism’ in order to revise the roles ascribed to human beings on the one hand and mere ‘things’ on the other hand.13 Matter itself is supposed to be ‘fgured as a vitality at work both inside and outside of selves, and is a force to be reckoned with without being purposive in any strong sense’.14 With regard to questions about the interactions between human beings and their surroundings, Bennett’s approach resonates well with the broader felds of Science and Technology Studies and network theories. For the crossing between these strands of research and a sociological

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view on the politics of climate change, the role of religion and the signifcance of worldviews in the ongoing development of Western modernity, one of the outstanding fgures in recent years has been Bruno Latour. Thus it is his work on Facing Gaia that is chosen here as an exemplary counterpart for the intersections between New Materialism and Christian social ethics in the context of the environmental crisis.15

Matter vs. materiality in Latour’s Facing Gaia What Latour tries to undermine is an understanding of Nature as the neutral counterpart that transcends and eludes all cultural infuence.16 To face Gaia is to turn away from Nature as ‘we’—the ‘Moderns’ Latour seeks to understand and address throughout his works—are used to comprehending it. This Nature forms one of the central pillars of what Latour describes as the ‘constitution’17 of modernity: the belief in Nature as the source of an objective truth, which unites all political parties and thus eventually pacifes all political confict through unambiguous knowledge.18 For Latour, it is this belief in Nature and its transcendent stability that keeps the Moderns from realising the full and existential bearing of climate change.19 Cultural developments transform what was supposed to be the unchanging Nature around us. In the Anthropocene, Nature can no longer be defned independently from culture, and if we follow Latour, in fact it never could.20 They do not form two separate spheres, but only the one complex of ‘Nature/Culture’.21 The Modern assumption of a strict separation between Nature and all human culture for Latour has a twin in the distinction of human subjects on the one side, who act in a world of objects, which on the other side remains purely passive. In both cases, his critique aims at the implicit claim that such presumptions are in some way an entirely neutral given of how the world objectively is. Instead, it becomes vital to see how both sides of those distinctions are complex products of human life in interaction with its surroundings: [W]e obtain the apparent inertia of the material world as soon as we distribute agency among causes and consequences in such a way as to attribute everything to the causes and nothing to the consequences, except the property of being traversed by the efect without adding anything to it. We gain access to materiality when we reject this secondary operation that eliminates agents and when we leave the consequences with all the agency of which they are capable.22 Instead of one-sided human subjects being the active cause for consequences in the world of equally one-sided passive matter, Latour seeks to describe a world of complex networks where efects of other efects efect further efects, and no special roles are assigned a priori. Human beings as well as all the things, which infuence them in whatever they do, are thus primarily conceived of as

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forming one indistinct ‘metamorphic zone’.23 This zone comprises all the materiality of the world, whereas a fgure like passive matter or even the Nature of the Moderns appears only as a secondary construct, highlighting selective aspects of what happens in those networks while obscuring others. This ‘Great Enclosure’24 without any clear-cut and defnite orientations is what Latour suggests we call Gaia.

Actors in networks and the distribution of agency In refuting the idea of a pre-given dichotomy between active human subject and passive matter, Latour fundamentally challenges how and to whom agency is attributed. The conceptual core of his understanding of materiality or the metamorphic zone therefore lies in his consequential account of what ‘acting’ is. A concise presentation of Latour’s theory of action is given in his Reassembling the Social from 2005. The most basic way in which action is taken to occur and be observable in the world is considered to be ‘how someone makes another do things’:25 ‘if we stick to our decision to start from the controversies about actors and agencies, then any thing [sic!] that does modify a state of afairs by making a diference is an actor—or, if it has no fguration yet, an actant’.26 What constitutes an action in this sense is the consequence of whatever happens within a network: if there is an observable consequence, acting has occurred. More complex qualities like intention or mentally represented purpose therefore become less relevant as they only emerge in secondary operations of interpretation. The implications of such a consequentialist theory of action can be seen in the example of how to describe the network that evolves between a hotel keeper and her guests.27 The hotelier wants the guests to leave their room keys at the reception to prevent them from getting lost. For the guests, it might seem most convenient to just keep their keys with them, in order to be independent of the reception. If the hotelier simply asked for the keys to be handed to the reception on their way out, guests might not take it seriously or forget about it. The solution is a rather large and heavy metal key pendant: its weight and size cause the guests to hand the key over so as not to carry it around with them. Therefore, the relevant network in this aspect of a hotel’s operation cannot be adequately described without referencing the role of this pendant: in making the guest give the key to the receptionist, the pendant is an actor in this network, an active ‘mediator’ instead of a merely passive ‘intermediary’ between hotel keeper and guest.28 Latour’s methodological principle to keep the observation and description of what is going on in the world uncompromised by preconceived categories like a sovereign human subject or the cliché of matter, is to ‘follow the actors’.29 This leads him to the description of efects, of diferences made that result in a modifed state of afairs and thus step by step make accessible what is connected in a vast network that is impossible to survey as a whole. Every identifcation of an enduring actor in such a network is secondary to the multitude of actants, which

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can be observed in the frst place. Therefore, agency primarily has to be considered as distributed among all those actants that form materiality. What can be gained from Latour’s view on materiality with regard to Laudato Si’ and its conceptual problems described above? One objection pointed to the confict between the claim of an intrinsic value of all creatures and the purely passive and value-neutral matter they are supposed to be made of. If we consider agency to be distributed throughout all of materiality, the primary multitude of actants marks a vital step towards the extension of intrinsic value beyond human beings. In Latour’s understanding of the ANT, the appearance of human beings as well as all fguration of specifc actors occurs as a secondary operation in describing the networks observed. Since the consequentialist theory of action— presented in Reassembling the Social and still efective in Facing Gaia, in spite of the diferentiations introduced in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME)30 — equates relevance in networks with the efect evoked by an actant, the value of each actant in any network can be understood as closely linked to the action through which it exists in this network in the frst place. There remains, however, a fundamental problem about the special role and value of human beings, which Laudato Si’ aims to uphold: if the levelled agency of actants is the basic factor for the attribution of relevance or value, then Latour’s ANT holds no basis for a distinctive position for humans. Even though Latour’s works can be understood to aim at motivating humans to a specifc sort of political action, Latour himself admits the ‘complete indiference for providing a model of human competence’31 in his ANT: since any a priori epistemological decision on which kinds of actors are to be observable, an assumption like the rational human subject as the starting point for any description would be methodologically incompatible. Whether or not Latour’s approach has the potential to close this gap has been contested especially within the sociological reception of his ANT. In their discussion of Reassembling the Social, Keller and Lau criticise Latour for engaging in ‘the ideological trade of deresponsibility’ (das ideologische Geschäft der Entverantwortung). 32 And even with regard to Latour’s more recent works, Hamilton has pointed out that Latour, together with a large tendency in the humanities, threatens to lose sight of the power of human agency, rendering it impossible to confront the course of the Anthropocene. 33 For this reason, the goal of the following section is to deepen the philosophical understanding of actants in general as well as organisms and human beings in particular within their respective ecological relations. At least to some extent, the diferentiations in AIME might be able to achieve this and meet the objections above, but Facing Gaia itself remains quite sparse with regard to a systematic reception and continuation of AIME’s ontological modes as a mean for its own argumentation. Even without such amendments, the strength of Latour’s works lies in the cross-disciplinary links he provides for ecological questions with perspectives from sociology, epistemology and ontology. When Facing Gaia frequently refers to Whitehead’s works for assistance in revising the modern

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concept of ‘Nature’,34 Latour himself points towards introducing Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’,35 or process philosophy, as a philosophical reference system. In following this direction further than Latour did, the conceptual yield can be signifcantly increased.

Whitehead’s panexperiential ontology: understanding humans within a world of becoming experience Similar to Latour despite the diferent historical context, Whitehead criticises the dominant ‘materialism’36 or ‘materialistic mechanism’37 in Western modernity. For Whitehead, this view combines the ‘bifurcation of nature’38 between physical and phenomenal properties with a metaphysical exaggeration of modern physics. Where Latour aims to make the description of actor-networks as granular as possible, however, Whitehead develops a rational scheme, systematic but nevertheless open for ongoing revision, to provide a general understanding for our diferent felds of experience while avoiding the reductionist fallacies present in the dominating worldview of Western modernity. The frst step of the following section introduces the basic elements in Whitehead’s ontology. Second, the question of how these elements come together and develop more complex structures is treated before the third step highlights the process concept of values as a bridge to the discussion of Laudato Si’.

The fnal facts are becoming subjects of experience For Whitehead, the purpose of philosophy lies in the ongoing endeavour to rationally describe the fundamental structures of reality common to our different felds of experience.39 First and foremost, the systematic scheme of such descriptions is required to be logical and coherent: its principal assumptions must neither contradict each other nor stand as axiomatic claims with no explicable relation. Furthermore, since even the most consistent system of metaphysical descriptions is never an abstract end in itself, Whitehead requires his envisaged scheme to be in principle adequately applicable to every feld of experience. Since the scope of such felds of experience can always be extended, such a scheme can never claim to have reached its fnal conclusion and to be ‘true’ in this concluding sense. Instead, even as a cosmological system it remains open to ongoing revision, every time a newly considered experience necessitates a correction of the descriptive patterns. The predominant example for those requirements to be failed is seen in the inadequacy of modern materialism, when it is applied to our self-experience as human beings.40 According to Whitehead, the roots that helped this metaphysical model to become dominant in Western modernity lie in Cartesian substance dualism combined with the ever-extended aspiration to explain every feld of experience in terms of ‘extended matter’: a universe built out of individual substances of matter, each existing independently through time and related to other

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pieces of matter in the external relations described by classical modern physics.41 Since this scheme does not include any account for the relevance of an inner dimension of frst-person experience, human self-experience is either explained away as a mere epiphenomenon of microphysical processes or rescued by means such as the assumption of a categorical jump in the evolving universe, which bridges the gap between passive, deterministic matter and the phenomenal quality of mental subjectivity.42 Since for Whitehead neither of these options can be satisfying, he holds that some basic form of experience has to be assumed all the way down: from the human self to the animal organism and to the individual event in the history of an electron, which also constitutes itself in reaction to its environment.43 As a consequence, Whitehead’s own position is centred around a process concept of ‘actual entity’ or ‘actual occasion’,44 as that which is taken to be actually real in the strictest sense: ‘The fnal facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.’45 There are especially two aspects to be spelled out here. First, the fnal facts are characterised as ‘drops’ or ‘events’ of experience.46 Neither are they merely punctual nor substantially unchanging, but individual events with a certain ‘duration’.47 As such, those fnal facts are essentially becoming in contrast to being conceived as primarily static being: when their becoming reaches its ‘satisfaction’48 in the concrete realisation of this specifc event of experience, their present passes by and forms part of the past of all future processes of becoming. The second aspect to be pointed out is that by characterising the actual entities as the fnal facts, all that exists is to be considered either as an experiencing subject itself, or it exists essentially as an element in such experience. This primary ontological role of becoming experience forms Whitehead’s ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ in response to the tradition of Cartesian substance ontology: ‘that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness’.49 With everything—the Greek pan—being ontologically grounded in experience, Whitehead ofers a truly ‘panexperiential’50 philosophy.

Material objects and the hierarchy of organisms If the fnal facts are understood as drops of experience, how do they form the stable structures of reality which mark our everyday experiences? The process answer to this question starts with the event of a single experience and what distinguishes its content and form from others. To explain the dynamic evolution of the universe and life within it, Whitehead assumes an efective direction in this process towards the realisation of more complex patterns of experience compared to what is possible to experience in an empty space.51 A frst step lies in the repetition of elements in the immediate past, which allows for the continuity of form necessary, for example, for a chain of events to continue the path of a specifc electron for a certain period. Such a group of actual entities characterised

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by realising the same formative element is termed a ‘society’, with the individual actual entities being its ‘members’.52 When those members are experienced by another actual entity, the society enriches this experience in its contrast to other societies or even to a world with no continuous elements at all. Whitehead distinguishes two diferent ‘strategies’ in this context, which both aim at bringing forth larger societies and improve the conditions for subsequent events of experience.53 In a world of primarily chaotic processes, the frst strategy is focused on stability: on upholding certain structures as independently of their changing environment as possible. Whitehead links this strategy to material objects: The art of persistence is to be dead. […] A rock survives for eight hundred million years; whereas the limit for a tree is about a thousand years, for a man or an elephant about ffty or one hundred years, for a dog about twelve years, for an insect about one year.54 To minimise the relevance of novelty is at the same time the key to and the price for this strength in continuity. As long as there is no direct physical impact, a rock can remain largely untouched by what occurs all around it; however, with this suppressing of novelty being the main focus for the actual entities that constitute that rock, Whitehead claims that their experience remains a practically trivial repetition of the past. In contrast, the second strategy inverts the relevance of occurring novelty. Whitehead links it to living organisms. Through the inclusion of novel developments in the surrounding world in the experience of subsequent actual entities, the importance of mere repetition and stability is relativised. As in Whitehead’s illustration with regard to the art of surviving, on the one hand this renders the societies of such organisms more fragile over time and dependent on a certain range of stable structures being given. On the other hand, however, it enables the organism—strictly speaking, the dominating strand of actual entities that integrate this organism’s levels of experience—to achieve a vast variety of more complex patterns of experience. Through the course of the evolution of life, this strategy is seen to have brought forward the whole range of living organisms in their diferent degrees of incorporating the surrounding processes and responding to them: from single-cell organisms up to the self-conscious experience of human beings.

Intrinsic values in a panexperiential materiality The bridge from this—roughly sketched—ontological scheme to the issues of Laudato Si’ is constructed by the place and function of value in Whitehead’s philosophy, which has been left out so far. Every actual entity is a process of becoming experience. What is experienced is the multitude of past actual entities that constitute the ‘actual world’ up to the present experience.55 This actual

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world is brought together in the concrete present experience, realising one of the potentialities enabled by the infuence of past events. Once the experience as a concrete present passes away, it becomes part of the material for future experiences. In Whitehead’s words: ‘The many become one and are increased by one.’56 The given material grows together in the form realised by the actual entity. In this process of ‘concrescence’, the actual world is experienced, or ‘felt’, by the actual entity.57 As in any of those cases only one of the available potentialities is realised, and since even the sum of past events can never completely determine which one this is going to be, Whitehead assumes an element of ‘decision’58 in the becoming of each actual entity, efecting its own occurrence as an enrichment of the cosmic process of processes.59 Thus, the universe is a process of processes, whose fnal facts are events of experience, experiencing past events of experience on the edge which is the present concrete realisation of a hitherto unrealised potentiality. How internal and external relations come together to form this relational ontology opens the view to the ontological status and role of intrinsic and extrinsic values in this process universe. If an actual entity is taken to be a drop of experience, the content of this experience is frst and foremost its own realisation. To become a specifc event of experience is to experience the realisation of this specifc potentiality.60 For the individual actual entity, this experience as its own subjective perspective on the actual world bears immediate signifcance: the intrinsic value of realising a specifc potentiality in the process of the universe is to experience this very realisation, not as a bygone fact but as a present event. The more complex and the richer in contrast the pattern is, in which the actual world is experienced, the more ‘intense’ the experience of an actual entity can be with regard to the experienced intrinsic value.61 Any experience would not be the same if part of the content or the way this content is experienced were diferent. For this reason, Whitehead assumes all relations linking an actual entity to elements of its own experience to be internal relations: they all together constitute the identity of this specifc actual entity.62 When a past actual entity becomes part of subsequent processes, this being experienced by another actual entity has no further efect on what this past actual entity was in its own present. While this relation is an internal one from the perspective of the present actual entity, it has to be considered an external one from the perspective of the past actual entity.63 Respectively, when the past actual entity is experienced, its own intrinsic value contributes to the intrinsic value of the present actual entity, thereby gaining an extrinsic value with regard to the present actual entity.64 As the intrinsic value is graded in accordance with the complexity and intensity of its experience, so is—at least in rough approximation—the potential extrinsic value it can contribute to subsequent experiences. With these aspects of Whitehead’s ontology laid out, the connection to Latour can be spelled out. Latour developed the notion of materiality in order to combat the dominant cliché of matter in the worldview of the Moderns. In order to undermine the dichotomy of active subject and passive object, he introduces us to

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retracing the networks of actants and the efects they bring forth, before we carry out the secondary operation of fguration, of fguring them as things or humans. By applying a purely consequential theory of action, however, Latour can identify each actant only by means of its efect on other actants. With the conceptual tools from Whitehead’s philosophy, this notion of materiality as based on external consequences can be combined with the inner dimension of experience. All actants are constituted by actual entities, defned by their own event of experience and including the element of decision with regard to the concretely realised potentiality. Even as some or most of such actants are to be considered as conglomerates or ‘societies’ of actual entities, like the hotel key pendant in the example above, the active component Latour ascribes to their function receives an ontological foundation. The intrinsic and extrinsic values of actual entities form the relational networks, which can be observed in the metamorphic zone of Latour’s materiality. Since on the level of fnal facts, everything is experience and it is experience that provides all perceivable processes in this world, Latour’s notion can be refned towards a panexperiential materiality.

Using panexperiential materiality to systematise the claims of Laudato Si’ When Laudato Si’ thematises the world we live in, its refections are framed by the theological notion of creation. For Pope Francis, this opens up a certain degree of freedom when it comes to normative claims without the necessity of a systematic rationale. After all, its intention is not to be a philosophical treatise, but a papal encyclical. So this genre undoubtedly has its advantages with regard to accessibility and widespread resonance, but is, on the downside, hardly capable of avoiding certain difculties. An exemplary case can be seen in the apparent incoherence between the encyclical’s attribution of intrinsic values to diferent entities on the one hand and the special value of human beings on the other hand. Underpinned by the authority of the Pope, these claims can nevertheless be made as a testimony of Christian creation theology and mark an important stand against the anthropocentric exploitation of nature. However, this position exposes itself to the critique that because of the depicted incoherence, Laudato Si’ was unsuited to provide promising guidance in today’s environmental crisis. This in turn increases the difculty for theologians and others to constructively work with the encyclical towards the bundling of religious as well as non-religious resources in the eforts against climate change. It is against this background that the search for a philosophical foundation for the axiological claims in Laudato Si’ gains its relevance. What makes Latour’s works so valuable in this regard is their ability to link the ecological perspective with questions of sociology, epistemology and ontology. He manages to problematise seemingly self-evident concepts like that of matter within the tradition of Western modernity, thereby opening up an explicit discussion of otherwise implicit assumptions. As it was retraced above, his notion of

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distributed agency undermines the all too simple dichotomy of active subject and passive object, relativising the anthropocentric axiom that all genuine activity, and therefore all genuine end in itself, was restricted to human beings. Brought together with the encyclical, the metamorphic zone of Latour’s materiality ofers a potential basis for the claim that human and non-human actors alike are to be accredited the quality of intrinsic value. The conceptual connection between actor and value could be further established with the help of Whitehead. Every actual entity has or realises the intrinsic value to experience the signifcance of its own realisation as a hitherto unrealised potentiality. The internal dimension of contrast and intensity of this subjective experience at the same time introduces a way to qualitatively differentiate the actors, where Latour’s ANT concentrates predominantly on the quantitative aspect of connections in an observed network as a means to distinguish between actors. Combining Latour and Whitehead in the notion of panexperiential materiality ofers one approach to a coherent foundation that connects the two main axiological claims of Laudato Si’. The contrast we know by means of our own self-experience, especially in its conscious aspects, can serve as a good reason to assume that the human organism provides the basis for a special degree of experiential intensity. Most noticeable in this can be considered the capacity to experience what is real in contrast to non-realised, pure potentials.65 This contrast widely enhances the potential to intentionally afect oneself and others, whether for good or for evil. The refection of this potential gives rise to the feld of ethics. One of its insights is the special responsibility, which stems from the impact of human activity on the quality of future actual entities, concerning the intrinsic value of their own experience as well as the extrinsic value they develop in setting the stage for the potential range of subsequent actual entities. Recognising the value of self-conscious experience and the inseparably implicated responsibility with regard to subsequent developments ofers a conceptual foundation for the distinguished role that Laudato Si’ ascribes to human beings as ‘an image of God’ (LS 84). To sum up the journey of this chapter, its starting point was two levels of questions provoked by the axiological claims in the encyclical Laudato Si’, with regard to the threefold distinction between the living human, living non-human and nonliving matter: how the diferent attributions of intrinsic value can be understood in relation to the special dignity of human subjectivity and how the occurrence of such values in an otherwise value-neutral material world can be grounded. The way Latour undermines the dichotomy between active humans and passive matter through his distribution of agency among all actants in the metamorphic zone of materiality at the same time undermines any clear-cut separation between human and non-human life. By avoiding these categorical distinctions, Latour ofers a coherent foundation for the encyclical’s multiple attribution of intrinsic values beyond human exclusivity and provides a conceptual link towards the ecological refection of ontological issues in general. From the perspective of Laudato Si’,

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however, Latour goes too far in simply dissolving the tension between humans and non-human values, since the special role of human responsibility towards creation is equally dissolved. To maintain the connection between ecological concerns and ontological refection, Whitehead’s process ontology was considered for the systematic expansion towards a panexperiential materiality: the graded intensity of realised experience allowed for one way to bridge the gap between the distributed agency among all actual entities and the tiered order of intrinsic values, which grounds the special status for the intrinsic as well as extrinsic value of human experience. For the tradition of theological anthropology that the encyclical emerges from, Whitehead’s philosophy nevertheless presents several obstacles, which could not be explored in detail here. But even under this caveat, the conceptual conjunction with a general understanding of the material world beyond modern materialism—be it process ontology or any better suited one— can build an important bridge for the message of Laudato Si’ to be understood beyond its Catholic audience. After all, using process ontology to think about values does not have the goal to suggest its adoption as a simple solution to ecological challenges, but to help our understanding meet the complexity of what is at stake in human interactions with their environment, from our immediate surroundings up to the scale of planetary systems.

Notes 1 Francis, ‘Laudato Si’’. References to Laudato Si’ will appear in the main text with the abbreviation LS; numbers refer to paragraphs. 2 Cf. Barbato, ‘Holy See’; Heimbach-Steins and Stockmann, ‘Impuls’. 3 Cf. Barbieri, ‘Post-Secularity’, 82–85. 4 Cf. Vogt, Christliche Umweltethik, 219–267. 5 For the dialectical approach to polarities in Francis’s thinking cf. Borghesi, Pope Francis. 6 Grey has convincingly shown the theological continuity between the strong anthropocentrism in Gaudium et spes and Francis’s position in Laudato Si’: Grey, ‘Only Creature’. 7 Cf. Miller, ‘Integral Ecology’, 11–21. 8 Since Laudato Si’ does not use the terms ‘intrinsic value’, ‘proper value’, ‘value in themselves’ or ‘intrinsic dignity of the world’ as precisely defned and diferentiated concepts, it seems unproblematic to summarise them under the term ‘intrinsic value’. 9 Cf. Clough, ‘Treatment of Animals’. 10 Cf. Moellendorf, ‘Cry of the Earth’. 11 Cf. Deane-Drummond, ‘Catholic Forms’, 251–253. 12 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10. 13 Cf. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 1–19. 14 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 62. 15 Another rewarding example is given by Barad, Meeting the Universe. From her background in theoretical physics, she attributes agency to assemblages instead of individual actors. While this helps to undermine human exclusivism, it poses its own challenges for an intrinsic value of individual creatures in general as a desiderate for theological refection. 16 Cf. Latour, Facing Gaia, 7–38. 17 Latour, Never Been Modern, 29–32.

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Cf. Latour, Facing Gaia, 146–183, 220–254. Cf. Latour, Facing Gaia, 20–33. Cf. Latour, Never Been Modern, 15–28. Latour, Facing Gaia, 16. Latour, Facing Gaia, 71. Latour, Facing Gaia, 58. Latour, Facing Gaia, 221, referring to the painting of Caspar David Friedrich. Latour, Reassembling, 70, Fn. 82. Latour, Reassembling, 71. Cf. Latour, Berliner Schlüssel, 53–61. Cf. Latour, Facing Gaia, 69, Fn. 71. Latour, Reassembling, 12. The conceptual continuity in Latour’s works is a question in its own right. As an entry point cf. Latour, ‘Coming Out’; Gertenbach and Laux, Zur Aktualität, 253–258. Latour, ‘On Actor-Network-Theory’, 373. Keller and Lau, ‘Bruno Latour’, 328. Hamilton, Defant Earth, 85–98. Cf. Latour, Facing Gaia, 35–36, Fn. 66, 68, Fn. 61, 85. Whitehead, Process and Reality, xi. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 78. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 51. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 30–31. Cf. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 3–17. Cf. Brüntrup, ‘Motivation und Verwirklichung’. Cf. Kann, Fußnoten, 150–167. It is important to note that Whitehead’s critique is directed to the impact of Cartesian dualism in Western history and not against Descartes himself. For a more recent analysis of this problem cf. Strawson, ‘Realistic Monism’. The biological implications of Whitehead’s philosophy have gained signifcant attention in recent years: cf. e.g. Koutroufnis, Organismus als Prozess; Falkner and Falkner, Selbstgestaltung der Lebewesen. Cf. Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, 16–20. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18. Cf. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 105–107. Whitehead later changed his terminology for the basic units of his ontology to ‘actual entity’, while the term ‘event’ moved closer towards a more general meaning; cf. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 80; Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, 23. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 125. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 26. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 167. Cf. Grifn, Reenchantment, 97. Cf. Whitehead, Function of Reason, 1–28. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 34. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 101–102. Whitehead, Function of Reason, 2. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 28. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 41. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 43. Cf. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 88, 190. Whether there are conscious aspects in how this realisation is experienced, can be regarded as a secondary question here. For the status of conscious experience see Whitehead, Process and Reality, 161–162; Grifn, Postmodern Philosophy, 61–62. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 83. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 59.

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63 Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, 31. 64 Cf. Grifn, Postmodern Philosophy, 74. 65 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 188.

Bibliography Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. DOI:10.1215/9780822388128. Barbato, Mariano P. ‘The Holy See, Public Spheres and Postsecular Transformations of International Relations: An Introductionʼ. In The Pope, the Public, and International Relations. Postsecular Transformations, edited by Mariano P. Barbato, 1–22. Culture and Religion in International Relations. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-46107-2. Barbieri, William. ‘Post-Secularity and the Pluralization of Public Theologyʼ. In T&T Clark Handbook of Public Theology, edited by Christoph Hübenthal and Christiane Alpers, 69–85. London; New York: T & T Clark, 2022. DOI:10.5040/9780567692184.0009. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Borghesi, Massimo. The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018. Brüntrup, Godehard. ‘Motivation und Verwirklichung des autonomen Selbstʼ. In Warum wir handeln—Philosophie der Motivation, edited by Godehard Brüntrup and Maria Schwartz, 175–200. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012. Clough, David L. ‘Rethinking Our Treatment of Animals in Light of Laudato Si’ʼ. In Laudato Si’ and the Environment: Pope Francis’ Green Encyclical, edited by Robert McKim, 95–104. London: Routledge, 2019. DOI:10.4324/9780429492068. Cobb, John B. Whitehead Word Book. A Glossary. With Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality. Claremont: P&F Press, 2008. Deane-Drummond, Celia. ‘Working with Catholic Forms of Christianityʼ. In T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, edited by Ernst M. Conradie and Hilda Koster, 244–254. Bloomsbury Collections. London; New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2020. DOI:10.5040/9780567675187.0038. Falkner, Gernot G. and Renate Falkner. Die Selbstgestaltung der Lebewesen in Erfahrungsakten. Eine prozessbiologisch-ökologische Theorie der Organismen. Biophilosophie 2. Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 2020. Francis. ‘Laudato Si’’. 2015. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/ documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Gertenbach, Lars and Henning Laux. Zur Aktualität von Bruno Latour. Einführung in sein Werk. Aktuelle und klassische Sozial- Und Kulturwissenschaftler|innen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019. Grey, Carmody T. S. ‘The Only Creature God Willed For Its Own Sake: Anthropocentrism in Laudato Si’ and Gaudium et Spesʼ. Modern Theology 36, no. 4 (2020): 865–883. DOI:10.1111/moth.12588. Grifn, David R. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism. A Process Philosophy of Religion. Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Grifn, David R. Whitehead’s Radically Diferent Postmodern Philosophy. An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Hamilton, Clive. Defant Earth. The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2017.

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Heimbach-Steins, Marianne and Nils Stockmann. ‘Ein Impuls zur ‘Ökologischen Umkehr’—Die Enzyklika Laudato Si’ und die Rolle der Kirche als Change Agentʼ. In Die Enzyklika Laudato Si’. Ein Interdisziplinärer Nachhaltigkeitsansatz?, edited by Marianne Heimbach-Steins and Sabine Schlacke, 11–54. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2019. Kann, Christoph. Fußnoten zu Platon. Philosophiegeschichte bei A. N. Whitehead. Paradeigmata 23. Hamburg: Meiner, 2001. Keller, Reiner and Christoph Lau. ‘Bruno Latour und die Grenzen der Gesellschaftʼ. In Bruno Latours Kollektive. Kontroversen zur Entgrenzung des Sozialen, edited by Georg Kneer, Markus Schroer and Erhard Schüttpelz, 306–38. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1862. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. Koutroufnis, Spyridon A. Organismus als Prozess. Begründung einer neuen Biophilosophie. Whitehead-Studien 4. Freiburg i.Br.; München: Alber, 2019. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. Der Berliner Schlüssel. Berlin: Akad.-Verl., 1996a. ———. ‘On Actor-Network-Theory. A Few Clarifcationsʼ. Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996b): 369–81. ———. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. ‘Coming Out as a Philosopherʼ. Social Studies of Science 40, no. 4 (2010): 599–608. ———. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge; Medford: Polity, 2017. Miller, Vincent J. ‘Integral Ecology: Francis’s Spiritual and Moral Vision of Interconnectednessʼ. In The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’: Everything Is Connected, edited by Vincent J. Miller, 11–28. London; New York: T & T Clark, 2017. DOI:10.5040/9780567673190.0009. Moellendorf, Darrell. ‘The Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poorʼ. In Laudato Si’ and the Environment: Pope Francis’ Green Encyclical, edited by Robert McKim, 60–75. London: Routledge, 2019. DOI:10.4324/9780429492068. Strawson, Galen. ‘Realistic Monism. Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychismʼ. In Consciousness and Its Place in Nature. Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?, edited by Galen Strawson and Anthony Freeman, 3–31. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2006. Vogt, Markus. Christliche Umweltethik. Grundlagen Und Zentrale Herausforderungen. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2021. Whitehead, Alfred N. The Function of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929. ———. Science and the Modern World. Lovell Lectures, 1925. New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1948. ———. The Concept of Nature. The Tarner Lectures. Delivered in Trinity College November 1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. ———. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Giford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28. Corrected Edition Ed. by David Ray Grifn and Donald W. Sherburne. New York; London: The Free Press, 1978.

5 BINDING THE WOUNDS OF MOTHER EARTH Christian Animism, New Materialism and the Politics of Nonhuman Personhood Today Mark I. Wallace

In my teens I used to wake up at sunrise and fnd quiet outdoor spaces where I could be alone. In college I did the same by walking in a wooded lagoon area on the University of California at Santa Barbara campus. By the lagoon early one morning I entered a clearing, and what I thought was a large dog bounded from the forest towards me. Magnifcent and terrifying, it raised up on its hind legs, put its huge paws on my shoulders, and fastened its gaze on me in an unblinking stare down. I froze. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. ‘This is a big dog’, I thought, but it didn’t look like any dog I had ever seen. It presented a long, commanding muzzle; massive shoulders; and yellow knowing eyes that cut through me like a knife. A rope was tied around its neck. At that moment, a young woman appeared through the trees and spoke to me, ‘Don’t move, it’s a wolf.’ The wolf and I locked eyes for a moment—and in a fash the woman reached out to grab the loose end of the rope, the creature bounced of my shoulders, and both disappeared into the woods. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. That morning I entered another world—a world of dangerous beauty and power that didn’t make any sense within the assumptions of my everyday experience. Prior to this encounter, my existence followed the sanitised routines kept by many of us: I lived and worked in temperature-controlled buildings; I ate processed, pre-packaged food; and I relied on fossil-fuel modes of transportation that didn’t require me to account for the real cost to the planet of my consumerist lifestyle. I interacted with the wider expanse of nonhuman nature as a passing show and not especially relevant to what really mattered to me at that juncture in my life. But locking eyes with a wolf a few inches from my face—in all of my fear and vulnerability—shocked me into the painful realisation that I was ill-equipped for this other world—this other world in all of its strangeness, mystery and force. Amidst the busyness of my routine existence something weird and wonderful DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-6

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was occurring just outside my college dormitory window. Something was happening that I hadn’t expected and for which I was badly prepared. After Jesus’ resurrection in the Gospel of Luke, two of his disciples are joined by Jesus on the road to Emmaus, but they fail to recognise his identity. Following what appears to be many hours of rambling conversation, these disciples continue to mistake Jesus as a stranger who is surprisingly unaware of the events leading up to his own arrest, trial and crucifxion. Only as night falls do Jesus’ unknowing followers recognise him as the new Messiah.1 Before the lagoon animal, I was like these disciples. I was ignorant of what was taking place directly in front of me. As a person of faith, I had always believed in revelatory moments, but after my encounter with the wolf I was beginning to see that the natural world itself, in all of its vibrancy and splendour, is a continuous revelation. I had always understood that divinity was somehow present in creation. Yet now I saw that everyday life is charged with intimations of another world—a parallel, unseen world of glory and awe—that had always been there but that I had largely missed. To this day, I am not sure what kind of animal jumped up on me in Santa Barbara. Was it really a wolf? A big dog that looked like a wolf? Something else?2 Perhaps the creature was a hybridised wolfdog—a mixed Canis lupus that presented and behaved like a wolf but that was crossbred with a dog, recently or in its distant past.3 Producing wolfike pups through artifcial selection is called backcrossing: mating a lupine dog with a wolf (or a wolfdog with high-content wolf DNA) in order to pass on the wolf ’s genetic profle in the propagation of the hybrid animal. This is an arduous discipline in which breeders select for a constellation of certain primitive traits that approximate, if not fully realise, the feral beauty and intelligence of an untamed wolf. At times, backcrossing has been seen a controversial practice. By directly intervening in the birth-cycles of what are today two very diferent canines, wolves and dogs, wolfdogs are occasionally the unhappy byproducts of a confusing genetic assemblage. But this hereditary mingling need not result in behavioural problems. Native people, in particular, testify to centuries of afability between humans and wolfdogs—and between humans and quasi-domestic wolves. As canine scholars Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg put it, ‘In contrast to Western “scientifc” approaches, stories of Indigenous peoples from around the world tell of almost universally positive interactions between wolves and humans.’4 Especially among Indigenous communities, we have numerous accounts of deep and meaningful relationships between wolfdogs and humans, and between wolves and humans, in spite of the non-native bias that such relationships are pockmarked with insecurity and not genuinely possible. To be sure, my encounter with the lagoon canid was fraught with danger, but it resolved any potential confict between us with grace and intelligence. I don’t know what percentage of wolf DNA was carried by the animal I met that morning, but to me that doesn’t matter. For my purposes, what matters is the transformation of my original worldview that took place based on this encounter. Whatever its genetic heritage, the majestic wolf (or wolf hybrid) that met me in the clearing years ago catapulted

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me into a new relationship with the power and wonder of the living world that continues today. ***** I recently wrote a book called When God Was a Bird in which I narrated a series of my interactions with everyday animal others, especially birds, using the hoary category of animism to make sense of such interactions.5 The notion of animism—the ascription of an inner vibrancy or life-force to all things—is a contested term that both resists and welcomes contemporary critical adoption. For me, the value of this analytical tool cannot be overemphasised. The concept of animism enables me to better understand the full personhood of the Santa Barbara wolf as a highly intelligent, ethically responsible, and socially adept being who exercised remarkable restraint in the face of my shock and confusion during our sudden meeting at frst light. Philosopher Arthur Danto writes that ‘[i]t is responsible agents, executing their own purposes, who are regarded as persons’.6 In my mind, the lagoon canid was just such a person. It exercised its own purposive moral agency in deciding to abruptly, but nonviolently, take stock of my movements and intentions in the early hours of its forest constitutional.7 And I believe that for many of us, assigning rational, moral personhood to a being who clearly exhibits the kind of self-awareness and emotional complexity that this wolf demonstrated is not at all a stretch of the imagination. But the idea of animism also unlocks the discursive language necessary to study the capacities for sentience, rationality, relationality and fourishing that essentially defne all forms of life—everything from moulds and mushrooms to plants and humans—not simply iconic fauna such as the highly evolved lagoon wolf. Be this as it may be, the term, until recently, had appeared to be hopelessly overburdened by its association with the regnant racist and xenophobic assumptions at the point of its most infuential academic deployment in the late1900s. Then and now, animism became a handy weapon in the intellectual arsenal of white supremacy. It was especially useful—along with similar terms such as paganism, fetishism, totemism and the like—as the ideological baseline for the development of anti-Indigenous, English-speaking social and cultural anthropology during the Victorian era. This baseline carried both academic and political valence. Diachronically, the theory of a universal life-force was studied as a coeffcient in the cultural evolution of human societies from their original ‘primitive’ state to their fully realised ‘civilised’ status in the modern West. Politically, it played an important role in justifying Great Britain’s (along with other European countries) fated emergence as the era’s frst global industrial power vis-à-vis its vassal colonies and extraction zones. Etymologically akin to the Latin word animus, which means soul or spirit, animism was vigorously advanced by the late nineteenth-century British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor.8 Tylor developed a comprehensive ‘doctrine of spirits’9 to analyse how traditional people attributed entitative spirits or souls to

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all things, living and nonliving, humankind and otherkind. With special reference to the natural world, he writes that the traditional animist ‘fnds the abode of his good and evil spirits in great rocks, hollow trees, mountains, deep rivers, dense groves, [and] echoing caverns’.10 In this regard, I fnd that Tylor’s pan-spiritism does operate with a certain analytical clarity by illuminating how Indigenous communities, premodern and today, envision nonhuman nature as ‘ensouled’ or ‘inspirited’ with living, sacred power. In my judgment, however, two insurmountable problems stand out in his particular formulation of animism. On the one hand, Tylor describes ‘the spirits proper to men, animals, and things’11 as distinct, localisable entities who mysteriously enter into and sometimes control certain lifeforms and locales. Trading on Roman and pre-Christian notions of the genius loci—the elemental spirit who inhabits or sometimes guards specifc places—he envisioned such self-subsistent spiritual beings as external personalities with their own independent agency. Contemporary neo-animism highlights the prospects of human engagement with something like a spiritworld that is analogous to our own, but not with reference to particular ‘ghostsouls’ such as dryads, nymphs, elves, fairies, genii, demons, gods, etc. that take up residence in the bodies or habitats of other beings.12 Instead of Tylor’s ‘doctrine of spirits’, the present-day academic study of animism centres on the numinous wonder of living in harmonious relationship with the more-than-human-world, a world both like and unlike our own. ‘This animism’, as religious studies scholar Graham Harvey says, ‘refers to ways of living that assume that the world is a community of living persons, all deserving respect, and therefore to ways of inculcating good relations between persons of diferent species’.13 This way of construing animism shifts the focus away from Tylor’s taxonomy of ‘vaporous materiality’14 —a pseudo-scientifc classifcation system of animating soul-entities that now appears manufactured and not true to the general lived experience of Native people over time—towards a model that stresses interdependence, common personhood and mutual responsibility. On the other hand, the problem of Tylor’s animism is directly related to his racist, evolutionary bias against the very communities he purports to study. Shocked at the putative barbarism of his ethnographical subjects, the so-called ‘rude races’,15 the overall emotional tone of his oeuvre devolves into terror and chaos. Its controlled discourse quickly surrenders to monstrous vignettes about vengeful spirits wreaking havoc on the bodies of pregnant women16 to re-animated corpse-vampires who have a predilection for sucking the blood of children.17 In today’s academic parlance, animism stands for a new inter-relational ontology in which all beings are bearers of inherent value and vital members of a communion of subjects.18 But Tylor’s theory of human development assumes an early (read pre-contact) stage of the depraved and childlike ‘savage races’19 giving way to an advanced stage of fact-based, educated white men who expertly purge the modern world of slavish ignorance and primitive survivals. As occidental civilisation advances, the lower races are replaced by the higher races. Inexorably. ‘It may be that the increasing power and range of the scientifc method’, Tylor blithely

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summarises, will ‘continue the progressive work of past ages because light has increased in the world, and where barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view’.20 In the wake of Tylor’s relegation of tribal people to the level of ‘barbaric hordes’ in need of a ‘clear view’—a dark justifcation of the horrors of the modern era from Pope Alexander VI’s Doctrine of Discovery to Euro-American colonialism and genocide21—the question goes begging whether the racist pejorative ‘animism’ can be reclaimed based on its postcolonial explanatory range, its derogatory origins notwithstanding. ***** Guardedly, Chickasaw poet and essayist Linda Hogan does think that the critical recovery of animism—what she calls a ‘beautiful way of seeing’—is possible if performed with care and precision.22 But such a recovery is difcult given the troubled history of this ugly academic slur. Hogan writes that ‘[t]he introduction of the studies of animism to academe was a surprise to me Hearing this for the frst time at a conference, I was horrifed. We were killed in great numbers for being called Pagans and animists’.23 She prefers the tribal descriptor ‘tradition’ to the scholarly term ‘animism’ because ‘it is not a term traditional peoples would use to describe our relationship with, and love for, the world around us’.24 Nevertheless, she writes, ‘I am grateful for the new animism, because it counts for something. Its importance cannot be overstated.’25 And she concludes, ‘What matters is the sacred that is present in everything an acknowledgement that all are sentient beings and of the smallness of our own being in this world of the living, ongoing, life force’.26 Let me give an example of Hogan’s ‘beautiful way of seeing’ through a fresh reading of a biblical story. I am interested in the account of a blind man who, when healed by Jesus, saw people like trees walking about in the Gospel of Mark 8:22-26. Here is the pericope in question: They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I see people, but they look like trees, walking about.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he looked intently, and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then he sent him away to his home, saying, ‘Do not even go into the village.’ Now traditional commentators say that after Jesus rubbed some of his spit into the man’s eyes, and in response to Jesus’ query, ‘Can you see anything?’, the man’s vision is only partially remedied insofar as he muddles together people and trees. Their point is that it is only after Jesus touches the man a second time that he is able to see everything around him with precision and clarity.27

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But I think this interpretation misses the point. The moral of the story is not that Jesus’ frst healing touch failed and needed to be corrected by his second laying on of hands. More accurately, it is that both modes of seeing—the muddledtogether eyesight and the clear-sighted eyesight—are necessary for the man to enjoy full vision. It is not that the man partially sees in the frst instance and only completely sees in the second. Rather, the man’s initial perception of the humanlike qualities of nearby trees—his insight into the personhood, as it were, of tall woody plants—is the necessary condition for his full-spectrum ability to see all things clearly. Recognising the personhood of trees is an animist exercise in discerning that ‘all are sentient beings’, as Hogan puts it.28 All things are imbued with spirit and alive with personhood, self-awareness, teleological aspirations and the capacity to be in relationship with other beings. In traditional cultures it is sometimes said that all of us are persons but only some of us are human. Among Indigenous people, there are bird persons, river ancestors, mountain gods, wolf nations, thunder beings and tree people—a teeming mass of diferent but related lifeforms all endowed with sacred personhood and inviolable rights. In greeting one another or at the beginning of a ceremony, many North American Lakota people signal the presence of their interdependence with other living beings by saying Mitakuye Oyasin, which means ‘all my relations’. This invocation celebrates the vibrant community of mutually supportive kinfolk—the human persons and the more-than-human persons—who weave together the sacred hoop that is necessary for the maintenance of mutual fourishing. Animism proposes that all things—plants and animals, rocks and fungus, mountains and rivers—are persons who are flled with ‘the living, ongoing, life force’.29 In spite of historic Christianity’s genocidal persecution of traditional animists, its own founding documents, painfully and ironically, are deeply rooted in the rich animist soil of sacred Earth. Christian animism, then, is not the importation of something foreign into its native terroir but, rather, it is the long lost but still possible recovery of its ownmost identity. This ancient way of knowing, still discernible within the deep genetic code of biblical faith, has always been a latent strain of meaning available to a variety of interpreters. The aim of my Christian animist recovery is to give new life to the church’s central Johannine teaching that God became fesh and dwells among us. Relying on this touchstone, the essential grammar of Christian faith is both unitary and twofold: the heavenly and the earthly are one; the transcendent and the thisworldly are the same reality; divinity and all of created matter subsist together as one body, one substance, one fesh. Christian animism isn’t a recipe—chili con carne—but the glad tidings of Dios con carne; the eternal Godhead is carnally in-carn-ated—literally, made into meat—within the roots, bones, blood, feathers and visceral, vulnerable fesh of all created beings. The good news that God is promiscuously enfeshed in all physical forms knits together the entirety of Christian scripture and tradition: the ambulatory God walks about the Garden of Eden during an evening breeze; the vegetal God becomes leaves and branches in

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the burning bush who talks to Moses; the tornadic God answers his servant Job out of a whirlwind; the bleeding God entangles Godself in the scarred fesh of his crucifed son; and, as the Holy Spirit, the winged God enfeathers Godself as a dove when alighting upon Jesus at the time of his baptism, and the burning God enfames Godself in the tongues of fre that rest upon the disciples’ heads on the day of Pentecost.30 If you read the Bible with fresh green eyes, you re-discover it is an animist palimpsest: it reveals traces of its earthly origins everywhere even though much of ofcial Christianity has tried to erase these Pagan survivals. And with green eyes, you discover that Mark’s sight restoration miracle makes the most sense as a two-step process in which each step is best understood in a complementary, not a successive, fashion. In the frst instance, the blind man’s creative, intuitive and holistic ‘right brain’, as it were, is restored: he gains the animist ability to perceive the true inter-relational character of all beings, especially trees and humans, as living persons who are walking about together. In the second instance, his analytical, linear and atomistic ‘left brain’ is healed: he now sees with precision not only the unity but also the diferences between trees and humans—that is, he now sees the relative boundary lines that separate the arboreal world from the human world.31 By going deeper into the man’s perspectival animism we can discern the power of his distinctive ontology. By confating trees and humans, the man trades on his belief that both lifeforms are animate beings characterised by their inherent agency, sentience and capacity for relationship with others. ‘I see people, but they look like trees, walking about’ (Mark 8:24). Relying on his visionary and integrative right brain, the man does not encounter trees and humans as occupying diferent taxonomic ranks. Instead, both modes of being are experienced as interrelated subjects who fow in and out of each other in like movement and common identity. Using Tylor’s Primitive Culture as my central case study, my point is that classical Western thought rejects right-brain thinking as primitive and irrelevant. In regard to Mark’s tree people/people trees, our regnant ontology carefully polices the distinction between ‘unfeeling fora’ and ‘sentient human beings’ to whom it exclusively ascribes intelligence and afectability. In the received model, all forms of vegetation are merely insensate objects (not flial lifeforms with inherent value independent of human utility) and thereby only (and always) available to us for control and extraction. Indeed, according to the standard model, it is impossible to assign animacy to senseless woody plants because we have already arrogated to ourselves the privileged role of being the most highly evolved species on the planet. We assert that we are uniquely advanced beyond other lifeforms, and thereby have the power to rightly discriminate between entities that are living and nonliving, sentient and non-sentient, and deserving of life and expendable in our drive for acquisition and control. We bestride the world like a Colossus under whose huge legs the fate of nonhumankind is determined.

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Left-brain critical perception, yes, right-brain unitary thinking, no. Unlike the blind man who can now see all of reality in its unity and divisibility, our stunted worldview is blind to its own narrow assumptions. Our tree friends— and we human people—are not entirely the same, but we are also, and perhaps more importantly, much alike. Trees, like us, enjoy rich and varied cognitive and emotional lives. Like us, they have rational capacities, emotional feelings, distinctive moods and particular ways of behaving and communicating. When threatened, trees send out nasty tannins and dangerous gases to ward of predators. When in love, trees produce sweet-smelling pheromones and electrical signals, often through underground fungal networks, and thereby teach one another how to live together with enough soil, light and nutrients for everyone to fourish. Nowadays, foresters and ecologists recognise that trees and humans are similar: we look alike—tall and upright—and we rely on one another for food and nurture.32 Is it any wonder, then, that the healing of the blind man consisted frst and foremost in his new-found ability to see the deep connections between human persons and tree people—and to see these connections not as a stage to be overcome in the healing process, but as the necessary condition of the man’s progress towards full-sightedness? ***** Its troubling history notwithstanding, I have sought to this point to critically valorise the contemporary notion of animism, and its deep afnity with original Christianity, due to the promise of its all-embracing relational ontology. To some degree, my proposal of Christian animism follows the turns to ‘new materialism’ within contemporary continental philosophy, queer theory, critical animal studies and quantum physics. I fnd especially helpful the new materialist analysis of the agential capacities of nonhuman beings, and the posthumanist disavowal of anthropocentrism, as critical insights into the formation of generative intersubjectivity across the divides that separate humankind and otherkind. A new vitalist ontology of the relational energies of the material world, coupled with a new anti-speciesist ethics of equal regard for all lifeforms, are parallel movements that support the critical recovery of animism as the hidden baseline of the Christian religion. Jane Bennett is an infuential new materialist who, at frst glance, sounds many of the important animist themes I’ve outlined in this essay. She writes about the inherent vibrancy of material formations as ‘the capacity of things to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’. 33 Furthermore, she helpfully specifes the exact nature of the agential dynamics of everyday matter by noting her agreement with Spinoza’s idea of Conatus, namely, the inherent efcacy of ‘everything insofar as it is in itself endeavors to persist in its own being’. 34 And yet while Bennett afrms that all of the natural world is characterised by ‘an active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new’, 35 she balks at labelling her

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‘monism’ as a ‘diversity unifed by a common spirit’. 36 Bennett makes clear that her ‘vital materialism is more thoroughly nontheistic’37 than the alternative view in which material vibrancy ‘is best attributed to a nonmaterial source, to an animating spirit or “soul”’.38 Matter, she writes, is ‘intrinsically lively (but not ensouled)’. 39 By eschewing the language of divinity, spirit or soul as possible cognate terms for understanding the conative nature of things, Bennett marks of her position from ‘several nonmodern (and often discredited) modes of thought, including animism, the Romantic quest for nature, and vitalism’.40 Initially she notes what may appear to be prima facie similarities between her position and these ‘discredited’ thought-systems. But in the end, she doubles down on her criticism of premodern animism and vitalism by refusing to ‘revisit and become temporarily infected by discredited philosophies of nature, risking “the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, and other premodern attitudes”’.41 By invoking the old canard of ‘superstition’ as a put-down of premodern worldviews, sadly, the stench of Occidentalism wafts throughout Bennett’s new materialism. Her desire to avoid the contagion of ‘discredited philosophies of nature’ such as ‘animism’ and other ‘premodern attitudes’ refects her Enlightenment circumscription of reality according to modernity’s agreed-upon criteria of rational experience. In Native vernacular, the Earth is holy. But over and against the signifcance of Indigenous belief in the spiritual unity of all things—and contrary to Hogan’s point that ‘[w]hat matters is the sacred that is present in everything’42—Bennett purchases her secular materialism at the price of denigrating, once again, premodern tribal knowledge as outmoded, superstitious and irrational. My point is not that Bennett should appropriate tribal categories not her own, or invoke ideas about religious transcendence as the guarantor of her project. Rather, I am suggesting that by scrubbing clean any reference to what William James called the possibility of something more43 —however this something more might be said using tribal and new animist notions of the spiritual or the sacred, or even quasireligious terms such as faith or hope—Bennett’s thought devolves into a thin and reductive materialism that fails to account for the power of the ancient (and now critically recovered) animist embrace of the ‘living, ongoing life force’44 that unifes all things as common kinfolk. I read Bennett’s philosophy as a welcome, but truncated, half-turn to a neo-vitalist ontology that ofers a partial corrective to the necrophilic and exploitative attitudes towards the natural world—a world that is viewed as dead and inert rather than alive and sacred—that defnes our era of late capitalism. But this half-turn is not a full-turn. It is not a full-turn to a more robust retrieval of the very inter-relational assumptions—Hogan’s ‘beautiful way of seeing’45 —that animated for tens of thousands of years, and could do so again, tribal and other religious lifeways of harmony and balance between humankind and all otherkind. *****

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Is animism a sort of naïveté run amuck? I concede that Hogan’s notion that the ‘sacred is present in everything’, or the Markan blind man imputing personhood to trees, seems to operate in an alternative reality discontinuous with modern life. But could it be that animism might ofer to us a wider self who is open to hearing rumours of immanent transcendence without categorically dismissing such rumours as premodern ignorance?46 Paul Ricoeur writes that the fnal aim of the philosopher is to become an ‘adult critic and a naïve child’ in which one seeks to be grounded in both post-positivist science and ancient wisdom traditions.47 Could, then, the modern and the ancient mutually coexist and enhance each other? Alas, it seems that even a post-positivist thinker such as Bennett, who carefully discerns the lineaments of genuine vibrancy in material things, has ruled out such rapprochement. Bennett et al. strike me as captive to the modern West’s epistemological canons that disallow appeals to anything like mystery, alterity, presence or what George Steiner calls ‘a wager on transcendence’,48 as hidebound returns to discredited superstitions. In this regard, sadly, E.B. Tylor and Jane Bennett are cut from the same Anglo-American imperialist cloth. In spite of the academy’s sometimes unsympathetic misunderstanding of the idea of animism, ancient and modern, in the nineteenth century and today, the power of everyday animism to challenge and productively transform our basic existence is now reverberating across the global spectrum. This revolutionary animism is manifesting today as Mother Earth politics. It is particularly potent in the public realm where the breakdown of democratic norms is threatening any sense of mutual responsibility for the common good. In conclusion, let me give three brief examples of this liberatory dynamic within the contemporary global civic community. In 2008, Ecuador created an original, groundbreaking constitution that enshrined in perpetuity the fundamental rights of the natural world—what the Ecuadorans call Mother Earth. As well, in the Quechuan language derived from the ancient Inca empire, the recent charter also refers to the natural world as Pachamama. The new Ecuadoran constitution says, ‘We [are] celebrating nature, the Pacha Mama (Mother Earth), of which we are a part and which is vital to our existence.’ It continues, ‘Persons and communities are bearers of rights and shall enjoy the rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution Nature shall be the subject of those rights that the Constitution recognizes for it.’ And the constitution specifes three particular rights to be recognised for nature, namely, (1) nature has ‘the right to integral respect for its existence’; (2) nature has the right to ‘the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles’; and (3) nature has ‘the right to be restored’.49 Pioneering an innovative vision of the nation-state’s responsibility for maintaining ecosystemic integrity within its borders, Ecuador is the frst country in the world to grant basic rights to Mother Earth. It has followed up this revolutionary judicial philosophy with new legal doctrines that challenge the everyday assumption that nature is inert matter with no inherent value apart from its utility for human use. Just last year, Ecuador’s highest court revoked a state mining company’s extraction permits in a national forest in the northwestern region of

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the country. The high court appealed to the constitution’s Mother Earth provisions as the basis of its ruling that mining would likely damage the fragile and threatened ecosystem of the forest—in animist parlance, mining would likely traumatise the body of Pachamama.50 Similarly, in 2010, Bolivia passed the ‘Law of the Rights of Mother Earth’, in which Pachamama is defned as ‘a dynamic living system comprising an indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny. Mother Earth is considered sacred, from the worldviews of nations and peasant indigenous peoples.’51 Akin to Ecuador’s progressive constitution, Bolivia’s natural rights law posits Mother Earth as the bearer of legal personhood; possessor of inviolable natural rights; and revered as sacred based on the ancient animist worldviews of Indigenous communities, and especially the Quechuan people, the same Native group noted in Ecuador’s new agreement. Here again animist sensibilities give life to this novel legal framework: according to Indigenous communities, human beings are obliged to preserve and restore the fragile health of Mother Earth with an eye towards all beings’ common personhood and common destiny. Finally, let me ofer a third example of everyday animism as the basis of a new global politics. In 2017, the New Zealand parliament decreed that the giant Whanganui River that cuts through the heart of the country’s South Island should now be recognised as a living sacred being with inherent legal rights. This unique law is designed to preserve what the original people of New Zealand refer to as the mana, or spiritual power, and the mauri, or life-force of the river. The new legislation stipulates that the Whanganui River is ‘a living and indivisible whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating its tributaries and all its physical and metaphysical elements’. The river has ‘a set of intrinsic values’ including the ‘rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. The river, then, is more than just a physical body of water. Rather, using animist grammar, the Whanganui River comprises ‘metaphysical elements’ insofar as it is a ‘spiritual and physical entity that sustains the wellbeing’ of all life within its bountiful watershed.52 As is the case with Ecuador and Bolivia, New Zealand’s parliamentary act stems directly from the animist values inherent in the Indigenous belief system of the aboriginal Maori people. Furthermore, this law, just like in Ecuador and Bolivia, is sending shock waves through Greater Polynesia as the practical political work of preserving the Whanganui River’s health and integrity—its divine personhood, as it were—continues apace. ***** Today, we inhabit a planet where everything is a commodity. Every part of the world has been monetised as an asset or a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Education is a consumer good. Healthcare is a for-proft business. Food production is controlled by corporate interests. The whole expanse of the natural world and its life-giving bounty has been reduced to a commercial

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enterprise within the worldwide economy. Market privatisation of most goods and services is the dominant feature of contemporary society. How could the ancient idea of animism and its ideological corollary, Mother Earth politics, ofer an efective counter-testimony to the values of the free market within global capitalism? Consider in this vein the Indigenous science of Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi nation and a plant biologist at SUNY Syracuse. Kimmerer writes that in the Potawatomi language ‘rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fre and places. [These] beings that are imbued with spirit are all animate.’ She continues that one of her community’s central rituals, braiding sweetgrass, embeds her in the beauty of an animate world replete with medicinal and nutritional gifts for everyone. Braiding the silky strands of sweetgrass into a basket—breathing in its fragrance, catching sight of its rich colour scheme, feeling its soft tendrils—is a palpable experience of braiding the hair of Mother Earth. For Kimmerer and her community, braiding sweetgrass is the same as braiding the hair of Mother Earth. Many years ago, bumping headlong into the lagoon wolf opened me to the prospect of another world that I couldn’t imagine. Like the blind man who, when healed, saw walking trees in front of him, I now envision this new world as a soulful habitat populated by myriads of interrelated lifeforms—a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects53 —all of whom are bearers of quickening spirit and sacred grace. I now see before me a world of beauty, power and awe. And I believe it will be the beauty of the world that will redeem the world, if indeed the world is destined to be redeemed. Not angry politics, not despair over what we have or haven’t done, not guilty hand-wringing that it is too late for us to intervene and mitigate the efects of the disaster now upon us. Anger and guilt, while important impetuses in motivating people to action, are not sustainable afects that can undergird consistent change over the long haul. In my judgment, rather, it will be a nurtured sense of gratitude and wonder for the many-splendoured Earth that will save our species and many other lifeforms and habitats. It will be a cultivated sense of spiritual awe in the generous lap of Mother Earth—resting in the beauty and bounty of Pachamama—that will be the ground tone of a new Gaian politics for our time. For Kimmerer, the ritual of braiding sweetgrass is equivalent to braiding the hair of Mother Earth. In this vein, the work of climate justice, environmental restoration and racial and economic equity should now be understood by us as caring for the bodily wellbeing of Mother Earth and her many inhabitants. This terrestrial politics is played against the animist baseline of an age-old song—a song now sung again in a new key for our contemporary moment. And so going forward, with a nod to Hogan’s and Kimmerer’s spirit-flled vision of the common personhood of all things, let us sing in unison, 1.

When we cleanse the atmosphere that gives us breath, we repair the damaged lungs of Mother Earth.

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When we tend to the rivers and seas that sustain all beings, we tend to the weakened circulatory system of Mother Earth. When we restore natural habitats to their life-giving potential, we care for the broken body of Mother Earth. When we labour to heal the hurting plant, animal and mineral souls around us, we nurture the rich family life of Mother Earth. And when we show sympathy for the broken-hearted and vulnerable human beings in our midst—for those who are sufering from mass incarceration, ethnic cleansing, gender-based violence, toxic contamination and intergenerational poverty—we bind up the wounds of Mother Earth. Amen.

Notes 1 In Luke 24, the strangeness of Luke’s post–resurrection narrative of the disciples’ encounter with Jesus on the road to Emmaus is deepened by a series of structural aporias in the text itself. Knowledge is not knowing: While the disciples are well informed about Jesus based on their comprehensive discussion of ‘all these things that happened’ (v. 16) to him in Jerusalem, including that he is reportedly ‘alive’ (v. 23), they fail to recognise him as the subject matter of their searching conversation. Darkness is light: While the disciples clearly see Jesus during the ‘day’ (v. 13) as ‘Jesus himself came near and went with them’ (v. 15), they don’t know who he is, and it is not until it is ‘almost evening’ (v. 28) that they undergo enlightenment and rightly identify him as Jesus. Being present is being absent: Even after a full day of Jesus’ disappearance from his burial tomb and re–appearance during his long walk with the Emmaus disciples, he again went missing at the very point his disciples fnally comprehend who he was: ‘Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight’ (v. 31). 2 California stipulates that ownership of wolves or frst–generation, high–wolf–content wolfdogs as pets is illegal without a special permit. See ‘State of California— Restricted Species Laws and Regulations’. 3 Ujfalussy and Kurys, et al., ‘Diferences in Greeting Behaviour Towards Humans’, 1–17. 4 Pierotti and Fogg, The First Domestication, 6. 5 Wallace, When God Was a Bird. 6 Danto, ‘Persons’, 6:111. 7 It is beyond the scope of this article to make a full case for nonhuman animals as conscious, rational and moral beings. But it should be noted that dogs and wolves, in the words of animal behaviour scientist Marc Bekof, have long been understood as ‘exemplars of highly developed cooperative and coordinated behavior’ in which ‘individuals learn what is “right” and “wrong”—what is acceptable to others—the result of which is the development and maintenance of a social group that operates efciently’ (Bekof, Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues, 168). In this vein, note the legal case on behalf of Happy the Elephant, who has been held in captivity for 50 years, most recently at the Bronx Zoo (see ‘First Elephant to Pass Mirror Self– Recognition Test; Held Alone at the Bronx Zoo’). In 2018, The Nonhuman Rights Project and others fled a petition in the New York Supreme Court arguing for Happy’s legal personhood, fundamental right to bodily liberty and thereby her release to an elephant sanctuary. Signifcantly, it is the frst time the highest court in a US state has heard such a case. While the court ruled 5–2 against the petitioners in June 2022, as of this writing, another petition to reargue the case has been submitted to the court. Akin to my experience of the lagoon wolf, Happy is understood by elephant behaviour experts as able to demonstrate capacities of self–awareness, empathy

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

and moral concern for the welfare of other beings in her life, including her human caretakers. My case in point is Tylor’s Primitive Culture. But other fn de siècle works in British anthropology of religion could also be noted in this regard, including William Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and The Worship of Nature, inter alia. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:100. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:171. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:100. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:377–453. Graham Harvey, ‘Introduction’, 5. In this regard, see both the widely infuential statement of the new relational animism in Bird–David, ‘“Animism” Revisited’, S67– S91, and its continued development in Abram, Becoming Animal. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:412. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:412. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:99–115. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:175–187. See Grim, ‘Knowing and Being Known by Animals’, 373–390. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:100. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:410. Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 19. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 21. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 18–19. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 22. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 22–23. In this regard, see Collins, Mark, 388–395. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 23. Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 23. My Johannine conviction regarding God’s full immersion in creaturely existence is resonant with deep incarnation theology in Gregersen, Incarnation, and Edwards, Ecology at the Heart of Faith. I regard my notion of Christian animism—all things are alive, bearers of personhood and inviolably sacred—as an exercise in deepening and extending Gregersen et al.’s pan-incarnationist model of God and the world. The neuroanatomical science of the left and right cerebral hemispheres is controversial. Whatever might be the neurological basis of this analysis, I fnd ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ to be illuminating root metaphors for understanding the origins and development of human cognition and personality. Using the left/right brain binary as a framing device for making sense of her own personal and scientifc journey after the sudden onset of a cerebrovascular event, see Taylor, My Stroke of Insight. On the oft–unseen cognitive and emotional lives of trees and other plants, see Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. Cf. Latour, Science in Action. Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, proposition 6; cf. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 2–4, 20–23 inter alia. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 118. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xi. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 16. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvii. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvii. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvii–xviii. I fnd it odd that while Bennett disparages vitalism and animism as premodern superstition, she nevertheless embraces a certain version of panpsychism where ‘mind’ is posited as existing in all things. See Bennett, ‘Powers of the Hoard’, 260 note 31.

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41 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 18. Embedded in this citation, Bennett approvingly quotes Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want? 149. The Mitchell quote is signifcant because it feshes out Bennett’s opposition to animism. Like Mitchell, Bennett regards animism as a primitive, superstitious worldview that modern enlightened people dismiss out of hand as regressive and childish. Mitchell writes that traditional animists interact with what he calls inanimate objects ‘as if they were alive’—an impossible claim that no sensible person can take seriously. Like Mitchell, Bennett rules out any return to such a worldview as a betrayal of the rational norms that modern thought holds sacrosanct. 42 Linda Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 23. 43 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 400–410. 44 Linda Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 23. 45 Linda Hogan, ‘We Call It Tradition’, 19. 46 Over and against the dominant anthropology of the skin-encapsulated ego, the notion of a more expansive self that subsists within the wider biosphere has many sources, including Indigenous traditions alongside Heraclitus, Spinoza and Whitehead, as helpfully summarised in the philosophy of deep ecology (see Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology). 47 Ricoeur, ‘The Critique of Religion’, 222. 48 Steiner, Real Presences, 214. 49 ‘2008 Constitution of Ecuador (rev. 2021)’. 50 ‘Plans to Mine Ecuador Forest Violate Rights of Nature’. 51 ‘Bolivian Law of the Rights of Mother Earth’. 52 ‘Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017’. 53 Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 5.

Bibliography Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage, 2010. Bekof, Marc. Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Refections on Redecorating Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Bennett, Jane. “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency.’ In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, edited by Jefrey Jerome Cohen, 237–69. Santa Barbara: Punctum, 2012. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Berry, Thomas, The Dream of the Earth. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2015. Bird-David, Nurit. ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.’ Current Anthropology 40 (1999 Supplement). S67–S91. ‘Bolivian Law of the Rights of Mother Earth,’ accessed June 22, 2022, http://www .worldfuturefund.org/Projects/Indicators/motherearthbolivia.html. Collins, Adela Yarbro. Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia Series. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007. Danto, Arthur C. ‘Persons.’ In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards, 8 volumes. New York: Macmillan. 6: 110–14. Edwards, Denis. Ecology at the Heart of Faith: The Change of Heart That Leads to a New Way of Living on Earth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006. ‘First Elephant to Pass Mirror Self-Recognition Test; Held Alone at the Bronx Zoo,’ accessed July 27, 2022, https://www.nonhumanrights.org/client-happy/. Gregersen, Niels Henrik, editor. Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.

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Grim, John A. ‘Knowing and Being Known by Animals: Indigenous Perspectives on Personhood.’ In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, 373–90. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2006. Harvey, Graham. ‘Introduction.’ In The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, edited by Graham Harvey, 1–12. London: Routledge, 2014. Hogan, Linda. ‘We Call It Tradition.’ In The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, edited by Graham Harvey, 17–26. London: Routledge, 2014. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Mentor, 1958. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientifc Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987. Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Peck, Raoul. Exterminate All the Brutes. HBO Max, 2021. 4 episodes, documentary video. Pierotti, Raymond and Brandy R. Fogg. The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ‘Plans to Mine Ecuador Forest Violate Rights of Nature,’ accessed June 22, 2022, https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/02/plan-to-mine-in-ecuador-forest -violate-rights-of-nature-court-rules-aoe. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘The Critique of Religion.’ In Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, edited by Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart, 213–22. Boston: Beacon, 1978. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics, translated by A. Boyle. Everyman’s Library Volume 481. London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1910, 1950. ‘State of California – Department of Fish and Wildlife – Restricted Species Laws and Regulations,’ accessed June 22, 2022, https://wildlife.ca.gov/Licensing/Restricted -Species. Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Taylor, Jill Bolte. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. New York: Penguin, 2008. ‘Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017,’ accessed June 22, 2022, https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2017/0007/latest/whole.html. Tylor, E.B. Primitive Culture, 2 volumes. New York: Gordon, 1871, 1974. 2:100. Ujfalussy, Dorottya Júlia and Anita Kurys, et al. ‘Diferences in Greeting Behaviour Towards Humans with Varying Levels of Familiarity in Hand-Reared Wolves (Canis lupus).’ Royal Society Open Science 4 (2017): 1–17. Wallace, Mark I. When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Vancouver: Greystone, 2016. ‘2008 Constitution of Ecuador (rev. 2021),’ accessed June 22, 2022, https://www .constituteproject.org/constitution/Ecuador_2021?lang=en.

6 SPIRIT POSSESSION AS FOCAL POINT IN THE CONSTELLATION OF RELIGION, MATERIALISM AND ECOLOGY Mary L. Keller

I picture the words ‘religion’, ‘materialism’ and ‘ecology’ (RME) as three stars in a constellation. Let us call this constellation RME. If you approach the constellation from diferent angles in space, it will unmake and remake itself in infnite patterns. In the spirit of simplicity, this chapter drops a practice, spirit possession, into the middle of the constellation, delivering a focal point, a circumcentre, with which to view the constellation (see Figure 6.1). Spirit possession might be an odd practice to use as a circumcentre due to its potential to conjure the worst of racist and sexist evaluations of religious Others. For that very reason, revaluation of spirit possession from feminist and Indigenous studies perspectives delivers important and critical insights for each triangulation of RME. Spirit possession foregrounds religious alternative agential ontologies: who or what is speaking when a forest spirit overcomes a woman and speaks through her? What can we say about human agency in relation to powers that speak through humans?1 In terms of materiality, spirit possession unsettles the binary of material/immaterial. The spirit requires the material body of person, rock, tree, etc. The possessed person is not in conscious control and therefore requires community members—extra materiality—to witness, evaluate and record the event. Spirit possession entails a concentration of power that alters social relations. Spirit possession delivers a critique of modern notions of property or territorial possession. Nomadic spirits disregard the boundaries of self or place. The felds of new animism and new materialism are whispering excitedly nearby. In terms of ecology, when spirits overcome a body, their activity illuminates the body’s porosity as a heterogeneous interface; the self is overcome by energetic forces born of the land’s heritage. Spirits are by their nature from the past, and their participation in the present carries with it ecological memory. Spirit possession is haunting activity in which a spirit from the past takes over a body in the present to correct or re-balance the future trajectory.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-7

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Religion

Materialism FIGURE 6.1

Materialism

Ecology

Ecology

Religion

Ecology

Religion

Materialism

Spirit possession as a focal point for triangulating religion, materialism and ecology.

Spirit possession indigenises ecology by re-membering; a process that echoes Indigenous historian Nick Estes’s argument that Our History Is the Future.3 This chapter continues a comparative methodology developed over 25 years in which I draw from case studies of spirit possession—fctional and non-fctional, anthropological, literary and theatrical—to elucidate formal issues in the comparative philosophy of religion.4 I have selected two anthropological articles exploring guardian spirits from Cambodia, to which I bring a history of religious analysis informed by Indigenous theorisations of matter’s spirited energy. Courtney Work is co-author or author of both articles.5 She is an anthropologist who examines the entanglement of environment, religion, economy and political formations in the context of climate change in Cambodia. With shared concerns we diverge in our interpretations of spirit possession in productive ways. Cambodia is fertile ground to consider forest, water and other guardian spirits thanks to 4,000 years of Khmer culture rich with spirits. Also, Cambodia is a contact zone between capitalist development schemes and guardian spirits.6 Cambodia is ‘a frontier for large-scale land acquisitions’ and ‘more than half the arable land in the country’ has been granted to corporations as Economic Land Concessions (ECL).7 In Part 1, we see how the contact between a corporation, local government, labourers and a guardian spirit inevitably incite the ‘coercion, radical inequality, and intractable confict’ identifed by Mary Louise Pratt as constitutive of contact zones.8 Work’s chapters are based on feldwork with rural Khmer communities. Let me explain the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘indigenous’ in relation to Khmer identities as I use them in this paper. For our purposes, capital ‘I’ Indigenous refers to those communities who self-identify as Indigenous, part of a movement begun in the 1970s to deliver a pragmatic umbrella under which people with ancestral ties to land who underwent colonialism could work for territorial integrity on the international stage. The Khmer have not sought recognition as Indigenous people. Constituting approximately 90 per cent of Cambodia’s population with approximately 4,000 years of heritage in the region, the Khmer are the dominant community. Their government and urban centres are deeply tied into global markets and politics, while their rural communities engage ‘market-independent economies (not isolated, but not dependent)’.9 The ontology of spirits

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herein described is a shared cultural norm between rural community members, Buddhist priests, government and corporations. Across Cambodia’s demographics, spirit demands are ceremonially acknowledged. Thus, neak ta, or Cambodian spirits, are best understood as little ‘i’ indigenous in a nearly ecological sense— they are of or from the region. The rural Khmer represent how ‘subsistence existence’ develops ‘strong relatedness to the land’.10 I draw from self-identifed Indigenous scholars and raise the Khmer spirits as exemplary of alternative ontologies that are not limited to Indigenous communities, but rather refect strong relatedness to the land common to many agricultural or aquacultural traditions with ancient roots. The chapter proceeds in three parts. Part One uses ‘Religion’ as the apex of the constellation RME and uses Alice Beban and Courtney Work’s ‘The Spirits Are Crying: Dispossessing Lands and Possessing Bodies in Rural Cambodia’ (2014) to deliver an inductive immersion in a contemporary example of spirit possession. We engage with spirit possession’s power to draw an audience and consider the profound issues of agency that are raised when a spirit overcomes a human and speaks through her. Part Two twists the constellation, with materialism as the apex concept. Using a second article by Work, ‘Chthonic Sovereigns’ (2019), we step back with a wider-angle lens to consider the materiality of Cambodian spirit possession in terms of territorial guardianship. I track a transition in Work’s analysis as she eschews the nomenclature of spirits and emphasises instead energetic ‘entities’ that enter and ride their mediums, delivering a political economy of the energetic chthonic sovereigns. I position Work’s concerns that ‘religion’ and ‘spirits’ are categories of dualistic heritage (e.g. they reside on the immaterial side of dualistic thinking) in the context of recent comparative studies of spirit possession that criticize the language of spirit possession for its colonialist origins. The question of materiality and spirit possession is closely tied to language in the aftermath of the commodifcation of non-Western and enslaved bodies in contact zones of European colonialism. Spirits that possess bodies, or chthonic sovereigns that catch power? That is the question; developing an indigenous lexicon is part of the answer. We shift the constellation a third time in Part Three, placing ecology as the apical concept, stepping away from the focus on Cambodian case studies. A focus on spirit possession allows us to navigate between the local scale of spirit possession and narratives of planetary ecological crises. When we apply the formal considerations of Part One and Part Two regarding a person who is spoken-through and a landscape indigenised by its guardian spirits, the question of human agency in our times of ecological crises shifts into a new perspective. Local spirits like those we meet in Part One and Part Two resist the Spirit of Capitalism—the extraction, commodifcation and unequal redistribution of the natural resources because they are guardians. But now they, and I argue all of ecology, must contend with the most powerful spirit that stirs matter and excites energy—the Spirit of Climate Change. The Spirit of Climate Change is a force multiplier for other related ecological crises. It exercises capriciousness and potential harm that

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is not in response to local behaviour, unlike the local spirits we meet in Parts One and Two. This spirit is possessing all Earthly matter, disproportionately impacting subsistence people. The constructive impetus of this epic tale of the local spirits versus the Spirit of Climate Change is a pragmatic and rhetorical wager, my attempt to describe human and non-human agency accurately in our time. Parts One, Two and Three deliver a focus on religion, materialism and ecology, respectively, arguing that spirit possession is an essential story for understanding the conundrum of human agency in our time.

Part One: The spirits are crying in Cambodia; religion at the apex Before telling the story of a possessed woman in Cambodia, allow me to defne religion and spirit possession. For critical comparative studies of religion, I follow Charles H. Long in thinking of religion as an ‘orientation to the ultimate signifcance of one’s place in the world’.11 Long’s work delivers a fundamental reframing of religion in conversation with post-colonial and Indigenous theorisations of human relationships to land and matter. With this place-based, locative and hermeneutical defnition of religions, we focus on bodies navigating physical landscapes and symbolic landscapes where social axes of power are at work. Novel encounters deliver disorienting and reorienting experiences during which the transformation of self and worldview are most possible. From this methodological foundation, I argue that spirit possession exercises a fundamental, orienting authority for the community involved, delivering to the community a sense of the ultimate signifcance of their place in the world. Humans become interfaces between seen and unseen forces. They are connected to and can become instrumental agencies for spirits. Ann G. Gold’s defnition of spirit possession serves well for comparative spirit possession studies: ‘any complete but temporary domination of a person’s body, and the blotting of that person’s consciousness, by a distinct alien power of known or unknown origin’.12 In Part One, a woman’s body is overcome, her consciousness is blotted, and a guardian spirit, a neak ta, makes its needs known. In Khmer, the medium is called a rup (form or body), a person transformed to serve as a form or body. Cūl Rūp means the spirit enters the body, or it is said that the spirit rides the medium.13 In ‘The Spirits Are Crying’, Beban and Work describe a scene of spirit possession near a mountain in the Pursat province of Cambodia where in 2009 a mountain spirit, a neak ta known as Yeah Tape, overtook a woman.14 The area is home to an ancient, Angkorian-era stone circle (ca. 800–1300 CE). Buddhism has been frmly and widely established since the 14th century. It is the overarching religion of the region, and Khmer people also maintain relationships of reverence with their local indigenous spirits. Yeah Tape is very powerful and is connected to the royal family. She guards the mountain Phnom Gok. In 2001, Economic Land Concessions (ELC) in Yeah Tape’s territory were awarded to the Pheapimex Corporation. In 2004, Pheapimex began work to

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transform the forest to monoculture cassava plantations, but resistance was too great. Returning in 2009, Pheapimex had sufcient momentum to initiate deforestation. Cambodian labourers migrated to the area for work, including a woman who travelled from her province 50 kilometres away. Beban and Work write: After two months working for the company, the woman said she was visited by the spirit of the mountain [Yeah Tape] in a dream: ‘The spirit told me I would become a medium ... I shouldn’t be afraid, I would be protected ... I was afraid ... I wanted to tell the spirit that I could not do it.’ Later that week, she went to the temple [the Buddhist temple that preceded the plantation] to attend the holy day service and make an ofering to the monks. It was on that day the spirit possessed her and chased the men [her fellow Pheapimex employees] away from their bulldozers. (‘Spirits Are Crying’, 602) It is consistent with many spirit traditions that dreams are a state of consciousness in which one may begin receiving preparatory messages from spirits. Dreaming is a ‘thin space’ between spirit and medium, where intimacies are initiated; part of a spectrum of states in which human consciousness is less guarded. The woman’s fear of and resistance to becoming a medium is also common among accounts, even in traditions where mediumship is recognised as a valuable skill. The costs of being in the service of a spirit are understood to be very high, requiring that one meet the demands of the spirit. The day of her spirit possession, the woman attended services at the Buddhist temple, in front of which Pheapimex bulldozers were clearing forest. Leaving the service with other temple-goers, the woman suddenly convulsed and staggered on the road, overtaken by spirit possession. The convulsions stopped as temple-goers and company workers were looking on. The woman stood tall and walked toward the machines; people followed her. ‘Stop!’ the spirit shouted, holding up the woman’s hand. ‘Stop now!!’ She continued walking toward the machines. The men working the machines stopped. ‘You must stop taking down the trees’, the spirit said. ‘This is our home. This mountain has been our home since ancient time; if you cut the trees we cannot stay.’ The woman then slumped to the ground and the workers climbed down from their machines, unwilling to continue their assigned task. ‘The spirits are crying’, the woman later said. ‘The forest is dying and they can no longer live.’ (‘Spirits Are Crying’, 593–594) Work interviewed the woman, who could recall what came before and after the event, but not during, when her consciousness was blotted.15 The short-term impacts of this event were signifcant. ‘“People were afraid of the spirit after that,” the woman’s husband said, “no one would come clear for the company.”’16

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Yeah Tape took place, rebuking myriad losses. Beban and Work cite Louise Child’s argument that ‘spirit possession is more than a claim to subaltern power, it is an activity that efects “radical transformative relations between persons” (Child 2010: 54)’.17 Yeah Tape rides the woman and alters social relations by reorienting their concerns, restoring their attention to the ecological heritage of the land. This event marked the beginning of a campaign. Buddhism, the dominant religion, became the institutional go-between for Yeah Tape, the Buddhist monk, an NGO, the government and Pheapimex. After much negotiation, in July 2012 provincial government ofcials presided over a tree-planting ceremony. Five hectares of land were returned to the temple. Beban and Work assess: Five hectares within a 315,000 ha ELC [Economic Land Concession] is not an unqualifed ‘successful’ resistance against land grabbing, and the overall efect of the tree-planting ceremony was to return some land to the community while legitimizing the large-scale concession. We analyze this story not as a coherent narrative of resistance, but to recognize the central role that spirits play in everyday life in Cambodia, mediating land/labor relations between corporations, villagers, and the state. (‘Spirits Are Crying’, 594) In their fnal analysis of the campaign initiated by the spirit possession, they write, ‘the words of our research participants and the historical underpinnings of state/society/religion in Cambodia reveal the spirit to be a political actor whose interventions have material consequences’.18 I make a diferent claim by emphasizing the evidence that runs contrary to modern notions of the political: dream visitation, and nomadic habitation of a woman’s body. Most importantly, the spirit exercises agency sufcient to resist temporarily Pheapimex’s imposition of the time value of money by thwarting their maximisation of short-term profts. Yeah Tape’s actions deliver a pre-commodifed sense of land, an other meaning of matter, where value is realised in right relations with an agential forest.19 What of the woman’s agency? I keep my hermeneutical lens on the body of the possessed woman and ask what the story reveals about her and her community’s orientations. This keeps a place-based and practice-oriented analysis of religion as the apical concept. I have previously characterised these kinds of events as the intertwining work, war and play of spirit possession whereby a putatively coherent self becomes an instrumental agency. The possessed body is transformed, and work, war and play are accomplished for another who is usually at a distance, as interpreted by those who witness the event.20 Once Yeah Tape overcomes the woman’s consciousness, the woman is wielded like a hammer, her hand raised to stop the bulldozer. She is played like a fute, spoken-through rather than speaking. The woman’s body becomes an agency—a place to conduct the business of another (Yeah Tape) who is usually at a distance. Indeed, the woman’s instrumental agency carries enough power that the event not only conserved fve hectares

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of forest, but continues to traverse spacetime as it plays on in Beban and Work, and in this chapter. The woman’s orientation to the ultimate signifcance of her place in the world is transformed in at least three important ways. First, the woman’s consciousness is overcome, and she becomes rup. In the dramatic overtaking of the woman’s body, she staggered and convulsed. As rup, Yeah Tape stood tall within the woman’s form, marched towards the bulldozers, commanded the bulldozers to stop and drew an audience of people with her. Work, war and play. Second is the transformation of gender norms and other axes of social hierarchy particular to the region.21 It is often the case that a body possessed by spirits will break gendered norms as in this case, where the possessed woman demands men stop their work. Women activists in Cambodia have been on the frontlines of protest where their self-declared role is to be a voice for non-violence, and a bufer to protect the local men.22 Unlike such contemporary activists, the possessed woman resisted playing a role, and did not initiate this protest. As a conscripted medium, she confronts the bulldozer. As rup, the woman is transformed to serve as an instrumental agency, and this elevates her place in the gender and class relations of plantocracy, temporarily superseding the power of the corporation to demand employee compliance. A third transformation is the woman’s transition from rup (form) back to self, marked by the collapse at the conclusion of the event. Once the spirit left her, her consciousness had to be restored before she could regain control of her body. Post possession, her self is always potentially rup in service to the spirit. Cumulatively, these transformations alter social relations among the woman, her fellow employees, a Buddhist monk, a local NGO, government representatives and Pheapimex because a non-human force altered the calculus of human agency. We have focused on the orienting power of Yeah Tape’s overcoming of the woman’s body, which for our purposes means we have considered its religiousness. In Part Three, I will ask whether we are all possessed by an unprecedented spirit, but frst I focus on spirit possession and materiality, the confguration of RME voted most likely to have critical concerns about spirits and possessions.

Part Two: Chthonic sovereigns; materiality at the apex Shifting the constellation such that materialism is the top star, we take a step back from our focus on Yeah Tape and use a wide-angle lens to consider the larger community of neak ta of which Yeah Tape is a member. In Work’s 2019 article ‘Chthonic Sovereigns’, she argues for a new nomenclature to free the neak ta from the confnes of religious language. Work describes religion ‘as a state efect that facilitates the capture of energetic interactions between people and their environments’.23 The shift in titles from ‘Spirits’ to ‘Chthonic Sovereigns’ reproduces the thrust of her argument: religion is an efect of the state, the word ‘spirit’ is part of an ‘obfuscating ideological apparatus’ and she is inspired by recent work in Indigenous studies and new materialism to provide a critical rethinking of the relationship between neak ta, humans and ecology.24

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In her expansion on neak ta, Work writes that they are: non-physical entities, ubiquitously but variously engaged in Cambodia and, by diferent names, across Monsoon Asia. These names translate loosely as ‘Ancient ones,’ ‘guardians’ and ‘owner (master) of the water and the land’ respectively. Neak ta are engaged as protectors and guardians of territories, and insist on particular types of behaviors and resource use in their territories. They are managers of the animals, plants, and the rains that ensure abundance. Arbiters of justice as well, they punish inappropriate behavior through accident, illness or denying access to resources. (‘Chthonic’, 1) In Work’s terms, neak ta are chthonic (under-the-surface) sovereigns (governing the land, water ‘and the rest of the living world sometimes referred to as “nature”’25). As described by Work, the issue is whether humans perceive the land to be dead or alive: ‘If the [human] mind considers the land to be dead, then the communication [with the land] fails, requiring direct communication [from a neak ta through a medium].’26 In Part One, we saw that Yeah Tape was roused to enter her medium because Pheapimex was treating the land as though it were dead. Work critiques both early scholarship in Cambodia that described neak ta as superstitions and more contemporary scholarship that uses the frame of animism, whereby ‘neak ta becomes spirit—metaphysical guardians of territories, spirits of founding ancestors, or the earth-bound deities in Buddhist cosmologies’.27 She argues against the inherent dualisms of religion that linger in animism’s references to spirits. In the context of an expanding discussion rethinking animism in Southeast Asia and its relationship to universal religions, these sovereigns of the land emerge beyond their confnement, or their assignation as spirits. They are in and of the water and the land and are instrumental social actors in the articulation of economic activity and political strategies as well as Buddhist practice. (‘Chthonic’, 1) 28 Spirits and religion are out, and chthonic sovereigns are in. Neak ta are nonphysical, energetic entities engaging in economic and political strategies, collaborating with Buddhism’s institutional endurance. Work maintains the agency of the neak ta (after the language of religion and spirits is cast of ), by describing neak ta as ‘manifestations of “the fecund energy of the soil” (Mus 1933, 10)’.29 Neak ta are ‘neither spirit nor supernatural’ but rather are a ‘critical conduit between humans and natural resources (economy)’.30 Work employs the discourses of emergent consciousness and thermodynamics, from whence comes ‘the idea that organisms emerge and self-organise, which inserts

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intention [matter is self-organizing] and removes the deity’.31 Work is concerned that ‘deity’ replays Western theological dualisms while I am concerned that ‘entities’ elide the storied connections to ancestors, deities and spirits. In this, Work and I are probing representational concerns that are shared widely.32 The interdisciplinary feld of spirit possession studies is not only concerned with the word ‘spiritʼ, but also with the word ‘possessionʼ. Coupled in the term ‘spirit possession’, the colonialist aftermath of dualisms and the enslavement or commodifcation of human bodies as chattel is constitutive of the nomenclature. Elizabeth Ann Mayes opened this line of criticism in Spirit Possession in the Age of Materialism.33 Terms like ‘self-possession’ arose in the Enlightenment as part of a cosmology that applied to select selves and select territories. Mayes tracks how the feld of psychology overtook clerical authority in the treatment of spirit possession, with the resulting transformation that spirits are products of minds, not agential forces. Contemporary to these Enlightenment developments, colonised bodies and natural resources were defned in law as possessions, available for plunder. J. Brent Crosson introduces recent work criticizing the term spirit possession to explore ‘a more unsettled form of sovereignty than either Western political or “spirit possession” have often depicted’ as found in the nonsensational, mundane practices of co-habiting with other-than-human powers.34 These critics track how Western ideas of property and race are implicit in the nomenclature of spirit possession, and propose strategies to otherwise describe situations of living with non-human power. Based on his feldwork in Trinidad, Crosson declines the language of spirit possession and argues that ‘African religious practices of “catching power” can provide a critical alternative to these racialized and gendered dynamics of “possession,” modifying the conceptual and geographic province of Foucault’s critique of Western political theories of sovereignty.’35 Paul Johnson argues that ‘Possession’s Native Land’ is the Atlantic economy of 1450–1850, born of the encounter with religious Others at the inception of the commodifcation of matter. He argues that the further across geographic or temporal distance one attempts to apply the language of spirit possession, the more problematic it becomes. ‘When “spirit possession” loses its organic relation to the colonial process of its birth and emergence in relation to the terms of property, it begins to take on a status more like that of “religion” itself, a sheer artefact of occidental classifying force and infuence, however universally “religion” has by now been indigenized’.36 Johnson acknowledges that ‘scholarly protestations’ are ‘mostly too late. Like the term religion, possession is everywhere all at once, running wild’.37 The strategic issues regarding the use of the words spirit, deity or spirit possession pose a similar conundrum to the question of whether to use the language of ‘the sacred’.38 As articulated by Chidester and Linenthal, this is a categorical issue of situationalist understandings versus substantialist understandings of words like ‘spirit’. A situationalist understanding of spirit identifes spirit as a signifer on a landscape of language games. A substantialist understanding of spirit,

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on the other hand, claims that Yeah Tape is truly real. She has ancient origins, an enduring story and was present to the people who witnessed the possession. This substantialist understanding of spirit is similar to but diferent from describing neak ta as an emergent, self-organising entity. Rather than eschewing the word ‘spirit’, I think we are in a strategic position of including talk of ancestors, deities and spirits to make sure that substantialist representations of Yeah Tape retain their discursive space, and are not ‘new materialised’ out of the story. One of the earliest, fnest and yet little studied Indigenous philosophies of spirit is found in Basic Call to Consciousness, where John Mohawk writes: ‘We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter—grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force that produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.’39 As noted by Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt, concepts like ‘spirit’ and ‘power’ are key elements of ‘most if not all North American Indigenous views of agency’.40 Academics are right to critique the legacy of Christianity’s dualistic and dehumanising categories. We are also witness to a moment of burgeoning storytelling where substantialist narratives are emerging as a polyvalent mosaic, within which words like ‘spirit’ are used and linguistically specifc words like rup are used. We are witness to a dance between the hegemony of English words and specifcity of local words. Neak ta represent a local, agential ontology that requires nuanced study including linguistic, ecological, historical and political expertise. In contrast, 'spirit’ represents a generalisable category that is afoot in the translational realms of contact zones, perhaps running everywhere strategically. The Khmer are representative of humans who walk in two worlds, navigating with axes of power that manifest situationalist realities and substantialist mores. They negotiate compliance with the daily demands of a capitalist economy which enforces a situationalist understanding of neak ta—Pheapimex bulldozes the forest to increase the commodity production of the land because spirits signify nothing in Pheapimex’s accounting practices. The Khmer also negotiate substantialist realities. Bulldozers stopped. The retention of Yeah Tape’s story as a substantial spirit, and more specifcally as a neak ta, indigenises the present diferently from if we lose the deity and represent a medium as a thermodynamic conduit of self-organising consciousness.41 My alternative reading of ‘spirit’ is this. Rather than dismiss the words ‘spirit’ and ‘deity’, I make a pragmatic argument. Firstly, spirit is used by communities and confers a relatable status and narrative continuity for stories, like the story of Yeah Tape who has always protected the mountain and has connections to the royal family.42 Secondly, rigorous eforts to represent local agential ontologies across multiple disciplines are delivering what Elana Jeferson-Tatum imagines will become an ‘indigenous lexicon of worldwide standing and theoretical purchase’ that refects indigenous ‘non-transcendental metaphysics’ in the comparative philosophy of religion.43 For example, she defnes ‘person’ in an African materialist philosophy as any form of ‘nature world’ that exercises ‘morally efcacious being’.44 ‘Person’ is an achieved state of ‘morally efcacious being’.

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A human who is not a morally efcacious being does not achieve the status of personhood that might be conferred upon a life-giving plant. From this perspective, the word ‘spirit’ as in ‘the spirits are crying’ serves pragmatically to confer recognition of the non-human personhood of the forest.45 Neak ta are morally efcacious beings. In addition, neak ta transform humans into morally efcacious beings; a kind of decolonialism that requires taking over human consciousness. If human minds are inattentive to the communication of the land, if humans think the land is lifeless commodity, neak ta take over a human and make the communication clear using the human voice. Yeah Tape transformed the woman from her inattentive capitalist self (in which her job demanded that she make the forest proftable) to her role as a rup that stops bulldozers. In terms of our constellation RME, it is with matter that religion and ecology co-create a universe of responsible relations. Stories with religious afordances deliver traditional ecological knowledge designed to knit morally efcacious beings into communities that maintain balance; an insight that philosopher of science Donna Haraway embraces.46 I am arguing for retaining a language of spirits not despite the colonialist framework, but rather to identify what is the necessary doubleness of Khmer ontologies, in which situationalist and substantialist claims co-exist in the strategies developed by communities as they navigate their daily lives. While new materialism and new animism aspire to bring the best of emergent sciences to describe such dynamics, spirit possession traditions, with all the representational troubles of this nomenclature, deliver an important anteriority that strips the ‘new’ of its packaging. My continued use of the term ‘spirit possession’ is meant to hold a rhetorical space between situationalist and substantialist understandings. While the lexicon of indigenous non-transcendental metaphysics is being built, spirit possession lives on in this chapter for the fnal turn of the constellation.

Part Three: The spirit of climate change; ecology at the apex We have arrived at our fnal triangulation, with ecology as the apex. As circumcentre, spirit possession helps draw ecology into a tight relationship with religion and materialism. In the paradigmatic story of Yeah Tape commanding the bulldozers to stop, we see three ways that spirit possession indigenises ecology: restoring place, reorienting time and regaining freedom to move. Yeah Tape conserves a section of forest, a small neak ta refugia.47 Yeah Tape restores her ecological time. She fghts against the temporality of ELC, disrupting capitalism’s future orientation that drives towards money’s time value. Yeah Tape exercises seminomadic freedom. By semi-nomadic as opposed to nomadic, I mean to identify the need for and love of homelands vast enough to aford freedom to move following the rhythms of seasons. ‘This is our home. This mountain has been our home since ancient time; if you cut the trees we cannot stay.’48 She speaks for the trees, while she exercises nomadic freedom to travel horizontally across modern property lines. She governs vertically (chthonic origins, terrestrial forests and

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atmospheric realms where life-giving rains are delivered as reward). To paint the picture with a broom, we could say that Yeah Tape enacted ecological indigenous resistance to the Spirit of Capitalism. I want to suggest a twist to the plot of this ecological reading of spirit possession. This twist requires a lens that allows us to view the local context of the neak ta, from which we zoom out to consider the global atmosphere and the thickening blanket of greenhouse gases that bake future warming into Earth’s temperature. What if we consider the thickening blanket of greenhouse gases as matter that has taken on a spirited life of its own beyond our wildest dreams? What if we cohabit Earth with a spirit even more powerful than the Spirit of Capitalism? What if we, morally efcacious and morally inefcacious beings, are possessed by the Spirit of Climate Change? Here are the parallels I see. A relatively small number of humans playing the role of the clever but lazy sorcerer’s apprentice have conjured not just an emission genie that is out of control, but a super-djinn (djinn are the possessing spirits in many Islamic cultures and the origin of the word genie). The superdjinn generates feedback loops that accelerate warming such as the albedo efect on polar ice caps. We live with a new host of avatars of the Spirit of Climate Change: heat dome, polar vortex, sister vortices, snowpocalypse, stormageddon, super typhoon, super hurricanes, super storm, megadrought and frenado. ‘Unprecedented’ precedes the description of these new avatars. Like the God of the Old Testament, the Spirit of Climate Change is too mighty for humans to look at directly or comprehend fully. We see glimpses of the Spirit of Climate Change (SCC) in digital icons, like the animations of weather anomalies that cover 100 years of warming in 60 seconds. This is our version of encountering the burning bush. SCC has possessed trees that are now moving up mountains in search of the right temperatures; a fateful march that ends at the top of mountains.49 SCC is accelerating the waters of Earth’s hydrological cycle, speeding evaporation, generating atmospheric rivers elevated above landscapes rather than coursing between banks, desiccating rain forests, transforming permafrost into impermafrost. It is altering what were interlocking migration cycles, opening plants before the arrival of pollinators, contorting the migration dance of birds and animals who arrive before or after their food sources are ready.50 SCC has made all matter the instrumental agencies of its energy. We are wielded by its forces, thrown hither by its winds, swept yon by its foods. SCC presses human communities into climate refugee fights. We are spoken-through by its raging voice, played like futes with new seasonal rhythms driven by vortex and dome that threaten and disrupt the seasons once set by jet streams and their memories. Massive patterns of energetic exchange such as oceanic currents form what ecological scientists call ‘memory’. The dissipation of those patterns is understood as a loss of memory, which I am suggesting is an ecological parallel to the muted consciousness of a possessed body. As reported in Nature, ‘The Ocean Is Losing Its Memory’.51

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Why is such a narrative useful? It describes the problem of agency with which humans and non-humans are faced. We appear to be muted in our conscious response to the SCC. Morally efcacious beings would secure ecology and starve the SCC by shutting down the top ten percent of emitters. When we return our focus to Yeah Tape, we return to an imaginable scale of human interactivity with local spirits, akin to the conservationist’s strategy to protect refugia. In the epic tale, wherever morally efcacious persons live, human and non-human persons, guardian spirits engage battles to adjudicate right action. When humans consult the genius loci of the place, the local guardian spirits, they may become morally efcacious beings.52 To extricate our muted consciousness from the accelerating fogs of the Spirit of Climate Change, we reject being instrumental agencies serving the SCC and seek out a diferent form of instrumental agency by connecting with the genius loci of the mosaic of biospheres in which we live and breathe and have our being. Adaptation guided by the neak ta, the genius loci. Yes, it is an underdog’s battle. There is no master narrative of triumph. Only myriad tales of place-based, practice-oriented human and non-human persons, restoring their morally efcacious being.

Conclusion With spirit possession as a focal point in triangulations between religion, materialism and ecology, relationships between the three terms are always at play. The place-based and practice-oriented methodology afords no categorical purity or escape from the aftermath of colonialism’s commodifcation of matter. Rather, RME functions like a tensile constellation for which spirit possession elucidates relationships and amplifes pre-contact ontologies. In Parts One and Two, in the contact zone of Khmer culture, neak ta are destined by their guardianship of water and land to resist the Spirit of Capitalism. Drawn in by the story of a woman possessed by Yeah Tape, we focused on the agency of the possessed woman in Part One, considering how her instrumental agency exerts an orienting power on her community, transforming her intersectional status in remarkable degrees, from migrant, female labourer to rup who commanded the bulldozers to stop, and for a while they did. In Part Two, with materialism at the apex, spirit possession illuminates the following relationship: it is with matter that religion and ecology co-create a universe of responsible relations. When humans fail to attend to the material world of agential lands, neak ta overtake humans, restoring their own potential to be persons, morally efcacious beings. Neak ta, guardians of the land and water, adjudicators of rewards, re-member in their homelands through their haunting interventions. Part Three, with ecology at the apex, proposes a reading of our current ecological crises supercharged by the Spirit of Climate Change, the force multiplier. Fossil fuel corporations use a small percentage of capitalism’s minions to shovel ungodly volumes of emissions, feeding SCC. We countered the stupefying force

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of SCC by returning to consider neak ta as representative of local spirits whose success in preserving refugia is the last best hope of a globe possessed by the superdjinn. I am wagering that, empirically and narratively, we arrive at an adequate understanding of our agency by describing the epic battle: protecting the refugia of local spirits to counteract the awesome power of SCC that 20 per cent of us feed disproportionately. Our new agential calculus is this: alter the behaviour of 20 per cent of humans, delivering relief to the 80 per cent least responsible for feeding SCC, thereby restoring morally efcacious beings. The claim is that we are all possessed. The question is ‘With what spirits will we cultivate our instrumental agency?’

Notes 1 Important theorists for this chapter include Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt, ‘Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency’. They build a conversation between key writers in new materialism, new feminist materialism, posthumanism and other discourses concerned with the ontological turn in social sciences and the similar but diferent specifcities of non-human agency that are foundational in Indigenous theorisations of agential ontology, including the agency of stories, songs and cross-species kinship relations. They criticise the lack of attention given to Indigenous scholars and experts. Inherent in Indigenous ontologies are the ethical bonds between humans and non-human agents, requiring of scholarship to build relationships of ‘robust solidarity in the political and material work of promoting well-being of Indigenous peoples’ (13). Also, Jeferson-Tatum, Religious Matters, and Long, ‘Indigenous People’. 2 See Avery Gordon, Haunting, and Keller’s discussion of Gordon in ‘Spirit Possession’, 74–75. 3 Estes, Our History is the Future. 4 For previous examples of cross-genre theory and method see Keller, Hammer, 1–20; Keller, ‘Women and Possession’, 8694–8699; Keller ‘Spirit Possession’, 66–86; Keller, ‘Indigeneity’. 5 I am very grateful to Courtney Work who provided feedback on drafts of this chapter. Errors in understanding or misrepresentation are my own. Erik Davis and Maurice Eisenbruch provided expertise on linguistic issues and feldwork experience with ritual specialists. Colin Pitet’s feedback honed the argument. Discussions and conference presentations with Carol White and Yianna Liatsos continue in our joint theorisations of Small States. 6 In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt defnes contact zones as a ‘space of colonial encounters, the space which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish on-going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable confict’ (p. 8). 7 Beban and Work, ‘Spirits Are Crying’, 598. 8 Pratt, Imperial, 8. 9 Work, personal correspondence, 8/02/2022. 10 Work, personal correspondence, 8/02/2022. 11 Long, Signifcations, 7. 12 Gold, ‘Spirit Possession’, 35. 13 Eric Davis, personal correspondence, 3/2/2022; Work, personal correspondence, 7/1/2022. 14 Beban and Work, ‘Spirits Are Crying’, 593-610. 15 Work, personal correspondence, 7/1/2022.

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16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52

Beban and Work, ‘Spirits Are Crying’, 594. Beban and Work, ‘Spirits Are Crying’, 605. Beban and Work, ‘Spirits Are Crying’, 595–596. See Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt’s overview of Karen Barad’s work on agential realism and its relationship to Indigenous theorists as part of the larger context in which these issues are being explored very powerfully. Like Rosiek et.al., my focus is on amplifying lesser-studied voices. Keller, Hammer, ‘Women and Spirit Possession’. Keller, ‘Women and Spirit Possession’. Susan S. Sered argues against deprivation theories (women are deprived and this is ‘primitive psychotherapy’) and for the revaluation that women possess an ability rather than exhibit a pathology. Sered, Priestess, 140. Work, personal correspondence, 7/1/2022; Park, ‘Our Lives’. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 6. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 3. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 3. Work, personal correspondence, 7/1/2022. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 1. Let me note that Work is using the traditional understanding of ‘instrumental’ here in contrast to symbolic or metaphysical actors. Part of my efort in describing the agency of the possessed person as instrumental agency is to deconstruct the binary of instrumental/symbolic, prioritise the lesser term (few people think of religion as the instrumental side of the instrumental/symbolic binary) and invoke the multiple resonances of instrumental not only as ‘working’ but also its musical referents, e.g. played like a fute. The contrast is this—Work describes chthonic sovereigns that are instrumental social actors and I describe the instrumental agency of the person possessed. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 3. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 3. Work, ‘Chthonic’, 8. See Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt, ‘Non-Human Agency’. Mayes, Spirit Possession. Crosson, ‘Possessed’, 546. Crosson, ‘Possessed’, 588. See also Crosson, ‘Catching’. Johnson, ‘Possession’s Native Land’, 673. Johnson, ‘Possession’s Native Land, 673. Keller ‘Indigenous Studies’, and Chidester and Linenthal, Sacred. Mohawk, Basic, 85. Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt, ‘Non-Human Agency’, 12. For a study of the religious afordance of supernatural narratives see Davidsen, ‘Fiction’. Work, personal correspondence, 7/1/2022. Jeferson-Tatum, Matters, 280–281. Jeferson-Tatum, Matters, 26. Beban and Work, ‘Spirits’. Haraway, Trouble. Refugia is a technical term designating geographical areas that support species survival during climate changes identifed in the past where species survived such events as ice ages, and informing conservation policy in the present as scientists determine preservation priorities to maximise biodiversity. Work, ‘Spirits’, 593–594. Kolbert, Extinction. Durant et al., ‘Climate’. Nature, ‘Ocean’, 398. Wes Jackson, Consulting.

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Bibliography Beban, Alice and Courtney Work. ‘The Spirits are Crying: Dispossessing Land and Possessing Bodies in Rural Cambodia’. Antipode 46, no. 3 (2014): 593–610. https://doi .org/10.1111/anti.2073 Bourguignon, Erika. ‘World Distribution and Patterns of Possession States’. In Trance and Possession States, edited by Prince, Raymond, 203–212. Montreal: R.M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968. Chidester, David and Edward T. Linenthal, eds. American Sacred Space. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Child, Louise. ‘Spirit Possession, seduction, and collective consciousness’. In B Schmidt and L Huskins (eds) Spirit Possession and Trans: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp 53–70). New York: Continuum, 2010. Crosson, J. B. ‘What Possessed You? Spirits, Property, and Political Sovereignty at the Limits of ‘Possession’’. Ethnos 84 no.4 (2019): 546–556. https://doi.org/10.1080 /00141844.2017.1401704 ———. 2019. ‘Catching Power: Problems with Possession, Sovereignty, and African Religions in Trinidad’. Ethnos 84 (4): 588–614. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844 .2017.1412339 Davidsen, Markus Altena. ‘Fiction and Religion: How narratives about the supernatural inspire religious belief—Introducing the thematic issue’. Religion, 46, no.4 (2016): 489–499. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0048721X.2016.1226756 Durant, Joel M., Dag Ø. Hjermann, Geir Ottersen, Nils Chr. Stenseth, ‘Climate and the match or mismatch between predator requirements and resource availability’. Climate Research 33, no.3, (2007): 271–283. https://doi:10.3354/cr033271 Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London, New York:Verso, 2019. Gold, Ann Grodzins. ‘Spirit Possession Perceived and Performed in Rural Rajasthan’. Contributions to Indian Sociology 22, no. 1 (1988): 35–63. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Jackson, Wes. Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press: Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2010. Jeferson-Tatum, Elana. Religious Matters: African (Vodoun) Materialities and the Western Concept of Religion. PhD diss, Emory University, 2016. Johnson, Paul Christopher. ‘Possession’s Native Land’. Ethnos 84.4 (2017): 660–677. Johnson, Paul C. and Mary Keller. ‘The Work of Possession(s)’. Culture and Religion 7, no. 2 (2006): 111–122. Keller, Mary L. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Spirit Possession: Women and Possession’. In Encyclopedia of Religion 2, edited by Jones, Lindsay. 2nd ed. Vol. 13, 8694–8699. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA Imprint, 2004. ———. ‘Indigenous Studies and ‘the Sacred’. American Indian Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2014): 82–109. ———. ‘Spirit Possession’. In Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, edited by Gutierrez, Cathy. Brill handbooks on contemporary religion ed. Volume 9, 66–86. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015.

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———. ‘The Indigeneity of Spirit Possession’. In Spirit Possession: Multidisciplinary Approaches to a Worldwide Phenomenon, edited by Pócs, Éva and Andras Zempléni. New York, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Reprint Edition. London: Picador, 2015. Long, Charles H. ‘Indigenous People, Materialities, and Religion: Outline for a New Orientation to Religious Meaning’ In Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, edited by Reid, Jennifer, 167–180. London, Boulder, Oxford, New York: Lexington Books, 2003. ———. Signifcations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Philosophical and Cultural Studies in Religion. Boulder, CO: The Davies Group, 2004. Mayes, Elizabeth. ‘Spirit Possession in the Age of Materialism’. PhD diss, New York University, 1995. Mohawk, John. Basic Call to Consciousness. Summertown, Tenn.: Native Voices, 2005. Mus, Paul. India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa. Clayton, Vic.: Center of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. 1933. [1975]. Nature, Research Highlight, ‘The Ocean is Losing its Memory’. 06, May 2022, https:// www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01246-5 Park, Clara Mi Young. ‘‘Our Lands are our Lives’: Gendered Experiences of Resistance to Land Grabbing in Rural Cambodia’. Null 25, no. 4 (2019): 21–44. https://doi.org /10.1080/13545701.2018.1503417 Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. Ryan, Alexandra E. ‘Spirits as Hypotheses: A Reconfguration of Spirit Possession in a Contemporary Case Study’. M.A., Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, 1998. Rosiek, Jerry Lee, Jimmy Snyder and Scott L. Pratt, ‘The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement’ Qualitative Inquiry (2019): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177 /1077800419830135 Sered, Susan Starr. Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Steyn, Elizabeth A. At the Intersection of Tangible and Intangible: Constructing a Framework for the Protection of Indigenous Sacred Sites in the Pursuit of Natural Resource Development Projects. Ph.D. Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal, 2017. ———. ‘Chthonic Sovereigns? ‘Neak Ta’ in a Cambodian Village’. The Asia Pacifc Journal of Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2019): 74–95.

7 AUTOTHANATOGRAPHY AND TERMINAL RELATIONALITY IN THE TIME OF THE ANTHROPOCENE Yianna Liatsos

This chapter enters the discussion on religion, materialism and ecology by considering how illness writing, and more specifcally self-referential stories of terminal illness, engage two leading themes associated with the Anthropocene narrative, those of an imminent demise and of biotic and geotic relationality. In line with the dominant approach to the illness experience in the feld of medical humanities, I adopt a phenomenological perspective to the topic and build my discussion on an understanding of embodied consciousness and a well-rehearsed distinction, among philosophers of illness, between lived and objective time. My interest in personal stories of lifeending illness regards their narrative performance of dissonance, whereby consciousness, afective states and intimate connections shift and change as the authorial self at the helm of the narrative experiences bodily doubt and a corresponding realignment within a secular social order of signifcation. My aim is to consider how the textual performance of this dissonance illuminates the afective economy of terminal temporality and its social ontology and to bring these insights to recent discussions in the environmental humanities that conceive of dying as an ethical practice at the time of environmental catastrophe.

Dying in the time of the Anthropocene The Anthropocene discourse of the past 20 years, if not earlier, has been characterised by world-wide dire visions. Reports published every so often from the UN and other global bodies on the state of environmental destruction ofer apocalyptic scenarios of impending doom. The February 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which ‘draws from 34,000 studies and involved 270 authors from 67 countries’, paints the most recent such picture.1 In its summary of the nearly 4000-page report, the World Resources Institute ofers six headings straight out of the Anthropocene playbooks:2 ‘Climate impacts are already more DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-8

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widespread and severe than expected’; ‘We are locked into even worse impacts from climate change in the near-term’; ‘Risks will escalate quickly with higher temperatures, often causing irreversible impacts of climate change’; ‘Inequity, confict and development challenges heighten vulnerability to climate risks’; ‘Adaptation is crucial. Feasible solutions already exist, but more support must reach vulnerable communities’; and the qualifying catch, ‘But some impacts of climate change are already too severe to adapt to. The world needs urgent action now to address losses and damages.’3 Within the Environmental Humanities community, criticisms of the Anthropocene grand narrative centre on its contextual—historical, geopolitical, economic—erasures, magnifed by its scaling efects. In his essay ‘Derangements of Scale’, Timothy Clark sums up the quandaries such efects create by noting how the Anthropocene’s planetary scale ‘is often almost mockingly useless … to daily questions of politics, ethics or specifc interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc.’.4 Clark ofers architectural and geopolitical examples to elaborate on the disparities that materialise when scales shift upwards or downwards: a building that appears structurally sound as a miniature model falls apart in its full size; global factors are obscured, if not altogether distorted, as they are processed through national political systems driven by individualist interests. Dana Luciano expands on the predicaments of scale derangement by considering the dizzying efects of ‘deep time’—geology’s sense of a longue durée that professes to overcome the limits of modern historical consciousness and its consolidation of Western humanism. In her November 2020 talk in the Lynch Distinguished Lecturer Series, Luciano turned to Lauren Berlant’s idea of ‘cruel optimism’ to address geology’s masochistic attachment to deep time: deep time is revered for its capacity to keep us in relation to the world, all the while smashing our puny habits of thought and exposing the insignifcance of the meaningproducing mattering of our time (political time), and the carnally bound mattering of our bodies (experience). Echoing Sylvia Wynter’s insight into epistemological afnities between the theocratic (early Christian—‘Man1’) and humanist (postrenaissance—‘Man2’) orientation of Western thought, Luciano points to geology’s paradoxical materialism, which abstracts actual material situatedness and specifcity. In Literature and the Anthropocene (2020), Pieter Vermeulen echoes Clark and Luciano by pointing out the sublime quality of geology’s scales, which inspire awe, terror, astonishment and boredom in equal measure. Conjuring Sianne Ngai’s notion of ‘stuplimity’ (a hybrid concept of stupefaction and sublimity), Vermeulen notes how the Anthropocene narratives’ ‘relentless and cheerless accumulation of worrying facts brings readers to the limits of their capacity to process information … [The] creeping fatigue [that ensues] does not inspire action or a desire to escape from the systems in which we are trapped’.5 As comedian Colin Jost says in one of his Saturday Night Live segments of ‘The Weekend Update’, where he addresses a 2018 UN report predicting catastrophic climate change by 2030, We don’t really worry about climate change because it’s too overwhelming and we are already in too deep. It’s like if you owe your bookie 1000 dollars,

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you’re like ‘Oh OK, I have to pay this dude back.’ But if you owe your bookie a million dollars, you’re like ‘I guess I’m just gonna die.’6 This personalisation of dying and its shift from the impersonal geological scale to the smaller, individual one is also evoked, more solemnly and as an ethical practice, in recent writing that has sought to work through the afective overload of mass extinction narratives. Roy Scranton’s 2015 publication Learning to Die in the Anthropocene exemplifes this move. Scranton’s book aims to mediate the predicaments of the Anthropocene’s sublime scales by refocusing attention to lived experience, thus ofering the promise of restoring material specifcity (singular embodied situatedness) to the abstract sufering that Anthropocene narratives convey. Yet Scranton repeats the paradox of humanism’s abstracted materialism by championing an approach that aims to emancipate humanity from what he considers to be its compulsive, reactive patterns of the ‘fght or fight’ response. Scranton turns to Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s 18th-century Samurai manual and Peter Sloterdijk’s 2011 idea of the philosopher as an interrupter, to advocate for a ‘practice of dying’ that curbs the fear of impending death by replacing the viscerality of the body with the idea of an irreducible relationality among all biotic and geotic forms. He calls this approach ‘philosophical humanism’: Philosophical humanism in its most radical practice is the disciplined interruption of somatic and social fows, the detachment of consciousness from impulse, and the condensation of conceptual truths out of the granular data of experience. It is the study of ‘dying and being dead,’ a divestment from this life in favor of deeper investments in a life beyond ourselves. In recognizing the dominion of death and the transience of individual existences, we afrm a web of being that connects past to future, them to us, me to you.7 Scranton’s practice of dying involves the deliberate abandonment of the embodied self ’s life drive and its myopic grounding in the present, in favour of a ubiquitous material interrelatedness whose abstract quality is further compounded by rational detachment and a longer temporal span. In their own small book Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (2018), Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky similarly evoke ‘bodhisattvas, saints, and philosophers’ for lessons in giving up egoism and its foundation on human exceptionalism, in search of a more eco-friendly ethic of material interdependence that paradoxically upholds moral virtues—Zwicky specifcally names those of courage, self-control, justice, compassion and contemplative practice. ‘Now that we are up against that wall’, Bringhurst argues in his essay in the volume, ‘it’s more important than ever before that we learn to think like an ecosystem, not like a spoiled brat or a biological singularity’.8 Claire Colebrook’s article ‘A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World’ (2019) delivers a compelling genealogical corrective to this pattern of

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thinking: more so that proposing a critical departure from the dominant cultural paradigm of our times, this posthumanist ethic of interrelatedness ‘that privileges becoming and relations over the horror of something that simply is, bearing no relation to anything’, has been an integral aspect of Western thought since antiquity, and has been particularly favoured in theocratic grand narratives with violently universalising normative embodiments.9 The narrative of planetary interrelationality, according to Colebrook, reproduces the fantasy of wholeness in the image of self ’s deifcation, whose omniscient perspective persists even in the face of (Hu)Man’s demotion. The desire to ‘think like an ecosystem’ then has—perhaps unintended—afnities with a totalising perspective that forecloses alterity’s signifcations and departures. In other words, where material relationality is counterposed to a metaphysics of meaning that endorses human exceptionalism, Colebrook, much in the spirit of Wynter, sees an afnity between the totalising aspirations of both epistemologies. In critiquing this ‘eco-fundamentalism’10 Colebrook turns towards aesthetic visions that tolerate the ‘richer diference’ of chaos instead of rushing towards ‘stable wholes that occur through processes of selection’ and, after Edouard Glissant, she advocates for opaque and disruptive connections to the world so as to provide space for the ‘incommensurable’ to unsettle and expand our storyworlds and imaginary.11 While preserving the political practicality of relationality to illuminate ripple efects rather default interdependencies, I turn to illness narratives to consider how their small-scale, singular perspective on and confrontation with demise and loss may ofer richer insights for how to understand the workings and social ethos of relationality in our time.

Narrative temporality and autothanatographic writing Early in his classic book of literary criticism entitled The Sense of an Ending (1967), Frank Kermode describes normative human experience as situated ‘in the middest’, whereby the social storyworld and its imaginary precede and follow the human lifespan. Repeating Horace’s insight about epics, Kermode notes, Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fctive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.12 The experience of being brought ‘into the heart of the matter’ (in medias res) upon birth is one of immersion, a narrative membership in a meaningful storyworld already underway. Kermode’s follow-up assertion that we die in mediis rebus, which is to say ‘in the middle of things’, posits a predicament only in a secular context. For Kermode, the social capital of end-of-life/apocalyptic religious narratives lies in their ability to ‘make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle’ and provide a pattern to life that gives meaning

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to the otherwise in-fux temporality of the ‘middest’ experience.13 In the secular context of modern Western humanism, however, no such consonance is available. Here the course between birth and death entails a shift of situatedness, whereby the singular self moves from the heart of life’s evolutionary unfolding to the observation decks in the peripheries, no longer efortlessly in sync with history’s progressive movement. Put simply, the move from in medias res to in mediis rebus in a secular context is a move from the source of interconnection and interdependence associated with life’s overall élan vital to a place of isolation, where one becomes superfuous and expendable by virtue of being unable to keep up. Medical humanities has placed great emphasis on the development of ‘narrative competence’ among healthcare workers in the interest of providing a community of care to patients who face an uncertain future. Illness writing, which Neil Vickers calls a capacious category that includes fctional as well as nonfctional narratives written by carers as well as patients and associated with all genres in which illness plays a conspicuous part, is characterised by its engagement with the displacement/interruption that illness brings about: not only does the self no longer partake in the hustle and the bustle of the social body (in medias res), but it is also obliged to process what philosopher S. Kay Toombs has described as four levels of illness temporality, none of which resembles futurity’s unblemished open-endedness that grounds secular meaning’s promised evolution. Founded in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of time and the distinction between lived/inner and objective/social time, Toombs’s article ‘The Temporality of Illness’ (1990) describes illness as possessing a quadruple temporal constitution that requires the recurring negotiation of consciousness between pre-refective sensory experience (embodied, lived, inner) and social discourses (narrative, objective, institutional). The patient experiences illness corporeally (as a carnal discomfort);14 communicatively (turning to the available language of sufering to represent the experience of somatic distress); institutionally (as the medical discourse’s identifcation of disease); and constitutionally (as a state of being going forward). At each of these levels of consciousness illness adopts a diferent temporal quality: corporeally and communicatively, illness registers as inner time, shifting from the experience of immediate sensation to the longer duration of signifcation (the symbolic structure of language)—whereby the patient’s experience becomes ‘part of a larger whole’.15 Institutionally and constitutionally illness registers as outer, objective time, which in the event of a lifethreatening diagnosis divulges embodiment’s radical contingency. The diagnosis of a serious illness thus clarifes the insecurity of what has been, until that point, the secular self ’s assumed situatedness in a humanist in medias res. ‘The time of the body no longer fts into the time of the self ’, as philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus notes in his discussion of the experience of illness: corporeal precarity halts the ‘natural’ march onwards and upwards, both individually (terrifyingly) and socially (inconveniently).16 The terminal illness memoir engages the quintessential humanist narrative form of the self, auto-graphy, thanatologically, which is to say not in its traditional orientation towards life (bios), with its

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ever advancing thrust, but rather towards death (thanatos). Without the possibility of restitution to a forward-looking order, the autothanatographic writing of terminal illness memoirs sheds light onto the growing distance between the time of the dying body and the time of the modern social self, and in so doing fnds a language for coming to terms with the trauma that is humanism’s essential aporia in the face of the end. In autothanatographic writing the practice of dying takes the form of a textual dissonance that does not so much interrupt the normative social imaginary or become chaotic, but rather attends to the de-composition of the self as a form of secular social engagement. In speaking of textual dissonance I am referring to narrative features that Ato Quayson, in his book on disability in literary writing, describes as the ‘aesthetic nervousness’ of literary texts that represent physical or cognitive disability. Quayson defnes ‘aesthetic nervousness’ as a textual efect whereby ‘the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are shortcircuited’ in the interaction between disabled and ‘normal’ characters in the text; where the very constitution of the text’s narrative structure is confused in a manner that signals sensory disquietude; and where the social patterns of recognition are unsettled in a way that ‘forces the subliminal cultural assumptions about the disabled out into the open for examination, thus holding out the possibility that the nondisabled may ultimately be brought to recognize the sources of the constructedness of the normate and the prejudices that fow from it’.17 I will return to the social and political implications of this fnal insight and its engagement with the practice of dying in the time of the Anthropocene later in the chapter. First, I turn to two recent illness memoirs whose structure starkly captures this kind of dissonance/nervousness in the face of a life-threatening diagnosis—on the one hand induced by the radical disjunction between the present and the past as transformation (who is the subject experiencing illness in relation to the healthy self of the past?); and on the other hand induced by the indeterminate connection between the present and the future as intention (who is the self that the subject experiencing illness will become in the future, if only as the dead author of the illness narrative?). Poet Nina Riggs’s 2017 memoir The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying recounts the author’s experience with breast cancer from the time she is identifed as having ‘one small spot’ that is ‘highly curable’, according to the oncologist assigned to her case, to the time when a series of scans identify the cancer’s spread frst to her bones and then to her lungs, a few weeks before her death at a hospice facility in Greensboro, North Carolina (according to the memoir’s afterword, written by her husband). The memoir covers the two years between the bookending diagnoses, and is structured alongside the medical protocol of cancer representation: it is divided into four parts that bear the designation ‘Stage’, making legible both the undisputed dominion of cancer’s linear trajectory in Riggs’s life, from Stage 1 to Stage 4, and her futile eforts at stalling its terminal course. Without access to clarity born of retrospection, Riggs’s perspective remains frmly undecided as she navigates cancer’s ‘prognostic time’—an arbitrarily shifting temporal terrain that detonates time with its fundamental unknowingness,

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according to anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain.18 Riggs writes with both colourful irreverence and detached abjection about the joys, anguish, pleasures and sufering of ordinary days spent as Cancerland’s prognostic subject/cancer object— from a time when she imagines that ‘one small spot is fxable’ and translates into ‘a year of your life’, to a time when she is given a metastatic diagnosis. In relating her experience of illness, which is scafolded by a series of tests and scans that consistently reveal the failure of past treatments and the persistence of cancer growth, Riggs’s memoir is subdivided into numbered segments with descriptive titles whose script length runs anywhere between one paragraph to a handful of pages. The brevity and variable foci of these segments gives The Bright Hour an aphoristic quality that further enacts the fragmentation of narrative emplotment and corresponding narrative voice that Riggs’s diagnosis triggers and compounds with each incremental shift. The memoir’s longest segment of 14 pages is entitled ‘Vigipirate’ (after the French national security alert system) and appears in Stage 4 of the memoir, which is itself nearly twice the size of the other three stage sections that average 60 pages each. The length of this narrative stage performs the efect of its temporal experience whereby, as Riggs herself states in another segment of Stage 4, ‘in cancer time [a couple of weeks] feels like years, decades—like the remaining days of your life are soaring by on a busy interstate’.19 With the end becoming more viscerally evident as Riggs grows weaker and less able to live in her body without the support of medical intervention, time expands as ‘body time’ while also shrinking as ‘self time’. The segment ‘Vigipirate’ recounts a trip Riggs and her husband take to Paris to celebrate his 40th birthday. This comes half a year after Riggs’s mother dies of terminal cancer and two weeks after Riggs’s cancer is diagnosed metastatic and her oncologist capitulates that Nurse Jon, a stress management specialist who teaches soft-belly breathing to cancer patients in the hospital where Riggs receives her treatments, can ofer Riggs something ‘way more valuable’ than anything she can—signalling the limits of medical treatment and its temporal authority born of its promise to restore the patient’s ‘healthy self ’.20 In this segment, flled with anecdotes of Riggs and her husband living in Paris in their twenties, in medias res, with their whole life ahead of them, and now, with her as a terminally ill patient, she gives an aesthetic reading that was unavailable to her before her illness. The text under consideration is housed at the French National Museum of the Middle Ages and is one of the six tapestries that comprise La Dame à la Licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn, c. 1500). Riggs focuses her attention on the tapestry that represents the sense of sight, depicting the female fgure as holding up a mirror for the unicorn to see its refection: I used to imagine that in the mirror the unicorn was seeing a horse refected back: the immortal is spying the mortal self. I loved this, and his insouciance at the realization. It’s fne: I live and I die and I live again. But no: I can see now that the mythical horn refracts and refects through the mirror for eternity. [The fgures on the tapestry are] only smug because they have

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never existed: they are only thoughts, ideas, art—private tumults foating on an ancient woolen draft … The lady and the unicorn’s expressions are cool stares we will never quite understand. We stare back because we want to know what they will never know: what to yield to and when, why we resist so briefy.21 Riggs’s observations reference the appeal of all forms, whose metaphysical— mythic, religious, philosophical—pronouncements ofer the senses a consolation vis-à-vis corporeality’s impermanence. ‘It’s why I write’, Riggs admits, to ‘give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them’.22 Riggs’s insight into her autothanatographical composition afrms the desire that drives writing even as she shifts the character of this desire in the context of a dying practice. Writing the self in the face of an even-nearing end is motivated not so much by the need to uphold disembodied thought and restore a home in the sphere of meaning, in medias res, but rather by an intention to bear witness to the growing distance from this orderly centre of signifcation, and to fnd a language for living in mediis rebus, however unsure such language is of its purpose and its conjecture. ‘Sometimes I worry [that I write] instead of allowing myself to feel things’, notes Riggs in concluding her refections on the role of writing, pointing to the afective excess of her experience with illness that is already with her and lies ahead yet. Art critic Tom Lubbock’s short memoir Until Further Notice, I Am Alive (2012) recounts the author’s experience with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a type of malignant Grade IV brain tumour. Where Riggs’s cancer diagnosis has an innocuous start that allows her, at the start of her memoir, to hope for restoration to her earlier life (‘One small spot … becomes a chant, a rallying cry. One small spot is fxable. One small spot is a year of your life. No one dies from one small spot’),23 Lubbock’s diagnosis is immediately dire and arrives after the author has an unexpected seizure while on vacation. ‘The news was death’, reads the frst line of his memoir, following the date of ‘August 2008’, when he receives his diagnosis following a series of scans.24 ‘And it wasn’t going to be maybe good luck and getting through it’, the next sentence clarifes. ‘It was defnitely death, and quite soon.’25 The temporal strain that opens Until Further Notice contextualises the memoir’s laconic structure and irregular timeline: the short memoir is made up of brief segments (some are a line long) that assume the quality of diary entries and date from ‘August 2008’ until ‘October 2010’, when Lubbock enters the hospice where he dies a couple of months later. The entries appear steadily in the early part of Lubbock’s diagnosis, from August until October 2008, but then become irregular and appear predominantly to report on pending scans (‘I live in leases of three months: the distance between each scan’ he reports on October 23, 2009), operations and, later on, a series of ‘bad news’, including Lubbock’s progressive loss of language.26 In this regard the aesthetic nervousness of Lubbock’s memoir is frst and foremost literal, which is to say it captures the steady corporeal and linguistic de-composition of its author.

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The textual dissonance of Lubbock’s memoir, however, is also demonstrated via conficted refections he records on his diagnosis and what, early in his memoir—a week after his frst craniotomy and while recovering in the hospital (an October 2008 entry)—he describes as ‘the practice of death’ he aspires to take on. Lubbock pens an entry in which he references William Empson on Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’—‘It’s a poem in favour of the human practice of dying’— to address his own writing practice and the doubleness he faces as patient subject/ cancer object: It is the phrase ‘human practice’ that holds the mind; its double surprise. Human, as opposed to? Angels, divinities (because immortal)? Or animals (because, though mortal, not conscious of their mortality)? And practice?—when it would be more normal to say ‘condition’ or fate’—and said as if we knew well what that practice was. Well, there are ways in which dying is a practice, among other rites of passage; and we can imagine it is also as a rite of non-passage, as a conclusion. I’m trying to be in favour of the human practice of dying. Trying to make it into a practice. No fngers crossed. No probabilities. Only possibilities—or (so far as possible) certainties. Without pessimism or optimism. Holding your allegiance to the world, even while accepting your links to it are very weak.27 Lubbock’s longing for a detached, meditative witnessing of his own decline comes a page after a refection he encloses in parentheses, as though to signal its forbidden quality: ‘(… if I die of this tumour, I will not face an abrupt ending, I will probably enter gradually into worsening degrees of incapacity. Of course I would want to die more quickly. Thoughts about suicide possibilities)’.28 In the context of this parenthesis the composed, dispassionate consideration of a ‘practice of dying’ can be read as a disembodied counterweight to the visceral terror of losing the habitual/re-cognisable semblances of oneself—one’s material capacities in the form of embodied consciousness. In spite of their introspective quality the two considerations, one more restrained than the other (in parenthesis), short-circuit the self emerging in the early part of Lubbock’s memoir. When Lubbock begins radiation and chemotherapy treatments in early November 2008, a budding ‘narrative problem’ further unsettles his writing.29 ‘I don’t know at what stage, and in what story, I am … I don’t know what my narrative frame is—well, moribund, surely enough, but span is all’, Lubbock writes in late January 2009, after two months of no writing entries.30 An entire year of Lubbock’s life unfolds in the ensuing ten pages of his memoir, during which his treatments and scans are preventing his tumour from growing, which is deemed ‘good’—a word that means ‘life itself ’ according to Lubbock.31 When the ‘bad news’ begins arriving on March 26, 2010, that there is tumour activity again and he needs to return for another brain surgery and set of treatments, the pace of entries becomes more regular again: ‘Good news, continued, made me lazy. Now I am quickened’, Lubbock observes, though we are warned to be suspicious

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of how the narrative voice is operating (who it is that speaks) in light of the author’s worsening language difculties.32 ‘Before I was surviving, and living in fear. Now I am in danger again, and living in hope’, he clarifes.33 In a 6:00 a.m. musing before his second craniotomy on 13 April 2010, he compares his writing process to Scheherazade’s storytelling—striving ‘to endlessly defer’ the end.34 ‘Prolong, prolong’ becomes a rallying cry to the healthcare workers who consult with him about possible treatments which become progressively more toxic and less efective. ‘It is not possible to get any distance from my project: being alive’, he writes on 16 July 2010, after the latest scans show that the treatment regimen he had been following since April did not impede the tumour’s growth.35 ‘Objectively, from the outside you may say, my life is terrible, unbelievable’, he continues. ‘And it’s true, I hate … the way I am at the moment. But there is no objective view, I am here, in it.’36 And again, two weeks later (on 30 July 2010) he notes, ‘I am still a protagonist. Or rather, there are two of them. There is the die-er and the survivor. Both of them last for the same span, have the same future. But they have a diferent name.’37 Lubbock’s undeterred return to the composition of his memoir can thus be read as an attempt to ‘extend’ his presence as a re-presentable self, though this representability is no longer one of afrming the self ’s inclusion in a secular in medias res but rather one of marking the self ’s estrangement from it. Yet this experience of estrangement is not without vitality and movement of its own, and if the experiential dynamism of the in mediis rebus existence reads as afective dissonance, that doesn’t make it any less essential. This idea is perhaps best captured in a refection Lubbock ofers on hope as the bad news returns in the Spring of 2010: Hope—is it good or bad? This ambivalence about hope. Hope fnally disappointed will bring greater grief: so resist it. Or hope denied is folly, even at the risk of delusion, if it brings advantage—happiness for now, or conceivably a longer life. For hope is not delusion, anyway. It doesn’t claim to know. It simply wants. Respect it.38 Echoing the resolve of his memoir’s title (Until Further Notice, I Am Alive), Lubbock here ofers an insight into the limits of an unequivocal practice of death and its proposed pharmakon of detachment from human want as hope: Lubbock reads this proposition as a folly born of fear that want/hope will bring yet more grief. Told from the perspective of a personal terminal horizon, Lubbock’s memoir, much like Riggs, captures how writing the death of the self ofers an alternative way of coming to terms with a sense of an ending—not as an abstract principle void of visceral selfshness, the kind that clings to life at all cost, but as an evolving lived experience that is dissonant, conficted and open-ended. ‘We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises’, writes Riggs in the penultimate paragraph of her memoir; ‘They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.’39 ‘I am a divided creature’, notes Lubbock in the penultimate

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entry of his memoir: ‘one side makes me a hopeful survivor … the other side makes me an obvious stopper … Even this is happiness … perhaps as long as I can fll out this play, dying itself may be accepted.’40 In capturing how to live in the precarious state of terminal temporality, autothanatographic writing also reveals a way of being in the world tangentially, both full of want for the life that this world contains, and attentive to the incommensurability that consciousness must endure in witnessing its own demise. To return to Quayson once more, if the composition of these autothanatographies assists Riggs and Lubbock in signifying the experience of dying in real time and in metabolising the fear of unknowability, they also become a form of social engagement with their readers about the experience of dying. What kind of social work do these texts perform in accounting for the dying self? And what does it mean for us as actors and implementors of the Western humanist/modern storyline to turn to terminal illness memoirs in order to make sense of the shifting relation between the temporal coordinates of in medias res and in mediis rebus in the time of the Anthropocene?

Terminal relationality in the time of the Anthropocene In the frst instance we can read autothanatographical writing as elaborating on the practice of dying that Scranton, Bringhurst and Zwicky promote for coming to terms with the environmental catastrophe in our times. The narrative nervousness of terminal illness memoirs unsettles social patterns of recognition by employing the intimate voice of autography to point towards the disintegration rather than the formation of the self in the image of the social, and by exposing the shaky constructedness of humanism. In this way, terminal illness writing both interrupts the fantasy of the modern self and its exceptionalism and resituates the human in the greater living (biotic and geotic) order. By using the personal voice to narratively process the lived experience of dying, however, autothanatographical writing circumvents the ‘stuplimity’ that an abstracted ‘practice of dying’ ends up reproducing, when it employs the same large-scale methodical logic at the heart of Western humanism to bid its case of thinking like an ecosystem. The experience of dying that emerges from each of Riggs’s and Lubbock’s memoirs is singular and unsystematic, and reports on the unpredictable/uncontainable/un controllable narrative efects that the self confronts when its fantasy of stability and permanence is disrupted, forcing it to realign its connections to the world. By insisting on speaking as an embodied self even in facing the end, the voice of these authothanatographies attends to the anarchic carnality that houses the self and that, in the context of illness, exposes the self as a ruse worth reevaluating and resituating in a living topography. This is exactly the value of illness for the social imaginary, according to Virginia Woolf, who, in her 1925 essay ‘On Being Ill’, argues for the social work that illness writing performs. Woolf notes how illness interrupts the habitual patterns of everyday life and its normative social consciousness. In being removed

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from health’s ‘cautious respectability’, the ill consciousness, according to Woolf, rethinks our criteria for measuring social value: In health the genial pretence must be kept up and the efort renewed—to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work by day together and by night to sport. In illness this make-believe ceases … we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We foat with the sticks on the stream; helter skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the frst time for years, to look around, to look up—to look, for example, at the sky … Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless … If we were all laid prone, frozen, stif, still the sky would be experimenting with its blues and golds. Perhaps then looking down at something very small and close and familiar, we shall fnd sympathy.41 Woolf ’s refections on the alternative sympathy and relationality that illness makes available address both the altered situatedness of the self-as-patient and her transformed sociality: no longer compliant with the normate, the self turns her attention to the local, ordinary and small-scale reality for recognition and connection, however ephemerally. Woolf grants to this approach the attribute ‘sympathy’, though this version of sympathy departs from the moral kind—the kind of totalising relationality— that serves as the social glue of ‘the army of the upright’. Where the distant sky, in its scale and symbolism, upholds the divine beauty and metaphysical indiference of the social in medias res, the nearby fower, ant or bee (examples that Woolf ofers) invite the ill self ’s sympathy in their fragility, insignifcance and in their in mediis rebus status. The experience of bodily doubt that Western philosophical thought deems unique to humans, according to Havi Carel,42 in Woolf ’s writing generates a recognition of a shared chaotic precarity with the geotic and biotic life that exists in the peripheries of the Western theological and humanist orders of signifcation, and achieves this insight without relinquishing the self, but in redirecting its orientation. Thom van Dooren repeats Woolf ’s insight when he notes how it is the fragility of life that ‘positions all organisms (including humans …) as parts of a broader multispecies community … in which we live and die with others, live and die for others’.43 I would call this kind of sympathy/recognition that emerges from illness writing terminal relationality, to signal the dissonance at the heart of its conceptualisation: at once sequestered from in medias res by virtue of its precarious temporality and embodied uncertainty, and in afliation with the social imaginary via attendance to its storytelling drive. The contribution of Riggs’s and Lubbock’s memoirs to considerations of dying as a practice, then, is to insist on terminal relationality’s situated, generative and evolving character and to voice that perspective from within the process of dying, since there is no other place their authors can occupy. Their writing, in this regard, unfolds in the middle voice register, which forgoes qualifcations such as ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ positionality, and afrms, instead, a more

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entangled perspective of the writing practice. As Roland Barthes points out, the middle voice declines the authoring sovereignty and distance from textual emplotment and locates the writer, instead, inside the writing, where infuence and efect co-occur beyond primacy.44 Put simply, writing in the middle voice is an intransitive activity, whereby the author is not anterior to the composition but rather is interior to it, shaped by and in the writing itself. The illness memoir, as a writing practice, not only bears witness to the self ’s aporetic transformation but also forges an alternative storyworld to house its lived experience. Such a narrative does invariably interrupt the meaning-granting grammar of the normative storyworlds, the undertaking, that is, that Scranton endorses in the time of the Anthropocene, but it does so without a divestment from this life. Singularly dissonant, the ‘middle voice’ selves that are found in Riggs’s and Lubbock’s memoirs remain attached to this life through eforts at signifcation, even as their storytelling oferings require, in Walter Benjamin’s words, their complete consumption by the gentle fame of their stories.45 This brings me to a second assessment of autothanatography’s social work and contribution to an understanding of relationality in a time of demise and loss. In her essay ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, Deborah Bird Rose turns to poetry (Seamus Heaney’s ‘A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also’) and indigenous storytelling (the Moon and the Dingo story of the Ngarinman people of Australia’s Northern Territory) to fnd a language for understanding how to process and be in community in ‘a time of unfathomable loss’—the sixth mass extinction currently underway. The poem centres on a dog who unwittingly betrays the confdence of his people by getting distracted and not taking their message— that they don’t want to die forever—to the great spirit Chukwu. When a toad lies to Chukwu that humans don’t want to return from death and Chukwu grants their wishes, the dog becomes inconsolable, ‘crying out all night behind the corpse house’.46 The story recounts a similar lie, this one told by the lonely Moon to the Dingo, that by dying he can return back to life after a few days, just as the Moon does. After resisting the taunt for a while, the Dingo reluctantly succumbs and goes to his death, while his community of dingoes gathers to bear witness to his irreversible expiration through ‘a great howling lamentation’.47 Rose centres her attention on the characters of the crying dog and the howling dingoes in an efort to describe the kind of response that emerges in the community of survivors/readers of terminality. Rose reads these two texts as narratives of ‘the death zone’, which is the liminal threshold ‘where the living and the dying encounter each other in the presence of that which cannot be averted’.48 The death zone occasions a sociality in the time of in mediis rebus— humanism’s Achilles’ heel: how to be a self and be in relation beyond the fantasy of a permanent metaphysical home to replace what Rose calls ‘the house of life’.49 According to Rose, We live after death in the sense that the deaths of others precede us … And so we live with the dying of others. As long as we live we are surrounded

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by death, and until it is time for our own death we are the ones who call out to the dying, who stay with the dying … We are social animals enmeshed in bonds of solidarity, and we are members of the wider family of those who cry behind the corpse house. Exactly here, where to be alive is to be implicated in the lives and deaths of others; exactly here we are called into an ethics of proximity and responsibility.50 Conceived as death zone narratives, Riggs’s and Lubbock’s autothanatographies do not so much elaborate on the shortcomings of Western humanism as restore it to its proper scale within the larger web of earth life, and in doing so invite their readers’ recognition of our shared in medias res constructedness and shortsightedness.51 In this regard the two memoirs can be read as exemplary texts that interrupt humanism’s fantasy of immortality and exceptionalism, and become singularly situated swan songs that invite a response from their community of readers as a form of terminal relationality. If our response is to be ethical, in the sense that Rose explains, it will attend to the life force driving the middle voice of these narratives, as they attend to their own demise while nonetheless remaining attached to life through writing. Philosopher Lev Shestov attributes a divine quality to such attentiveness, which he describes as a ‘certain kind of craziness to love all that is doomed to perish’, but in echoing Rose’s call to direct this kind of crazy love towards earth life, I conceptualise it as a love that doesn’t transcend death, but intransitively descends into its certainty, in the process reconfguring the character and value of hope in the face of unwinding life.52 To recall Riggs’s observations of La Dame à la Licorne, the attentiveness/love that terminal illness memoirs reveal and elicit is all too mortal—not privy to the mythical unicorn’s insouciant refection of the horse in the mirror. It is through their crazy attachment to life, rather than their detachment from it, that autothanatographies illuminate the creative drive of the will to live in every expiring being, and summon our social attentiveness and middle-voiced response in the shadow of the Anthropocene.

Notes 1 Levin et al., ‘6 Big Findings from the IPCC 2022 Report on Climate Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’. 2 In the two decades since Crutzen and Stoermer’s publication, multiple variants of the term (Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, Symbiocene and Ploutocene, among others) have challenged the analytical capacity and comprehension of ‘Anthropocene’. I nonetheless continue to employ the term in a ‘strategically essentialist’ manner, because, as David Farrier notes, it remains a useful ‘provocation’ for considering ‘what it means to be human in a time of political, ethical, and ecological crisis’—in Kate Rigby’s ‘Introduction’ in Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation. 3 Levin et al., ‘6 Big Findings from the IPCC 2022 Report on Climate Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’. 4 Clark, ‘Derangements of Scale’, 148. 5 Vermeulen, Literature and the Anthropocene, 4–5.

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Colin Jost, ‘SNL Weekend Update: U.N.’s Climate Change Report’. Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Refections on the End of a Civilization, 91. Bringhurst et al., Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis, 36. Colebrook, ‘A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World’, 175. Colebrook, ‘A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World’, 193. Colebrook, ‘A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World’, 189. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 7. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 17. I am making a reference here to Povinelli’s diferentiation between carnality and corporeality, where the former is conceived as ‘a physical mattering forth’ in the biopolitical imaginary, while the latter adheres to the ‘judicial and political’ logic of the discourse (7). Toombs, ‘The Temporality of Illness’, 237. Svenaeus, ‘Illness as Unhomelike Being-in-the-World: Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Medicine’, 339. Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, 17–18. Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us, 52. Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, 259. Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, 204. Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, 228. Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, 232. Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, 7–8. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 11. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 11. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 73. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 39–40. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 38. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 61. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 62. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 75. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 86. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 92. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 108. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 135. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 135. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 140. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 92. Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, 306. Lubbock, Until Further Notice I Am Alive, 142. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, 36–38. Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness, 87–88. Referenced in Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 4–5. See Roland Barthes, ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb?’ See Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 2. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 4. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 4. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 5. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 4. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 5. Quoted in Deborah Bird Rose, ‘In the Shadow of All This Death’, 5. I expand on the shift from a transcending (metaphysical/abstract) to a descending (materialist/embodied) narrative gesture that is frst considered by Sam Durrant in his discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals in the essay ‘J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, And The Limits Of The Sympathetic Imagination’, 132.

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Bibliography Barthes, Roland. ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb?’ In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, 134–144. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller.’ In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 83–110. Bonneuil, Christophe. ‘The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene.’ In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, edited by Clive Hamilton, Francois Gemenne and Christophe Bonneuil, 17–31. New York: Routledge, 2015. Bringhurst, Robert and Jan Zwicky. Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis. Saskatchewan, Canada: University of Regina Press, 2018. Carel, Havi. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2016. Clark, Timothy. ‘Scale: Derangements of Scale.’ In Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1., edited by Tom Cohen, 148–166. Open Humanities Press, 2012. Colebrook, Claire. ‘A Cut in Relationality: Art at the End of the World.’ Angelaki, 24:3, 175–195, 2019. Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. ‘The ‘Anthropocene’.’ Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17– 18, 2000. Durrant, Sam. ‘J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, And The Limits Of The Sympathetic Imagination.’ In J.M. Coetzee And The Idea Of The Public Intellectual, edited by Jane Poyner. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006, 118–134. Jain, S. Lochlann. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Jost, Colin. ‘SNL Weekend Update: U.N.’s Climate Change Report.’ NBC, October 13 2018, https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/weekend-update-uns -climate-change-report/3812222 Kermode, Frank. Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Levin, Kelly et al. ‘6 Big Findings from the IPCC 2022 Report on Climate Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.’ February 27, 2022. https://www.wri.org/insights/ipcc -report-2022-climate-impacts-adaptation-vulnerability Lubbock, Tom. Until Further Notice, I Am Alive. London: Granta, 2012. Luciano, Dana. ‘The Lynch Distinguished Lecturer Series | Lauren Berlant in Conversation with Dana Luciano and Rebecca Wanzo: The Unfnished Business of Cruel Optimism: Crisis, Afect, Sentimentality.’ November 19, 2020. http:// sds.utoronto.ca/events/the-lynch-distinguished-lecturer-series-lauren-berlant-in -conversation-with-dana-luciano-and-rebecca-wanzo-the-unfnished-business-of -cruel-optimism/ Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Rigby, Kate. Reclaiming Romanticism: Toward an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2020. Riggs, Nina. The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying. London: The Text Publishing Company, 2017. Rose, Deborah Bird. ‘In the shadow of all this Death.’ In Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnson and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013, 1–20.

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Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Refections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2015. Svenaeus, Fredrik. ‘Illness as Unhomelike Being-in-the-World: Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Medicine.’ Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 14, 333–343, 2011. Toombs, S. Kay. ‘The Temporality of Illness: Four Levels of Experience.’ Theoretical Medicine 11, 227–241, 1990. Vermeulen, Pieter. Literature and the Anthropocene. New York: Routledge, 2020. Vickers, Neil. ‘Illness Narratives.’ In A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth, 388–401. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Woolf, Virginia. ‘On Being Ill.’ The New Criterion: A Quarterly Review, IV:1, 32–45, 1926. Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.’ CR: The New Centennial Review, 3:3, 257–337, 2003.

8 A POETICS OF NATURE: RELIGIOUS NATURALISM, MULTIPLICITIES AND AFFINITIES Carol Wayne White

Introduction With the use of the Anthropocene concept, we often envision, acknowledge, and embrace a series of events that are part of the realities of life in the twenty-frst century.1 Among these are the unprecedented current rates of carbon released into the atmosphere over the past 66 million years, the rapid rise of sea levels and climatic changes that are predicted to displace millions of people, and other crises such as mass species extinction, water scarcity and ocean acidifcation.2 Our understanding of the Anthropocene concept includes contributions from the Great Acceleration graphs that indicate a series of distinct earth system changes are at play, including ‘atmospheric composition, stratospheric ozone, the climate system, the water and nitrogen cycles, marine ecosystems, land systems, tropical forests and terrestrial biosphere degradation’.3 Moreover, the Planetary Boundaries framework delineates specifc limits that should not be exceeded in order for the earth system to maintain its function as a life support system.4 As suggested by a host of scientists, ecologists and scholars in various felds, these events are a set of interrelated problems generated by the accelerated efects of human industrial activity on the Earth’s system; indeed, industrial society has become a global geophysical force on the planet’s system, comparable to other natural processes, unleashing planetary forces beyond our control that threaten the continuing viability of many species, including our own. Responses from scientists, humanists, ecologists, and activists to these sobering admissions are wide-ranging, including the set of Anthropocene narratives that Christophe Bonneuil has identifed as woven tales of ‘how we got here’: the naturalist narrative, currently the mainstream one; (2) the post-nature narrative; (3) the eco-catastrophist narrative; and 4) the eco-Marxist narrative.5 In this essay, I focus on the mainstream or naturalist meta-narrative, associated with a cluster of perspectives sharing some fundamental convictions: (i) that earth itself is a single system DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-9

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within which the biosphere is an essential component; (ii) that human impact is global and accelerating, now threatening the fundamental life processes of earth; (iii) that this change is traceable geologically, possibly implying a new geological epoch, ‘the Anthropocene’; and (iv) that there is a need to radically change current human activities in order to avoid this threat.6 At its best, this Anthropocene grand narrative inspires human agents genuinely interested in transformative praxis. At the same time, however, it has generated paralysis, nihilism and despair among many, often blinding us from considering other possible, alternative ways of embracing the realities of anthropogenic disruptions in the contemporary era. This chapter aims to deconstruct this specifc functioning of the Anthropocene narrative, exploring other narratives that are often made invisible by an overarching concern for the human and activity by the human.7 It introduces a poetics of nature (or ecological aesthetic) grounded in the tenets of religious naturalism. As a capacious, ecological religious worldview, religious naturalism reframes humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature. Religious naturalism also features a materialist, relational ontology, encouraging humans’ processes of transformative engagement with the more-than-human worlds that constitute our existence and with each other. In seeking to establish this poetics of nature as a basic orientation in American life, I locate its lived truths in the poetic, philosophic, and literary expressions of such iconic fgures as Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, and Anna Julia Cooper. Individually and collectively, these visionaries, writers, and poets have countered a hegemonic culture’s triumphalist view of humans as standing outside of nature and managing nature to our own beneft. Inspired by their aesthetic-ethical visions found in select works, this poetics of nature re-inscripts the human as part of life’s complex web of cultural and cosmic meanings; it re-arranges established, infuential positionalities; and it accentuates new emphases in myriad nature’s enunciations, desires, dreams and possibilities. Functioning as one critical intervention to the dominant Anthropocene narrative, this poetics is structured by specifc narrative expressions that consider new, creative ways of understanding human-nature relations, conceptualising human agency, and responding to the multi-layered challenges of anthropogenic disruptions. In this regard, this poetics of nature aligns itself with some of the general aims of ‘a decolonizing ecopoetics for our own time of multifaceted rupture’ that Kate Rigby delineates in Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation.8 Moreover, with its grounding in religious naturalism, this poetics of nature attends to some key questions that Sigurd Bergmann raises surrounding the category of the human in Anthropocene discourse while also emphasising religious and ethical contributions to Anthropocene narratives.9

Part One. A view of the relational, material human in religious naturalism Within academic settings, religious naturalism constitutes the very best of interdisciplinary studies, including insights from traditional felds of inquiry

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(philosophy, theology, history, metaphysics, physics, biology, history) as well as newer ones emerging from ecology, animal studies, and literary/cultural criticism. As introduced in this chapter, religious naturalism is an umbrella term for a diverse set of religious and philosophical perspectives that share the common conviction that nature is ultimate, or that nothing transcends nature.10 Acknowledging that the concept ‘nature’ is a historically evolving term that is also a contested site among various types of thinkers, I defne nature as the complex, endless, and evolving relations that constitute all that there is, or what is often called natural reality. As Donald Crosby observes, Nature requires no explanation beyond itself. It always has existed and always will exist in some shape or form. Its constituents, principles, laws, and relations are the sole reality. This reality takes on new traits and possibilities as it evolves inexorably through time.11 The qualifer ‘religious’ in religious naturalism establishes the natural order as the centre of humans’ most signifcant experiences and understandings. While afrming nature as the only realm in which people in search of value and meaning live out their lives, this claim embraces a sense of nature’s richness and spectacular complexity. As Wesley Wildman asserts, for religious naturalists there is the ceaseless, explicit focus on myriad nature in ‘its beauty, terror, scale, stochasticity, emergent complexity, and evolutionary development’.12 In this context, myriad nature references all that is, including human life, as forms and function of matter, where matter is imbued with a dynamic quality that contains self-organising capacities, such that there is a tendency for ever more complex formations to appear. In prioritising matter in this sense, religious naturalism also rejects mind-body distinctions, insisting that all existents, or all things, living and non-living, are constituted of the same basic elements. Finally, religious naturalism’s approach to nature as matter is emergent or expansive in orientation, rejecting reductionist inclinations.13 At the heart of religious naturalism in all of its variants is the idea of emergence. As an important new concept for thinking about biological and cosmic evolution, emergence helps us challenge some widely held paradigms about the nature of ‘nature’ within the last two decades. According to molecular cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, a prominent representative of religious naturalism, emergent properties arise as a consequence of relationships—for example, the relationships between water molecules that generate a snowfake or the relationships between neurons that generate a memory. Emergent properties also give rise to yet more emergent properties, generating the vast complexity of our present-day cosmic, biological, ecological, and cultural contexts.14 In refecting meaningfully on the emergence of matter (and especially life) from the Big Bang forward, religious naturalists promote an understanding of myriad nature as complex processes of becoming. This view of nature includes humans who, with other organisms are inextricably bound together in a web of mutual interdependence.

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Religious naturalism ofers a compelling conception of humans as natural processes intrinsically connected to other natural processes. The advances of science, through both biology and physics, have served to demonstrate not only how closely linked human animals are with nature, but that we are simply one branch of a seemingly endless natural cosmos. Furthermore, Big Bang cosmology shows the world evolving naturally, based on the interconnection and interaction of all of its fundamental components. It also provides a wonderful epic from which to understand humans’ rootedness in materiality. As Loyal Rue, a major proponent of religious naturalism, observes, human beings are the manifestation of many interlocking systems—atomic, molecular, biochemical, anatomical, and ecological—apart from which human existence is incomprehensible. On this account, humans are natural products of other natural processes and intimate participants with them. Embedded in nature, the category of the human is defned as material through and through. Consider, for example, that ‘[o]ur bodies contain the mineral elements of primordial rocks; our very cells share the same historically evolved components as those of grasses and trees; our brains contain the basic neural core of reptile, bird, and fellow mammals’.15 From the vantage point of religious naturalism, celebrating human animals as emergent life forms is not reducible to concluding that human beings are the triumphant summit of natural development. Rather, as suggested by recent insights in ecological studies, all members of an ecosystem are equally important, comprising it as a functional whole. Within each web, each species of animal has a niche for which it is more or less adapted, and has attributes that others lack. This ecological framework challenges those who would use evolutionary history as the basis for deciding who is better than whom. It also leads us to interpret evolution in a much more expansive sense, shorn of the distortions of conventional anthropocentric orientations. Rather than view evolution as the meta-narrative of an increasing capacity of human nature to manipulate other forms of nature, we now emphasise the successive emergence of new forms of opportunity, or the continual diversifcation of new modes of being. Within this ecological context, evolution is associated with new patterns of harmonious coexistence among bountiful nature rather than the progressive development of increased specialisation. In The Sacred Depths of Nature, Goodenough ofers a lucid account of humans as natural organisms, providing sound scientifc data that supports the notion of our fundamental interconnectedness with other living beings: And now we realize that we are connected to all creatures. Not just in food chains or ecological equilibria. We share a common ancestor. We share genes for receptors and cell cycles and signal-transduction cascades. We share evolutionary constraints and possibilities. We are connected all the way down.16 Goodenough’s observations support my view that humans are, by our very constitution, relational, and our wholeness occurs within a matrix of complex interconnectedness—in ways of conjoining with others that transform us. In a religious

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context, the notion of humans seeking, fnding and experiencing community with others—an essential aspect of our humanity—is evoked here. Exploring the tenets of religious naturalism in conjunction with values discourse, we consider humans’ awareness and appreciation of our connection to ‘all that is’, as an expression of the sacred, or of what we perceive and value as ultimately important. Value in this sense refers to an organism’s facility to sense whether events in its environment are more or less desirable.17 Minimally, this facility evokes the notion of adaptive value, which is the basic matrix of Darwinian theory.18 Within a larger ecological framework, however, this truth takes on a fuller meaning, as Holmes Rolston suggests: ‘An organism is the loci of values defended; life is otherwise unthinkable. Such organismic values are individually defended; but, as ecologists insist, organisms occupy niches and are networked into biotic communities.’19 With its expansive sense of human embeddedness within myriad nature and our material, relational constitution, religious naturalism helps to ground a poetics of nature (or ecological aesthetic) that accentuates new emphases in our enunciations of desires, dreams, and possibilities. Accordingly, this poetics evokes Peter Van Ness’s notion of the spiritual dimension of life, or ‘the embodied task of realizing one’s truest self in the context of reality apprehended as a cosmic totality. It is the quest for attaining an optimal relationship between what one truly is and everything that is.’20 One way of achieving this optimal relationality is recognising (in an embodied, intimate manner) that established, infuential positionalities always already await humanity’s desire to become fully itself. More precisely, this poetics of nature has humans considering how other life forces, bodies, modes of being—infnitely multiplied—share in the capacious entangled web of life and amid shifting, ontological orderings. As one biotic form, humanity experiences an irreducible ‘thereness’, which is prior to the objectifcations of ‘I-it’ dualisms created by our conceptual abstractions. Simply put, humans are entangled in all that is, even before we can begin to conceptualise ourselves as human beings.

Part Two. Towards a poetics of nature Embracing these theoretical insights, the poetics of nature outlined here features narratives, ideas, images, and poetic visions that show humans living, experiencing and seeing diferently as irreducible relational, material beings. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work is helpful in this regard. As a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she has urged dominant settler cultures to redefne their evolving relationship with nature and to forge new values and modes of valuation appropriate to our intimate encounters with the more-than-human world. As she suggests in this passage about the gifts of strawberries, we begin to see diferently when we forfeit anthropocentric assumptions: The plant has in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary

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ftness is increased. When it is successful in enticing an animal such as me to disperse its fruit, its genes for making yumminess are passed on to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than those of the plant whose berries were inferior …. What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed.21 When we begin to see in the expanded way Kimmerer suggests, our shifting attentions accentuate a complex matrix of ‘becoming’ and ‘experiencing’ that is a part of myriad nature. Roaming within this materialistic topography brings a sense of strange wonder to our human relationality and the possibility of becoming other than what we are at any given moment when recognising such intimate states of entanglement.22 Merlin Sheldrake’s study on fungi ofers another intriguing perspective that shifts attention away from large-scale human knowing to small, intricate wonders of myriad nature. Sheldrake describes spheres of more-than-human communication that reveal intimate interactions between organisms underground—these are often not detected by ordinary human perception. Fungi are fascinating to Sheldrake because they provide an excellent case study into how organisms use their chemical senses featured in distinct olfactory systems to explore and make sense of their environments. He observes: Plants, fungi, and animals all use similar types of receptors to detect chemicals. When molecules bind to these receptors, they trigger a signaling cascade: One molecule triggers a cellular change, which triggers a bigger change, and so on. In this way, small causes can ripple into large efects: Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as thirty-four thousand molecules in one square centimeter, the equivalent of a single drop of water in twenty thousand Olympic swimming pools.23 This detailed explanation from Sheldrake conveys remarkable insight into just how intimately entangled humans are with more-than-human nature. With the capacity to smell, humans participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organise much of their existence. The examples given by Kimmerer and Sheldrake are important contributions to the perspectival epistemology that this poetics of nature advances. Alternatively known as metaphysical perspectivism by Crosby, this epistemology holds that the world humans inhabit has a plurality of entities, each with its own individuality and particularity of expression. Accordingly, everything that exists in the world has a distinctive perspective on everything else: All the elemental particles, atoms, molecules, compounds, inorganic and organic entities and combinations of those entities, including human beings and their histories, cultures, and societies, and all of the actions, reactions,

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functions, qualities, and traits of these particular things and their relations are included. No two perspectives or systems of them are exactly alike.24 This critical notion helps destabilise Western humanity’s ordinary (or grand) sense of knowing, in its typical pursuit of classifying and organising nature’s profound alterity and complex processes of becoming.

Part Three. New narratives of seeing, living, and becoming differently French poet and philosopher Paul Valery once described ‘poetry as a separate language, or more specifcally, a language within a language’, which is another way of suggesting what could be expressed in poetry but not elsewhere.25 Building on this insight, the ‘poetic’ becomes one portal for grasping the richness and value of myriad nature. Accordingly, when expressing the intimacies of myriad nature, this poetics of nature is structured by an assemblage of poetic expressions, passages, sensibilities, and perspectives—another language indeed—that illustrates an infnity of meanings and possibilities beyond the excess of large-scale anthropocentric prosaic narratives. Mary Oliver’s insights are vitally important in this regard. Her poetry encourages us to do more than view the natural world as a work of art, or as pleasure for the senses, or even as a stimulator of human curiosity. Rather, when experiencing her poetry, one becomes mindful of what might be called ‘rapt attention’ to the particulars of our embeddedness in myriad nature. As suggested by one critic, Oliver’s canon of poetry is an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilisation for too much furry and inattention, and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making.26 As suggested in her very popular poem ‘Wild Geese’, Oliver represents the bodily experiences of humanity as essentially embedded in myriad nature; she describes the soft animal of our bodies loving what they love and fnding their place within the family of things.27 Oliver’s imagery exemplifes beautifully the conviction that humans are not outside the web of relations that constitute life. More specifcally, it contributes to this poetics of nature in accentuating the view that our humanity is not an abstract, metaphysical given, but rather an achievement that becomes fully itself with an appreciation of its embedded materiality. Inspired by Oliver, this poetics of nature also alerts us to the powerful infuence of cultural memes that both harbour anthropocentric desires and valorise an exceptional human nature. In ‘Sleeping in the Forest’, the intensely sensuous, bodily experiences of the forest inhabitants reveal subjectivities that do not depend on the typical culture-nature divide that features largely in much American folklore and cultural narratives: I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging

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her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fre of the stars but my thoughts, and they foated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.28 The state of sleeping, an intimate activity, allows us to see that humans are always already immersed in, and entangled with, the smaller worlds upon which we depend. Our humanity, from this perspective, stems from realising its irreducible, inescapable, entanglements and mutual interdependence with other processes of nature. As Oliver demonstrates in recounting these experiences with the forest’s many inhabitants, breaking into view here is another narrative of grandeur of the often taken-for-granted natural landscapes and processes that inspire awe, wonder and gratitude. Furthermore, remaining faithful to a vision of myriad nature as it is, this poetics of nature does not feature humanity eschewing loss. Rather, as natural creatures, humanity forsakes an imaginative route to immortality, immersing ourselves in what is here, mesmerised by its variegated splendour. This poetics thus ushers in a contemplative life where one’s awareness and experience of materiality is not overshadowed by theological and doctrinal abstractions. Without appealing to supernaturalism or to some metaphysical anchoring, it unabashedly afrms life—and a life that does not go according to our own human wishes and plans. There is the humbling awareness that life unfolds and we with it. Life understood here evokes the deepest mysteries of being here as natural entities: natural transformations occur all the time, and part of that movement involves death. This poetics of nature also embraces the splendour of possibly achieving (or becoming) our humanity in infnite ways—a task that can never be completed in an unfolding, mysterious universe. Dillard touches on this theme in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, when describing her experiences of living in a remote part of the Blue Ridge Mountains after surviving a near fatal bout of pneumonia. Weaving together observations of the surrounding landscape with personal longings and refreshing refections, Dillard speaks of dwelling diferently because she sees differently—as the mountainous landscape. She observes:

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Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failure of all life. This is our heritage, the piebald landscape of time. We walk around; we see a shred of the infnite possible combinations of an infnite variety of forms.29 The enduring appeal and importance of encountering and beholding such variegated texture also leads Dillard to refect on the possibilities it has for humans: What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down. The texture of the world, its fligree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility of beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.30 As a pilgrim encountering the prolifc sacrality of mountain life, Dillard recognises there are no easy or conventional answers, for ‘our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery’.31 Such mystery destabilises our sense of knowing in the usual human pursuit of classifying and organising myriad nature’s profound alterity. Dillard’s refections underscore the profound ecological perspectivism highlighted earlier, accentuating the poetic conviction that our limited human perspective is part of a multiplicity of perspectives. She writes: I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under the trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is it.32 As Dillard helps us to imagine, the possibility of dwelling diferently, of experiencing the strange, relational worlds of which we are constituted, evokes the expansive sense of miraculous life that occurs each moment, on granular scales that we often forget about when focusing only on human aspirations and desires. She ofers a poetic sense of this forgetfulness in an illuminative line from For the Time Being: We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious—the people, events, and things of the day—to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuf like color.33 There is an invitation to live out of a new vision of life, to deepen our appreciation of other-than-human nature, exploring and honouring our connectedness to all that is, as well as with each other.

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In the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman ofered another poetic rendering of humanity’s miraculous entanglement with life in Leaves of Grass: Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, Or animals feeding in the felds, Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. To me the sea is a continual miracle, The fshes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?34 Whitman’s verse describes the rich sensateness of human materiality, and it also celebrates our inextricable connectedness with the many worlds that constitute our being here—realities that are always there waiting for us to notice and acknowledge. The capacious miracle that Whitman draws us to—and one that he invites us to experience—also invites the language of desire, suggesting an erotic materiality, as found in his efusive afrmations of our basic interconnectedness: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you …35 As a site of illumination, Whitman alerts us to the dangers of emplacing what is fuid and porous with normalising discourses. As one life force among many, humanity

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must resist solipsistic tendencies and egoistic impulses: there is no isolated self who stands over against the felds of interaction. Put another way, there is no private self or fnal line between interiority and exteriority—we always include the other (even if by acting to exclude it). As a natural entity, the human experience of selfhood is constitutionally relational and inevitably entangled in temporal becoming. Another important slant on the expansive relationality engulfng the category of the human in this poetics of nature is found in the writings of the nineteenthcentury feminist Anna Julia Cooper. In nature, Cooper saw egalitarian principles at work that helped her to speak out against ill-conceived views of racial and gender relations constructed within human formations.36 When speaking out against various forms of oppression and cultural imperialism, Cooper argued that such developments are not in keeping with nature’s design: ‘Now I need not say that peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable. Despotism is not one of the ideas that [man] has copied from nature.’37 Cooper re-envisioned the human as an important fnite realm (or, perhaps, as constituting a unique valueladen matrix) of potentiality within the unfolding of cosmic infnite possibilities.38 Cooper imbued her views of nature with aesthetic-ethical infections, consistently characterising humans as evolving, perfecting, and maturing processes. In ‘The Gain from a Belief ’, Cooper uses processional imagery for human life to challenge the scepticism and positivism of various European philosophers who saw humanity as nothing more than a conglomeration of cells best explained by scientifc empiricism. Cooper rejects this reductive materialism in favour of a loftier view of humanity, or a ‘sublime conception of life as the seed-time of character for the growing of a congenial inner-self to be forever a constant presence’.39 Likewise, in ‘What Are We Worth?’, Cooper extends her naturalism when describing black Americans as dynamic, malleable entities capable of transformative growth, contingent on society’s provision of the proper conditions and forms of cultivation for its maturation: It is labor, development training, careful patient, diligent toil that must span the gulf between this vegetating life germ (now worth nothing but toil and care and trouble, and living purely at the expense of another)—and that future consummation in which ‘the elements are so mixed that Nature can stand up and say to all the world, ‘This is a [hu]man.”’40 According to Cooper’s understanding, various forms of inequality are illinformed social constructions that are not inherent to the natural strivings and agential activities operating within humans. Cooper’s feminist outlook essentially desired a world where mutually enhancing events and dynamic relations among individuals occurred. The process philosophical system inaugurated by Alfred N. Whitehead in the 1930s ofers another way of understanding some of the truths expressed by both Cooper and Whitman. Process thought afrms all reality as consisting of processes rather than material objects; and processes are best defned by their relations

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with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. In this processional framework, all entities have subjectivity and responsiveness, and there is a dynamic relationship between individual organisms. Each occurrence in turn exerts infuence, which enters into the becoming of other occurrences. These basic unit-events of the world are not vacuous, but rather possess a subjective nature that allows them attributes that might be called feeling, memory and creativity. Every event, while infuenced by the past through a process Whitehead calls prehension‚ exercises some amount of self-determination or self-creation.41 Every event has some power to exert creative infuence on the future. This creative advance into novelty characterises Whitehead’s cosmos. The technical Whiteheadian term, ‘internal relations’, helps us to make sense of these activities. According to this principle, what we are is made up of a host of entangling and ever-changing relationships, all of which leave their traces on our life from its beginning to its end. At the same time, we are, within the context of those relationships, creative agents, making a diference, great or small, in the lives of others in the immediate present and in the long-range future.42 In this respect, Cooper’s and Whitman’s respective naturalisms, in very distinctive ways, accentuate the Whiteheadian view that ‘[e]very epoch has its character determined by the way its population re-act to the material events which they encounter. This reaction is determined by their basic beliefs—by their hopes, their fears, their judgments of what is worthwhile.’43 Moreover, Cooper’s historical example and her sensibilities anticipate and strengthen the case for this poetics of nature aspirations of addressing justice for myriad nature. Evoking Rigby’s sense of a decolonising ecopoetics, Cooper’s insights are crucial to those of us who are concerned about the ethics of unrestrained development as a means of dominating nature in all its forms—it is not an either/or situation, as humans are also natural organisms. As I have argued elsewhere, Cooper’s aesthetical-ethical approach to life placed paramount emphasis on relationality as a metaphor constitutive of nature’s reality. With such rhetorical gestures, Cooper feshes out Whitehead’s notion that all livings things are characterised by a threefold urge: ‘to live, to live well, and to live better’.44

Part Four. A poetics of nature’s moral imagination: re-envisioning human agency Inspired by Dillard, Oliver, Whitman, and Cooper, the narratives associated with this poetics of nature compel humans to re-consider who and what we think we are within the nexus of relational existence. In light of the omnipresence of the Anthropocene narrative, they also compel us to ask about the meaningfulness of the concept of human agency when acknowledging humanity’s entanglement with other processes. When set within the context of moral theory, the anthropocentric narrative raises thorny questions for some thinkers about the challenging task of moving from the descriptive to the normative. In other words, when

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asking about humans’ purposeful activity in response to the Anthropocene, there is the perennial conundrum of how to get from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’. As ethicist Maria Antonaccio has stated more eloquently, ‘Invoking the classic “is-ought” distinction from moral theory’, various thinkers contend that as a ‘description of our current planetary condition, the Anthropocene “cannot, by itself, support any conclusion for how we ought to behave”’.45 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fesh out a mature or full position, it nonetheless suggests that in positing humans as material processes embedded in nature, a poetics of nature ofers potential inroads for us to consider. In other words, it provides a plausible rationale that we can use in our ethical concerns about the state of the planet, as well as in our responses to the question, ‘What ought we to do?’ This poetics of nature provides an implicit normative stance in positing humans as an integral aspect of nature made aware of its embedded relationality. As relational, material organisms, humans are evolutionarily equipped to ask ‘why’ our activities matter within the universe. Phrased another way, as value-laden, natural processes, humans are capable of being concerned about the efects of our activities as we enact our structural relationality with other material processes. From this critical consciousness emerges the possibility of cultivating a moral imagination, or the signifcance of grasping our constitutive relationality, as Wendell Berry suggests with the term ‘propriety’. Berry uses this term to describe the fttingness of our conduct to our place or circumstances, even to our hopes. It afrms ‘the fact that we are not alone. It acknowledges the always-pressing realities of context and of infuence; we cannot speak or act or live out of context. Our life inescapably afects other lives, which inescapably afect our life.’ 46 With such an expansive sense of human embeddedness within myriad life, this poetics of nature celebrates the fullness (the ‘More’) of life. In this context, enacting our constitutive relationality is to exist in a state of wonder, constantly afrming life in all its splendour and complexity. It is important to do this in the contemporary era, in our disenchanted world, where the dominant practices, values, and aims have us habitually forgetting who we are. When we forget about who we are in this expanded sense, we participate in alienating structures of relationality. In this context, the aesthetical-ethical resonance of this poetics of nature suggests that ethical solutions to global problems will not be found if contemporaries ignore the interconnectedness of all life. Additionally, this poetics has the potential to disrupt our daily habitual modalities of dwelling in a false sense of isolation, or losing ourselves in exaggerated abstractions—both byproducts of ordinary perception. Here again, the wisdom of Process thought is helpful with its description of what Whitehead coined the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’.47 One commits this fallacy  when mistaking an abstract belief, opinion, or concept about the way things are for a physical or ‘concrete’ reality itself. For Whitehead, this term is helpful to counter reductionist ideas of reality, specifcally, the dominant view of his day that physical objects could be assigned temporal existence without reference to other objects. Against this view, Whitehead argues that ‘among the primary elements of nature as apprehended

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in our immediate experience, there is no element whatsoever which possesses this character of simple location’.48 The concept of an isolated atom, for example, is the product of intellectual abstraction, and such abstractions, by defnition, represent the lifting out of a thing from its concrete environment. Embracing this philosophical truth, one then recognises in the most immediate sense that the human is not a static entity, but an integral part of ongoing processes always already circumscribed in material concreteness, in a nexus of intimate relationalities. Cultivating these sensibilities may help us to pause, absorb, and take in the array of life’s splendour that greets one in engaging every single entity. Finally, this ecological aesthetic does not harbour or declare a guaranteed triumphalism. Rather, those who embrace it attest to a tentative uncertainty that pushes us to remember the expansive miracle articulated here: humans are actually structured in our evolutionary capacities as biological organisms to love, and to create alternative systems of interaction and forms of relationality. These forms of love involve local forms of activism such as protesting mountaintop mining for coal, drilling for oil/petroleum, and fracking for gas and oil; or, when deciding on the food we eat, determining how it is produced and transported and considering ways of decreasing food waste in the US and elsewhere. At the same time, the forms of love I associate with this ecological aesthetic may be indicative of Ursula Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism or ‘deterritorialized environmental vision’ articulated in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global.49 In other words, the moral imagination I am trying to sketch here sustains itself through our willing participation in ‘movements of scientifc inquiry, movements of cultural expression, movements for global distributive justice, movements to eliminate needless suffering, and movements to preserve the ecology of our home planet’.50 Certain possibilities may occur when human organisms begin to align their actions with the deeper mystery that we are not at the centre of all that is. If there is anything for humans to promote and celebrate, it is an ecological perspectivism that shows that how we act from minute to minute, or how we achieve or become our humanity, does have signifcant efects on humans, other animals, plants, and eco-systems.

Notes 1 The Anthropocene concept was frst coined by the chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen in 2000, and has since spread within the scientifc disciplines, across the humanities and through the media into public consciousness. For a glimpse of some of the conceptual issues involved in coining this epoch the ‘Anthropocene’, see Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 2 R.E. Zeebe, A. Ridgewell and J.C. Zachos, ‘Anthropogenic Carbon Release Rate Unprecedented during the Past 66 Million Years’, Nature Geoscience 9 (2016): 325– 329; Matthew E. Hauer, Jason M. Evans and Deepak R. Mishra, ‘Millions Projected to Be at Risk from Sea-level Rise in the Continental United States’, in Nature Climate Change 6 (2016): 691–695.

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3 Will Stefen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gafney and Cornelia Ludwig, ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review 2 (2015): 3. 4 https://www.stockholmresilience .org /research /planetar y-boundaries .htm l. Accessed June 2022. 5 Christophe Bonneuil, ‘The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene’, in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a new Epoch, eds. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne (London: Routledge, 2015), 16. 6 Rolf Lidskog and Claire Waterton, ‘Anthropocene—a Cautious Welcome from Environmental Sociology?’, Environmental Sociology 2, no. 4 (2016): 395. 7 Parts of this chapter’s discussion appear in ‘Big Miracle and Religious Naturalism: Rescuing Myriad Nature from Popular Fantasies of Nature Rescue’, in Natural Communions: Religion and Public Life, vol. 40, ed. Gabriel Ricci (New York: Routledge, 2019). Reprinted with permission from Taylor and Francis Group LLC (Books) U.S. 8 Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 3. 9 Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Is There a Future in the Eye of Humans? A Critical Eye on the Narrative of the Anthropocene’, Forum: Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society, 2016, 3. https://csres.iu.edu/. Accessed June 2022. 10 For a sampling of current works, see Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Loyal Rue, Religion Is Not about God: How Our Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They Fail (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Chet Raymo, When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2008); Jerome Stone, Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008); Donald Crosby, The Thou of Nature (New York: State University of New York Press, 2013); Michael Hogue, The Promises of Religious Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2010); Carol Wayne White, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (New York: Fordham Press, 2016). 11 Donald Crosby, Living with Ambiguity (Albany: SUNY Press), ix–x. 12 Wesley Wildman, ‘Religious Naturalism: What It Can Be, and What It Need Not Be’, Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 1, no. 1 (2014): 41. 13 Donald Crosby, ‘Matter, Mind, and Meaning’, in Donald Crosby and Jerome Stone, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism (New York: Routledge, 2018), 118. 14 Ursula Goodenough and Terrence Deacon ‘From Biology to Consciousness to Morality’, Zygon Journal of Religion and Science 38, no. 4: 801–819. 15 Michael W. Fox, ‘What Future for Man and Earth? Toward a Biospiritual Ethic’, in On the Fifth Day: Animal Rights and Human Ethics, ed. Richard Knowles Morris and Michael W. Fox (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1978), 227. 16 Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature, 73. 17 R.J. Dolan, ‘Emotion, Cognition, and Behaviour’, Science 298: 1191–1194. 18 Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 158. 19 Holmes Rolston III, ‘Environmental Ethics and Religion/Science’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. P. Clayton and Z. Simpson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 911. 20 Peter Van Ness, Spirituality and the Secular Quest (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 5. 21 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientifc Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions; frst paperback edition, 2015), 30. 22 For some humanistic and artistic perspectives on the transformative aspects associated with experiencing wonder in and with nature, see Sigurd Bergmann and Forrest Clingerman, eds., Art, Religion, and the Environment (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

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23 Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021), 27. 24 Crosby, Living with Ambiguity, 67–68. 25 Kenneth Koch, ‘The Language of Poetry’, The New York Review May 14, 1998 issue. https://www.nybooks .com /articles /1998/05/14/the -language -of-poetry/#:~ :text =Thinking %20about %20what %20could %20be ,boundaries %2C %20another %3A %20%E2%80%9Cthe%20language. ​ ​ ​ ​ Accessed June 2022. 26 https://poets.org/poet/mary-oliver. ​ ​ ​ ​ Accessed June 2022. 27 Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 347. 28 Oliver, Devotions, 403. Reprinted by permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency as agent for the author. Copyright © Mary Oliver 1978 with permission of Bill Reichblum. 29 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007; reissued in 2013), 147. 30 Dillard, Pilgrim Tinker Creek, 141. 31 Dillard, 11. 32 Dillard, 95. 33 Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 175. 34 Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (Library of America College Editions) (New York: Library of America, 1982), 513–514. 35 Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 27. 36 Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 71, 177–178. 37 Cooper, A Voice from the South, 150. 38 Cooper, 244, 258, 297. 39 Cooper, 295. 40 Cooper, 244. 41 Alfred N. Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas (New York, The Free Press, 1967), 176ff. 42 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed., David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 59ff, 65–67, 76, 160ff. 43 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 99. 44 Alfred N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1929), 8. 45 Maria Antonaccio, ‘Demoralizing and Re-moralizing the Anthropocene’, Religion in the Anthropocene, eds. Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 122. 46 Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Berkeley, Counterpoint, 2000), 13. 47 Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1925]), 51. 48 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 58. 49 Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), 10. 50 Wildman, ‘Religious Naturalism’, 54.

Bibliography Antonaccio, Maria. ‘De-moralizing and Re-moralizing the Anthropocene.’ In Religion in the Anthropocene, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann and Markus Vogt, 121–37. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. Bergmann, Sigurd. ‘Is There a Future in the Eye of Humans? A Critical Eye on the Narrative of the Anthropocene.’ In Forum: Consortium for the Study of Religion Ethics, and Society, 2016: 1–7. https://csres.iu.edu/. Accessed June 2022.

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Bergmann, Sigurd and Forrest Clingerman, eds. Arts, Religion, and the Environment: Exploring Nature’s Texture. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Bonneuil, Christophe. ‘The Geological Turn: narratives of the Anthropocene.’ In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne, 15–31. London: Routledge, 2015. Berry, Wendell. Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000. Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Crosby, Donald. Living with Ambiguity. New York: SUNY, 2008. Crosby, Donald. The Thou of Nature. New York: State University of New York, 2013. Crosby, Donald. ‘Matter, Mind, and Meaning.’ In The Routledge Handbook of Religious Naturalism, edited by Jerome Stone and Donald Crosby, 118–28. New York: Routledge, 2018. Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Dolan, R.J. ‘Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior.’ Science 298 (2002): 1191–4. https://doi .org/10.1126/science.1076358 Fox, Michael Fox. ‘What Future for Man and Earth? Toward a Biospiritual Ethic.’ In On the Fifth Day: Animal Rights and Human Ethics, edited by Richard Knowles Morris and Michael W. Fox, 219–30. Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1978. Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Goodenough, Ursula and Dean Terrence. ‘From Biology to Consciousness to Morality.’ Zygon Journal of Religion and Science 38(4) (2003): 801–19. Gould, Stephen J. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hauer, Matthew E., Jason M. Evans and Deepak R. Mishra ‘Millions Projected to be at Risk from Sea-level Rise in the Continental United States.’ Nature Climate Change 6 (2016): 691–5. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2961 Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hogue, Michael. The Promises of Religious Naturalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2010. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientifc Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed editions; First Paperback edition, 2015. Lidskog, Rolf and Claire Waterton. ‘Anthropocene: A Cautious Welcome from Environmental Sociology?‘ Environmental Sociology 2(4) (2016): 395–406. https://doi .org/10.1080/23251042.2016.1210841 Oliver, Mary. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. Rigby, Kate. Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Rolston III, Holmes. ‘Environmental Ethics and Religion/Science.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, edited by P. Clayton & Z. Simpson, 908–28. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Rue, Loyal. Religion Is Not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They Fail. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

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Schmidt, Jeremy J., Peter G. Brown and Christopher Orr. ‘Ethics in the Anthropocene: Aresearch Agenda.’ The Anthropocene Review 3(3) (2016): 188–200. https://doi.org/10 .1177/2053019616662052 Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2021. Stefen, Will, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gafney, Cornelia Ludwig. ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.’ The Anthropocene Review 2 (2015): 81–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785 Stone, Jerome. Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative. New York: State University of New York Press, 2008. White, Carol Wayne. Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism. New York: Fordham Press, 2016. Whitehead, Alfred N. The Function of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929. Whitehead, Alfred N. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1925]. Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality, Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Grifn and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. Whitehead, Alfred N. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose (Library of America College Editions). New York: Library of America, 1982. Wildman, Wesley. ‘Religious Naturalism: What It Can Be, and What It Need Not Be.’ Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 1 (2014): 36–58. Zeebe, R.E., A. Ridgewell and J.C. Zachos. ‘Anthropogenic Carbon Release Rate Unprecedented During the Past 66 Million Years.’ Nature Geoscience 9 (2016): 325–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/NGEO2681

9 QUEERING STORIES OF RELIGIOUS MATERIALISM Plural Practices of (Earth) Care and Repair Todd LeVasseur, Paul M. Pulé and Alfonso Merlini

We sit as a collective to co-create this chapter, beginning our writing process on 8 April 2022, four days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their, at that time, most recent and ominous report on climate change. This report echoed those that came before it, once again articulating that our species has scant time, especially on geological scales, to change our lifeways if we are serious about avoiding catastrophic post-2°C temperature rise before the end of this century. In not pulling its punches, that IPCC report fully recognised the role of (ongoing) colonialism in creating the climate crisis,1 placing the lion’s share of responsibility for it squarely upon the shoulders of the Global North. We will demonstrate here that this circumstance is in fact gendered, but we will not belabour the many predictions that suggest maladaptive and untoward trajectories of climate destabilisation from this or any other study or report, as the reality is the impacts are already here, and those that are coming are now unavoidable, and worse still are and will continue to be experienced inequitably, though ultimately by all human communities and Earth 2 Others.3 Sadly, these trends will continue to exacerbate climate vulnerabilities for the most marginalised. Notably however, what the IPCC report attempts, but seemingly fails to do, is to remind us that we are organisms who derive from trophic fows of energy and are evolved primates with bodies living in ecologies-of-alive places; that we are steeped in a monistic evolutionary materialism of emergent biogeochemical cycles throbbing with and from incoming sunlight energy, within which organisms either adapt or die. In other words, we too are animal in-and-of this Earth. Climate change is potentially forcing (some) humans to experience and accept the material agency/ ies of Earthen beings and ecosystems through dark, composting interactions of materialities and bodies into ever new symbiogenetic forms.4 Given this, we want to help you as reader think and feel your way through this race with time so that we might together gain deeper insights into what climate DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-10

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repair of queered 5 material ecosystems means and looks like, especially through a critical view of religious studies. But frst, we expose some of the causes of our stark global realities.

The masculinities of global crises The climate emergency is a penultimate symptom of the centuries-long, fabricated and masculinist6 break between human (masculinist) culture and otherthan-human Nature.7 Taking this as fact, we expose gendered transitions away from male-dominated discursive-linguistic cultural and social practices, including normatively within religions-as-performed by people, in favour of a pluralised relationality between planet and people, including normatively within religions-as-performed by people. We do so because religiosity has profered some of the principal institutional causes of the gendered roots of our social and ecological crises throughout human his/her/their stories. Focusing attention on the masculinist discourses of global collapse is something that has long been absent from theorising within environmental/sustainability studies and the connection to religious studies.8 In this chapter we take a unique approach to challenging these traditional masculinist narratives about the human/Nature binary, each telling our diferent stories (two are more academic, one is more personal, although all three of us are trained academics). We do so in hopes of ofering heterogenous steps both logical (academic) and personally afective/emotional (an erotic animation that is all too often absent from academic writing) towards a human/Others relationality that mirrors the complexity of Earth’s complex processes and relational cycles. We respond to the evolutionarily maladaptive consequences of masculinist traditions, replete with their potentially unlivable and oppressive trajectories, by proposing a socially progressive and ecologically sustainable future that is pluralised. We do so in hopes that humans-who-perform-religion advocate for and incorporate into their respective ethics, doctrines, rituals and institutional structures a suite of socially progressive and ecologically relational understandings that we argue are needed for a truly sustainable future to arise. Our response is informed by Gender and Environment discourses,9 particularly ecological feminisms and masculinities, moving through these inherited analytical lenses and critiquing essentialism to arrive at a queered, post-Anthropocentric, postgender grounding in material fows of a living, evolving Earth. This focus aims to refect on and challenge the forces of market capitalism that function as a religious discourse and worldview and has shaped modernity by the market’s erosion of social trust and environmental health.10 Here, we prioritise intersectional analyses such as those ofered by the liberal and radical conceptualisations and applications of the Gender and Environment metanarrative, seeking to build on dialogues that centre on emerging theories about materiality/materialisms and religious studies (as seen in this edited volume), especially discourses on the religion and Nature/ecology nexus. However, we note, based on our own

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experiences being trained within the Academy, that the progressive reworkings of the human/Nature relationship through ecological feminism have rightly stopped short of formulating alternative masculinities, and ecological masculinities have unfortunately been late additions to the mosaic of considerations about the ways that masculinist impacts on Earth’s living systems, our communities, and ourselves, including within the Academy, can be transformed.11 If it does indeed turn out to be true that masculine ecologisation is too little, too late, queering as a pathway to the diversifcation of contemporary social constructs might, in the company of Earth as a refuge for religiosity along with material performances and poetics, help us better grasp some sanity as we each fnd our ways through the dreadful transitions and possible collapse scenarios that are upon us.12 It may be that afective/emotional/spiritual guidance may go a long way in helping us weather the storms ahead by turning us towards each other— despite our many complex diferences in identity and praxis—by engaging what we recognise as the contemplative self within that dwells in us all. So, what might a braided set of stories about embodiment ofer various materialities and the queer ecologies of alive places?

Story#1: Todd—a journey through religious studies, materialism and climate collapse Having introduced gender binary limitations above as a team of co-authors, I (Todd) begin by turning inwards to religious studies, with this move informed by the material criticisms of queer ecologies, critical art and performance studies and ecophenomenology. I begin here in hopes of foregrounding the vital and lively powers of matter and material formations, to help expose the ways that our cultural failure to attend to these material powers and fows have left us theoretically, afectively, emotionally, psychologically, strategically, politically and physically—indeed precariously—unprepared to sit with the deep implications of climate collapse beyond the abstracted episteme upon which the Academy resides.13 Instead, we write as a collective in all of our braided stories, in solidarityfrom-behind as overly educated cis-hetero Global North men, recognising that other theorists and holistic cultures have understood the world to be populated by Other agencies, materialisms, powers and cultures14; that the absencing of these ‘Othered’ understandings is precisely a form of ongoing onto-epistemological colonialism tethered directly to resource extraction–based capitalism.15 This Othering is part of the very self-same (gendered) mechanisms that have directly contributed to the climate crisis that is now upon us all, so we reside in solidarity-from-behind with frontline communities the world over, fghting against violent dispossession and extraction on a climate-changing planet. Given this, a central question emerges, in our stories in this co-created chapter: Where is the needed psycho-socio-cultural evolution to contend with these conundrums? We especially ask this of communities that beneft materially from violent dispossession and that have lifeways based on fossil-fuelled extractivism, wherever these occur.

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This leads to another question: How do we keep the embodied and feshy material of the human corporal body (both literally and metaphorically) from killing itself, if at all (i.e. evolutionary survival is never guaranteed)? Answering such questions requires an evolution in values, behaviours and ontologies capable of assisting humans with living through rapid climate changes. And with this, another: How can religions (for some readers/theorists: spiritualities) join, and even guide, this process, if at all? This question is one that should mobilise and motivate more research and theorising within religious studies and is one that I (and we as a team) contend with in our personal and professional lives. Note that these questions are not asked as dry theoretical ones. We are not advocating for a ‘greening of religion’ that was argued by Lynn White, Jr. in 1967.16 At best, this legacy provided highly simplistic readings of how humansas-organisms-in-ecosystems, and at that, materially alive and agential ecosystems, make decisions about how to behave within living ecosystems. Worldviews may, and indeed do, inform such decisions; however, humans operate within competing values and worldviews, where these are often unconscious and at odds with one another. This is, of course, part of the problem: we’re born into industrial, fossil-fuelled lifeways that we did not ask for, that are almost impossible to escape, and upon which we depend to get food, to perform our jobs and that force us to live in material ways at odds with our value systems of Earth care. More so, these lifeways are actively lobbied for by fossil fuel companies who have budgets of hundreds of millions to do so and are supported by national policies in almost every country on the planet. It is naive to think a simple shift in worldview at individual or corporate levels can change this state of play, let alone within the eight years we have left (at time of this writing) to reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in hopes of preventing the serious threat of climate collapse. In pondering these questions, especially through my story here, I turn to queer ecologies (aka sex ecologies and Earth sexualities).17 I do this because I recognise that the absurd, the imperfect, the contradictory (see above motivating questions of this chapter), the ironic and the vulgar, as well as anti-sentimental views and radical uncertainties pervade ‘bad environmentalism’.18 As such this demands of us a response to the inadequate myopic dangers of ecopiety,19 including where such eforts occur in the Academy. Consequently, I research and write in ways consistent with the theorising of the feminist scholar Vicki Kirby, who points out that if ‘it is in the Nature of biology to be cultural [, to be] intelligent, capable of interpreting, analyzing, refecting, and creatively reinventing—then what is this need to exclude such processes of interrogation from the ontology of life?’20 In short, why do we subscribe to so many dualisms (such as man/woman; male/female; masculine/feminine; human/Nature),21 even when understanding the limits of such inherited thinking? Life truly is so much more complex than that. For the purposes of this chapter, we are guided by this insight and write from personal journeys along our respective paths-of-becoming in a culture onto-epistemologically built on an abstracted and socially constructed dualism that separates us from Nature; a culture that has failed to take the material agency/agencies of Others (both biotic and abiotic) seriously.

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This compels us to ask: Why? And thus, further still: What has left us blinkered, both theoretically and performatively, to such agencies? And: How has this facilitated the death of our material body? or, How might our storied experiences shared in this chapter suggest ways to at least contend with the implications of this lack, if not outright counteract it? How can stories like these—personal stories—bring us back to our material bodies, in service of belonging and love, based on a recognition of our inescapable immersion in and of Earth? Clearly, we do not have time or space to systematically fesh out answers to these various questions (or the ones mentioned earlier); however, they compel us to write this chapter. They also beseech us to seek answers to, or at least try to theorise about, the failure of many human communities that ground their understandings of reality within religious cosmologies and cosmogonies, where such communities via religious teachings, worldviews, ritual behaviours and other performed modes of acting within ecologies of places have not also systematically asked such questions; and where these communities have historically also abstracted the human away from Nature. Given these questions and starting assumptions, we engage with three seemingly disparate stories, and styles of storytelling, motivated by the questions shared above.22 In terms of grounding understanding of self-in-community and, even more so, defning what a human community is and who is recognised as a member of it, with obligations and duties entailing to it, religions have historically played the largest guiding role throughout human history. Here the three of us take religion to be based on humanly created cosmologies related to understanding of sacred realities and the norms, corporeal and haptic practices, institutional structures and doctrines and rituals that emerge from these stories that are tethered to the sacred (emically, and as inspired by/derived from the sacred). We are then theoretically supportive of classifying stories that are functionally equivalent to more historically accepted categories of world religions (eliding the colonial baggage of that nomenclature) as religious. We are also in support of theoretical approaches to religion that privilege more individualistic approaches to sacred realities, including those tethered to dark green religious narratives23 grounded in the sciences and/or in experiences of the evolved, Otherised world, as religious, too. A key premise we hold is that these cosmological stories will change in the decades to come. This may be particularly true for humans (aka sophisticated primates located in ecologies-of-alive places) who are materially and thus culturally, technologically and existentially impacted in deleterious ways by the material impacts of runaway climate disruption and destabilisation.24 In fact, emergent data suggests such changes in stories and practices that are religious, especially those that reify ritual practices related to material pilgrimage and ceremonial interactions with sacred sites in wider Nature, are indeed already underway.25 However, it is recognised that many religious communities in the Global South to date ascribe climate changes to spiritual beings or as punishment for immoral/bad behaviour.26 And because ‘narratives are constructed out of a sequence of embodied experiences and perceptions’,27 the future of religious narratives will be informed by the embodied

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and experienced perceptions of a very diferent Earthly climate, whether these are, for example: ●

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Narratives around personhood and/or river goddesses in India as India’s riverine/aquatic agency is threatened by reductions in ice and snow melts that have formed their aqualine bodies for millennia. A shifting cryoscape in the Himalayas that signals demonic forces that may be overly angry due to lack of ritual fdelity. Emerging posthumanist conceptions of human bodies and their connections to the sacred, and also to wider Nature, broadly. Ritualised grieving around ongoing extinctions and solastalgia. The need to care more deeply for the poorest in the face of climate change, as seen in the moral exhortations tethered to Christology in Laudato si’. Indigenous responses to violent ongoing settler colonial extractions of sacred places.

These are just some of the examples we could highlight, strongly suggesting that religious narratives and practices will unavoidably change as the material habitats within which humans reside and evolve change. However, what does this say about power dynamics during these changes? How can the inherited binaries discussed above and that motivate some of the questions we raise here, help humans see beyond traditional blinders, especially those that colour relations of power and the ability to adapt to climate changes in ways that leave humans ill prepared to create new, or reinterpret old, religious narratives and bodily practices in materially (climate) changed places? To address this, we give more attention to the binaried aspects of the human/Nature relationship, unpacking the story of (eco) queering further still, to help us think and feel our way through these dilemmas.

Story #2: Paul—gendering the human/nature relationship towards greater care Ecological feminism emerged in the 1970s and gained momentum in the 1980s as a conceptual and practical amalgamation of feminist theory and environmental justice. The discourse focused on the ways that patriarchal domination afects both women and Others in similarly oppressive ways. While ecofeminist scholars and activists have gone to great lengths to de-essentialise its original tenets,28 the feld of study emerged from essentialised foundations, initially leaning heavily on defnitions of women as fertile, fragile, Earth mothers.29 An emergent suite of liberal and radical patinas challenged these traditions and have most infuentially shaped today’s ecological feminism, enabling it to play a lead role in revolutionising the environmental humanities by astutely applying feminist analyses of gendered power relations to the human/Nature relationship. On the other end of discourses of gender binaries, there have been recent developments that aim to complement these structurally focused aspects of

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ecological feminism. A key goal of ecological masculinities30 as a feld is to specifcally expose the ways that men as individuals and masculinist constructs have initiated and maintained patriarchal machinations that have been subjugating and dominating marginalised humans and Others for millennia through military, religious, civil, educational and familial constructs. When we think about the impacts of masculinities on Earth, Others and the self, it is important to note that the feelings and behaviours within and amongst men as a complex and diverse constituency of main benefciaries are not innate, nor fxed, but are the products of social constructions.31 The same can be said for those who are Otherised in a masculinist world; both oppressor and oppressed are variable and formed and, by this logic, are not to be considered monolithic and are reformable. Further, it is important to recall that pluralisms of masculinities (like femininities) are abstract, constructed, chosen and dwell in us all. The feld of ecological masculinities argues that the healthiest of ecosystems are those that are the most versatile and inclusive. The feld of study is guided by the insights and politicisation of ecological feminisms, articulating gender-critical analyses of masculinities and their impacts on both planet and people.32 Paralleling the unfolding of ecological feminism, recent developments in ecological masculinities33 point us in the direction of care as a postgender human quality that reaches beyond notions of manhood (as can be said for women and femininities), arguing that since men and masculinities can and indeed do exhibit and embody care, that care is clearly not the prized virtue of any gender alone. In other words, our physiological and behavioural embodiments are not fxed or bifurcated as gender essentialisms might imply. As a pluralised discourse, ecological masculinities pursues transitions beyond masculinist hegemonisations and towards ecologisation in us all, including in biologically sexed men and culturally formed masculinities, and provides a frame through which people can also potentially transform/revolutionise/ecologise religious communities in the decades to come. Applied experiments with pedagogies of masculine ecologisation are emerging, providing some recent explorations of the nexus between spirituality, religiosity, gender identity (coupled with imperatives of gender equality and institutionally supported gender positivity) and Earthcare.34 Mirroring the contesting of gender binaries as seen in queered developments in ecological feminism,35 ecological masculinities are now similarly being queered.36 To assist in this endeavour, I (Paul) look to post-essentialised horizons posited by queer ecologies. I consider queer ecologies represent some of the most important contributions to conversations about gender identity and Earthcare to date. I also recognise that the feld of religious studies has been slow to engage with queer ecologies, outside of some scholars in the religion and Nature/ecology subfeld.37 Queer ecologies expose us to more versatile manifestations of the human/Nature relationship, providing an ontological home for transgender women, lesbians, queer women, women who do not want to reproduce, women who want the right to abortion as healthcare and non-binary and gender-fuid/expansive people who have been excluded from malestream society,

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having their identities commonly dismissed. Queer ecologies can broadly be considered a feld of study dedicated to understanding and developing intimacies between humanity and other beings that are in efect post-sex,38 and that explicitly attend to the material dimensions and vibrant matter of life on Earth. The Earth intimacy that queer ecologies espouse helps to remind us that we are decentred, immersed, dependent on and afected by myriad Others all the time—indeed our lives depend on complexity—and yet, oddly, we refer to this ultimate reality as weird, abnormal, or, literally, queer. After all, identifying as non-binary, two-spirited or agendered does not exclude masculinities, or femininities. Consequently, the ecologisations of feminisms and masculinities provide vital scafolding within a broader, queering metanarrative as the most normative way to conceptualise gender identities; not as mutually exclusive composites but as interrelated essences of a gender-fuid ecosystem of identities, with each providing vital contributions to a postgender Earthcare materialism, including possibilities within religious communities responding to a changing climate. Queer ecologies implore us to not break with any particular gender identity. Rather, we are invited to pass through and reach beyond specifc gender identities to arrive at the human species as a composite of heterogeneous identities that are inescapably ‘in and of Earth’ in complex, variable and dynamic forms. When viewed this way, humanity becomes an Earth-attuned species that challenges and looks beyond discrete gender identities and power dynamics within human systematics and is therefore unavoidably subject to change. Queering the human/Nature relationship keeps gender and sexuality fuid, efectively animating and eroticising human/Other encounters. Transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who have been subject to marginalisation in similar ways to Others have much to teach us about how futurist posthuman realities might look, feel and function. Contrary to marginalising these perspectives and embodiments, we ought to be following their lead towards a posthuman future that is ecologically immersive and, in comparison to those contemporary norms that are traditionally reifed, queer what has been ecosophied as normal. This accommodates for the textured stories refective of our particular lived experiences; that life is beautifully infnite, and intimately responsive to our materially and fantastically diverse home planet and is worthy of our honouring it thus. In saying this, we recognise such queering and movement towards deeper care will take time, efort and dialogue; that many religious communities extant the world over will most likely resist such queering, as many are tethered to malestream dualisms of male/female, and human/Nature, both, and will remain bolted to the view that queering is deviant. However, we note a few exceptions: the Swedish Church, the Living in Love and Faith initiative of the Church of England, more theologically liberal strands of Judaism and even some varieties of LGBQT+ friendly Protestantism, Unitarian Universalists, Catholic Workers, Catholics informed by liberation theologies and/or Laudato si’, and new religious movements that are gender progressive and geared towards environmental care. Alongside these, of course, are various tribal-based indigenous religions with a history of non-binary individuals

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and rituals that celebrate two-spirited persons within materially alive ecosystems. Sadly, however, we point to the largely white evangelical and conservative-leaning Christian political right (both Catholic and Protestant) of the USA as more evidence that certain subgroups within a religion will actively attempt to maintain power over reproductive rights on the premise of dogmatic religiosity by limiting female bodies and agency. This is seen in the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade in June 2022: a decision passed by fundamentalist Christian Supreme Court Justices and the morally aligned politicians that appointed them. To no great surprise, such religious demographics in the US are also, at least to date, staunchly against accepting climate change as reality or, at best, as caused by humans.39 Overall, there is a need to be sanguine about hoping for some miraculous ‘greening’ of religion, triggered by worldview reorientation as climate collapse accelerates; and probably a need to be as equally sanguine about a ‘queering of religion’ as well, at least in the short term, even if some religious groups may come to be supportive of ‘greening’, but remain actively opposed to queering.40 How, then, can we understand the grounding of self in diferent material understandings and stories, especially if dominant religious ones are most likely going to struggle in the short term with understanding material agencies that are all around us? Co-author Alfonso’s explorations of performance ofer a possible pathway beyond such binaries and into a felt and lived experience of such materialities. His story is purposefully and strategically written to elicit afective and emotional sensibilities in the reader that are not grounded within the hegemonic logos-centred discourses of dry, rational, overly sourced academic writing. This is done (1) to help the reader feel and be exposed to the type of discourse-beyond-binaries we feel a materially warmer planet will elicit, and that we need to cultivate (including in the Academy) in order to queer binaries; and (2) as an ‘insider’ example of the dark green material practices related to surfng and art in dark green religious performance spaces, which Alfonso practices in his daily life as a ‘dark green’ surfer-artist.41

Story #3: Alfonso—performance studies and oceanic materiality I’m driving up the interstate, on my way home from a reunion with friends I hadn’t seen in over 40 years. They have been my friends since childhood. We grew up together, went to school together, were best friends, but had gone our separate ways over time. I think about our childhood. I think about the reunion, the conversations, reacquainting. They all remained close friends; I remained the loner. They had many questions, mostly centred on who I am now, and refections on their own journeys. I quickly began to realise they had all chosen very traditional paths, not straying from the worlds they were each born into, and through those worlds, what they were each handed as truth. I followed a feral, somatic, entheogenic path; one that became sympathetic to psychoactive hallucinogens taken in ritualised and ceremonial contexts.

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What bound our childhood group together was our collective love of surfng. This was to become a lifelong passion for me, a bonding with the ocean, and recognition of my source42 that is my guide for life understanding and that serves as a core of my relationship with everything. It nurtures my soul and guides me to love. This guide is in part defned by one of the innovators of contemporary hybrid surfng culture, Tom Blake.43 Through the course of his life, Blake came to an understanding of the world around him based on the reality he was born into, grown by an attentive passion for the ocean, and clarifed through time and relational exchanges with Others. He defned this life-grown realisation as: Nature = God.44 I asked my friends if they still surfed. ‘No.’ I asked what they thought of environmentalism, receiving a common reactionary retort: ‘Environmentalists are the problem’. As I drove, I remembered. We were all in the same middle school science class in April 1970, when our teacher introduced us to the frst Earth Day.45 The teacher explained what the day represented and handed us each a stack of Ecology Flag decals to commemorate the day. The bell rang. We piled out of the class and proceeded to cover the school with stickers like middle school children do. Maybe I was the only one listening that day, I thought as I drove. How could such a singular moment in my early education be a lifelong guide for me, and completely lost on my friends? I thought about my life. My education. My separation from the group began immediately after high school graduation. I moved away to go to university. Years of loosely being in touch afrmed that they stayed close to home, holding tight to traditions and beliefs that for me began wearing thin over time. Their environmentalism, defned by a vision of self, separate from Nature, somehow above it all, superior in form, intellect, and consciousness—the same dualism Paul describes above. I considered as I drove: aren’t we evolutionarily motivated to grow beyond what’s handed us at birth, to adapt? I’m sure we talked about it back in that same middle school science class. Is a vision of humanity separate from Nature at the core of the problem facing the environment?46 I guided my thoughts away from the desire to compare myself to my old friends. I love them all dearly, and aren’t we all equally responsible for the future? But what about corporate responsibility, I asked myself? Surely, in the broad equation of anthropocentrism, greater accountability should be placed there? No, I resolved, as I drove my car, painfully aware of its contributions to our hydrocarbon dependencies and a heating planet. We’re all in this together, interdependent and equal in life. We are the corporation. We, the currently and contemporaneously living humans, are the collective present body of all human history. My education is in Art. My training came through the classic academic tradition; the basics of theory and application. Space, shape, line, form, colour,

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texture, scale, proportion, variety, unity, rhythm, balance, perspective, depth; these would be the guiding elements and principles that formed my relationship with Art and Life. Then a journey through various disciplines, before, expectedly, choosing one to focus on. I thought about this fow in Art education—frst theory, through material, then discipline. I refected on how this fow not only applied to my Art making, but my life, too. My Art practice had evolved alongside my environmentalism. I made charcoal to draw, paint brushes from agave blades and pigments from Earth. Found objects became sculpture. I sought ways to make Art without new material. My materialism diminished as my Art making increased. I became a storyteller. I thought about the material of storytelling, language and culture. Logocentrism as defnition and sometimes separation. It felt as though my friends and I were speaking entirely diferent languages, yet we all spoke English.47 I thought about the use of Russian agit-trains attempting to unify disparate populations through a common narrative towards an imposed common goal.48 Based on my experience of being a teen when it happened, the frst Earth Day may have inspired a shift in US-based consciousness at that time, especially in wealthier and more afuent white communities, but it began, in part, as a response to an oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel of the coast of California. I wondered, is disaster the only mechanism for global change? Can there be a material tempering without broad-sweeping sufering and death? And, shouldn’t the tools of change be a refection of the moment? Are the tools used to create the frst Earth Day even applicable today? As I drove the car, a thought drove my mind: how can we change? This is my story, your story, and our story. Here is what I have learned: Space, Shape, Form: There is really only one body. It is life. It is real. It is known and unknown. Unity, Rhythm, Proportion: There is one consciousness. Variety, Colour, Texture: We struggle with these instead of celebrating them because we see our separate bodies and believe they defne us. Line, Perspective, Depth: Everyone wants the same, according to Maslow and the Buddha, both. What are the lyrics to a song that soothes desire and eases sufering? Scale: A sense requiring an experienced vision. Looking, and seeing. Balance: Impossible without all the rest. I’m not sure how to trigger a postmaterialist, posthumanist consciousness shift. I do know none of this is possible without new vision and a collective realisation, which all three of us cycle back to in our stories throughout this chapter: We are Nature! Our behaviour, human Nature, is natural. Our current terrestrial body refects our health. We (the Global North and elite from the Global South, and within

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that especially cis-hetero masculinities, pace Paul’s section) are unhealthy as a singular organ of this global organism. The same ‘We’ are at the forefront, past and present and most likely into the future, of killing ourselves with consumptive materialism; blinded by belief. Unless this same ‘we’ can make an immediate efort to heal ourselves and see ourselves as part of a species collective, we will destroy life and much of its Earthly manifestation and continue to perpetuate unjust sufering in human communities the world over. I continue my drive towards the place I call home, knowing it to be temporary like so many other places I’ve called home throughout my life. I loosen the grip my thoughts have on my attention. Looking around as I drive, I see beauty, even in the ugliest of places. I recognise the duality of my mental activity in this consideration, seeing destruction, but also the beauty of life unfolding, which includes destruction; always attempting to make sense of the world I am born into, seeing it through the frst opening of baby eyes, judging it with looks from aging eyes. I realise that it is these eyes that project sufering on reality, from a position of human-centred consciousness, that struggles to internalise a ‘deep time’ perspective of millions of years. This attempt to hang on to a transient fantasy of the self as a separate thing. But, from what? Each other? Nature? Life? I fnd temporary peace in the blissful blend of education and experience that is life. I have been blessed with wonderful teachers, human and Other. I won’t deny the particularities of what I know, despite being in a culture (and at times, an academic culture) that says entheogenic states of nonduality, and building a care for Earth from such states, are deviant; despite thousands of hours spent in the ocean, on an eight-foot length of foam covered with fbreglass, communing with breaking oceanic material energy, with that energy shaping into liquid waves over sandbars, cobblestones and reefs teeming with oceanic material agencies in the form of fsh, octopi, sharks and seaweeds. Finally arriving at home, I smiled a thought; this story found me, driving along the road. Here we are. Now it’s found you, on the material pages (or pixels) of this chapter. I hope that my story helps facilitate some connection to your soul and ofers you some guidance as well.

Earthcare: the material workings of spirit, body and mind We arrive, the three of us, here at the end, back at the beginning. The writing process and submission timelines have aforded us the ability to dwell on our materially active and alive planet, for fve more months since the IPCC report was published and the beginning of our writing together. In that time, Europe has baked and dried up, China has baked and dried up, Africa has baked and dried up, Pakistan has fooded and trees have been found in places in the Arctic not predicted to have trees for numerous decades yet. They are here. The changes. The rapidity. Our dominant discourses, cultural structures and institutions have failed, even adequately, to predict the rate of change upon us, let alone

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provide tools and solutions to stop it.49 The Academy is just one such place of cultural failure, and this admission impacts the three of us, as those trained in the Academy and who believe in teaching and writing as worthy pursuits to help humans better understand their situatedness on their Earthen, living, fecund home. Based on our collective reading of the data, and as shared here, most religions to date, especially ‘mainstream world religions’, have also failed to provide needed tools and solutions to stop the change. This is because many of them as created and performed by humans to date are as complicit with being stuck in the binaries criticised in this chapter; and if in ascribing materialities at all to agents, to still limiting such materiality to supernatural forces and beings. Through our ponderings in this chapter, motivated by questions of moving beyond (if it is indeed even possible now) binaries, of queering materiality, of refecting on stories, including religious stories, about Earthly realities, we have presented the material workings of spirit, body and mind, as we perceive them ourselves, individually and collectively. These categories speak to/are all emergent properties of humans as evolved primates living within materially active and alive ecologies of place/s (including in the Academy, where we perform our scholarship and research in vibrant and alive material places). We have aimed to weave together these seemingly divergent stories that braid a common theme: in a constantly changing world, the materiality of our animal selves does indeed matter, enabling us to move through, sink in and be part of Earth. This is a perspective where ‘we’ surpasses ‘me’ and fabricated lines of separation that have long beneftted a select few at great cost to the many (may, in time) dissolve. It is our hope that these musings have stirred something within you that feels familiar and can ofer comfort, hope and solidarity on a materially heating, climate changing planet.

Notes 1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ‘Climate Change’, accessed 28 April 2022. 2 Earth is capitalised throughout this chapter to ascribe agency to the other-thanhuman world and invert the anthropocentric tendency to marginalise, otherise, deny, distance, devalue and disregard life beyond human constructs. We do so, in part, to expose this tendency of abstracting humans away from material biophysical monistic reality. 3 Henceforth ‘Others.’ 4 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016. 5 ‘Queering’ is used throughout this chapter strategically as both an adjective and a verb. 6 For our purposes, these masculinist root causes are defned as hegemonised malestream (O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic’, 62) conceptualisations and enactments that embolden the slow violences of an individualist, competitive, entitled, extractivist, consumerist, materialist narcissism that prioritises self-gain of a select few (male) privileged individuals over the intrinsic value of human and Other agencies that comprise the Global Majority. 7 Nature is similarly intentionally capitalised. See Fns. 2 and 5; Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1980; Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2015; Hultman and Pulé, Ecological Masculinities, 2018; Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, 2019.

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8 Nagel and Lies, ‘Re-gendering Climate Change’, 1–5. 9 MacGregor, ‘Gender and Environment: An Introduction’, 1–24. 10 Loy, ‘The Religion of the Market’, 275–290; Foltz, ‘The Religion of the Market’, 135–154. 11 Pulé and Hultman, Men, Masculinities, and Earth, 2021. 12 Pulé and Ourkiya, ‘Postgender Ecological Futures’, in print. 13 LeVasseur, Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future, 2021. 14 Bird-David, ‘Animism’ Revisited’, 72–100; Watson and Huntington, ‘They’re Here—I Can Feel Them’, 257–281; Bawaka Country, ‘Co-becoming Bawaka’, 455–475. 15 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’, 215–232; Quijano and Wallerstein, ‘Americanity as a Concept’, 549–557. 16 See LeVasseur and Peterson, Religion and Ecological Crisis, 2017 for a 50-year retrospective on this move. 17 Hessler, Sex Ecologies, 2021. 18 Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, 2018. 19 Taylor, Ecopiety, 2019. 20 Kirby, ‘Natural Convers(at)ions’, 221. 21 Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 1993. 22 More on this in Story #2 below. 23 Taylor, Dark Green Religion, 2010. 24 LeVasseur, Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future, 2021. 25 Haberman, Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds, 2021. 26 Haberman, Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds, 2021; Allison, ‘Deity Citadels’, 268–285. 27 Menary, ‘Embodied Narratives’, 83. 28 Archambault, ‘A Critique of Ecofeminism’, 19–22; Gaard, ‘Queering the Climate’, 515–536; Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 1993. 29 Ecological feminism is now comprised of a diversity of theories and practices refective of Karen Warren (Warren, ‘The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism’, 125–146), Val Plumwood (Plumwood, ‘Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism’, 3–27), Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva (Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism, 1993), Greta Gaard (Gaard, ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’, 114–137), through to more contemporary interpretations by Mary Phillips and Nick Rumens (Phillips and Rumens, ‘Introducing Contemporary Ecofeminism’, 1–16) and Douglas Vakoch (Vakoch, ed., Transecology, 2020)—to name a few. 30 Hultman and Pulé, Ecological Masculinities, 2018. 31 We acknowledge that social constructionism is contested given it struggles to recognise objective reality (Bury, ‘Social Constructionism and the Development of Medical Sociology’, 137–169; Craib, ‘Social Constructionism as a Social Psychosis’, 1–15). 32 Pulé and Hultman, Men, Masculinities, and Earth, 2021. 33 Pulé and Ourkiya, ‘Postgender Ecological Futures’, in print. 34 Pulé and Sykes,’Transforming Destructive Masculinities Norms through the Work That Reconnects’, 2022. 35 Mortimer-Sandilands and Erikson, Queer Ecologies, 2010; Gaard, ‘Queering the Climate’, 515–536. 36 Pulé and Ourkiya, ‘Postgender Ecological Futures’, in print. 37 Bauman, Meaning ful Flesh, 2018. 38 Sandilands, ‘Lavender’s Green?’, 20–24; Gaard, ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’, 114–137. 39 Globus Veldman, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism, 2019. 40 On the former, we point towards an article based on an extensive literature review that clearly evidences that humans motivated by teachings, ethics, rituals and material

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practices within the Abrahamic religions ( Judaism/s, Christianity/ties, Islam/s), and even the ‘world religions’ broadly, have contributed to the destruction of Earthen ecosystems and material places; and where for those who subscribe to most varieties of the Abrahamic religions, which are the worst environmental ofenders, it is in a large part due to their inherent anthropocentrism and conservative theologies (Taylor, Van Wieren and Zaleha, ‘Lynn White Jr. and the Greening of Religion Hypothesis’, 1000–1009). Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, 2010; LeVasseur, Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future, 2021. On surfng as a form of ‘aquatic Nature religion’, see Bron Taylor (Taylor, ‘Surfng into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion’, 923–951), and as a form of posthuman materialist, embodied religion, see LeVasseur, Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future, 2021, especially Chapter 7. For a more complete reading on the life of Tom Blake, see Lynch and Gault-Williams, Tom Blake: The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman, 2001. See Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, 2010 on dark green religiosities that hold nature as a spiritual centre. On the largely white religious roots of US environmentalism, broadly, see Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, 2015 and Berry, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism, 2015; but see Laurel Kearn’s extensive work on emergence of environmental justice movement within Black Christian churches, especially United Church of Christ: https://www .ucc.org/what-we-do/justice-local-church-ministries/justice/faithful-action-ministries/environmental-justice/ For an exploration of such anthropocentric dualisms and their impact on the human treatment of Earthen ecosystems, see Bender, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology, 2002. On the role of language and discourse, broadly, in shaping human conceptions of (and thus, possible treatment of ) Earthen ecosystems, see Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, 2021. On agit-trains, see https://incite-online.net/heftberger4.html, accessed 27 May 2022. Carrington, ‘Major Sea-level Rise’, accessed 29 Aug 2022.

Bibliography Allison, Elizabeth. ‘Deity Citadels: Sacred Sites of Bio-Cultural Resistance and Resilience in Bhutan.’ Religions 10 (2019): 268–285. Archambault, Anne. ‘A Critique of Ecofeminism.’ Canadian Women’s Studies 13, 3 (1993): 19–22. Bauman, Whitney, ed. Meaning ful Flesh: Refections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet. Earth [sic]: Punctum Books, 2018. Bawaka Country, et al. ‘Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space.’ Progress in Human Geography 40, 4 (2016): 455–475. Bender, Frederic. The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Bufalo: Prometheus, 2002. Berry, Evan. Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Bird-David, Nurit ‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.’ Current Anthropology 40 (1999): 72–100. Bury, Michael. ‘Social Constructionism and the Development of Medical Sociology.’ Sociology of Health and Illness 8, 2 (1986): 137–169.

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Carrington, Damian. ‘Major Sea-level Rise Caused by Melting Greenland Ice Cap Is ‘Now Inevitable’.‘ The Guardian. Accessed Aug 29, 2022. https://www.theguardian .com /environment/2022/aug /29/major -sea -level-rise -caused -by-melting -of -greenland-ice-cap-is-now-inevitable-27cm-climate. Craib, Ian. ‘Social Constructionism as a Social Psychosis.’ Sociology 31, 1 (1997): 1–15. Ferrando, Francesca. Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Foltz, Richard. ‘The Religion of the Market: Refections on a Decade of Discussion.’ Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 11, 2 (2007): 135–154. Gaard, Greta. ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.’ Hypatia 12, 1 (1997): 114–137. Gaard, Greta. ‘Queering the Climate.’ In Men, Masculinities, and Earth: Contending with the (m)Anthropocene, edited by Paul M. Pulé and Martin Hultman, 515–536. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Globus Veldman, Robin. The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019. Haberman, David, ed, Understanding Climate Change Through Religious Lifeworlds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. Harari, Yuval. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hessler, Stephanie, ed. Sex Ecologies. Cambridge: Kunsthall Trondheim/The Seed Box/ The MIT Press, 2021. Hultman, Martin and Pulé, Paul M. Ecological Masculinities: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Guidance. New York: Routledge, 2018. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ‘Climate Change: A Threat to Human Wellbeing and Health of the Planet.’ IPCC. Accessed on April 28, 2022. https:// www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/press/IPCC_AR6_WGII_PressRelease -English.pdf. Kirby, Vicki, ‘Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture was Really Nature all Along?‘ In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 214–236. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008. LeVasseur, Todd. Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future. New York: Lexington Books, 2021. LeVasseur, Todd and Peterson, Anna, eds. Religion and Ecological Crisis: The ‘Lynn WHite Thesis’ at Fifty. New York: Routledge, 2017. Loy, David. ‘The Religion of the Market.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, 2 (1997): 275–290. Lynch, Gary and Gault-Williams, Malcolm. Tom Blake: The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman. Irvine: Croul Family Foundation, 2001. MacGregor, Sherilyn. ‘Gender and Environment: An Introduction.’ In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by Sherilyn MacGregor, 1–24. New York: Routledge, 2017. Menary, Richard. ‘Embodied Narratives.’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 15, 6 (2008): 63–84. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientifc Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 1980. Mies, Maria and Shiva, Vandana. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1993. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Erikson, Bruce, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Nagel, Joane and Lies, Trevor Scott. ‘Re-gendering Climate Change: Men and Masculinity in Climate Research, Policy, and Practice.’ Frontiers in Climate 4, 5 (2022): 1–5.

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O’Brien, Mary. ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, 1 (1981): 144–157. Phillips, Mary and Rumens, Nick. ‘Introducing Contemporary Ecofeminism.’ In Contemporary Perspectives on Ecofeminism, edited by Mary Philips and Nick Rumens, 1–16. London: Routledge, 2016. Plumwood, Val. ‘Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.’ Hypatia 6, 1 (1991): 3–27. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pulé, Paul M. and Hultman, Martin, eds. Men, Masculinities, and Earth: Contending with the (m)Anthropocene. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pulé, Paul M., Hultman, Martin and Wågström, Angelica. ‘Introduction: Discussions at the Table.’ In Men, Masculinities, and Earth: Contending with the (m)Anthropocene, edited by Paul M. Pulé and Martin Hultman, 17–101. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pulé, Paul M. and Ourkiya, Asmae. ‘Postgender Ecological Futures: From Ecological Feminisms and Ecological Masculinities to Queered Posthuman Subjectivities.’ In Beyond Anthropocentric Masculinities: Posthumanism, New Materialism and the Man Question, edited by Ulf Mellstroöm and Bob Pease. New York: Routledge, in print. Pulé, Paul M. and Sykes, Abigail. ‘Transforming Destructive Masculinities Norms through the Work That Reconnects.’ Deep Times Journal—A Journal of the Work That Reconnects Spring, 2022. Available online: https://journal.workthatreconnects.org /2022/03/24/transforming-destructive-masculinities-norms-through-the-work -that-reconnects/. Quijano, Anibal, ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.’ International Sociology 15, 2 (2000): 215–232. Quijano, Anibal and Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘Americanity as a Concept; or, the Americas in the Modern World-System.’ ISSA: International Social Sciences Association 134 (1992): 549–557. Sandilands, Catriona. ‘Lavender’s Green? Some Thoughts on Queer(y)ing Environmental Politics.’ Undercurrents: Critical Environmental Studies (May 1994): 20–24. Seymour, Nicole. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Stibbe, Arran. Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. New York: Routledge, 2021. Stoll, Mark. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Taylor, Bron. ‘Surfng into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, 4 (2007): 923–951. Taylor, Bron. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Taylor, Bron, Van Wieren, Gretel and Zaleha, Bernard. ‘Lynn White Jr. and the Greening of Religion Hypothesis.’ Conservation Biology 30, 5 (2016): 1000–1009. Taylor, Sarah McFarland. Ecopiety: Green Media in the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Vakoch, Douglas, ed. Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature. London: Routledge, 2020. Warren, Karen. ‘The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.’ Environmental Ethics 12, 2 (1990): 125–146. Watson, Annette and Huntington, Orville, ‘They’re Here–I can Feel Them: The Epistemic Spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges.’ Social & Cultural Geography 9, 3 (2008): 257–281.

10 THE MATTER OF OIL Extraction Vitalisms and Enchantment Terra Schwerin Rowe

Predominant approaches to the study of religion and ecology have linked environmental destruction to a modern loss of meaning purpose or sacrality in the material world. Lynn White, for example, famously characterised environmental destruction as rooted in Biblical dominion—a mandate that also spurred Christian aims to eradicate local animisms that had provided protection against disafected exploitation.1 Even earlier than White, Joseph Sittler mourned the loss of an integral link between Christian redemption and doctrines of creation, leading to a devaluation of meaning and sacrality in nature.2 Similarly and more recently, Seyyed Hossein Nasr has portrayed environmental destruction as rooted in the modern loss of the sacred in nature.3 Along these lines, Thomas Berry called for a ‘new story’ to both fll the void of a lost shared story and re-integrate religion, science and ethics.4 Religion and ecology scholarship that has followed in the wake of these early infuential scholars variously but repeatedly reiterates a sense of environmental destruction rooted in modern disenchantment.5 Often closely associated with Max Weber, the disenchantment thesis assumes that what it means to be modern is to not believe in ghosts, spirits or animate matter.6 An assumed link between this disenchantment and environmental destruction is shared beyond religion scholars as well. On a popular level, many were compelled to environmental consciousness through flms like Afuenza, which connected increased consumption to a loss of meaning—the compulsion among afuent modern folk to fll this void with consumerism.7 In scholarly discourses as well, new materialist aims to restore animacy, agency and vibrancy to matter are often associated with a stronger environmental ethos.8 New materialists often explicitly distinguish matter’s animacy from something like an indwelling and animating spirit, soul or mind,9 but a key point of connection between infuential religion and ecology perspectives and some new materialisms lies in a shared sense of the important role afects like wonder play DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-11

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in eliciting environmentally friendly attachments to the material world. These perspectives, too, are often framed in terms of the disenchantment thesis. For example, before her infuential new materialist text, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett focused explicitly on the disenchantment narrative.10 A main inspiration for The Enchantment of Modern Life was Bennett’s sense that the disenchantment thesis has a way of producing the kind of world it describes: where moderns are unable to be surprised and enticed by matter’s uncanny responsiveness, they will not be able to create attachments to it. Bennett especially emphasises the importance of enchanted matter’s ability to evoke emotions like wonder, awe and curiosity and ties these afective responses to crucial markers for environmental ethics.11 New materialisms have compellingly shifted attention from the anthropocentric, linguistic and historic to materiality among and beyond the human. From the perspective of environmental concerns, new materialisms seem crucial where they provide resistance to reductive commodifcations of matter, a more accurate accounting of the ways matter ‘talks back’ in phenomena like climate change,12 or a bottomless interdependent relationalism (intra-action) that resists standard narratives of self-sufciency.13 Such resistance to reductive and instrumentalist materialisms clearly resonates with religious studies. Religion and ecology scholars have similarly aimed to re-enchant nature with strategies ranging from articulating a sense of divine immanence in the world14 to the importance of afective attachments to the natural world evoked by experiences of wonder and awe15 —all of which, it is hoped, will lead to stronger environmental ethics. The disenchantment thesis has been an efective diagnostic for good reason. Many environmental and social problems ft within the framework of a loss of meaning, leaving consumerism to fll the void. Yet, as I have argued more fully elsewhere, energy and extraction have been particularly prone not to disenchantment but enchantment well into modernity.16 There is pressing need, then, to look more closely at what disenchantment diagnoses have overlooked: the ways enchantments continue to function into the 20th and 21st centuries, often towards decidedly environmentally unfriendly ends. What we fnd in oil and extraction narratives are animate views of matter—but animacies that explicitly legitimise colonial extraction and enslavement and entice rather than thwart extraction. The case of oil seems particularly troubling. Its large-scale extraction commenced in the 19th century when reductive materialisms were well entrenched. Consequently, oil’s animate materiality proved enticing for spiritual folk in particular precisely for the ways it could resist the view that matter was void of spirit and inert. In light of these narratives, a presumed link between the animacy of matter and environmental ethics needs a closer look. There is something more interesting going on between enchantment, materiality and environmental degradation than the disenchantment narrative and its religion and ecology variants have been able to account for. Given how pervasive this thesis has been for religion and ecology, shifting away from it will necessitate signifcant methodological and theoretical reassessments. In particular, the assumed link between re-enchantment and environmental ethics

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needs to be re-theorised so that enchantment, material animation and vitalism is expected, but remains ethically ambiguous. As such, enchantment might still serve important purposes for environmental ethics, but as an always ambivalent wonder-like opening calling for constructive bridge building towards desired ethical aims.

The liveliness of rocks: sacralised extraction vitalisms While new materialisms and vitalisms have sought to resist the reduction of matter to inert stuf, extractive and energy-intensive lifestyles have, in turn, been animated by a long history of attributing life, growth and vitality to an immanent potentiality for animation within matter. Before mining activities became infused with mechanistic expectations, they were informed by a view of mineral development as organic—and often the Christian belief that their development and extraction played a key role in divine plans for the redemption of the world. Even after a mechanised and secular perspective on extraction set in, the terms and concepts relied on have retained these vitalist roots. The term ‘resource’, for example, retains etymological roots in resurrection theologies. Historians Daniel Hausmann and Nicolas Perreaux have traced this etymology, noting that the Latin root of resource, resurgere, means to ‘arise from, to resurrect, to get up, or to recover’.17 Indeed, before 1600, resurgere was predominantly used in reference to the resurrection of Christ or the possibility of humans rising from the dead.18 Even beyond Christianity, Greco-Roman theories viewed minerals as developing organically, as seeds planted deep within the earth. In Christian sources as early as St Paul, the seed is a common metaphor for resurrection.19 Through the Middle Ages, a theory of minerals as seeds planted within the earth and growing according to divine plan constructed an enticing link early on between mineral extraction and redemption. Even at what is widely recognised as the beginnings of modern mining in 16th-century Saxony, extractive activities were commonly interpreted within religious cosmologies and philosophical vitalisms that assumed a view of mineral matter as growing and transforming, guided by divine providence.20 The historical impact of mineralogical animacies is onerous. Orlando Bentancor has emphasised that in the context of Spanish debates about the colonisation of the Americas and enslavement of Indigenous populations, matter’s capacity to generate itself and even have a sense of autonomy from divine power was integral rather than resistant to logics seeking to legitimate Spanish colonialism and extraction.21 Rather than the disenchantment of matter rendered dead, in the context of early modern and colonial extraction the liveliness of matter all the more demonstrated a need for the perfecting activities of ‘civilised’ human ingenuity and industry.22 In addition, the animacy of minerals, their organic development and ability for self-generation was taken to mean that the earth was a ‘never-ending resource of riches’23 —a conclusion that would be shared even into the 19th century by those interested in investing oil with divine purpose.

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Petro-vitalisms Beyond colonial-era mineral extraction, the liveliness of matter can also be seen as a key infuence on the 19th-century enchantment of oil, shaping views of its purpose and value for society. We see this curious animacy of oil matter functioning in the US context in two key registers: through the lens of the popular spiritualist movement, Harmonialism, and more orthodox Christian resurrection narratives. If ‘to be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday’,24 then oil emerged as enchanted precisely for the ways it shook everyday Cartesian-Newtonian expectations of matter that had become pervasive in 19th-century US culture. Environmental historian Paul Sabin has done extensive research on early oil narratives—examining sources from newspaper articles to advertisements and folk songs. Sabin demonstrates that oil evoked a pervasive sense of shock, wonder and incredulity on account of its mysteriously animate materiality. He concludes that ‘during the 1860’s petroleum seemed to reawaken a perception of the earth as animate and mysterious Nature’.25 Oil gurgled and grumbled with digestive-like noises. In one moment it would respond to oilmen who could agitate their wells to perform for an onlooking crowd. In another moment it could turn infuriatingly ‘temperamental’, defying oilmen’s control, starting and stopping at will—a problem that caused ‘considerable consternation among investors and observers alike’.26 What Sabin doesn’t analyse is the way this reception of oil was profoundly entangled with religious enchantments. Many industrial activities and resources have been sacralised.27 But what distinguished oil, making it particularly prone to sanctifcation in an enduring and culturally pervasive way, was its curious materiality, the way it seemingly disrupted binaries of mind/spirit and matter, animation and dead matter. Historians Darren Dochuk, Rochelle Raineri Zuck and B.M. Pietsch have illuminated the particular interest that spiritual groups took in oil extraction in the 19th century.28 Zuck, for example, emphasises that even more than the ‘lucrative fnancial opportunities’ of oil, these groups were enticed by the ability of oil to ‘demonstrate the “practical” applications of spiritualism’.29 For example, a group of Christian spiritualists created the Chicago Rock Oil Company not primarily for economic purposes but for the ways the curious materiality of oil could disrupt seemingly settled modern binaries. According to Zuck, they ‘hoped that oil itself could function as a kind of medium and persuade nonbelievers that spiritualism could make practical contributions to modern life’.30 Spiritualist techniques of divination and other spirit communication were seen as particularly useful in discovering the matter/spirit sources of oil. Once discovered, oil furthermore seemed to do what divinity did: it could transform societies and resurrect dead or dying economies. Such practical applications of religious beliefs were especially enticing in a disenchanted world where science seemingly had the corner on empirical results. In this context, oil demonstrated the fundamental inadequacy of reductive and dualistic materialisms. It

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enticingly conveyed that there was more to the surface of reality than could be seen and more to matter than mechanistic sciences could account for. Oil seemed to lend empirical evidence to the fact that there were forces within the material world that were ignored to the detriment of the atheistic scientist, politician and entrepreneur. One of the most popular and culturally pervasive forms of spiritualism at the time was Harmonialism.31 Anya Foxen describes Harmonialism as having three main features. First, a monistic view of reality, emphasising the ‘material [as] continuous with the immaterial, the physical with the spiritual and human with the divine’.32 Second, an intermediary reality—identifed variously and often interchangeably as pneuma, spirit, ether or energy—that could link the human organism with the cosmos and divine reality. The third feature of Harmonialism is a prescribed method to tap into and utilise these intermediate substances to bring the human, cosmos and divine into a mutually benefcial harmony. Physical and spiritual health as well as economic prosperity fow from one’s accord with cosmic rhythms.33 With oil’s already observed mysterious disruptions of spirit and matter, along with long traditions associating electricity, magnetism and ether with the intermediate substance that could assist harmonisation with the divine cosmos, oil was primed for enchantment.34 Andrew Jackson Davis became a leading voice of Harmonialism. His Principles of Nature (1847) communicated a cosmology that began with primordial reality, the Sensorium, where matter and spirit were a unit. As creation unfolded, matter became more and more difuse, less and less refned, resulting in a separation of spirit and matter. Historian Darryl Caterine describes this dissolution as a ‘cosmic alchemical process in reverse’.35 As creation unfolded and less and less harmony could be found between spirit and matter, intermediary realities could be utilised to mend that break and return harmony to the cosmos. Davis gave particular attention to the ability of technology to play this intermediary role. Properly employed, technology could actively reverse this dissolution of reality through a process Davis called ‘progression’. Davis viewed technology as, ideally, a new kind of alchemy, re-uniting matter with spirit, refning and moving it to a higher plane of reality. Electricity and magnetism in particular were interpreted as subtle, intermediary forms of matter. Even more than their economic role, their true value was as a ‘metaphysical teaching tool’36 because they could act as a bridge between what modernity had mistakenly divided. In fact, as Caterine explains, the electric machine came to be seen as a ‘kind of sacrament’, a way that humans could participate in and ‘come to know the indwelling power of the universe directly’.37 This view of the material world as infused with and animated by unseen forces made oil all the more enticing a form of matter, like electricity and magnetism, that could help bridge a divide between spirit and matter. Zuck thus emphasises the important role Harmonialism played in the reception of oil. This was the view that informed the Chicago Rock Oil Christian spiritualists, mentioned earlier, as well as famous oil mediums like Abraham James. James became

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famous for his ability to locate untapped oil wells by communicating with the spirit world and inscribed his indebtedness to this form of spiritualism by naming his frst spiritually discovered oil well ‘Harmonial 1’.38 Where Harmonialism relied on the afects of wonder and enchantment at matter’s spiritually infused animacy, the role of the practitioner was to employ spirit/matter mediums to harmonise oneself and society at large with the cosmos. Some, but not all, of these Harmonialisms were interpreted through a Christian lens. Other religious sanctifcations of oil also viewed it as animate and selfregenerating, but articulated their oil vitalisms in frameworks more recognisably consistent with orthodox Christian theologies. A remarkable example can be found in Rev. S.J. Eaton’s 1866 text, Petroleum.39 Eaton served as Presbyterian pastor in the Titusville, PA, region where the frst oil strike took place on US soil in 1859. In Petroleum, Eaton refected on the dramatic changes brought by petro to his hometown and articulated creation and redemption theologies of oil. Echoing ancient mineralogies, Eaton theorised that oil had been planted as a seed by God to come to full fruition at divinely appointed moments to serve human needs.40 Towards the end of his text, Eaton tackled a question of the ‘Permanence of the Supply’. Only six years after the frst oil strike, questions were already swirling: ‘Will it be permanent? Is it laid by in sufcient quantities, either as oil, or the material from which oil distilling, to supply the wants of man through all coming time?’41 To answer the question of oil’s limits, Eaton emphasised that the history of creation, even before Adam, was to make the earth ‘a ft abode for man’.42 This has been God’s plan since the beginning and all creation’s developments—even up to the discovery of oil in his time—have been providentially guided: ‘It was not mere accidental circumstance that this vegetable deposit was changed to coal and oil, nor was it a merely fortuitous event that in these last years these stores of wealth were brought to light. It is as the time appointed in the eternal counsels of their appearance. It is as the fulfllment of the word of life, that earth should supply abundantly the wants of all the creatures moving upon its surface.’43 Providentially guided, the processes that have formed petroleum have not been mechanistic, but organic, and cyclical. Eaton acknowledged that oil and coal have been formed from ancient vegetable deposits buried deep within the earth beyond human observation. But, he emphasised, we can draw conclusions about the subsurface from creative activities above the surface: if we take the mode of his operation, as we see it carried forward on the earth’s surface, as a criterion by which to judge, we shall be strengthened in the belief that the same course of production and supply is carried out in the regions below.44 Just as harvests continue from year to year—having their times of dry spells and plentiful harvest—while there may be times of greater or lesser oil harvest, the organic and cyclical nature of oil development guarantees that there will never

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be a time when it simply runs out. Indeed, there is ‘no evidence that the formation of oil has ceased in the regions below’.45 Just as for Spanish colonists the cyclical nature of mineral growth led to conclusions that they were tapping into a source of ‘never-ending…riches’,46 for Eaton too, the cyclical nature of mineral growth suggested an unlimited resource in petro. But for Eaton, the natural cycles of oil are rendered all the more limitless where they are linked to divine omnipotence. In addition to the providential guidance of organic processes above and below ground for the express purposes of human need and desire, Eaton asserted divine omnipotence. For Eaton the question of created limits fts the measure of divine power. At one point when asked about the limits of oil he merely responds with the limits of God: ‘There is no limit, surely, to Omnipotence.’47 The slide is subtle, but the implications monumental: questioning the limits of oil becomes tantamount to questioning the limits of God. Oil emerges as enchanted with unlimited divine power.

Current petro-vitalisms These are not merely problems of earlier modernities, more enchanted than the present and left to the past. Energy and extraction vitalisms continue to inform current forms of petro exuberance—and now climate denialism. Cultural theorist Anne Pasek, for example, demonstrates the important and under-theorised role of vitalisms in current climate denialisms. Pasek acknowledges the salience of the characterisation of climate denialism based in the production of doubt (in the vein of Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt), but emphasises another, less theorised, kind of denialism not driven by disenchanting scepticism, but by the celebration of life, liveliness and vitality.48 Pasek focuses on the climate denial campaign initiated by the conservative think tank, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), around 2006. Initially responding to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, they intensifed their strategic eforts when the Obama administration aimed to identify CO2 as a form of pollution subject to EPA regulation.49 In a series of TV commercials aimed to sway public opinion, the CEI did not ‘direct its viewers’ attention to contested facts, suspect political actors, or even the concept of global warming in any immediate way. Instead, it asked viewers to refect on the status and meaning of a particular molecule.’50 In short, it focused viewers’ attention on the liveliness of carbon. One commercial overlaid a series of images of sunbathers, joggers, antelope, forests and children with a narrator’s voice: There’s something in these pictures you can’t see. It’s essential to life. We breath [sic] it out. Plants breath [sic] it in. It comes from animal life, the oceans, the earth, and the fuel we fnd in it … It’s called carbon dioxide—CO2’. What ‘some politicians want to label … a pollutant’, the voice concludes, ‘we call it life.51

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This form of climate denialism, Pasek emphasises, is not rooted in doubt but in a ‘connection between the carbon cycle and the moral good of life as such’—an approach Pasek identifes as ‘carbon vitalism’.52 Pasek doesn’t focus on afect, but it is clear that carbon vitalist climate denialisms are depending on it in key ways. The commercials aim to de-mechanise the status of CO2 as ‘pollutant’ by drawing on afective registers that would align with a political base animated by pro-life sentiments. The strategy furthermore evokes earlier afective strategies of harmonising one’s life rhythms with the cycles of the cosmos—here, though, exclusively focused on the petro-carbon cycle (even to the detriment of other earth cycles). By increasing afective connections to CO2 through life and liveliness to combat a mechanised status of CO2 as pollutant, this form of climate denialism aims for a re-enchantment of CO2 to fortify against climate change mitigation. A second example of current extraction vitalisms, articulated by E. Calvin Beisner, is clearly conveying a sacralised petro-vitalism by building on resonance between the pro-life afects of carbon vitalism and explicit reference to Christian theologies of redemption. Founder and spokesperson for the conservative think tank, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, Beisner and his organisation have been major promoters of climate denialism.53 In 2013, Beisner wrote a Christian Post op-ed in response to evangelical David Jenkins who, in turn, was writing in support of climate scientists Kathryn Hayhoe (also an outspoken evangelical) and Thomas Ackerman. In their own op-ed, Hayhoe and Ackerman had argued against Rush Limbaugh for the legitimacy of climate science and the centrality of climate concerns to evangelical values. Beisner clearly writes in the vein of carbon vitalism—’Carbon dioxide is essential to all life’—but articulates a sanctifed version of it. Beisner does not deny that increases of CO2 have happened over time, but contests the conclusion of climate scientists that increased CO2 leads to dangerous warming by arguing that earth’s feedback loops have been designed well enough to respond to any of these anthropogenic efects.54 His theological argument focuses on Jenkins’s advocacy for carbon sequestration, which Beisner frames as a ‘carbon dead end’—a denial not only of the carbon cycle but simultaneously of resurrected life. Beisner sacralises the carbon cycle by emphasising its harmony with the resurrection life cycle. He constructs a resurrection theology of the carbon cycle by frst asking, ‘How did the fossil fuels get where they are? They are the remains of trillions of dead plants and animals, buried under vast layers of sedimentary rock and transformed by heat and pressure into coal, oil, and natural gas…They were not sinners. They bore God’s judgement on a sin not their own.’ He continues with explicit reference to St Paul’s agricultural metaphor for resurrection: [t]hey died. They were buried. And now they are being lifted out of the ground and transformed from matter into energy … Stop and think for a moment: Innocent creatures die, are buried, are brought up out of the ground, and bring life to others. Haven’t you heard that story before?

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Of course you have. It is the basic summary of the gospel: Christ (who knew no sin but became sin for us that we might be made the righteous of God in Him; 2 Corinthians 5:21), died for our sins according to the Scriptures; He was buried; He rose again from the dead on the third day according to the Scriptures.55 Beisner articulates a sanctifed carbon vitalism by aligning the carbon cycle directly with Christ’s life, death and resurrection. This sanctifcation then allows him to conclude that carbon sequestration is not just uneconomical, unethical or impractical, but contrary to the basic Christian message. This 21st-century petro-theology builds from an ancient Christian alignment between resurrection and agricultural metaphors as well as interconnected ancient theo-philosophical theories of organic mineral growth. The efect frmly links afects of wonder, vitality and sacrality to extractive practices. I do not mean to suggest that Beisner’s petro-theology—let alone Eaton’s or early modern and colonial mineralogies—should be equated with current new materialisms. Indeed, Beisner departs from them in key ways. In his vitalism, matter works according to a pre-determined divine design. Its ability to evoke awe and wonder is on account of its orderliness, its ability to follow the divine design and points beyond itself to the gracious providence of the Designer. Beisner’s (carbon) matter is lively, active and animated—in addition to the resurrectionstyle cycle, he emphasises the ability of systems to self-correct and self-regulate, similar to an immune response to harmful bacteria. But it would be difcult to argue that for Beisner matter is agential in the sense of most new materialists. Unlike colonial mineralogies articulated by Bentancor or early oil narratives, Beisner’s petro does not surprise or confound in a way that resists human agency since this matter’s wondrous characteristics frmly lie in its willingness to serve human needs and desires. Beisner’s petro-matter obediently follows a divine plan for the (anthropocentric) redemption of the world. While Beisner clearly departs from key features of new materialisms, extraction and petro-vitalisms like his do gesture towards points of vulnerability in an assumed link between afects of wonder or enchantment with animate matter and improved environmental ethics. This relationship between enchantment, attachment, reason and ethics needs specifc re-evaluation.

Oil, enchantment and religious environmental ethics The critic is not one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who ofers the participants arenas in which to gather.56 While an assumed link between wonder and ethics needs further analysis, it is also the case that disenchantment with oil hasn’t produced any better environmental ethics than its enchantment. In the heyday of oil discoveries, petro seemed

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more aligned with spirit or divine grace than the law-like certainties and predictabilities of the machine. Later, oil did become standardised in great part due to John D. Rockefeller’s monopoly, itself provoked by the uncertainties and indeterminacies of oil’s boom and bust cycles that undermined rather than furthered economic stability.57 Rockefeller’s Standard Oil successfully disenchanted oil by making its production and refnement predictable, mechanised, routine and, above all, immensely proftable. The US Supreme Court decision that Standard Oil had violated anti-trust laws, along with highly publicised union disputes with the oil industry and the Teapot Dome scandal broadened public disenchantment with oil.58 When combined with rapidly expanding car culture and infrastructural reliance on oil, this disenchantment of oil meant that by the 1920s, Americans were more addicted to oil than ever, but less and less conscious of their pervasive dependence on petro.59 There seems to have been a fux and fow, a dialectical relationship between enchantment and disenchantment when it comes to oil. In the wake of early 20th-century public disenchantment with oil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) has continually aimed to re-ignite a public sense of wonder and transcendence through oil in their marketing. Rather than enchantment at extraction sites, though, they’ve aimed their marketing at evoking these afects on the other end of the pump.60 As North Americans became disenchanted with oil, it became an ‘energy unconscious’,61 the unrecognised ‘magic that powers modernity’.62 Signifcantly, the eventual disenchantment with oil merely fostered new myths of continual economic growth, individual self-reliance and economic independence—all fundamentally fuelled by oil, but which, when unrecognised, create an illusion of mechanical self-propulsion.63 Petroculture scholars seem to evoke the ambiguity of dis/enchantment with oil when they identify oil as the pervasive ‘magic that powers modernity’ while also consistently calling attention to the confounding fact that it has taken until the 21st century to become aware of and analyse the cultural—and not just mechanical—efects of oil.64 In the mode of oil’s dis/enchantments, it is also important to note that certain animacies have motivated a praxis of resistance to oil extraction. Indigenous Andean U’wa cosmologies have long identifed oil as the lifeblood of Mother Earth. For the U’wa oil is thus sacred, but in contrast to Beisner’s and Eaton’s petro-theological exuberance this sacrality produces a praxis of reverence, respect and extraction resistance. For over 20 years the U’wa have engaged in acts of civil disobedience against the Colombian government as well as transnational oil companies empowered by North American politicians and investors. Despite continued enticements; economic and political pressure; threats of violence; and exploitation of legal loopholes, the U’wa community continues the struggle and maintains a costly and tenuous resistance.65 Zoe Todd’s oil animacy takes a diferent approach, avoiding the language of divinity or the sacred and foregrounding more explicitly the challenge that oil poses to relational ontologies and reciprocal responsibilities. Todd has come to appreciate a sense of the reciprocal responsibilities shared with lands, waters, fsh,

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berries, invertebrates and other beings as communicated by fellow Métis community members. From this perspective, Todd has been able to reckon with the agencies of fsh in her analysis of political philosophies of fshermen in Paulatuuq. But in the wake of an oil spill that killed innumerable creatures, wreacked havoc on the ecosystem and rendered drinking water dangerous, Todd admits to the greater challenge of accounting for the animacy and agency of oil while also accounting for petro as toxic pollutant. Compared to fsh, invertebrates or even many other forms of inorganic matter, it is ‘far harder’, Todd admits, to address ‘the ways in which the very pollutants involved in the Husky oil spill are themselves the extracted, processed, heated, split and steamed progeny of the fossilised carbon beings buried deep within the earth of my home province’.66 Todd wonders: how does one account for the animacy and intra-active entanglements of matter when that matter, even from the perspective of environmental ethics, is so closely associated with death, disease, toxicity and pollution? What are our responsibilities to ‘“inert” or polluting materials, like the oil that spilled into North Saskatchewan River this summer?’67 Todd’s response to the trouble of paradoxical all too animate/deathly oil draws from interlocutors like Heather Davis and Kim TallBear. She identifes oil as a ‘paradoxical kind of kin’. ‘[T]hese long-dead beings’, she emphasises, can remind us of the ‘life that once teemed here’, but also that matter-kin can be weaponised, transformed into ‘settler-colonial-industrial-capitalist contaminants and pollutants’.68 Recognising oil as both kin and vulnerable to weaponisation helps account, on the one hand, for the animacy of matter that renders it relationally wondrous while, on the other hand, still attending to the ways its enchantments may be profoundly destructive. Todd here demonstrates a distinctly diferent approach to academic critique commonly rooted in disenchantment. The solution to the enchantment of oil ofered by academic critique would be a demythologisation of oil, energy and extraction. It would pull back the cloak of mystifcation and enchantments surrounding oil and extraction, debunk its myths, undermine its unexamined powers and expose it as manipulable to the dangers of ideology, mythology and religion. In so doing, though, it would also render this matter passive, receptive to human meaning construction, dead and inert. Text, language and mind would once again fnd its place ordering matter. A new materialist angle on oil, then, would need to both account for its material entanglements, its agential resistance to human control and the way it always eludes human meaning construction—while also remaining vigilant about its modes of enchantment and animacy, questioning its ties to sacrality or transcendence as much as unconsciously assumed high-energy culture values more broadly. There are other reasons for resisting a pure demythologisation that are not widely acknowledged among new materialists. Like Bennett, religion scholar Jason Josephson Storm is critical of the narrative of disenchanted modernity, but he emphasises that what new materialists often overlook is the persistent role enchantment played even in the construction of the narrative of disenchantment.

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Josephson Storm demonstrates that the ‘myth of mythless modernity’ ironically arose in the historical and geographical context of occult and spiritualist revivals. Key proponents of the diagnosis of modernity as disenchanted, like Max Weber, were not only aware of these movements, but profoundly infuenced by them. Weber and others were therefore compelled by the idea of a loss of enchantment to pursue new enchantments. Consequently, from its beginnings the idea of disenchantment has evoked eforts for re-enchantment—a phenomenon that reveals the self-efacing character of disenchantment. For this reason, Josephson Storm argues that the idea that disenchantment was ever actually achieved is itself a myth. If what it means to be modern is to not believe in ghosts, magic and other enchantments, Storm concludes, with reference to Bruno Latour, then ‘we have never been modern’.69 Bennett, we should note, while emphasising the ethical importance of animate matter that can enchant and evoke afective attachment, does eventually acknowledge the potential for enchantment to infuse violent aims as well. Her answer to the problem of enchantment’s vulnerability to unethical aims, like Todd’s, resists the pure demythologisation of critique and aims to ‘fght enchantment with enchantment’.70 Similarly, Josephson Storm acknowledges that in the end, ‘we can never fully escape myth’. The task of critique, he concludes, might look more like ‘merely exchanging one tale for another, albeit hopefully, a better one’.71 The key departure Josephson Storm takes from a re-enchantment approach, though, is that while he does not seek a demythologising form of critique, he also demonstrates the importance of avoiding mourning either disenchantment or the unfnished project of disenchantment. His approach suggests closer attention to their interplay. Rather than the old modern ‘confict thesis’, zero-sum relationship between religion and science, fact and value, afect and reason, Josephson Storm highlights several historical examples where the relationship between enchantment and disenchantment emerges as ambiguously mutually responsive rather than merely confictual. We should not be surprised, he emphasises, to fnd that ‘reason does not eliminate “superstition” but piggybacks upon it’, that vitalism is often incited by mechanism, that religious belief is not always erased by science and technology but may fnd itself animated or transformed by it and vice versa.72 In this piggybacking view of enchantment and disenchantment, orienting questions for environmental ethics would not be ‘are we living in an enchanted world?’, or ‘what happened to our world of enchantment?’, or even ‘how do we re-enchant the world?’ Rather, it would expect enchantment. As Donovan Schaefer’s afect approach to science and ethics has emphasised, we can expect emotions like wonder and enchantment to continue alongside and even within science, environmental ethics and critical ethical refection as much as conspiracy theory and climate denialism.73 Where enchantment is ethically ambiguous but expected, the role of academic critique would still attend to the play of unmarked or unrecognised power dynamics and desires, but it would not end in a pure disenchanted, demythologised revealing of ‘naked reality’. Instead, critique could

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summon a gathering, create a public arena around common questions, concerns and causes. Rather than divide and pit against, critique could create publicly accountable points of connection between agonistic claims or construct bridges between ambiguous afects like enchantment and a desired praxis. In these arenas afects like wonder, awe and enchantment—though they wouldn’t necessarily lead to either good ethics or delusion—could still play an important role, opening a series of conjoined attachments and reasoned refections: I’m experiencing a sense of wonder, why is that? What is producing this awe? What gender, racial, or religious afects might be resonating here? And what are the ethical implications of that? If I were to dwell in this wonder, chase this enchantment, what kind of praxis would it produce? What would materialise? What world would it create? This is the continued and enduring value of critical religious and theological studies for oil and other material enchantments vulnerable to weaponisation. The persistent reliance of religion and ecology studies on disenchantment narratives, though, will require signifcant reassessments and alternative methodologies in order to better account for these enchantments. Though religious studies more broadly is rooted in and often remains dominated by the ‘myth of disenchantment’,74 there are also within religious studies consistent perspectives emphasising that myth is to be expected and enchantment anticipated, but they need not evacuate publicly accountable critical refection. These moments of myth and enchantment are not ones that human history will eventually move beyond—neither should they be accepted thoughtlessly. Myths encourage and evoke enchantment and so might be seen as playing a key role in stitching together moments of awe or wonder into a coherent narrative. These narratives then render feeting and subjective moments of wonder available for communicable and publicly accountable critical refection—not necessarily to move beyond enchantment, but to exchange some myths for others that better cohere with the worlds we’d like to see materialised.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Lynn White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, 1205. Joseph Sittler, ‘The Care of the Earth’. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘The Problem’. Thomas Berry, ‘The New Story’. See a version of this argument also in Rowe, Of Modern Extraction, 13. Josephson Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 1. De Graaf, Boe and Simon, Afuenza. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix; Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 16. See, for example, Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xiii. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life. Ibid., 3. Other new materialists do not centre the disenchantment thesis as explicitly as Bennett, but frame their approaches as responses to an over reliance in Western thought on language, concepts, mind and psychology. Alaimo and Hekman (Material Feminisms) as well as Karen Barad, for example, highlight an over-emphasis on discourse, language and human constructs (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 132).

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12 See Bennett, Vibrant Matter, as well as Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 5. 13 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 14 See, for example, McGrath, The Re-Enchantment of Nature, and Wallace, When God Was a Bird. 15 See, for example, Tucker, Worldly Wonder. 16 Rowe, Of Modern Extraction. 17 Hausmann and Perreaux, ‘Resources—A Historical and Conceptual Roadmap’, 181. Cited in Asmussen, ‘The Cosmologies of the Early Modern Resource Landscape’ [5]. 18 Ibid., 184 [6]. 19 See, for example, 1 Cor. 15: 3-4, 44. 20 See Rowe, ‘Capital’, Of Modern Extraction, 91–122. 21 Bentancor, The Matter of Empire. See pp. 1–40 on the characterisation of matter and pp. 284–352 on the animacy and agency of minerals. 22 See Bentancor, The Matter of Empire. 23 Ibid., 325. 24 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 4. 25 Paul Sabin, ‘‘A Dive into Nature’s Great Grab-bag’, 473. 26 Ibid., 475. 27 Callahan, Lofton and Seales, ‘Allegories of Progress’. 28 Dochuk, Anointed with Oil; Pietsch, ‘Lyman Stewart and Early Fundamentalism’; Zuck, ‘The Wizard of Oil: Abraham James, the Harmonial Wells, and the Psychometric History of the Oil Industry’. 29 Zuck, ‘The Wizard of Oil’, 21. 30 Ibid., 27. 31 Catherine Albanese has persuasively demonstrated these ‘metaphysical religions’ have been a consistent, pervasive and profoundly infuential sub-current in US life (A Republic of Mind and Spirit). 32 Foxen, Inhaling Spirit, 23. 33 Foxen, 20. 34 See ‘Energy’ and ‘Oil’ in Rowe, Of Modern Extraction, for more on electricity and magnetism and religion. 35 Caterine, ‘The Haunted Grid’, 376. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Zuck, ‘The Wizard of Oil.’ 39 See also my analysis of other texts like John J. McLaurin’s evocative slide between petroleum and Christ in ‘Oil’, Of Modern Extraction and ‘Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum’, in Bray, Eaton and Bauman, Immanent Religiosities, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking. 40 Eaton, Petroleum, 43, 35. 41 Ibid., 258. 42 Ibid., 250. 43 Ibid., 251–252. 44 Ibid., 264. 45 Ibid., 264–265. 46 Bentancor, The Matter of Empire, 325. 47 Eaton, Petroleum, 264–265. 48 Pasek notes that ‘while previous studies have focused on ideological and fnancial networks that promote climate denial, political economy alone is insufcient to explain the ways in which this message resonates to some’ (‘Carbon Vitalism’, 3). 49 This form of climate denialism (carbon vitalism) ‘coalesced as an interpretive community in response to the 2006–7 Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court’s case that debated the legal merits of classifying carbon dioxide as an air pollutant agent’ (Ibid., 4). 50 Ibid., 2.

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51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Ibid. Ibid. See Alumkal, Paranoid Science. Beisner, ‘Fossil Fuels, Enemy or Friend?’ He cites several studies that, as he interprets them, have concluded that earth’s vegetation is currently ‘starved for carbon dioxide’, that in previous times on earth the atmosphere held much higher rates of CO2 and that recent crop yields have benefted from the increased CO2. Ibid., n.p. Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, 246. See Dochuk, Anointed with Oil. The Supreme Court decision Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States split Standard Oil into 34 smaller companies. Union disputes with major oil companies helped sway public opinion against big oil—particularly when strikers were met with violence. Before the Watergate Scandal, the Teapot Dome scandal was widely regarded to be the most signifcant and high-profle scandal in the history of the US government. Dochuk, Anointed with Oil, 210–211. Bruce Barton, qtd in Dochuk, Anointed with Oil, 223. Yaeger, Patricia, ‘Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources’. Szeman and Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil, 50. See Andreas Malm on the convergence of petro and capitalism—and the efective illusion of continual growth and self-sustenance that is actually fundamentally dependent on oil in Fossil Capital. Szeman and Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil. Margarita Serje, ‘ONGs, Indios y Petróleo: El Caso U’wa a Través de los Mapas del Territorio en Disputa’. See also Ángela Uribe Botero, Petróleo Economía y Cultura el Caso U’wa. Many thanks to my colleague Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez for alerting me to this case and suggesting these resources. Zoe Todd, ‘Fish, Kin and Hope’, 106. Ibid. Ibid. Josephson Storm, Myth of Disenchantment, 3. Referencing Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 110. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 3. Schaefer, Wild Experiment. Josephson Storm, Myth of Disenchantment.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Albanese, Catherine. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Alumkal, Antony. Paranoid Science: The Christian Right’s War on Reality. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Asmussen, Tina. ‘The Cosmologies of the Early Modern Mining Landscape‘. In Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature, edited by Christine Göttler and Mia Mochizuki. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

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Beisner, E. Calvin. ‘Fossil Fuels, Enemy or Friend? Divine Design in the Carbon Cycle‘. The Christian Post, October 28, 2013. https://www.christianpost.com/news/fossil -fuels-enemy-or-friend-divine-design-in-the-carbon-cycle.html. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Berry, Thomas. ‘The New Story‘. In Teilhard in the 21st Century: The Emerging Spirit of Earth, edited by Arthur Fabel and Donald St. John, 77–88. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2003. Botero, Ángela Uribe. Petróleo Economía y Cultura el Caso U’wa. Bogotá: Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2005. Bray, Karen, Heather Eaton and Whitney Bauman, eds. Immanent Religiosities, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking. New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming. Callahan, Richard, Kathryn Lofton and Chad Seales. ‘Allegories of Progress: Industrial Religion in the United States‘. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010): 1–39. Caterine, Darryl. ‘The Haunted Grid: Nature, Electricity, and Indian Spirits in the American Metaphysical Tradition‘. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82 (2012): 371–397. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. De Graaf, John, Vivia Boe and Scott Simon. Afuenza. Oley: Bullfrog Films, 1997. Dochuk, Darren. Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Eaton, S. J. M. Petroleum: A History of the Oil Region of Venango County, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: J.P. Skelly, 1866. Foxen, Anya P. Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hausmann, Daniel, and Nicolas Perreaux. ‘Resources: A Historical and Conceptual Roadmap’. In Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes, edited by Ivo Amelung, Hartmut Leppin, and Christian A. Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2018, 179–208. Josephson Storm, Jason A. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern‘. Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–248. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2016. McGrath, Alister. The Re-Enchantment of Nature: Science Religion and the Human Sense of Wonder. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. ‘The Problem‘. In Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man. Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1997: 17–50. Pasek, Anne. ‘Carbon Vitalism: Life and the body in Climate Denial‘. Environmental Humanities 31:1 (May 2021): 1–20. Pietsch, B. M. ‘Lyman Stewart and Early Fundamentalism‘. Church History 82 (2013): 617–46.

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Rowe, Terra Schwerin. Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology. London: Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, 2022. ———. ‘Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum’. In Immanent Religiosities, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, edited by Karen Bray, Heather Eaton and Whitney Bauman. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Sabin, Paul. ‘‘A Dive into Nature’s Great Grab-bag’: Nature, Gender and Capitalism in the Early Pennsylvania Oil Industry‘. Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 472–505. Schaefer, Donovan O. Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism After Darwin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Serje, Margarita, ‘ONGs, Indios y Petróleo: El Caso U’wa a Través de los Mapas del Territorio en Disputa.’ Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'études Andines 32 (2003): http:// journals.openedition.org/bifea/6398; https://doi.org/10.4000/bifea.6398. Sittler, Joseph, ‘The Care of the Earth‘. In Evocations of Grace: Writings on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics, edited by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Peter Bakken, 51–8. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. Szeman, Imre, Lynn Badia, Jef Diamanti, Michael O’Driscoll and Mark Simpson, eds. After Oil. Edmonton: Petrocultures Research Group, 2016. Todd, Zoe. ‘Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory‘. Afterall 43 (Spring/Summer 2017): 102–7. Tucker, Mary Evelyn. Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase. New York: Open Court, 2003. Wallace, Mark I. When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. White, Lynn. ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis‘. Science 155 (1967): 1203–07. Yaeger, Patricia. ‘Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources‘. PMLA 126 (2011): 305–326. Zuck, Rochelle Raineri. ‘The Wizard of Oil: Abraham James, the Harmonial Wells, and the Psychometric History of the Oil Industry‘. In Oil Culture, edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

11 FICTION’S DOUBLE-HELIX Incarnate Process and the Capacity for Transformation in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Jessica Brown

If we continue to understand what we mean by incarnational ontology, and relentlessly allow our religious imaginations to be shaped by the processual and afective activity of this material (materialising) reality, would our religious capacities for ecological presence and care be diferent? To explore this question I turn to a fctive ecosystem, the world of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. After establishing three categories that work together to make this ecosystem a transformational ontology (an ontology where spiritual transformation is possible), I will consider what is at stake in fction’s double-helix of materialism and incorporeality—an incarnate relationality carrying capacities for transformation—and explore its realistic indices for our own world. Written by Charles Dickens, the novella A Christmas Carol was published on 19 December 1843. It tells the story of the money-lender Ebenezer Scrooge, a man whose obsession with money makes the Christmas season of giving and sharing particularly abhorrent. One Christmas Eve, he is visited by four ghosts. First is his late business partner Jacob Marley, whose adoration of money led to inexorably unkind treatment towards fellow human beings. Marley warns Scrooge of the tormented afterlife that awaits such greed and also warns of three coming spectres: the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future, all who arrive and show Scrooge moments of his own life, the lives of others and what awaits him if he does not change course. After this night, Scrooge awakens on Christmas morning to realise he has been given a second chance, and responds to this chance with profound gladness and action, bringing gifts and cheer to others. In reading the text, what emerges is not only an unfolding line of character transformation (the spiritual-narrative dynamics of someone changing), but also a storyworld replete with feshy, sensorial and atmospheric material. A fantastical story beloved by generations and taking many forms in stage and cinema, A DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-12

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Christmas Carol becomes for us an example of how fction works out a spiritual line through the materiality of that fctional world.

I. Tactilities, atmospherics and spiritual dynamics This section will ofer close readings of storyworld layers in order to establish, in a codifed way, three categories that work together to make a fctional ontology that enables transformation; the next section, then, will unravel these categories for further exploration into the relationship between materialism and spiritual movement. A concept from the narratologist David Herman, storyworld designates readers’ experiences of the fctional worlds they are immersed in when they read, the environment that the story is ‘embedd[ed]’ in.1 Recent work by Erin James has extended that concept into econarratology, exploring how a storyworld works environmentally, with diverse elements infuencing each other through their interconnections.2 For this essay, the use of storyworld emphasises this ecological aspect, against the idea that the fctional world is a static setting, and employs the concept with its ranging afectivity for the entities (characters and character arcs) within it. First, tactilities. This term denotes what is tactile—things that can be seen, felt, touched. For this close reading, the word specifes biological forms, especially body-forms and dermis-located experiences: sweat glands, nerve endings, hair follicles and sensory experiences. This stratum in the book references such things as gruel in a pewter mug, roasted goose, bandaged limbs and sweaty dancing. A frst example is when Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s underpaid employee, though dreadfully tired and frigid from the cold air at work, decides for some fun on his way home: ‘[He] went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s-buf.’3 Muscle movement, fallen snow and a blindfold generate these zones of activity: biological cells, water molecules and woven fabric are the granular necessities for these happenings. Another example of tactilities is a scene in which the Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge to a memory from his past: it is a Christmas Eve dance hosted by Nigel Fezziwig, to whom Scrooge is apprenticed. Dickens describes the dancing in a way that the reader is immersed in the materiality of the scene: the tremendous movement of the dancers, the heat of all the bodies, the pull of music through sound waves and vibrations, the abundance of food and drink. Alongside ‘a great piece of Cold Roast’, ‘a great piece of Cold Boiled’ and ‘mince-pies, and plenty of beer’ is ‘old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig all through the dance’ following the steps to ‘advance and retire, both hands to [their] partner, bow and curtsy, cork-screw, thread-the-needle, and back again to [their] place’.4 This moving, feshy, sweaty, eating and drinking scene throbs with tactility, a layer of storyworld that is replete with things and ‘thingyness’. This idea of the power of things has been deftly explored by the new materialist philosopher Jane Bennett, whose book Vibrant Matter I would like to

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connect with this mattered layer of the fctional storyworld as having its own special power. Defning ‘thing-power’ as ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce efects dramatic and subtle’,5 Bennett explains, Thing-power gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience. [O]bjects can become vibrant things with a certain efectivity of their own.6 It is not that we imbue things with our own meanings, but rather the things themselves animate a response. This Dickensian storyworld seems to recognise and even utilise how things radiate in the storyworld with specifc forces that impinge upon Scrooge, afecting the narrative arc as it unfolds. A vibrant example is the description of the Ghost of Christmas Present, a being (a spectral being) who is over-abundant in bodily presence: ‘He rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice.’ 7 The tactility here is profound: the skin of one hand literally touches the other, laughter is fgured as a kind of spillage and the descriptors ‘oily’ and ‘fat’ nearly infuse felt texture to the sound waves of his vocal chords. Furthermore, the Ghost of Christmas Present has arrived surrounded by many things: The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy refected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrifcation of a hearth had never known Heaped up on the foor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.8 This list almost throbs with thingness, not only brimming over in quantity but somehow in quality: there is a surfeit here that gives credence to the power of tactile things to radiate agentic presence. Dickens gives another list, which Scrooge is at times impervious to and disdainful of, that details the tactilities of street shops on this Christmas Eve. Here Dickens compares ‘great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts’ to ‘jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors’ and ‘ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions’ to ‘Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness’, where the apples ‘Norfolk Bifns, squat and swarthy, [set] of the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entrea[t] and beseech[] to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner’.9 Perhaps these lists could be read as an apologetics for the vibrancy of matter: not only are the nuts and onions given human comparisons, but Dickens writes these things in such a way that

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they pulse through the dim fog of the busy London street, tiny beacons of colour enacting action verbs ‘entreat’ and ‘beseech’. About this layer of tactility, it is not only that things themselves attain a kind of puissance but that the experience of their tactility is rendered as utterly crucial. The ability to engage with things—the way Bob Cratchit, though cold, uses muscle and lung to play with snow particles; the way the fddler at Fezziwig’s dance plays until he is red with sweat; the way the Ghost of Christmas Present has a richness of presence via materiality that embodies super-abundance—presents a mode of interaction with tactile things that makes this layer of the storyworld work. In this, perhaps the most important example for tactilities is how Scrooge is a body who does not feel. It is not only that Scrooge would rather be cold than pay for coal; he does not feel the cold. Dickens gives his readers a very clear idea of Scrooge’s imperviousness to temperature: ‘External heat and cold had little infuence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him.’10 This last line is important to consider; again, it is not only that Scrooge is coldhearted but rather, in a telling diference, that he does not register temperature at all. In their introduction to The Afect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth reference when Bruno Latour asked audience members what the opposite of ‘alive’ was: the answers ‘Latour found most intriguing were “unaffected” and “death.” He surmises: “If the opposite of being a body is dead [and] there is no life apart from the body [then] to have a body is to learn to be afected, meaning ‘efectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans.”’11 Here, unafectedness—or when capacities for being afected are truncated, damaged or missing—is confgured as opposite of being alive. Likewise, in this storyworld, tactilities play a vital part explicating the sensory and afective experiences of our protagonist; we can observe what Scrooge can and cannot register through the tactile world. Lisa Blackman’s work in Immaterial Bodies is pertinent here in that she extends the sensorium to consider both how the senses always work in tandem or coordination, captured by the concept of synesthesia, and how the movement of intensities, energies, sensations and afects between bodies are felt and registered through the perception of bodily movement.12 If the story starts with a body that is incapable of feeling temperature, this is an efective lens through which to understand the story arc, which scopes diferently than a protagonist transforming from cold- to warm-hearted, but transforming from someone who cannot feel to someone who can: from someone unable to be impinged upon to someone who can be impinged upon. Blackman further provides a vital addition: ‘This registering is not simply the registering of the internal actions of the nervous system, but rather that of the fow of sensation between bodies, which fnds its passage through the attunement of nervous systems with the other, human and nonhuman’13 —and with this, we begin to

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give shape to how the sensory-tactile category of the storyworld is indelibly intertwined with any spiritual movement. Atmospherics is a term that articulates the kind of ecology a space has, materialisms that could be measured by, among other things, a thermometer, barometer, photometer, cardinal directions, age and design. Of course, in the sense that atmospherics can be composed of material particles, like molecules of fog or photons from candlelight, and to the extent that they are experienced sensorily, the diference between tactilities and atmospherics is not based on hard lines of classifcation but rather on the diferent zones of materiality operating in the novel. Here is an example of the atmospherics layer in this storyworld ontology: It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal candles were faring in the windows of the neighbouring ofces, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms the dingy cloud [came] drooping down, obscuring everything.14 With specifc diction, Dickens registers a level of atmosphere that is a combination of weather, lightness and darkness and, perhaps most crucially, what it feels like to be on this street. This phenomenological or afective aspect of atmosphere has been explored by Gernot Böhme and brought to bear on literary analysis by Kate Rigby, who describes ‘Böhme’s ecological aesthetics as a mood-altering ambience that is felt in the fesh’.15 Explaining the formative capacities that entities have in creating atmosphere (versus a model of setting that is static and immutable), Rigby writes that ‘people, things and places “tincture” the environment in which they are perceived. It is by means of this tincturing of the environment by others in whose presence we fnd ourselves as corporeally afective beings that atmospheres are generated’.16 In the passage above, the ‘cold’ is ‘bleak, biting’, descriptors that connote how the coldness feels to the eyes and on the skin; the ‘brown air’, being ‘palpable’ has a thickness experienced by the human body, and the ‘fog’ is opposite of static but moving into houses and obscuring views across the narrow street. Atmospherics slightly zoom the focus to the netted ecologies that tactile things are enmeshed in, ecologies that are also felds of traction and connection, each with their own amount of permeability that shapes and morphs the lines of attunement as the lines are made (or not made). In another example, this description of a storefront window—‘The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed’17—evokes not only the lamp and the light from the lamp, but the warmth and ‘ruddy’-making impressions that these generate. The description of Fezziwig’s establishment as the Christmas Eve dance begins also captures a kind of atmospheric ecology. ‘The foor was swept and watered’, Dickens writes, ‘the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the

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fre; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night’.18 Though tactile things are named, rather than the lists above where the tactile things themselves seem to pulse with life, here we have prose more specifcally activating a kind of feeling about these tactile things; the tactile ‘trimmed’ ‘lamps’ and ‘swept and watered’ ‘foor’ give rise to an atmosphere that is ‘snug, and warm, and dry, and bright’ so that these adjectives enact a zone of sensory deliciousness—beguiling, inviting, satisfying and nourishing. With the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge invisibly walks through the streets and sees at one house ‘the fickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fre, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness’.19 Again, tactile things achieve a kind of ecology; here, frelight, plate and food create a zone of safety, hominess and also nourishment. These zones of atmosphere are built by tactility and swing out into cloudy spaces that afect characters in that space (particularly the protagonist), the narrative cartography and the narrative movement through it. Finally the third category, which perhaps best encapsulates the transformational arc: spiritual dynamics. For this more codifed categorisation, spiritual dynamics compose that line of Scrooge’s character development from pitiful, isolating, belittling greed; through to surprise, shock, fear, sorrow; onto sympathy, empathy, remorse and desperation; to the landing point (or fnal emergence or burgeoning) of exquisite relief, thanksgiving, glee, shared cheer and loving kindness. Perhaps, at frst, this category could be what is traditionally considered the ‘theme’ or ‘themes’ of the novel. Throughout the story are instances of prose that capture fairly abstract spiritual dynamics, as when Dickens writes about the day ‘when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys’.20 Here we have slightly metaphorical language to connote an abstract hope for goodwill. These spiritual dynamics are like non-material realities or stages of narrative movement, as in how fear and greed can become remorse and humility. For another example of this more abstracted spiritual state is this line: ‘But what did Scrooge care! To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.’21 Even with the metaphor given (of edging around the crowds of others), this line is more of a descriptor of a spiritual characteristic of Scrooge, the trait of being willingly isolated. Far more often, though, pivotal spiritual moments—apogees in a scene that plotting and suspense build towards—are embedded more narratively than the abstract notions in the frst two examples. For instance, when the Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge to his lonely self as a little boy, Scrooge responds with remorse at the way he treated a boy earlier, admitting, ‘There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.’22 Any evidence of thought for another—let alone a kindly

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thought, sorrowful on behalf of someone else—has been absent until this moment. It is a pivotal moment totally embedded in the narrative movement preceding it; this moment and others like it could be understood as congregating, congealed and traversal, in that the spiritual dynamics are narrative-bound, gathering all the ‘input’ of previous scenes and bounding out from what has come before, to emerge into new zones of Scrooge’s becoming. Another moment like this is when Scrooge, being shown Tiny Tim’s illness by the Ghost of Christmas Present, asks about the young boy’s fate ‘with an interest he had never felt before’.23 Like the frst zing of remorse above, this interest in another is unprecedented, congregating previous narrative movements into a release of a new, unfelt-before spiritual state. A fnal example of these spiritual dynamics comes with the arrival of the frightening third spectre, the Ghost of Christmas Future, a faceless grim reaper. Scrooge responds to his presence with humility and self-awareness not seen thus far: ‘Ghost of the Future!’ he exclaimed, ‘I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?’24 There is evidence of a willingness to listen, learn and change here that is radically diferent from the Scrooge we meet on the frst page: the narrative moments and movements that have gathered momentum and energies, that have ‘tenderised’ Scrooge’s impermeability into porosity, have brought Scrooge into this new zone of openness. Thus far with these examples, the power that has earned Scrooge’s transformative zones of becoming has been narrative momentum, deep structural movements that gather discrete moments from Scrooge’s life and allow them to congregate into a traversal shift, where these moments burgeon from where they have come into a newness that is unprecedented. This is perhaps an exciting way to understand spiritual development, in that it is not an imposed order of spiritual maturation but an organic, fowing, gathering, narrative-made becoming. It is also, in this storyworld ontology, utterly soaked with the frst two categories, the materiality of tactilities and atmospherics. The narrative trajectory for Scrooge’s character gains traction through his material experience: returning to the sensorium of his childhood locale and beholding the hardship of Tiny Tim’s bodily illness twists the hardened (muscular, neurological) character lines of self-isolation and greed into softer, porous forms. Designating the diference between tactilities and atmospherics is a way of distinguishing how these diferent kinds of materials function in the narrative in slightly diferent ways. This taxonomy, though, could be in danger of establishing a kind of Neoplatonic ladder for this storyworld, a ladder like this: Tactilities—body Atmospherics—air Spiritual dynamics—heaven Akin to this structure is a mode of narrative art and narrative interpretation wherein the materiality of a story is subservient, or at least only in service, to

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the deeper or larger thematic layer of narrative, or its spiritual dynamics. In this kind of reading, the abundant, felt materiality of the Dickensian storyworld might not even be recognised with any signifcance, or if it is, it is as signposts to the philosophical lessons of learning to change from greed to goodwill. Likewise akin to this kind of Neoplatonic taxonomy are the familiar concepts of transcendence and immanence: in regard to how the former operates in narrative interpretation, the materials of body and air serve as stepping stones to the higher purposes of narrative thematics. Hermeneutically, this utilises the materiality of the storyworld (e.g. appearance, weather, architecture) so that it merely functions as signs or markers for the seemingly more valuable transcendent truths of meaning. In regard to immanence, here the spiritual dynamics of Scrooge’s growth are embodied by sweaty dancing and giving gifts, with a kind of grace glimmering through material forms; this mode of reading, though, can also prize the incorporeal, in that the incorporeality of the story (the ideas, themes, meanings and narrative interpretations) can be ‘proved’ via the fction’s materiality. But look at this passage when Scrooge, brought invisibly to a party by the Ghost of Christmas Present, hears a familiar piece of music played upon the harp by his niece: When this strain of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the sexton’s spade that buried Jacob Marley.25 Does either transcendence or even immanence sufciently capture the connectivity between tactilities, atmospherics and spiritual dynamics we see entwining here? Indeed, this connectivity is not just that tactilities, atmospherics and spiritual dynamics are present together, but that they create a story in which their entwinement is necessary for the story to work. At this moment, all the tactilities and atmospherics generate-with Scrooge’s spiritual movement to arrive at this ‘softening’.

Storyworld layers: interrelated, processual, generating-with Let us look at examples of how tactilities, atmospherics and spiritual dynamics are totally interrelated, which in this story is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the experience of temperature. After Scrooge’s nephew invites his uncle to his house on Christmas Eve, ‘his nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially.’26 The spiritual state of the clerk, Bob Cratchit, brims over into the cold room and warms his body; the dynamics are established so that

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these diferent categories inform each other. Next is the scene when the Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge to the place where he was a boy: The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still present to the old man’s sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odours foating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten! ‘Your lip is trembling’, said the Ghost. ‘And what is that upon your cheek?’27 This spiritual moment of tenderness happens thoroughly through sensory layers of tactilities and atmospherics: the Ghost’s touch awakens Scrooge’s ‘sense of feeling’, a psycho-biological motion that is intensifed with the ‘forgotten’ bio-memories of smell, arousing ‘thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares’ to the point that Scrooge actually has a tear exit his tear duct—an occurrence nearly inconceivable at the beginning of the story. Regarding this incredible interrelatedness between the biologic and the psycho-spiritual, Blackman writes, ‘[T]he mattering processes include processes which cannot simply be designated as somatic (involving the nervous system for example), unless we are willing to conceive of materiality as being psychically attuned in ways we little understand.’28 When Scrooge wakes on Christmas Day, after realising that he has a second chance, he experiences a rush of joy that is utterly entwined with his ‘blood’, ‘danc[ing]’, sounds, weather, vista and the spiritual and psychological involvement with what is ‘glorious’: ‘Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!’29 This apex of ‘glorious[ness]’ is not so much a singular moment as it is a responsive eruption to what has fowed into this moment, a specifc incorporeal energy that the narrative, utterly enfolded in materiality, has brought Scrooge to. Returning to Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, Rigby posits materiality’s force not only upon our multi-sensory and nervine experiences, but ‘how the physical qualities of things, spaces, times of day and times of year, as perceived through the sensate human body, impinge upon our sensibility, mood and state of mind’.30 Also interacting with Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, the ecological theologian Sigurd Bergmann argues that ‘[a]n atmosphere is not at all a difuse, unclear, non-determined, shallow or subjective entity, but it ofers us a notion that emphasizes in an exciting way the interconnectedness of the inner and the outer, the bodily and the spiritual, the surrounding and the inhabitation’.31 Bergmann here imports the materiality of atmosphere with this charge of interconnecting with the interior spaces of spiritual turns and emergences. If one follows Scrooge’s line of spiritual dynamics or character becoming, perhaps one reason such a seemingly fantastical character change is efectuated is because it is thoroughly enmeshed with, enfeshed by, the material elements

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of the story. Any psychological shift or spiritual movement happens through material form: the sound of children laughing and singing in Scrooge’s childhood brings tenderness; the fervour of moving bodies at his old workplaceturned-Christmas-dance brings remorse; the nasty place where his belongings are divided up after his death brings terror. So on the one hand—in a kind of theoretical experiment—if these spiritual dynamics were disembodied from the fctive material world, they would be merely a diagram of psychological states or maybe an abstract scafolding on how empathy is developed. As is clear, in this story, the incorporeal—abstract ideas, psychological states, narrative phases— happens by, with and in the material. Dickens the fction writer captures in story Bruno Latour’s claim, ‘Longing for the naked truth is like longing for the purely spiritual: they are both dangerously close to nothingness. I prefer truth warmly clothed, incarnated and strong.’32 On the other hand, what is also clear is that something at home in tactilities— such as hunger and laughter, muscular-nervous-circulatory processes—achieves fullest poignancy when informed by a potential narrative or spiritual meaning that is more than metaphorical. As in, hunger is emptiness, and laughter is thanksgiving. Why that specifc moment of hunger and laughter matters is where they sit in the story’s fow. In this case, the material elements apart from the moving arc of spiritual dynamics would be an itemised list of elements needed for a Victorian Christmas painting: evocative, but static and discrete. In this thought experiment, it is what these two—materialism and incorporeality—generate together that enfolds and unfolds the narrative and the transformation it achieves telling. This enfolding and unfolding dynamism ofers a more processual view of how the storyworld works and points to a kind of double-helix between its materiality and incorporeality, so that the relationship between these is not hierarchical, or even complementary, but generative. In her book The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes towards this kind of deep connectedness between the incorporeal and the material: I do not want to privilege ideality over materiality, but to think of them together, incapable of each being what it is without the other to direct and support it. Ideality frames, directs, and makes meaning from materiality; materiality carries ideality and is never free from the incorporeal forms that constitute it and orient it as material.33 In a kind of meta-reading, this exploration could be about how fction works, so that material and incorporeal elements impinge upon each other with mattering force—but with Dickens, this story is about that very impingement. The more Scrooge allows himself to biologically feel atmospherics of heat and cold; the more he enters into the bio-strata of food, music, dance and sweat; the more he allows himself to be impinged upon by the realities of others’ stories, hardships and experiences of hunger and cold, the more he can undergo the narrative arc

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of transformation. Grosz writes this about Baruch Spinoza’s ethics: ‘For Spinoza, ethics is a movement oriented by encounters with others an ethics not based on autonomy and self-containment, the quelling of external impingements The encounters a body undergoes elaborate, develop, transform the powers of the nature of the bodies and thought to act and be acted upon.’34 In this light, such connectivity between these narrative elements does more than successfully narrativise a thematic line, with the material and spiritual serving as metaphoric refections of each other. Beyond metaphoric, the relationship between the material and spiritual elements is, as posited above, generative. Material and incorporeal elements together create the storyworld and the way that the characters can move through it with narrative possibilities. Even though Grosz’s work and the work on new materialism by Bennett carry signifcant diferences, we can put them in dialogue in Scrooge’s territory of becoming. Grosz writes, ‘The body is not a thing any more than the mind is a thing; the nature of each is continually modifed by the creative encounters that bodies undergo with other bodies and that ideas undergo with other ideas.’35 In Vibrant Matter, Bennett writes, ‘In lieu of an environment that surrounds human culture, picture an ontological feld without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral. All forces and fows (materialities) are or can become lively, efective, and signaling.’36 What is at stake in both of these positions—and crucial, too, to Böhme’s concept of atmosphere—is an ethics of encounter, of willing impinge-ability, prizing engagement that shares agency between human, non-human, more-than-human and incorporeality, not only for the ethical valence of mutual value (valuing the other), but through recognising that these engagements generate a reality—replete, responsive and modifying— that comes into being only through this interdependence. Again charging the materiality of atmosphere with its spiritually formative capacities, Bergmann writes, ‘Space and place are not mere containers for the encounter but essential and sometimes even crucial elements of it.’37 Finally, returning to Grosz, we can see again how this entwinement creates a helix of potentiality: ‘[I]deality opens materiality up not just as the collectivity or totality of things but as a cohesive, meaningful world, a universe with a horizon of future possibilities for being otherwise.’38 I place emphasis on the last part of this passage, how ‘being otherwise’ can happen through the generative processes between materiality and incorporeality.

Incarnation and a living hermeneutics of involvement This storyworld supplies ample confguration of the relationship between the material and incorporeal, such that any dualistic binary becomes submerged within responsive, generative connectivity. The kind of connectivity in this narrative storyworld is sticky, networked and mattering. A set of words can be considered here: Uncarnate—Carnate

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Uncarnate, not unlike the word incorporeal, means being without form or physicality, and carnate means having fesh. After this exploration into the becoming force between incorporeality and materiality, this is a strikingly dissatisfying pair. But what if we add this term? Uncarnate—Incarnate—Carnate If incarnate means something without physicality becoming fesh, what emerges is a processual relationship between uncarnate and carnate. Blackman also brings a processual lens to this im-material helix: ‘This is a processual approach to both the materiality and immateriality of the body, something that is perhaps lost if we frame afect as a “processually oriented materialism.”’39 This processual connectivity is what fction’s double-helix of materialism and incorporeality entails, and the emphasis on process brings us to value the mid- or in-process: incarnation as it is happening. Could we call it an incarnational force that this storyworld participates in, the incarnational force that is the ‘interplay and accompaniment’ between the incorporeal and the material?40 At the story’s core, Scrooge becomes ‘otherwise’41 because the transformation was, before actual, possible—a possibility arising through mid-process incarnate ontology. About the Incarnation in Christian theology, particularly as understood through the Gospel of John, Catherine Keller’s work in Intercarnations explores how incarnation overfows beyond the singular event of the Second Person of the Trinity becoming enfeshed, and radically informs the way we understand our cosmos: ‘It is always already included in all things, as the condition of their possibility and the mattering of their life. It comes exemplifying the life of the universe: the cosmic exemplar, not the sovereign exception.’42 Because the movement of mattering is mid-process during incarnation, allowing forms to be continually shaping, impinged and afected zones of becoming, is there an argument that an incarnational ontology provides the possibility for transformation? To this, an incarnational ontology means that the transformative value of second chances, graced encounters and participating in once-inconceivable storylines are actually possible: it is not only that they do happen, but that they can. In this storyworld, the generative connection between the biological cells of Scrooge’s body and the intangible hope for reparative mercy fnds recourse in the incarnate process of becoming: matter is not fxed, nor the wiles and wounds of the heart. Within the fux of incarnation, transformation is at hand. Considering what fction can bring to this conversation on materialism, religion and ecology, I hazard that the very way this storyworld works gives us insight into how our own world works. It is not just that religious frameworks for moral courage or mature loving kindness can be invested or should be invested in the things of this tactile world, but that these incorporeal ideas are generated by and with these things. This claim of semblance, though, between storyworld and real life can perhaps enter into a diferent critical mode of literary analysis and shift from

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representational to non-representational or beyond-representational, into queries of how the hermeneutic circle can become living, afective, resonant and shaping. Post-critique work by literary theorists such as Rita Felski, Hanna Meretoja, Marielle Macé and Anna Gibbs have explored, respectively, the formative attachments between readers and texts, particularly through afective hermeneutics, or the afect that words on the page have on readers;43 how the reader’s narrative imagination is shaped by the stories we read;44 how brushing up against fctional counterparts opens readers to the possibilities of their own ‘stylistics of existence’;45 and the attunement and resonance that writing creates between writer and reader.46 These prisms through which to understand hermeneutical space as afective lay critical groundwork to bridge this storyworld ontology with readers’ interactions with it, so that we can unpack the ways in which the material zones of items and atmosphere in this Dickensian yuletide tale impinge upon the reader and the reader’s experience with the same thingpower and narrative-shaping, character-making spatiality that they enact in the storyworld. With this, we can pause to consider the perhaps obvious implications of inspecting the materiality of a fctional storyworld. Could there be a case made that it does not exist? Acknowledging the materiality of the reader’s senses and brain decoding material marks on a page, the materiality inspected so far—the cold and fog and fesh, the gruel, goose and sweat—exists most apparently in the imagination. Is there anything to be said here? Dickens himself might ofer a response. In the tender scene when the Ghost of Christmas Past brings Scrooge to look at himself, a lonely boy left alone in the schoolroom, Scrooge feels sorrow for his old self, which arouses remorse and empathy for the young boy he had ignored earlier. Also slipped into this moment is something like an apologetics for fction. As Scrooge looks at his previous self, he recalls that visitors did show up for him: ‘“Why, it’s Ali Baba!” Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. “It’s dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know! One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the frst time, just like that.”’47 With references to The Arabian Nights and also Robinson Crusoe, we are presented with a case for the realness of fctional characters, an afrmation that incorporeal things have presence and, as such, something incorporeal like fction can be a companion for a human in need, at a physical as well as emotional level, as this scene by Dickens implies. Rigby argues, In this way, the space of literature too can constitute an atmospheric place For the ideas elicited by words can just as readily afect our physical condition as can the atmosphere generated by the physical environment afect our frame of mind [T]he literary reception of in textu atmospheres activates the same, or overlapping, neural pathways as would be in play in their experience in situ, eliciting an actual afective response to a virtual space of feeling.48

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The connectivity that fction generates, or reveals as necessary for narrative to work, also happens right along the porous and creative boundary of the fctional storyworld, between the territory of book and the human imagination, the also porous cells of the brain and the processual neural activity of bridge-building and storage. Dwelling on this understanding of the hermeneutic circle, we behold a version of a relationship between the incorporeal and material where the boundaries of their territories are slippery; each is open to the other, inviting and responsive. In Chaos, Territory, Art, Grosz explores the event of art and art-making, underpinning how the hermeneutic circle is certainly bodily: the event of sensation that art creates materialises the art-encounter so that a representational experience of reading-interpretation is rather a bodily experience, ‘on the body’s own internal forces, on cells, organs, the nervous system’.49 When Grosz writes, ‘[I]t is only art that draws the body into sensations never experienced before, perhaps not capable of being experience in any other way, the sunfower-sensations that only Van Gogh’s work conjures, the “appleyness of the apple” in Cézanne, the “Rembrandt-universe” of afects’,50 perhaps we can add to this list the art of the Dickensian storyworld and the vivid, enchanting narrative webs and arcs we are immersed in. The way in which, indeed, Scrooge beholds and encounters his old friends, Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe, we behold and encounter Scrooge. Scrooge’s transformation moves from the crushing gravity of selfshness to the transversal ability to shift outwards, towards others: this move is tactile and spiritual—but it is also a shift in power dynamics, from being entrapped within the colossal web of adherence to money-making and money-keeping structures to exiting that entrapment, and letting those structures fall in the face of incarnate loving kindness. Keller’s statement about incarnation gives insight to Scrooge’s disavowing the structures of power: ‘In its own historical context, the enfeshment of the one God in a particular body enacted a radical provocation, fnally intolerable to the sovereign powers.’51 The enfeshed transformation of a character has consequences in power and agency, and Bennett’s statement about vital materialism likewise gives insight to Scrooge’s transformation that realises a disinterested self: ‘[New materialists] believe that encounters with lively matter can chase in my fantasies of human mastery, highlight the common materiality of all that is, expose a wider distribution of agency, and reshape the self and its interests.’52 The storyworld’s double-helix of corporeal and incorporeal incarnates another kind of web than that of ‘sovereign powers’—a web of life-giving connections, which pulses with mutual cherishing, even multi-vectored cherishing, to see the ‘glorious’ in both morning light and in our neighbours. An incarnational worldview is certainly not new, but a lens that emphasises its afective and processual attributes gives special relief to the relationality-in-making that incarnation means. The paths of traversal becomings—our (potentially) religious-informed and (hopefully) actionable ethics recognising the worth of one another; treasured moral values of care and kindness; and even longed-for spiritual burgeonings—happen through incarnational lines, shapes, textures,

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biological cells and zinging atoms. As such, to return to the opening question, can our religious imagination be informed more radically by this afective and processual relationality of the incarnate force? What happens when traditional narratives of redemption are viewed through an afective lens that allows tactility and atmosphere to be a generating strand in the narrative, as much as any moral or spiritual value? Keller speaks to the way, theologically and culturally, we inhibit the incarnation from fully charging us with its formative power: Theologically, the incarnation itself gets sabotaged; it cannot quite deliver on its promise. Not at any rate on behalf of the God who ‘so loved the world,’ the God of the new creation, the new heaven (atmosphere, sky) and earth. Yet what can salvation possibly mean for Christian theology apart from the radical renewal—of the earth?53 In her introduction to Staying with the Trouble, Donna Hathaway wonders if our ability to register our ontological interconnectedness might deepen our own capacities to respond, so that responsivity yields ‘response-ability’.54 Rigby likewise posits our interconnected materiality as impetus to listen and respond: ‘Recovering a sense of our own corporeality, we discover also that we are ineluctably, for better or for worse, ecological selves, existing in environments and with others, by whom, like it or not, our psycho-physical state of being is infected.’55 Connected to this, Bennett argues that the shift from environmentalism to vital materialism shifts our responses through a radical reshaping of our worldview and, for me, the framework of incarnation carries out similarly signifcant shifts in our religious capacities for re-imaging how we are an interrelated part of the cosmos, allowing us to realise our capacities for transformation in more responsive ways. As Keller posits, ‘Such responsiveness might make us more ethically afective and efective, capable of stronger coalitional conversations, collective actualizations, terrestrial communions. If so, we have to do not with the imposition of beliefs but with the superposition of possibilities.’56 Incarnation as the mid-processing of our relationality, the generating-with connectivity between the material and the incorporeal, makes possible the chance for inconceivable transformations. With a deepened embrace of this chance, not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge’s journey from rigid isolation into festive exchange, participating in our incarnate cosmos can perhaps help us participate in our own arcs of transformation, so that we can become the responses so desperately needed at this juncture of existence.

Notes 1 David Herman, ‘Storyworld’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2010). 2 Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

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3 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (London: Walker Books, 2006), 23. 4 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 62. 5 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 6. 6 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi. 7 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 57. 8 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 74–5. 9 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 80. 10 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 8–9. 11 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Introduction to The Afect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 11. 12 Lisa Blackman, Immaterial Bodies: Afect, Embodiment, Mediation (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 72. 13 Blackman, Immaterial Bodies, 72. 14 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 9–10. 15 Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 54. 16 Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism, 62–63. 17 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 19. 18 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 58. 19 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 97–98. 20 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 13. 21 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 9. 22 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 54. 23 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 93. 24 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 117. 25 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 107. 26 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 14. 27 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 48. 28 Blackman, Immaterial Bodies, 88. 29 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 149 30 Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism, 54. 31 Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Atmospheres of Synergy: Towards an Eco-Theological Aesth/ Ethics of Space’, Ecotheology 11, no. 3 (2006): 336. 32 Bruno Latour, ‘Clothing the Naked Truth’, in Dismantling Truth: Reality in the PostModern World, eds. Hilary Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 115. 33 Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 12. 34 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 56–57. 35 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 67. 36 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 116–117. 37 Bergmann, ‘Atmospheres of Synergy’, 340. 38 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 13. 39 Blackman, Immaterial Bodies, 24. 40 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 251. 41 Grosz, The Incorporeal, 13. 42 Catherine Keller, Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 4. 43 See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 151–185. 44 See Hanna Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 45 See Marielle Macé, ‘Ways of Reading, Modes of Being’, New Literary History 44, no. 2 (2013): 217.

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46 See Anna Gibbs, ‘Writing as Method: Attunement, Resonance and Rhythm’, in Afective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Afect, eds. Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 47 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 50. 48 Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism, 65. 49 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 72–73. 50 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 73. 51 Keller, Intercarnations, 4. 52 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 122. 53 Keller, Intercarnations, 173. 54 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. 55 Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism, 63. 56 Keller, Intercarnations, 82. Emphasis added.

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bergmann, Sigurd. ‘Atmospheres of Synergy: Towards an Eco-Theological Aesth/Ethics of Space’ Ecotheology 11, no.3 (2006): 326–356. Blackman, Lisa. Immaterial Bodies: Afect, Embodiment, Mediation. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012. Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Walker Books, 2006. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Gibbs, Anna. ‘Writing as Method: Attunement, Resonance and Rhythm’ Afective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Afect. Edited by Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. Introduction to The Afect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. ———. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hermann, David. ‘Storyworld’ Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Routledge, 2010. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Keller, Catherine. Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Latour, Bruno. ‘Clothing the Naked Truth’ In Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Post-Modern World, edited by Hilary Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi, 101–128. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989. Macé, Marielle. ‘Ways of Reading, Modes of Being’ New Literary History 44, no.2 (2013): 213–229. Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Rigby, Kate. Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Accessed July 12, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040 /9781474290623.ch-002.

AFTERWORD Catherine Keller

What word can come after all these words of warning and of wonder? Besides a plain yes? This volume’s heterogeneous essays on religion and the new materialism, with their disturbingly and beautifully accurate accounts of our planetary situation, belong to the living present. That is the present in which there is still the chance to make the needed mega-systemic changes: the chance to reduce fossil fuel emissions fast and vastly enough to hold global warming to the 1.5°C limit in this century; the chance to transform rather than wreck civilisation and its habitat; the chance that is articulated in a ‘now’ in which ‘we’ are still on track for the hell of twice that or worse. Oh, how the facts of our present burn towards the overheated ‘after’. We repeat them almost liturgically, ritually, in the hope of motivating a rush of coolness, in the hope that greater and younger proportions of the population will make climate activism ever more—cool. Cool and insistent enough to pressure the economic and political powers seriously and really to shift. The very cool essays of this anthology do not add up to a manual for activists. They perform another kind of work, a labour that cannot be dismissed as merely academic or theoretical. The depth of their thinking serves not only to explicate the present problem from a great diversity of disciplinary perspectives upon religion(s). It works within and beyond academic disciplines to expose both hidden and open religious justifcations for ecosocial degradation. These pretexts routinely posture as transcendence of the materiality of the world, whether by otherworldly aspiration or spiritual individualism. Religions can deny climate change or treat it as superfcial distraction. They may focus their faith on an immaterial heaven, or teach such interiority as to render earth irrelevant. But this book’s authors do not merely analyse and criticise. With disarming creativity, this transdisciplinary thinking works also to mobilise the dissident energies of religious thought and practice, the earth-tuned energies that demand of earthlings responsibility for our material practices. DOI: 10.4324/9781003320722-13

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Still, so many thinkers wonder, why does such work on and in religion matter? Why keep wandering among the old spirits of this haunted house of civilisation? Again (and as the editors note) a certain factuality should make clear the diference to our material condition that religion makes—whether for good or ill: at least 84% of the population of the planet register as religiously afliated (other studies put it over 90%). If it were just half that, it would be an immense block of causal infuence! So one might be pardoned for presuming that atheists and agnostics with ethico-ecological commitments would for mere purposes of pragmatic efectuality want as much solidarity as possible with religious environmentalists. As the political philosopher and confessedly nonreligious William Connolly, so key to the new materialism, fnds ever fresh ways of insisting, the sort of planetary solidarity that can make the needed diference amidst the crises of democracy and of ecology will depend upon translating antagonism into agonism, not just between religions but between religion and secularism. This book encourages such solidarities not through mere elaboration of the disturbing facts but through the attractive specifcities and vivid narratives its essays materialise across a multiplicity of traditions. Some of these traditions would not readily count as ‘religions’: as in the Cambodian practices of spiritpossession that Mary Keller examines, or the secularised vitalism of oil that Terra Rowe reveals, or the ecologies of queerness in LeVasseur, Pulé and Merlini; or of terminal illness narrated by Yianna Liatsos. Yet they bring a disclosive luminosity to lively intensities discerned intimately and planetarily, to relations manifest in the vulnerable interstices of our bodily co-existence. And there the exposure of divergent sacralities in play brings the variational vibrancy of matter into revelatory focus. Other narratives, as in the ‘Christian animism’ proposed by Mark Wallace, or Jessica Brown’s literary transmutation of the incarnation, push enliveningly within and yet against the grain of the particular religion in play. All of this anthology’s essays can be said to lift a constitutive relationality into view, a material interdependence all too efectively concealed in our present planetary order of countable and commodifable, externally related subjects and objects. Within that nexus of internal relations, each of them investigates the mattering aliveness of what Jane Bennett so infuentially called ‘vibrant matter’. The pairing of interdependence and liveliness, not accidentally, echoes, as Ivo Frankenreiter demonstrates and Carol Wayne White deploys, the century-old process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead, key to Deleuze and Connolly. In this attention to the interrelated becomings of the ever-materialising world, time and space cease to lay back as mere parameters of extension. ‘Timespacemattering’ (Karen Barad) brings even the quantum elements into relation to the worlds we build of our uncertain patterns of embodiment—but brings these material relations into the bottomless interplay of mattering with valuing, with afectively resonating across layers, kinds and indeterminacies of existence. As Peter Scott, Kate Rigby and Sigurd Bergmann have assembled the authors of this volume, it now adds indelibly to the transdisciplinary freshness of the new

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materialism as it comes into play with each author’s own project in the study of religion. So the mattering at hand can be minded in its most subtle, most supple conveyances of meaning, crisis and purposefulness. And it can be tested for its fdelity to the earthly abundance and fragility of all that gets materialised, incarnate, intercarnate, as human. The conversation developed in and as this book works not just to justify new eco-solidarities or to criticise the systemic obstacles thereto. It performs, it materialises, a textual relationalism as its religio-ecology—religio of course coming etymologically either from relegere, to read again, or religare, to bind together. Of course, the very word ‘materialism’ is not incapable of backfring. As the new materialism becomes more familiar, its novum will not remain so novel. Its method will receive less explication, less distinction from the varieties of ‘old’ materialism—classical Newtonianism in its commonsense continuity, capitalism in its earth-consuming normalcy and Marxism in its anti-capitalist marginality. Ever and again the problem will arise of reduction to ‘mere matter’. And it won’t be quite enough to retort—’matter is not a matter of “mere”! It is the very means of meaning!’ That may be true. And yet the overloading of ‘materialism’ with the diverse older versions will continue to threaten a reduction to—something merely knowable, available to the senses; something that exposes all depth, all mystery, as mere mystifcation. Even too presumptive a dependence on the term ‘matter’ might over-simplify and damage matter’s transcorporeal, agential networks. For instance, take Einstein’s E = mc2. At this fundamental level, it remains crucial to distinguish between matter and energy. It will not do just to equate energy with matter— that would erase the mind-blowingly speedy, subtle microcosms and macrocosms that translate back and forth between energy and matter. Quite a diferent speed than that which Whitney Bauman displays in the fossil-fuelled pace of planetary destruction! The slowing down he advocates in his ‘critical planetary romanticism’ may retune the body in such a way as to distinguish the multiplicity of speeds vis à vis their planetary impact. And this will work to prevent the reductive version of materialism that would simply equate every energy at any speed with matter. These essays with their religio work against such reductionism systematically, and all the more efectively because quite indirectly, less through critique of the old materialism than demonstration of the new. There is, for example, no gesture of dismissal of the Marxist yearning for radical transformation, for a revolution that corrects the horrifc inequity of material well-being among humans. And of course since religion, particularly in its imperial Christian forms, was key to promising spiritual redemption to those who patiently and without protest accept their material suferings in the here and now, it bears responsibility for justifying that inequity. So such unorthodox proposals as Mark Wallace’s Christian animism work against the exceptionalisms—US, white, straight, human—that so debased matter, that degraded all those who could be identifed as more body than mind, more matter than spirit. The exceptionalisms empower those ‘taken out’, ex-cipere, out of the bonds of a shared world, into the fction of

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an independence wrought of the disenchantment and denial of our micro- and macro-entanglements and funded by the enforced dependencies of those other bodies.1 And such denialist fction runs on its own periodic enchantments. This is what Terra Rowe makes clear in relation to the over-determining matter of oil as it permeates the whole spectrum of our precarious relations: there is an enchantment that drove the petroleum business from the start. So the reductive ‘old’ materialist view cannot be simplistically juxtaposed to the new, as that of a disenchanted matter deadened by modernity to be answered by a reanimation. I am grateful for this correction of a tendency in my own thinking. The restoration of wonder in matter is not the key to healing the extractive pragmatics doing in our planet. Wonder too can be misapplied. But this analysis is convincing because it comes not from a secularising dismissal of the residues of religion. It emerges from within a self-critically theological perspective. Yet the point is far from mere demythologising of the stories of religion and its material universe. When I claim that religious scholarship on our environmental crisis is needed for its motivational power, it is because at a certain level the relegere recycles some of religion’s own attractive force. But this scholarly composting then involves simultaneously detoxing the reductive forms of materialism and its supplementary enchantments, religious and secular. How does motivational energy re-emerge from such internal critique? I think Carol Wayne White elegantly captures this possibility as ‘the poetics of nature’. It discloses ‘an implicit normative stance in positing humans as an integral aspect of nature made aware of its embedded relationality. As relational, material organisms, humans are evolutionarily equipped to ask “why” our activities matter within the universe’. We human critters are therefore able to take responsibility for the efects of our activities in relation to endlessly other material processes. In our entangled becomings we materialise together, responsibly and often not. The new materialism in these eco-religious deployments can motivate a greater responsiveness. While countering with discernment the old materialisms along with the old immaterialisms, this fresh discourse will not rely on being ‘new’. What after all is more capitalist in its allure than ‘new new new’? What sells better than the ‘new’ model? And how quickly does the new ‘new’ get old? And nonetheless in all of the discourses pulsing together in this attractive assemblage the new does matter. Like Whitehead’s ‘eros of the universe’, it lures, it invites, it calls, it makes possible what seems barely imaginable: such as the swift and planetary shift of our ancient species into a sustainably, collectively, perhaps even beautifully shared future. Catherine Keller

Note 1 Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018

INDEX

Actor-Network-Theory 4, 7, 67 aesthetic nervousness 121, 123 afective hermeneutics 195, 197, 198 agency 5, 13, 20, 22, 35, 49, 67, 69–72, 78, 79, 85, 86, 89, 99, 101, 102, 104–106, 108, 111–112n1, 134, 144, 151, 154, 156, 159, 163n2, 168, 176, 178, 195, 198 agential realism 4, 35 agonism 203 Alaimo, Stacy 4 animacy 89, 168–171, 173, 177, 178 animism 7, 15, 22, 85–94, 96nn13, 30, 40, 97n41, 99, 106, 109, 168, 203, 204 anthropocene 8, 21, 29, 48, 49, 59, 116–118, 121, 133, 134, 144, 145, 146n1 anthropocentrism/anthroparchy 4, 15, 18, 19, 68, 69, 90, 160, 165n40 architecture 37–39, 41–43, 44n46, 54, 192 atmosphere/atmospherics 9, 23, 31, 35, 48, 49, 55, 94, 110, 133, 182n54, 185, 186, 189–195, 197, 199 autothanatography 8, 128 Barad, Karen 4, 113n19, 180n11, 203 Bennett, Jane 4, 69, 90–92, 96n40, 97n41, 169, 179, 186, 187, 195, 198, 199, 203 Bentancor, Orlando 170, 176 Bergmann, Sigurd 134, 193, 195 biosemiotics 4

Blackman, Lisa 188, 193, 196 Böhme, Gernot 189, 193, 195 Bolivian “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth” 93 Braidotti, Rosi 4 Cambodia 100–106, 203 Christian animism 7, 88, 90, 96n30, 203, 204 chronological time 17, 18 climate change 3, 8, 13, 49, 52, 55, 57, 58, 60, 66, 67, 70, 77, 100–102, 109–111, 113n47, 116, 117, 151, 154–156, 159, 169, 175 climate denialism 8, 174, 175, 179, 181n49 colonisation 13, 14, 16–18, 170 comparative study of spirit possession 101, 102 Coole, Diana 4, 11n17 Cooper, Anna Julia 134, 143, 144 cosmotechnics 49 Covid pandemic 19, 20 creation 1, 16, 66, 68, 77, 79, 84, 168, 172, 173, 175, 199 critical planetary romanticism 21, 204 critical theories 23 Cūl R ūp 102 decolonial 21, 109 Dillard, Annie 134, 140, 141, 144

208 Index

disenchantment 8, 52, 168–170, 176–180, 205 distributed agency 78, 79 dying 116, 118, 121, 123, 124, 126–129 earth beings (earth oriented beings) 51, 62 earth bible 2 earthlings 2, 9, 13, 202 ecocriticism 2, 3, 5 ecological masculinities 153, 157 ecological responsibility (ecological care) 41 economic land concession 102, 104 ecophilosophy 5 electricity 30, 33, 34, 36, 39, 42, 45n57, 172 electron fow 6, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 41–43 enchantment 8, 9, 168–173, 176–180, 205 encounter, ethics of encounter 35, 41, 83, 84, 102, 107, 112n6, 137, 158, 195, 196, 198 energy 8, 14, 17, 22, 23, 32–34, 36, 53, 100, 101, 106, 108, 110, 151, 162, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 193, 204, 205 entangled becomings 205 environmental history 2, 3, 5 environmental humanities 2, 3, 6, 116, 117, 156 exceptionalisms 204 extinction 8, 18, 60, 118, 128, 133, 156 extraction 8, 17, 55, 57, 61, 85, 89, 92, 101, 153, 156, 169–171, 174–178 facing Gaia 67, 69, 70, 72, 79, 80 Feenberg, Andrew 49, 52 Felski, Rita 197 feminist theory 156, 163n6 fre, human use of 53, 56, 61, 62 gender 23, 95, 105, 143, 152, 153, 156–158, 180 Gibbs, Anna 197 globalisation 13, 14, 19, 20, 23, 49 global warming 174, 202 Gospel of Luke 24:13-31 84 Gospel of Mark 8:22-26 87 Great acceleration 14, 133 Grosz, Elizabeth 50, 53, 54, 194, 195, 198 Happy the Elephant 95n7 Haraway, Donna 4, 35, 109 Harman, Graham 4 harmonialism 171–173 Helms, Mary 57

Herman, David 186 Hofmeyer, Jesper 4 Hogan, Linda 7, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94 hope 112, 123, 125, 129, 163, 190, 196 human agency 67, 72, 99, 101, 102, 105, 134, 144, 176 humanism 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 128, 129 humans 1, 5, 8, 13, 15, 17–23, 38, 39, 41, 52, 66, 68, 72, 73, 78, 79, 84, 89, 90, 102, 105, 106, 108–111, 112n1, 127, 128, 134–140, 143–146, 151–157, 163, 163n2, 164n40, 170, 172, 188, 205 imago dei 15 immaterialisms 205 incommensurability 126 indigenous theory 100, 102, 112n1 In medias res 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 127, 129 In mediis rebus 119, 125–128 instrumental agency 102, 104, 105, 110–112, 113n28 integral ecology 66–68 intercarnate 204 intrinsic values 66–69, 75, 77, 78, 93 James, Erin 186 Josephson-Storm, Jason 178, 179 Keller, Catherine 9, 72, 196, 198, 199 Kimmerer, Robin Wall 94, 137, 138 Latour, Bruno 4, 7, 9, 54, 67, 70, 179, 188, 194 Laudato Si’ 7, 66–69, 72, 73, 75, 77–79, 156, 158 left/right cerebral hemispheres 96n31 life 1, 2, 7, 13, 14, 16–20, 23, 29–34, 38, 42, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 68–70, 74, 75, 78, 83–85, 87–89, 91–93, 95, 104, 110, 118–129, 133–137, 139–146, 154, 158–162, 163n2, 170, 171, 173–176, 178, 185, 188, 190–192, 196 living system 93, 153 Lubbock, Tom 123–129 Macé, Marielle 197 material(-ity) 3–7, 9, 26n32, 29–32, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 44n42, 49, 52–57, 60, 66, 67, 69–72, 75–79, 86, 90–92, 99, 101, 104, 105, 111, 112n1, 117–119, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142–146, 151–156, 158, 159, 161–163, 164n40, 165n42,

Index

168–172, 178, 180, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191–199, 202–205 materialism 3, 4, 6–9, 44n42, 69, 73, 79, 91, 99–102, 105, 107, 109, 111, 112n1, 116–118, 143, 151–153, 158, 161, 162, 169, 171, 185, 186, 189, 194, 196, 198, 199, 204, 205 materialism, new 4, 7, 22, 69, 70, 90, 91, 99, 105, 109, 112n1, 168–170, 176, 178, 185, 195, 198, 202–205 matter 3, 4, 7, 8, 29–32, 34, 36, 42, 49, 50, 52–54, 56–58, 66, 67, 69–74, 76–78, 88, 90–92, 100–102, 104, 107–111, 119, 135, 144, 153, 158, 163, 168–173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 186, 187, 196, 198, 203–205 Meretoja, Hanna 197 metabolism 42 microbes 31–33, 36–41, 43, 45n57 microbial fuel cell 36, 45nn51, 56, 57 middle voice 127–129 modern technology 48–50, 52, 53 modern Western 5, 13–16, 18, 21, 48, 51, 58, 59, 120 Mother Earth 7, 92–95 narrative 8, 9, 24, 95n1, 104, 108, 111, 116, 117, 119–122, 124–126, 128, 130n52, 134, 136, 140, 144, 161, 169, 178, 185, 187, 190–192, 194, 195, 197, 198 narrative imagination 197 nature, concept of 1, 73 nature 1, 3–6, 8, 9, 11n16, 13–19, 21–23, 29–31, 33, 34, 39, 41, 45nn51, 55, 49, 51–53, 59, 66, 70, 71, 73, 77, 83, 86, 90–92, 99, 106, 108, 134–141, 143–145, 147n22, 152–158, 160–162, 165n44, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 195, 205 neak ta 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112 nonhuman personhood 9, 83 object-oriented ontology 4 Oliver, Mary 134, 139, 140, 144 other-than-human 4 Pachamama 92–94 pan-spiritism 86 persistent organic pollutants 48, 55, 57, 60 petroleum 146, 171, 173, 181n39, 205 planetary 6, 7, 14, 17–19, 21–24, 48–52, 55, 59, 60, 62, 101, 117, 119, 133, 145, 202–205 planetary solidarity 203 poetics of nature 8, 134, 137–140, 143–145, 205

209

pollution 4, 58, 174, 178 Pope Francis 66, 67, 77 posthumanism 4, 112n1 process philosophy 73, 203 re-enchantment 8, 169, 175, 179 relationality 8, 9, 23, 85, 116, 118, 119, 126–129, 137, 138, 143–146, 152, 185, 198, 199, 203, 205 religio-ecology 204 religion: Buddhism 3, 16, 102, 104, 106; Christianity 3, 5, 10n13, 17, 19, 22, 68, 88–90, 108, 165n40, 170; Hinduism 3, 16; Islam 15, 19, 110, 165n40; Judaism 158, 165n40; religious naturalism 7, 8, 32, 134–137 Rigby, Kate 26, 129, 134, 144, 189, 193, 197, 199 Riggs, Nina 121–123, 125–129 ritual 6, 56–58, 94, 112n5, 155, 156 ritual process 56 Rose, Deborah Bird 2, 128, 130 sacralities 203 sacred ecomaterialism 29, 30, 32, 35, 37 scale 29, 30, 32, 34, 41, 42, 48, 50, 52, 57, 59, 62, 79, 100, 101, 111, 117–119, 127, 129, 135, 141, 151, 161 Simondon, Gilbert 49 Spinoza 90, 97n46, 195 spirit of climate change 101, 102 spirit possession 8, 99–105, 107, 109–111 spirits 18, 50, 56, 59, 61, 85, 86, 99–112, 168, 203 spiritual development 191 spiritual transformation 185 storyworld 9, 119, 128, 185–189, 191, 192, 194–198 sympoiesis 4, 26n32, 35 tactility/tactilities 9, 186–194, 199 technics 7, 48–53, 55–60 temporality 109, 116, 119, 120, 126, 127 terminal relationality 8, 126, 127, 129 thing-power 187 time 2, 4, 6–8, 13–24, 25nn17, 18, 30, 32, 33, 41, 48, 50, 52, 55, 59, 61, 62, 73, 75, 78, 86, 87, 89, 94, 101–104, 109, 116, 117, 119–122, 126–129, 134, 135, 140, 141, 144, 146, 151, 154, 155, 158–163, 172–175, 197, 203 transcorporeal 204 trans-corporeality 4 transdisciplinary thinking 9, 202 Turner, Victor 56

210

Index

Tylor, Edward B. 85–87, 89, 92 uncertain technology 31, 37, 38 vitalism 8, 9, 91, 96n40, 170, 171, 173–176, 179, 181n49, 203 vitalist ontology 90, 91 vital materialism 4, 69, 91, 198, 199 waste 7, 30, 31, 36–38, 43, 44n27, 45n56, 55, 57, 60, 146

western modernity 70, 73, 77 Whanganui River 93 White, Lynn jnr. 5, 154, 168 Whitehead, Alfred N. 7, 67, 72–79, 80nn41, 43, 46, 143–145, 203, 205 Whitman, Walt 134, 142–144 wolfdog 84, 95n2 wonder 22, 85, 86, 90, 94, 138, 140, 145, 147n22, 168, 169, 171, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180, 202, 203, 205 Zoë 7, 37–39, 42, 43