Thinking the Earth Provisionally

THE PROGRESSIVE IMAGINARY addresses the earth technologically, demanding it provide answers to the questions “what is it?” and “what can be made of it?” Such questions have become second nature to most of us, yet they clearly indicate a change of emphasis and orientation from the questions posed by the earlier European imaginary of theological providence. Here the questions were “how is this earth, created by God, intended to provide for humanity?” and “how can we interpret the earth’s activities in terms of God’s caring providence?” Today the questions we need to ask are quite different again, namely, “how might we address the earth if not theologically or technologically?” and “does the earth care?” These questions categorically reject the idea that the earth is merely a means to fulfill an overarching eschatology or anthropocentric project and do not expect an answer in terms of a single definitive way of enframing the earth. Rather, these questions simply assume that the earth is the indeterminately creative and inescapable place of our abiding, that it is the ecological context of our entire existence as human beings, and that this is no less true for innumerable other interdependent beings.

The providential imaginary, of course, had no problem with describing the natural world as purposeful. It was mistaken in addressing the earth as a whole as having a singular purpose and in thinking that this purpose was to serve humanity, but nonetheless the world was purposeful in the very literal sense of being “full of purposes.” Wherever the theologically informed naturalist looked, she saw signs of providence in the ways in which everything seemed so very well suited to perform its God-given purposes. Some, such as John Ray (1627–1705), early naturalist, dissenter, and member of the Royal Society, were willing to recognize that the creator’s purposes and care extended to more than just human beings:

It is the great design of Providence to maintain and continue every Species, I shall take notice of the great Care and abundant Provision that is made for the securing of this end. (Ray 1691, 86)

Ray’s The Wisdom of God as Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) did indeed set out to detail these specific and abundant “adaptations” and provisions in all their diversity, all of which he deemed the “effects of a sagacious and provident nature” (87). Ray suggested that the physical and behavioral suitability of each species (a term he was responsible for introducing in its “biological” form; Wilkins 2009, 64), for its natural role, could only be explained as a result of design. It was not, he argued, just a matter of there being a natural “mechanism” (92) or nature being “Plastick” or “Spermatick” (92); rather, it evidenced existence of an all-powerful “architect,” “engineer,” and “Wise-Superintendent” (93).

In this sense, it was Ray, and not William Paley, who instigated the field that came to be known as natural theology (Paley, as cited in Armstrong 2000, 4). However, although Ray foreshadows Paley’s famous metaphor of the watch with its finely tuned mechanisms found on the heath (Thomson 2005) and the implication that the watch, and consequently a still more intricately tuned nature, must be considered to have a designated purpose and designer, Ray’s importance does not lie in any teleological argument for God’s existence. Rather, Ray (1691, 131) exemplifies an early but cautious adoption of a technological metaphorics, one that is still wary of mechanistic allusions, speaking of such human inventions as a “few dead engines or movements” as compared to living beings “performing their own motions.” For Ray, human inventions are poor additions to, or parodies of, God’s creation that “cease presently to move so soon as the Spring is down” (131). Ray’s purpose in emphasizing providence is rather to bring about a realization that the reason “Man [sic] ought not to admire himself, or seek his own Glory, is because he is a dependent Creature and has nothing but what he has received” (133–34). Ray also explicitly argues that the creativity of nature has purposes that are not just reducible to instrumental means for human ends:

It is a generally received Opinion, that all this visible world was created for Man; that Man is the end of the Creation, as if there were no end of any other Creature, but some way or other to be serviceable to man. . . . Yet wise men nowadays think otherwise. Dr. More affirms, “That Creatures are made to enjoy themselves, as well as to serve us, and that it is a gros [sic] piece of Ignorance and Rusticity to think otherwise.” And in another place [More says], “This comes only out of Pride and Ignorance or a haughty Presumption, because we are encouraged to believe, that in some sense, all things are made for Man, therefore to think that they are not at all made for themselves. But he that pronounceth this is ignorant of the Nature of Man, and the knowledge of things. For if a good man be merciful to his Beast, then surely, a good God is Bountiful and Benign, and takes pleasure in that all his Creatures enjoy themselves, that have life and sense, and are capable of enjoyment.” For my part [says Ray], I cannot believe that all the things in the world were so made for Man, that they have no other use. (127–28)

In Ray’s providential approach, Creation has not yet been reduced to the natural equivalent of a workshop or machine, and there is a heartfelt recognition that all earthly purposes are not simply subservient to human ends. One might even think that there is an incipient ecology here in terms of recognizing the diversity of sensible “enjoyments” of lives that do not serve humanity and of which humanity in general is unaware.

Generally speaking, and despite notable resistance (in Romanticism, for example), Ray’s caution is lost in the transition between imaginaries as technics too evolve and become an increasingly dominant element of the progressive imaginary. Just a century later, William Hutton, philosophical author of An Investigation into the Principles of Knowledge (1794) and one of the founding figures of geology as a science, was fully utilizing the machine metaphor in his Theory of the Earth (1795). Hutton still retained a providential outlook, describing the earth as “‘a system in which wisdom and benevolence conduct the endless order of a changing world’; ‘what a comfort for man,’ he added, ‘for who that system was contrived, as the only living being who can perceive it’” (Hutton, as cited in Rudwick 2014, 70). However, as a deist rather than a theist, Hutton was content to think that God, having designed the system for humanity, had then left it running without further direct intervention. Hutton

called the Earth a machine in allusion to the steam-engines that were such a spectacular feature of the Industrial Revolution. Steam-engines demonstrated the huge expansive power of heat, as one phase in a repeated cycle that could continue to operate indefinitely. This cyclic character, Hutton argued, was just what made the Earth a natural machine. (Rudwick 2014, 70)

Two centuries later, Lovelock would recognize how Hutton’s “system of the habitable Earth” (Hutton, as cited in Rudwick 2014, 69) clearly prefigured Gaia scientifically, while denying, as we have seen, that the earth was any kind of “contrivance” or in any way contrived for human benefit. It is so very important that Lovelock, rather than emphasizing Hutton’s earth-machine, chose instead to emphasize the metaphor of the earth as “living organism,” indeed (as the title of the book in which Lovelock [2000, 15] declares Hutton a forerunner of Gaia makes explicit) as a planetary body that now requires a “planetary medicine.” He chooses to de-emphasize Hutton’s mechanistic frame, instead arguing that

the waters of the Earth, as James Hutton saw long ago, are like the circulation system of an animal. Their ceaseless motions (together with the blowing of the wind) transfer essential nutrient elements from one part to another and carry away the waste products of metabolism. The rocks themselves are like our bones, both a solid strong support and a reservoir of mineral nutrients. (38)

Once again, however, Lovelock illustrates how difficult it is to describe the earth, this time metabolically, without implying purposes, just as it seems so difficult to refer to the circulation of blood without referring to its purposes in distributing oxygen and how easy it is, if, for example, we say that one of those purposes is removing “waste products,” to fall into a technological framing, even of living bodies.

Notice, though, that if we refer to what the bloodstream provides, then less seems to hinge on the ascription of purposes. Presumably, no one would disagree with the contention that the blood provides oxygen to the body or, to return to our earlier example, that the deer’s white tail provides a warning to its companions. More expansively, even if it cannot be described as its purpose, it does not seem at all controversial to say that the spring grass provides for the deer’s sustenance. Provision here means that which appears and is afforded by a conjunction or pattern of events—it does not need to imply intent, an explainable causal chain, or a teleology. There is no necessary design or plan required to do this (although, of course, such occurrences can sometimes be intentionally enacted if circumstances allow). Rather, it is a way of speaking of an evolutionarily, ecologically, and only sometimes socially articulated conjunction of things/beings. Also notice that although provision may not be designed, it is not a matter of pure chance but of billions of years of earthly evolution. Provision is that which happens to afford possibilities for the continuation of certain temporary (provisional) patterns of existence, such as a human life, an ecological community, or a weather pattern. It is surely not controversial, then, to say that the earth provides for many different things in many different ways.

This is to say, if our notion of provision is not theological, but more a matter of ecological providance (i.e., of what the earth provides ecologically), this shifts the grounds of our understanding. When we say that the earth provides for any being, we do not mean that the earth as a whole deliberately sets out to provide what that being requires of it, that this is the earth’s intent or purpose. We mean instead that the existence of this specific being and the earth are so conjoined, so inseparable, so entangled, that the very substance of that being’s existence is in the earth’s provision. It is of the earth and in part it is the earth. Its existence, its form, habits, and life, all the affordances offered to it, are earthly. These affordances are not just random possibilities; they are ecologically co-constitutive, patterned, evolving together.1 Each and every being, however transitory, is held in the earth’s embrace, and each, however small, affects the future patterning of the earth’s provision. Some of these ecological relations can be described as purposive—as the feeding barnacle stretches out and rhythmically beats its feathery cirri in shifting ocean waters. Some appear as caring—the owl provides for its young; the stickleback defends its watery “territory”; the otters play, coiling round and diving under each other—but these purposes are not final in any sense, and each is in its turn entangled with everything else, with sunlight, atmosphere, forest, the river’s currents, the tidal rock pool.

It seems simple enough to imagine such specific occurrences together with a few of their earthly interconnections but more difficult to try to envisage the earth as a whole in this light; indeed, it is so difficult that it is tempting to say we should think only in terms of a concatenation of particular, more or less natural places or events with which we have some contact: the city park, the meadow, the tree on the street corner, the falling rain that precipitates experience. Certainly these encounters are a vital source of our understandings. Yet today we cannot not try to think the earth precisely because we desperately need to critically engage with, and offer alternatives to, earth’s (mis)representation, its abusive enframing within the progressive imaginary, and because we need to re-cognize the importance of so many earthly patternings—the deep time of evolution, volcanism, continental drift, shifts in ecology, the atmospherics of global climate change, and so on. Yet how to address the earth in words when language, as we have seen, is so inadequate and when concepts can be so easily reified, that is, when we slip so easily from partial interpretations and metaphors into generalized abstractions and grant more effective reality to specific concepts than the earth’s myriad manifestations?2

Certainly we need to avoid describing the earth as spaceship or machine or as the realization or embodiment of supernatural design. The earth is not a human birthright nor, as certain proponents of the Anthropocene might insist, something now anthropogenically produced. Not a resource. Not an object. Earth is not a system (even an autopoietic one) or a goddess, not a social “construct” or any kind of artifact. “It” is not even an organism, superorganism, or just another planetary body. “It” is not even an it, because this impersonal pronoun exemplifies a grammatical separation between persons and objects—but nor is the earth a person. We cannot finally determine what the earth is; we can only say, or seek, or point toward encounters, words, images, ideas, experiences, understandings, that express and enable different, less productive, but more creative modes of addressing and being addressed by an always evolving earth. We need expressions that expose some of the damaging limitations of providential, progressive/technological lexicons yet can also provisionally offer very different interpretations of our earthly involvements.

One possibility might be: the earth can be understood as that which lets ecologically entangled worldings, provisional ecologies, arise and appear from itself, world as a disclosure of the earth. As such, the earth constitutes emerging geological, ecological, and evolving patterns of being, now including human patternings. The reference to patterns here is intended to convey something of the sense of more or less coherent and coalesced, discernible and persistent, and similarly reoccurring arrangements or dispositions of bodies, events, things, fields, forces, and so on. Patterns in this sense are not designs or blueprints but active and evolving expressions. Earth might be interpreted as the immanent recurrent and successive generation and movement of these intricate patternings and existent interdependencies at vastly different temporal and spatial scales such that some seem, but are not, immutable, while others appear entirely ephemeral. These patterns are instantiated as a multiplicity of radically different but interconnected manifestations, such as the patterns of approaching storm clouds, the branching and rooting of the elm tree, the binary fission of bacteria, the earth’s magnetic field, the meandering and eroding riverbank, the seasonal migration of birds, the changing constitution of your microbiome, breaking ocean waves, rotting logs, the vast array of beetles for which “God” (at least according to biologist J. B. S. Haldane)3 seems to have an “inordinate fondness,” and so on, and on.

Consider how complicated the relations in each of these, and innumerable other, patterning instantiations are, each mediated in what we are accustomed to think of as quite different registers—material, semiotic, phenomenal—but which are themselves all manners of expressive existence (Smith 2001). Some patterns are concentrated, some diffuse, but involvements can be traced between and touch them all in various ways.

How, for example, is the rotting log (de)composed? It was branching elm, holding up into air, sprouting leaves eaten by caterpillars, aphids, beetles and their larvae, sheltering nests of summer birds, now becoming rich soil from which seed and sapling may again germinate and grow. The tree was, by osmosis and transpiration, drawing up rainwater percolating through soil, water once raised as vapor to clouds from oceans and leaves’ surfaces, then released and dropping as liquid or wintery flakes from stormy sky, fallen rain filling and shifting the course of waters streaming down to sea. Birds, carrying seeds, bacteria, and spores, migrate back and forth across seas following patterns of the earth’s magnetic field. Wood was created from leaves’ sun-powered photosynthesis, transforming atmospheric carbon to carbohydrates and then to lignins. Other nutrients were translocated through soil to other trees, some of different species, via fungal mycorrhiza entering or sheathing and connecting plant roots. The elm was felled by storm’s high winds after death consequent to infection by other fungal spores and bacteria introduced by scolytid beetles that leave intricate patterns of their feeding engraved under now peeling and shedding bark.4 Fungi softening wood replete with springtails, millipedes, also insects with symbiotic microbiomes that digest the materials resulting from lignocellulose degradation—microbiomes like but so differently constituted than ours, only recently discovered but already themselves depleted and altered by fungus-derived antibiotics. Rotting wood attracts ants and more beetles, some to find provision and shelter, some directed there to die by parasitic fungi infecting insects’ nerves and bodies, altering their behavior to suit fungal “purposes,” wreathing insect bodies in shrouds of fungal hyphae, bursting from chitinous exoskeletons to release new spores. And on and on.

And this description only begins to elaborate what happens to compose and decompose almost every log on earth in the “normal” pattern of events, that is, without sudden flood or volcanic eruption, firestorm or timber extraction. There is no end to these patternings, tracings, touchings, involvements, expressions. Whether phenomenal, pheromonal, phylogenetic, physical, phytochemical, phenolic, phytophagous, philic, phenological, and only now, in such moments as this, philosophically extrapolated. There is no possibility of tracing all these partially interdependent and interwoven movements, no single path to follow to an end, no pattern that predominates forever. Rather, these patterns, as the word implies, appear to recur with different rhythms and temporalities, whether of lives, generations, seasons, or days, and in subtly varying ways in every such instance. To consider this as if it were the workings of a machine is, as Lovelock suggests, appallingly derogatory; the earth far surpasses any technological or human frame.

The earth “produces,” but not at all like a workshop or production line; indeed, in an important sense, “it” does not work at all. This does not mean that the earth is broken or failing but that it is composed in manners that have no overall object or purpose but are (de)composed in its own multifarious gatherings. We might even say that the earth is the original and inhuman “inoperative community” (Nancy 1991), the differential sharing out and exposure of materio-semiotic patterns of existence (Smith 2010):

The unity of a world is not one: it is made of a diversity, including disparity and opposition. It is made of it, which is to say that it is not added to it and does not reduce it. The unity of the world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds. . . . Its unity is the sharing out [partage] and the mutual exposure in this world of all its worlds. The sharing out of the world is the law of the world.

The world does not have any other law, it is not submitted to any authority, it does not have any sovereign. . . . The world is not given. It is itself the gift. The world is its own creation (this is what “creation” means). (Nancy 2007, 109)

The earth naturally creates a world out of itself, a world composed of many worlds, that is to say, many modes of the earth’s patterning manifestations, each comprising, enacted by, and exposed to differently patterned beings. The world appears, but not just as it appears to me or you. It appears in the very different material, semiotic, and phenomenal registers of all the different beings that also, in their shared exposure to others, together compose the world. A bark beetle’s world is, and is not, “my” world; these worlds touch upon each other in many ways. They are both earthly, but they world so very differently. “My” world is, in any case, not mine; it is not my possession, it is what appears in relation to the earth that is exposed in and through my being. It is what and how I am given, what and how I am provisioned, what and for whom my exposure offers materio-semiotic affordances. The manner in which the beetle and I are mutually exposed, each to the other, our world-sharing, is not a matter of equivalence. The beetle might appear in my world only as a flattened body on the car windshield, as a photographic image in a book, or indirectly in the browning leaves of the elm tree or those patterns left exposed as bark falls away. I might hardly appear experientially to the beetle at all but still have meaningful and material effects upon its existence. This mutual exposure, even the nature of its being in any way sensed by me as mutual, is also delimited by the materio-semiotic imaginary I inhabit. In the progressive imaginary, the elm bark beetle becomes delimited as an economically and aesthetically destructive pest to be eradicated, controlled, and managed, although in one sense, it is only the messenger, not the message, the carrier, not the disease. The beetle has its own complex materio-semiotic relations, its own modes of expression. They are not economic or political in the same way that mine are, but they have economic and political effects. (So there is certainly a provisional ecological ethics and politics to be further elucidated here [Smith 2010].)5 All of us being(s) are, from our inception, involved in shaping and delimiting the affordances of the earth’s worlding, but we should remember that humans are not, as they appear to be in providential and progressive imaginaries (or even in Heidegger’s writings—see later), the worlds over-seers.

All this diverse activity, patterning, sharing, and composure appears, in some sense, “coordinated,” although this term may be taken to imply too much—for example, an entirely harmonious composition or even a “balance of nature” (something Latour certainly rejects where Gaia is concerned) rather than just a kind of inoperative ecological earth (Smith 2013). Those of a providential bent or seeking an explanation for everything might certainly interpret this “coordination” as evidence of a single underlying principle—a design setting out what is going to follow and not just an immanent expressive patterning. That, however, is clearly not our intent. Rather, the suggestion is that these expressive patterns play out together, roughly reenacting previous performances, but never with exactly the same cast and always lacking director, script, or playwright, even though they respond to certain recurring cues. Today, Latour suggests, what modernity had taken to be just the scenery is suddenly revealed as an integral constituent of the play. This play never ends but, dreamlike, shifts and disturbs story lines, eradicates or changes characters, settles and unsettles.

Yet we might still want to ask, how are such performances sustained, or “what holds all this together”? Ecology, of course, is one (relatively recent) word for this holding together of inordinately complicated patternings of composition–decomposition. Evolution is another. Both play key parts in Lovelock’s Gaia. Here, though, we again need to note the temptation to reify and define these terms in ways that make them fit within, rather than challenge, the dominant progressive imaginary. Darwin’s achievement, for example, is often described as his having provided the “mechanism” for otherwise materially inexplicable and variously interpreted ideas of evolution. For example, Gould (2002, 63) states that “Darwin developed the first testable and operational theory of evolution by locating all causality in the palpable mechanism of natural selection,” acting upon individual organisms each varying slightly from others of their species, all in “competition” for limited resources to enable them to successfully reproduce.

Things are, however, not quite so simple. Darwin, like John Ray before him, was an experienced naturalist, deeply involved in, and concerned with, nature. Like Ray, he remained somewhat wary of explicit mechanistic metaphors; indeed, The Origin of Species never actually refers to natural selection as a mechanism (Ruse 2005, 285), although Darwin does once use the phrase “whole machinery of life” (as cited in Richards 2002, 534) and often speaks of nature’s “productions” and “works” and “contrivances” in direct comparison to human works (see later). The image of the machine is also used by Darwin as a point of comparison with, and elucidation of, natural selection (Ruse 2005). Given the cultural dominance of mechanistic imagery, and it (somewhat ironically) being regarded as the only alternative to providential and teleological accounts, this mechanistic perspective is how Darwinism was, and often still is, received (though see Richards [2002] for an alternative account). In this sense, and in accordance with Kant’s earlier suggestions (see previous discussion), Darwin provided an explanation that opened the door to removing notions of purpose from nature writ large.

However, the evolutionary “mechanism” itself easily becomes reified as a kind of transhistorical force, a shaping tool, such that evolution becomes imagined as a kind of natural evolutionary “process” or a productive force acting upon nature’s “raw materials.” Natural selection becomes reified as a quasi-mechanical force that occurs everywhere and in every time in the same way, iteratively producing a better fit between species and something “external” we often call the “environment.” Here teleology can be reintroduced, sometimes, in its most damaging forms, envisaging evolution as a “progressive” teleological process, preparing the way for its processual culmination in what was often a racialized and gendered depiction of a competitively successful modern humanity—the tree of life crowned by the white European male.

For the most part, and despite his historical milieu, Darwin abjured such images. However, he certainly did want to retain a notion of overarching evolutionary progress and perfectibility in the sense that those individuals who reproduced successfully and preserved their “profitable variations” (Darwin 1884, 64) were deemed “better” than those who were “competitively” eliminated without leaving descendants. This progressivism, as Gould notes, was surely indicative of nineteenth-century European cultural biases. It was also, perhaps, a way of countering what Gould refers to as the loss of “solace” provided by what we have termed the earlier providential imaginary as it become further undercut by “mechanistic” rather than purposeful explanations for evolution. This removed any psychological comfort provided by an image of an earth designed by a caring God. Darwinism shocked but also suited its social times to the extent that its naturalistic approach obviated the requirement for supernatural design, and facilitated objectivism, but still tried to retain something of a godless teleology.

This tension is palpable in many passages in Darwin:

She [nature] can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends. . . . It may be that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. (Darwin, as cited in Richards 2002, 534)

Nature here is reified, selectively gendered, and anthropomorphized. She never ceases working but tenderly cares; she scrutinizes for quality control and preserves all that is good but ruthlessly eradicates the bad; she progressively improves all beings and herself.

In this and other passages, Darwin tries to provide an alternative for this, now compromised, desire for providential solace by emphasizing the grandeur of this evolutionary vision and trying to ameliorate the apparent harshness of an unending competitive struggle for survival. For example, in what Gould (2002, 137) describes as Darwin’s “softest” of all statements, Darwin states,

As selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

This statement hovers between the providential and the progressive. It replaces one form of teleology with another and makes a universal evaluative (and incipiently moralistic) claim about the consequences of natural selection for individual beings, a claim that seems difficult, if not impossible, to justify when the ecological repercussions of “perfecting” bodies/behaviors—think carnivory, parasitism, and so on—are taken into account. What works for the “good” of each being, in the sense of having received previously evolved attributes that make certain activities more closely allied to particular environmental circumstances, does not necessarily make its life longer, better, easier, or experientially richer (all terms that of course carry their own evaluative assumptions) and certainly has no such implications for those other beings with which it engages, often quite the contrary. How, then, could the “good of each being” be universalized, and how is it assured? What on earth could the good of each being possibly mean here? Perhaps we should recognize that Darwin’s soft statements actually exemplify a scientifically and ethically unconvincing attempt to argue that progressive ends might, just possibly, justify the evolutionary means—it is, perhaps, the closest Darwin comes to attempting to portray evolution as theodicy, to declare evolution unintentionally providential.6

Darwin’s explicit notion of evolutionary progress assumes that all that now exists is an improvement on what went before, that previous adaptations were somehow “imperfect,” but according to what standard could this ever be measured, when all we have is comparative reproductive success at that time, in that place?7 The clear implication here, though, is that humanity, with our “superior” mental endowments, is the epitome of evolutionary perfection (at least until something better evolves). However, as Ruse (1988, 120) argues, this thinking is questionable:

Humans are not disinterested observers from afar. We are products of the [evolutionary] process and, although fortunately for our well-being, unfortunately for our understanding, we are necessarily end products, in that we are still around to ask questions. Also that we are necessarily good (or if you like “good”) products, in that we are still around to ask questions. (our emphasis)

Ruse’s point about defining “good” in terms of a recursive anthropic interpretation of evolutionary history is well taken, but his expressing this point in overtly technological terms also speaks volumes. Ruse (2005, 300), in something of a Kantian vein, regards this mechanistic metaphorics as something that “contributes to the epistemic excellence of the science” despite his own argument that it is the “artifact-metaphor at the heart of Darwinism” (Ruse 1988, 121) that wrongly pushes us “towards progress of a kind. It is of the very nature of artifacts that we humans try to improve them. . . . They have a progressive history—and this I suggest tips evolutionists, Darwinians especially, into progressionism” (121). Yet, if this is so, then this metaphor’s contribution to epistemic excellence must surely be questionable!

Now, as Darwin also realized, this progressivism is only scientifically plausible if we presume an almost providentially stable, or only gradually changing, environment where adaptation can operate incrementally and continuously, each generation becoming “better” and “better” fitted to or integrated with that particular environment. This, perhaps, illuminates Darwin’s tenacious retention of Charles Lyell’s excessive geological gradualism in his own explanatory model, but it also effectively underplays the substantial evidence for previous mass extinctions and sudden, unpredictable, and dramatic environmental changes on all possible scales, some very local, some global. In other words, what we might call Darwin’s “ameliorative perfectionism,” his attempt to assuage the image of an entirely indifferent earth left by a “mechanistic” interpretation of a nature that lacks beneficent design, is another article of progressive faith now to be severely challenged by climate change and the earth’s sixth mass extinction. We are now in a situation where so very many “perfectly” well-adapted species will find that their “progressive” improvements count for nothing when they no longer fit with increasingly chaotic and rapidly changing circumstances. Indeed, it might be argued that only the ecologically fortunate, the exceptionally hardy, and the highly adaptable will survive. The parallels with contemporary capitalism and its promotion of “flexibility” as the new work ethic should be obvious and are in no sense accidental (see Smith 2019).

Evolution, then, as a concept, still has to struggle to free itself from the patterns imposed by the progressive/technological imaginary, and this cannot be achieved by viewing evolution or, for that matter, ecology “mechanistically,” for example, regarding variation as just the “raw material” of natural selection interpreted as a productive process. In any event, despite the triumphalism of the “modern synthesis” in biology from the mid- to late twentieth century, where, increasingly, only explanations couched in terms of strictly neo-Darwinian natural selection were deemed permissible, it has since become apparent that there is no single “mechanism” for evolution. This is something, as Clarke (2020) notes, that Margulis played a key role in arguing. There are, rather, several different and relatively distinct patterns of evolutionary change, each itself an expression of the many different ways in which patterns, organic and nonorganic, touch upon and involve each other destructively and creatively, continuously refiguring the legacies of the past upon encountering novel situations. There are many influences and ways of enacting evolution, through horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, evolutionary developmental biology, and so on.

Such revisions to Darwinian evolution are, of course, complicated and contentious issues because, though they do not undermine the basic theme of natural selection, they challenge its absolute hegemony within evolutionary theory and reshape its understanding. They also offer vitally important opportunities to rethink the concepts and metaphors we use to understand evolution, to recognize these terms’ cultural indebtedness and proffer (nonprogressive, nonmechanistic) alternatives. Evolution happens by more than one path, and its flows are interrupted by many different events and modes of change, pattern effects, and transmissions. It is composed of all manner of involvements between patternings, many of which are not well described by the term competition or by the focus on “individual organisms” who are, in every case, ecologically, natural historically, materially, and semiotically compr(om)ised. As Margulis (1997, 273) points out,

of all the organisms on Earth today, only prokaryotes (bacteria) are [actually] individuals. All the other live beings . . . are metabolically complex communities of a multitude of tightly organized beings.

Evolution and ecology are not mechanisms or processes; they are terms associated with ways of trying to explain the recurring and changing patterning of the world and are terms that act as potential, though complicated, placeholders for the emergence of (nonprogressive, nonprovidential) materio-semiotic understandings of a much-more-than-human world.

Humans obviously both add to and, all too often, as in the case of the progressive imaginary, disrupt, dissolve, or forcibly reshape these patternings through the uncaring imposition of economics, politics, ethics, and sociocultural and aesthetic patterns, which then continue to become constitutive of our earthly situation. Some of these reshapings, disruptions, and additions can be momentarily and situationally liberating for some humans; however, the progressive imaginary instantiates and imposes a technological ordering that fundamentally renders its own role invisible in enframing the earth and changes some patterns so drastically as to limit and even destroy their provisional affordances. In all this, though, and despite this, we are still of the earth.

Here, then, we might offer another provisional attempt at delimiting the earth: the earth can be understood as the gathering together, the sheltering allowance, of all these patterns and expressions, however discrete or nebulous, obvious or hidden, as the generative gathering and provisional sustaining of the (de)composition, of the patternings it lets arise.