Preface

TO SPEAK OF EARTHLY PROVIDENCE would seem anachronistic and dubious in a world of devastating pandemics, mass extinction, and destabilizing climate change. Nevertheless, rethinking the legacy of that providential imaginary which prospered in pre- and early modern Europe might still provide certain affordances for understanding and expressing responses to such issues. For all its faults, and there are many, this providential imaginary found, in the earth’s manifestations, signs of a world infused with care, albeit a care purportedly originating in God and directed primarily, or only, toward (certain) humans.

Tracing how this providential imaginary evolved into a succeeding (and globally dominant) “progressive” imaginary, we can witness how it was transformed in ways that still allowed its adherents to consider themselves “elect” or “favored” while evacuating an increasingly objectivized earth of all but the most superficial relations to care. That is to say, the imaginary of progress, including scientific progress, offered no respite from, indeed helped generate, a “systemic worldly indifference” such that referring to the earth as “caring” can only appear ridiculously and unjustifiably anthropomorphic or indicative of an antiquated wishful thinking. This absence of earthly solicitude should, we suggest, be considered a symptom and not just a consequence of this predominant modern mode of materio-semiotic engagement with the earth, now exemplified in global capitalism. Here the earth is systematically reduced to a largely inanimate resource in the service of the very projects that instigate the climatological changes now undermining this same world. In other words, the “successful” globalization of the progressive imaginary is revealed by climate change to be self-abnegating; its explosive teleology is now shown to lead only to an ignominious end of this world and the extinction of so many of its diverse inhabitants. Earth, though, will persist.

At issue, then, is how we might differently address, and also be materially and semiotically addressed by, the earth and how the earth matters beyond (human) signification. Certainly there is no single concept or metaphor adequate for engendering or conveying an alternative earthly imaginary. Earth is not a spaceship, a system, or a goddess, nor is it just another rock circling the sun, a superorganism, our birthright, and so on. This inadequacy occurs because of the expressive limits of any language and because the earth subtends and transcends the historically inflected worlds we inhabit, those worlds that matter and mean something to us. Earth, we might say, resists globalization, including conceptual globalization, and is both refractory and exceeds all attempts to encompass or enframe “it,” even technologically. After all, not everything can be integrated, synthesized, or reconciled (Baudrillard 2007, 67). This situation might, perhaps, be approached through Heidegger’s later philosophy, where earth and world are, of course, terms of art, but it is also, very importantly, something that can be experienced as manifestations of earthly indifference, care, and so on. Such experiences are something that philosophically inclined “nature” writers like Robert Macfarlane and Richard Jefferies explicitly address, which is why we begin and end with such accounts.

Despite these expressive difficulties, any ecological alternatives to the providential and progressive imaginaries that have so dramatically shaped our world would obviously need to offer some way to provisionally reconceptualize their legacies and to explicate very different, less destructive understandings of our earthly existence. Such a “provisional ecology,” albeit tentatively expressed and necessarily incomplete, must explicitly acknowledge how and what the earth provides.

This is where discussions around James Lovelock’s (1979) development of the Gaia hypothesis (originally developed with Lynn Margulis), including Bruno Latour’s (2017a, 2017b) recent and extensive interventions, might prove generative. Interestingly, although Lovelock’s work now provides key systemic insights used in contemporary climatological work, scientific critics often interpreted the planetary homeostasis of Gaia’s earliest iterations as impossibly providential and doubtfully anthropomorphic. However, in his more explicitly scientific moments, and in Latour’s (2017b, 69) subsequent claim that Gaia is “totally non-providential,” the earth is often portrayed as entirely indifferent to humanity’s clima(c)tic fate. To the extent that Lovelock’s texts actually travel back and forth between these poles, Gaia might serve as an opening on the tensions between earthly indifference and care, and thence on arguments we make here for understanding the earth in terms of its expressive composition of provisional (temporary, contingent, and yet creatively providing) ecologies. The claim here is that a provisional rather than providential understanding of earthly ecology might prove a more appropriate counter to forms of cold “realism” and/or alienated despair in the face of impending ecological disaster.