Understanding Earth as a material process.
In honor of Earth Day SUP is proud to present this excerpt from Theory of the Earth » by Thomas Nail
THE EARTH FLOWS because the matter of the cosmos flows through it. In this chapter, I take the flow of matter as the starting point for a new theory of the earth. This is because I think the earth is much more like a process than it is like a stable object (Spaceship Earth) or autonomous subject (Gaia).
The earth is a material process continuous with the expansion of the universe that produced, and continues to produce, the earth. The earth is not a vacuum-sealed object cut off from the outside. Nor is it an unchanging or uniformly changing substance following autonomous processes. Geology flows from cosmology.
Flows of matter continually compose, cycle through, and flow out of the earth. The earth is only the regional circulation of a much larger kinetic and entropic process. Historically speaking, philosophy, politics, and much of geology have not taken this ongoing flow of cosmic matter seriously.
This has led to an inverted understanding of the earth and our relationship to it. We have posited ourselves and the earth as profound reversals of the general movement of the universe, which flows, cycles, and dissipates entropically.1 The crowning achievement of reversal is anthropocentrism.2 We look at the universe and think how wasteful it is. Against its waste, we think life, and human life in particular, is so special because it fights against the waste of cosmic entropy. We have cast ourselves as the heroes in a universal drama of life against death.3
