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ABSTRACT Earth Matters: Religion, Nature, and Science in the Ecologies of Contemporary America by Daniel M. Levine

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ABSTRACT Earth Matters: Religion, Nature, and Science in the Ecologies of Contemporary America by Daniel M. Levine ABSTRACT Earth Matters: Religion, Nature, and Science in the Ecologies of Contemporary America by Daniel M. Levine Earth Matters examines the relationships between alternative religion in North America and the natural world through the twin lenses of the history of religions and cultural anthropology. Throughout, nature remains a contested ground, defined simultaneously the limits of cultural activity and by an increasing expansion of claims to knowledge by scientific discourses. Less a historical review than a series of fugues of thought, Earth Matters engages with figures like the French vitalist, Georges Canguilhem, the American environmentalist, John Muir; the founder of Deep Ecology, Arne Næss; the collaborators on Gaia Theory, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis; the physicist and New Age scientist, Fritjof Capra; and the Wiccan writer and activist, Starhawk. These subjects move in spirals throughout the thesis: Canguilhem opens the question of vitalism, the search for a source of being beyond the explanations of the emerging sciences. As rationalism expands its dominance across the scientific landscape, this animating force moves into the natural world, to that protean space between the city and the wild and in the environmental thinkers who initially moved along those boundaries. As the twentieth century moves towards a close, mechanistic thinking simultaneously reaches heights of success previously unimagined and collapses under the demand for complexity posed by quantum physics, by research in genetic interactions, by the continued elusive relationship of mind to health. This allows the wild to return inside through the internalization of consciousness sparked by the American New Age, but also provides a new model to understand the natural world as complex zone open to a wide variety of strategies, including the multiplicities of understanding offered through contemporary neopaganisms. Earth Matters argues for the necessity of the notion of ecology, both as an environmental concern but also as an organizing principle for human thought and behavior. Ecologies are by their nature complex and multi-variegated things dependent upon the surprising and unpredictable interaction of radically different organisms, and it is through this model that we are best able to understand not only ourselves but also our communities and our efforts to make sense of the external world. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 6 Earthrise ........................................................................................................................ 6 Cartography ................................................................................................................... 9 Technical Notes ............................................................................................................34 Giving Thanks ..............................................................................................................36 THIS VITAL LIFE .............................................................................................................. 39 Beginnings, and Beginnings ..........................................................................................43 Science and Science’s Discourse ...................................................................................48 Science, Truth, Time .....................................................................................................57 Let X = X .....................................................................................................................64 Doing Science ...............................................................................................................76 The Living and the Human ............................................................................................81 Bodily Vitalism and the Secularization of Health ..........................................................86 Worldly Vitalism: Nature and the Wild ....................................................................... 100 RELIGION , NATURAL AND OTHERWISE ....................................................................... 112 Religious History and the History of Religions ............................................................ 113 Overcoming Sympathy through Thickness .................................................................. 124 An American Metaphysics .......................................................................................... 132 Combat and Combinations: The Complexity of the Melting Pot .................................. 138 Creating Other(s) Histories or, Neither Your Earth Mother Nor Mine .......................... 148 Beneath the Bridge: Shadows and Violence on the Road to America (I) ...................... 160 Emerson: Man at the Center of Nature ........................................................................ 166 WALKING THE WORLD .................................................................................................. 180 The Threat of Blindness and Seeing Nature ................................................................. 189 Heading West: Finding God, Glaciers, and Politics in California ................................. 200 In Nature, Of the World, With God .............................................................................. 213 The Other Side of the Tracks: Shadows and Violence on the Road to America (II) ...... 218 Inheriting Foothills: What Leads Aldo Leopold to Think Like A Mountain? ................ 222 Go Tell It On the Mountain: The Whiteness of the Peaks ............................................ 234 Chaos: A Pause for Science ......................................................................................... 239 Crossing Chasms, Crossing Species ............................................................................ 242 Deep Ecology ............................................................................................................. 250 AS ABOVE , SO BELOW ................................................................................................... 263 Inferring Life: Entropy and Equilibrium ...................................................................... 272 Mind the Gap: Filling In the Sulfur Cycle ................................................................... 281 Hypothetical Daisies ................................................................................................... 286 All Hail the Queen: Gaia’s Grand Entrance and the Evolutionary Response ................ 291 Evolutionary Systems: From Capra to Complexity ...................................................... 301 A Gut Feeling: Bacterial Sex and the Myth of the Self................................................. 311 Sudden Shifts: The Ends of Science (Texts) as an Opening to Ideologies of Evolution 323 PAGANISMS , NEO AND NEW ........................................................................................ 333 Burning Wicks: The Shadows of Religious History and the Light of Science ............... 339 Holisms and Ecologies: Offerings of the New Age ...................................................... 349 The Slippery Slope of Invented History ....................................................................... 362 Spin Your Partner Round and Round: The Spiral Dance as Movement Text ................ 374 Maintaining Imbalance: Asymmetry and Community Engagement as a Corrective to Notions of Equality ..................................................................................................... 381 NATURAL COMMUNITIES , ECOLOGICAL CONCLUSIONS ........................................... 399 The One and the Many or, But We Were Promised Hovercars ..................................... 401 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 407 6 Introduction This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. John Muir , The Philosophy of John Muir in The Wilderness World of John Muir Earthrise We might point to our contemporary society with its growing reinterest in community and in rediscovery of one’s roots in the earth, on the one hand, and its fascination with space exploration, on the other. Jonathan Z. Smith , The Influence of Symbols on Social Change Christmas Eve, 1968. The upper right of the front page of the New York Times is dominated by a grainy, blurry photo beneath the headline “APOLLO NEARS MOON ON COURSE, TURNS AROUND TO GO INTO ORBIT; CREW SENDS PICTURES OF EARTH.” (Wilford 1968) Apollo 8 was a mission of firsts: the first entrance into the moon’s gravitational field by humans, the first lunar orbits, the first live transmissions of images from a manned space flight to an international television audience, as well as a host of other accomplishments surpassed by later programs (speed records, distances covered, 7 and so on). It was also the source of the first images of the earth from space taken by humans. If there is a point around which the explorations of this thesis are tethered, it is these iconic images of an earth, partially shrouded in shadow, rising into the absolute and inky darkness of space. Apart from their
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