Critical Zone as a Planetary Animist Sphere

Etho-graphing an Affective Consciousness of the Earth

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12901716
AutoresDan Yu (0000-0002-0666-943X, Yunnan University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen14
Número2
Páginas271-290
Fecha de publicación2020-10-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1749-4907 • E-ISSN: 1749-4915
EditorialEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/jsrnc.39680
OpenAlexW3090742523
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas29

This article offers a new animist study of ‘the affective consciousness of earth’ to explore deeper meanings and values of the earth as a planetary life system. Woven together as an interdisciplinary text with perspectives, concepts, and imaginative visions from earth sciences, religion and ecology, and environmental humanities, it introduces a conceptual proposition that the earth’s Critical Zone is a planetary animist sphere for the purpose of highlighting the livingness of the earth as a union of the biotic and the abiotic worlds. By interfacing relevant planetary perspectives from humanities and natural sciences, it argues that the metaphor of Gaia, as employed in geophysiology, inadvertently engenders a metaphoric animism that is a form of new animism in which the livingness of the earth is expressed in biochemical, sentient, and affective terms. The recognized complementarity of Critical Zone science and new animist studies in this article is meant to articulate a planetary environmental consciousness that is a hybrid of scientific and humanist endeavors for environmental sustainability

Animism · Astrobiology · Biology · Consciousness · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life