Journey to the Heart of Stone
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20084328 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Val Plumwood (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Pages | 17-36 |
| Publication date | 2007-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Culture, Creativity and Environment (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Brill (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1163/9789401204781_003 |
| OpenAlex | W2886992536 |
| ISBN | 9789401204781 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
Can environmental writing help break down the wall of human/nature dualism that has long separated western culture from the larger-than-human-world? Critical thought can help by tackling concepts like anthropomorphism and sentimentality whose main function is to delegitimate boundary breakdown between the human and non-human. But creative writing can also play an important part by making visible new possibilities for radically open and non-reductive ways to experience the world. Western philosophy, with its obsessive focus on human consciousness, has only with difficulty extended respect and consideration beyond the human to the human-like – animals and living things, excluding items like rivers or stones. In western culture and philosophy, stones have not been given an honoured place, and mind is seen as the pinnacle of existence, a pinnacle our species and ours alone, has climbed. For we moderns, stones are insignificant and anonymous, often in our way, but sometimes useful for our projects when torn from their place and history, crushed to pave roads and paths. Stone is dead matter, a mere resource or pure enabler – its character uninteresting, expressive of nothing but meaningless coincidence. Yet even the smallest stone represents an amazing conjunction of earth forces whose complexity puts to shame the puny puzzlings of humankind. If stone is the skeleton of our planet, and the dirt its flesh, humanity is an insignificant piece of the biota, a microscopic flea in the jungle of flora and fauna that lives upon its body. The culture that refuses honour to stones refuses honour also to the great earth forces that have shaped and placed them. The eviction of spirit and honour from stones and from the earth is one of the greatest crimes of modernity. This is an account of how we can see stones differently, as individuals, as makers of meaning, as prophets, teachers and tellers of tales, and of how Plumwood found all this and more in the Heartstone, an unusual stone with impressive powers of metaphor
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Dualism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Honour · Humanity · Nothing · Posthuman · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.47 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2026 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |