Does the Earth Care? Indifference, Providence, and Provisional Ecology

As its title indicates, this short, dense, lucid, and affordable book is intended to be thought provoking. Authored by environmental philosopher Mick Smith and his doctoral student Jason Young (both at Queens University, Canada), Does the Earth Care? will interest the growing number of geographers who research and teach about global environmental change. Geoscientists, including a number employed in departments and schools of geography, have presented ever more evidence that the scope, scale, and magnitude of the human impact is both unprecedented and cause for very serious concern. This evidence has inspired a wide range of responses, from denial through moderate policy reform to the radical demands of Extinction Rebellion. Recognizing that business as usual will not suffice, Smith and Young venture a set of arguments and concepts designed to shift modes of cognition, evaluation, and action.

Before I summarize the book’s contents, a word about the senior author. Smith will be well-known to many human and environmental geographers. Educated in the United Kingdom, and a longtime resident of Ontario, Canada, Smith has been publishing philosophically engaging books, articles, and chapters for some three decades now. He is founding editor of the journal Emotion, Space and Society, and has coedited books in these topic areas with Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson, and others. His extensive and sophisticated writing about environmental ethics and modes of valuation might not be so familiar to geographers, however, in part because Smith has largely published in philosophical journals such as Environmental Values. In this writing, Smith has engaged closely with the germinal works of Hans Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin, among others.

In Does the Earth Care?, Smith and Young tackle issues that concern a growing number of people across many disciplines, including geographers. How should we in the West—or more broadly those in the grip of capitalist modernity—apprehend our one and only planet? What sort of Earth are environmentalists seeking to defend? These are the authors’ key questions, their book adding to a fast-growing literature about the implications of anthropogenic climate change and the advent of the Anthropocene. Of course, planetary thinking is not new, enjoying an initial fluorescence between the late 1960s and 1970s, but human impacts on the planet are now far more significant and worrying than they were a half-century ago. Does the Earth Care? is thus published at a time when radical new thinking and commensurate action feel urgent across all domains—economic, political, and cultural.

The argument unfolds in nine dense but short chapters, with a prologue to kick things off. The key focus is a set of imaginaries that have, in the authors’ view, defined Western worldviews since the late Middle Ages, and an incipient alternative they call “provisional ecology.” The first imaginary is a religious one called providentialism, common until secularism took hold in Europe and elsewhere. It imagines a natural world that, although threatening and at times cruel, is nonetheless designed to offer humankind just what it needs courtesy of a deity. The second imaginary is a postreligious one that imagines the natural world as a vast set of objects that are to be used by humans in the name of a technology-saturated concept of progress. Both imaginaries are, Smith and Young argued, anthropocentric and rest on a notion of human exceptionalism that creates a distance between people and planet. The progressive imagination, connected umbilically to capitalism, has been especially damaging:

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. The issue, then, is how we might differently address, and also be materially and semiotically addressed by, the earth and how [it] … matters beyond human signification. (p. xii)

In effect, for Smith and Young, Earth System change—as reported by geoscientists—marks a crisis for the progressive imaginary akin to the crisis the providential imaginary suffered in Europe after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The authors devote much of their book to anatomizing this crisis. They question progressive axioms, namely that “nature” is external and a stock of “resources”; that human purposes justify treating nature as a mere means; and that our knowledge of the material world corresponds with little remainder to the “truths” of that world. As Smith and Young express it,

The Earth’s purpose does not lie in becoming “standing reserve” for human projects. Rather, we might say, Gaia is purposeful in the sense that the Earth is as near as we can ever get to (but is not) something that is an “end in itself.” … Humans do not bestow purpose on the Earth any more than we speak for it. (p. 32)

Smith and Young go on to reframe the concepts of purpose and provision, depicting the Earth as purposeful in an open, nonteleological way and as offering contingent and bountiful provision for all manner of entities. This leads them to de-Anthropocentrize the notion of care:

The modern reluctance to refer to the Earth as provisional and caring, rather than entirely indifferent, obviously circulates precisely because we consider care as … exemplified by certain ethical forms of “subjective” or sentient human behavior, for example, in idealized parent–child relations or in the care we sometimes bestow on our pets or, for some, on their automobiles. (p. 75)

They point to ecofeminism and indigenous peoples’ cosmologies as examples of non-Anthropocentric imaginaries of care. The authors summarize this as “provisional ecology,” wherein

The Earth does not care as a whole qua a totality or unitary entity, but then we need to stop thinking of Earth in this way. Rather, as an inescapable involvement, an anarchic gathering of differently changing patterns, innumerable ways of creating and holding things together, composing, decomposing, recomposing, as that which lets something originate from itself, care certainly is among the Earth’s worldly provisions. (p. 103)

In sum, a new imaginary calls on us to reembed ourselves in the soil, water, and air; to be humble; and to use our unique capacities as humans to better address, and be addressed by, the living world.

Does the Earth Care? is very learned. With considerable authority, the authors lead readers through discussions of works by Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Richard Jeffries, James Lovelock, Charles Darwin, James Hutton, and Bruno Latour, among others. The book is really a long essay, one whose argument is high level and pithy rather than concrete and finely argued. This reflects the book series it is part of, the University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners,” which publishes “short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.” In this sense, it is akin to the recently published Ecocene Politics by Ta˘na˘sescu (2022). A digest of Does the Earth Care? can be found here for readers considering whether to buy this short book: https://www.gaian.systems/research/does-the-earth-care.

Much as I enjoyed this book, its brevity is its weakness as much as its strength. For instance, the authors do not take the time to explain whether and how their notion of provisional ecology differs from other recent calls to arms, such as that issued by Crist (2019) in her book Abundant Earth. Unlike some other analysts, the authors also do not dwell on whether there are important distinctions between the concepts of earth, planet, world, and globe (whereas the likes of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour do in recent works). Additionally, there is no explanation of how imaginaries alter—an especially important issue today given the global scale of the imaginative shift required. There are also complexities and paradoxes attaching to “care” that are not addressed (cf. Abrell 2021). Relatedly, although I understand the authors’ focus on care for strategic reasons, it felt like a stretch to reframe the idea to say that the Earth cares for us and others. Crist’s (2019) notion of abundance, allied with the notion of provision, is surely reason enough for us to rethink progressive worldviews.

Despite these reservations, Smith and Young’s book is a stimulating read. It offers nuggets of insight and wisdom throughout, weaving together geoscience and the posthumanities to paint on a large and vivid canvas. We certainly need creative thinking about the future well before we are in a position to enact major change to capitalist political economy. This book is part of that out-of-the-box imaginative project. It avoids doom-and-gloom dystopian thinking, insisting that ecomodernism, green capitalism, and the like will be wholly insufficient. As such, it marries strong critique with an element of hope.

This leads me to a final thought. In its early decades as a university discipline, Anglophone geography often took a planetary perspective, albeit one that we might rightly question with hindsight. These days, geographers are beginning to rediscover that perspective in a suitably twenty-first-century idiom—think of work by Nigel Clark (Lancaster University), Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary, London), and Simon Dalby (University of Victoria, Canada). At the same time, many geographers have committed to a more-than-human geography in various ways, as much recent research about animals demonstrates. That work is often local in focus, though, rather than tackling the so-called “derangements of scale” (Clark 2015) intrinsic to the Anthropocene. At the same time, the decentering of the human that is now evident in parts of the discipline is not matched elsewhere. There is arguably an Anthropocentrism (still) abroad in our knowledge practices of the kind that Smith and Young challenge (cf. Chaplin [2017], assessing the field of intellectual history). Given our current socioenvironmental context, what sort of “Earth writing” should geographers be engaging in? Should there be a greater sense of urgency—even crisis—that might help, through intellectual change, to drive real-world change? Is Geography’s present-day heterodoxy—an undisciplined discipline—serving to make it unfit to adapt to the extraordinary pressures of the age (cf. Leszczynski et al. 2022)?