Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Harvey, is concerned with “taking seriously the intimations that the term 'person' ap-
plies not only to humans and human-like beings . . . but to a far wider community”, and
with asking how we are to treat or act toward such persons. Native peoples around the
world are our best teachers in this regard. A particularly accessible example comes from
the insights that anthropologist Irving Hallowell gleaned whilst living with the Ojib-
we people of southern central Canada, who speak of 'bird people', 'bear people' and
even, occasionally, 'rock people', because these are for them all subjects embedded in
a wider world of complex participatory relationships. For Hillman there is an intimate
connection between personifying and loving. In his words: “Loving is a way of know-
ing, and for loving to know it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing,
especially knowing what is in the invisible, hidden in the heart”. In science, Descartes'
fundamental division between living human subjects and dead external objects has seen
to it that personifying (and the loving that accompanies it) are considered nothing more
than mere projection and 'fantasy'. But today we can now realize that it was Descartes
who was projecting, and that his fundamental division of mind from matter was itself a
great fantasy—a chimera that we need only dissolve in order to find our true home in
the great psyche of the world.
If you have been trained, as I have been, to see the world as a machine and to see
yourself as not much more than a thinking, emotionally detached data-collecting robot,
then to personify the world in this way takes a great deal of courage. As I wrote this
topic, the unspoken scientific taboo against speaking of the world as a psyche exerted
its influence on me and tried its best to make me write nothing more than straightfor-
ward popular science. A strange vulnerability, an insecurity, sometimes plagued me as
I attempted to speak of the Earth and of the living beings that inhabit her not merely as
objects, but as subjects, as feelingful beings, but in the end a still, small voice persuaded
me of the urgency of the task. In quiet moments in my study, or outdoors, this deeper
voice convinced me that the prospects are bleak unless we can once again relate to the
Earth not as a thing or as a machine, but as a strange creature that improvises its own
unfolding in the cosmos through the ongoing creativity of evolution and self-transform-
ation. As you notice the tension between these different voices, I ask you to remember
the difficulty of the task and to consider yourself a conspirator in the effort to find a new
language for breathing life back into our experience of the Earth, who for the last 400
years has been treated as if she were a dead lump of rock with a few insignificant and
rather irksome life forms and traditional cultures clinging to her ragged surface. And
now the title of this topic reveals its double meaning, for 'animate' is both an adjective
and a verb. The adjective tells us that the Earth is animate—
alive
; the verb urges us to
find ways of speaking and acting that allow us to consciously re-animate the Earth so
that we bring her back to life as a sensitive and sentient Being—even, if you will, as a
