Earth

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EARTH

In science and philosophy earth (German Erde, Greek ge) can refer to one in a set of primordial material elements (earth, air, fire, and water, for the Greeks; wood, fire, earth, metal, water, for the Chinese) and to the physical body on which humankind lives. As physical home, the Earth serves as the reflective horizon or framework for human self-awareness and as a contingent unity among the array of individual entities they encounter. The Earth, defined by an elemental earthiness of rock and soil, is that which grounds the identity of humans in both physical and psychological senses, independent of wherever they may venture in information networks or outer space, while serving as a fund of resources available for exploitation. The tensions between these various approaches are imaged in the diagrammatic icon of the atom and the photo of the blue planet taken from space: matter that is mostly space and a life-giving sphere that appears more water than rock and calls perhaps for technological management.

Earth Science and Engineering

As soil and matter, earth has become a distinctive object for science and technology. The material out of which all things are made has itself become subject to chemical processing, synthesis, and nuclear engineering. The scientific study of matter existing independent of humans has expanded to examining those new forms of matter intentionally and unintentionally designed by humans and the interactions between the two, especially insofar as they may impact on humans themselves. As a planet the Earth is a body in space with a stable orbit at a distance from the sun suitable for the origin and evolution of life. During its 4.56 billion years the Earth has given rise to an abundance of organisms, first in the sea, and then diversifying and evolving to occupy land and air. As recipient of heat energy from both the sun and its own core, the Earth is a site of dynamic terrestrial behavior. The seven major tectonic plates comprising its rocky outer crust diverge and then compensate through convergence; its land masses, ocean basins, islands, and other prominent features such as volcanoes, mountains, plains, and valleys have gone through continual development—producing new materials essential of life and humans. Hominids appeared on the Earth 7 million years ago and Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago. Humans began to till the Earth about 10,000 years ago.

This early-twenty-first-century perspective on earth and the Earth sees them as dynamic complexities inviting examination and provoking manipulation. Especially with regard to the Earth, it is now perceived as a nexus of interactions between the solar system and its own atomic and subatomic foundations, as well as of exchanges between its own landmasses, oceans, atmosphere, and living organisms. Through earth system science these have in turn become, because of human technological powers and their commercial development, also subject to speculative engineering management. Earth system science is complemented by the possibilities of earth systems engineering and thus challenged to reflect ethically on both ends and means.

Philosophies of the Earth

The Earth has throughout human history been a focus of philosophizing, central to ethics, and a framework for self-understanding. For the Greeks, the Earth was implicated in their cosmology not only as planet and home of humanity, as focus of the gods who lived above its plane, and in relation to the heavens; its core constituent, earth, was also one of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. The Earth itself was a compound of the four elements. For the Chinese, the earth and heaven are the two forces responsible for engineering and completing nature and all its aspects. Earth and heaven also work together to create the five Chinese elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. As an element, the Earth is located at the center and is the cauldron, with the other four elements located in the four outer directions, east, west, north and south. Earth is also the element of the "naked" animal, the human, of the actions is representative of "thought." The element earth is also associated with the sense of touch, the sound of singing, the organ of the spleen, and the virtue of good faith. There have been two related controversies about the place of the Earth within cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical visions: whether the Earth is the center of a given scheme of existence or is only an element in a vaster cosmos, and whether the earth is a site of corruption at a distance from a purer realm or is a unique locus of corporeal and spiritual development.

Plato approaches both issues in his atypical dialogue, the Timaeus. He describes an original Demiurge who takes the elements of earth, fire, air, and water and "out of such elements which are four in number, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship; and having been reconciled to itself, it was indissoluble by the hand of any other than the framer" (33, c). This picture of the Earth as a model of balance, harmony, and fairness is complemented by a world soul infusing the world with a vitality and rationality of fair proportion: "The world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of god" (30, c). The Earth as an entity in the cosmos is described as located at the center and surrounded by the moon, the sun, and five planets in circular orbits. This picture from the Timaeus is opposed by another from the Phaedo. There Plato writes of the "earth and the stones and all the places [as] corrupted and corroded, as things in the sea are by brine so that nothing worth mention grows in the sea, and there is nothing perfect there, one might say, but caves and sand and infinite mud and slime wherever there is any earth, things worth nothing" (110, b). He condemns the passions and senses for "nailing" people to the Earth that, by its attractive power, can "drunkenly" estrange human souls from their true home in the aether beyond (83, d). His emphasis on the immaterial nature of the soul and its kinship with the intelligible structure underlying reality leads to a condemnation of the earthly as tempting snare.

Aristotle, by contrast, observes the Earth and catalogues its differences in beings—animate and inanimate—embracing "the delight we take in our senses," especially the sense of sight as indicating that "this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things" (980, a). His vision of the Earth as a nexus of beings defined by their for sake of which—their purpose as fully actualized—working in concert with other beings' drive to actualization, renders a grandeur to the dynamism and wholeness of the Earth and the totality of its excellences fully realized. His cosmological vision in On the Heavens further emphasizes this foundation status because "the earth does not move and does not lie elsewhere than at the center." Aristotle's placing of the Earth at the center of the cosmos around which the sphere of the fixed stars daily rotates, carrying with it the spheres of the sun, moon, and planets, is the authority cited by Ptolemy (85–165 c.e.) in working out his plan of the Earth in relation to the heavens.

The shift in perspective known as the Copernican Revolution began when the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) wrote his Little Commentary (1514). He argued that there was no one center to the universe, the Earth's center is not the center of the universe, the rotation of the Earth accounts for the apparent daily rotation of the stars, and the Earth revolves in a vast space. These ideas helped inaugurate the thinking that Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) would confirm a century later. This philosophy not only displaced the Earth from its central position in religious cosmologies, but made the planet itself into a composite of more basic materials to be analyzed and manipulated.

The Cartesian method of analysis led several European scientists in the 1860s to articulate how the basic constituents of all chemical compounds could be broken down into their simplest components. These elements, as measured and compared by their atomic weight, were arrayed in a chart, the periodic table, that both presented them sequentially (giving them an atomic number based on their atomic mass) and grouped them according to their electron configuration, which gives them similar chemical behavior such as the group of inert gases or that of alkali metals, for example. The table as presented in 1869 by the Russian chemist Dmitrii I. Mendeleev is still used with little revision other than filling in spaces left blank for predicted new elements.

Earths and Ethics

The approach to earth as a composite or collection of discrete units has informed one dominant modern philosophical perspective. Seen in terms of external relations among material constituents, this perspective tends toward a utilitarian approach to ethical problems. If the greatest number of people benefit from some alteration or use of an environment, or if some part of the environment which occurs naturally can be functionally replaced through technological advance, then utilitarianism allows for these alterations of the earth, even if they might involve a diminution in its diversity or degradations in its ecological viability. This approach has nevertheless promoted the rights of excluded social groups in arguments for environmental justice, as well as suggested that animals have rights as part of the earth (Singer 1990).

A contrasting philosophical perspective contends that the Earth has a distinct holistic identity, perhaps inseparably intertwined with the collective identity of humanity. Explorations of this option often rely on James Lovelock's Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), in which he posited the Earth is an evolving, self-regulating organism. In this view, the planet through its temperature, gaseous constituents, minerals, acidity, and many other factors maintains a homeostasis by active feedback processes operating in the biota. Other philosophical views, while not seeing the planet itself as a living being, do envision human identity as internally related to aspects of the earth in such a way that these relationships themselves constitute the identity of both, such as in the work of Arne Ness, Dave Abram, Glen Mazis, or Freya Matthews. From such a perspective a utilitarian ethics fails to adequately safeguard either the Earth or humanity and all those parts of the biosphere due respect for their intrinsic work.

Returning to the question of the Earth as the horizon for humanity's sense of meaning and purpose, one path in philosophy is that first proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) and its claim that the nihilism of modern culture can only be undercut by a reevaluation of values and a reidentification of humanity as no disembodied spirit but as an animal of passion, body, sensuality, and reason—whose greatest challenge is to create value and meaning while obeying the injunction to "remain faithful to the earth." Edmund Husserl called the Earth the foundation [Boden] of the sense of being human and likened the planet to an ark that would always be with humanity as its abiding sense of identity no matter where humanity ventured.

For Martin Heidegger, humans open up a horizon for meaning and purpose through the way that art and other institutions open "the strife between earth and world," as he articulated in "the Origin of the Work of Art." The artist, like other creators, must initiate a dynamic struggle between the context of meaning and value, which makes up the "world" of various epochs and cultures with the opacity and resistance of the sheer materiality of the earth. The earth both anchors and occludes this birth of meaning, so it is literally "grounded" and yet never fully fathomable, but suggestive. In his analysis of the elements fire, water, air, and earth, Gaston Bachelard saw the Earth as the dimension which gives humanity a rootedness, and a sense of infinite depth, as well as a resistance against which meaning is forged in action. The resistance of the earth is the "partner of the will." Humans are motivated to create and shape in response to the earth. Differing visions and temperaments respond to the continuum of earth in its span from hardness to softness. Humanity is motivated to forge the earth into creations as well as struggle against earth's gravity towards flight.

Increasingly, too, there is a growing interchange of Western philosophy with global philosophical perspectives that suggests the inseparability of humanity and earth. These ideas include the Buddhist emphasis on the ontological interdependence of all living and nonliving beings expressed through the concept of "emptiness," which might be better evoked as the relativity among all beings, as well as the depiction of the Buddha's original inspiration to seek enlightenment after shedding tears at seeing the worms and insects cut up by the plows making furrows in the fields with the same grief he would have had for the death of his family. There is the Daoist sense of nonacting [Wu wei] in which the beings of the Earth act through humans or as the Way [Dao] itself is the dynamic interplay of the entities of the Earth—"the ten thousand things"—as well as the Earth itself as a larger field of energy. Within North America, there is the Native American sense that all beings are part of Mother Earth or the Great Spirit, living on turtle island, the community of two-legged, four-legged, and all other beings of the four directions.

A challenge ahead is whether these philosophical perspectives can integrated with earth system science and engineering at the micro and macro scales in which they are now being practiced in order to give some basis for ethical decision making and a coherent perspective.

GLEN A. MAZIS