Earth ethics and creaturely cohabitation

Kelly Oliver

pp. 21-41

in: Dominik Ohrem, Roman Bartosch (eds), Beyond the human-animal divide, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In this chapter, Kelly Oliver develops an ethics of earth based on terraphilia, or loving the earth, that gives rise to connectedness beyond the autonomous moral subject, beyond humanism, and beyond recognition. Terraphilia is grounded on belonging to the earth as the home that we share with all living creatures. Oliver argues that this ethos of the earth can provide the grounds for a nontotalizing, nonhomogenizing earth ethics, if we can imagine a dynamic ethics based on the response-ability of biosociality and biodiversity rather than on universal moral principles that may close down the possibility of response. Oliver argues that earth ethics opens rather than closes the possibility of response and response-ability. In this way, earth ethics operates like Heidegger's poiesis or Derrida's poetic as if in order to open onto the alterity of earth rather than use it up in one totalizing worldview.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Derrida Jacques

Oliver Kelly