Exploring Earthiness

This book is a gift to all who are concerned about global warming, climate change, poisonous living environments, and the growing disparity between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Completed when Hurricane Sandy had wreaked havoc on the Northeast seaboard of the United States, this book is a timely wake-up call to all the inhabitents of our shared Earth.With clarity and rigor, Anne Primavesi traces the root causes of human beings' alienation from the earth and offers a new image of Earthiness as Oneness, defining it as a material, shared global state of being alive; with all life being supported by planetary resources held in common.Primavesi takes us on a journey through the desanctification of the land, the disdain of the earth, and the adoption of a utilitarian attitude toward nature and its resources in the West. She analyzes the dualism in the philosophical ideas of Plato and Descartes, the statements about property and ownership in Locke's works on government, and the ascendancy of technical rationality since the Enlightenment. She challenges the domination of mind over body, human beings over nature, and reason over all other faculties. The result of this domination is a downward spiral in which the resourceful earth has become something to be exploited, colonized, and conquered for profits and human greed.