The term “geophilosophy” is intended here in a nod both to Aldo Leopold’s idea of “Thinking like a mountain,” which I take as a provocation (what, or how, does a mountain think?) rather than a declaration of identity (“I’m the one who speaks for the mountain”) and, secondly, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ecophilosophizing. The latter can be found especially in A Thousand Plateaus and in the “Geophilosophy” chapter of their final work, What is Philosophy?. Mark Bonta and John Protevi provide a useful elaboration of Deleuze/Guattari’s views, while a growing number of other theorists draw from it in thinking about politics, society, and the human-nonhuman nexus.
More generally, geophilosophy is philosophy in and of the earth. To the extent that all our philosophizing, and all our culturing and politicking and religioning and art-making and languaging, emerges out of the effort to live with others in and on and with the earth, geophilosophy is everything, or at least the reflective and communicative part of everything. While much of that everything has heretofore (at least in recent times) been unconsciously geophilosophical, some of it is attempting to be conscious and reflective about it, and to get better at it.
The intent of this blog is to keep a finger on the pulse of at least some of the currents flowing in the direction of a better geophilosophy of living.