Nature’s Imagination: Reveries of Connection and Persistence

Abstract

Nature’s imagination has been conceived in an allegorical or humanist fashion. This paper argues for a natural imagination in actuality as a radical counterpoint to status-quo concepts of sustainability. The self-hood of non-human beings and the necessity of connection in the natural world are addressed and related to a philosophy of becoming. This paper insists on a material semiotics constituted through the willful aspect and imaginative capacity of all life forms. Maintaining the primacy of relationship, terra-consciousness may provide an imaginative antidote to our all-too-human alienation from non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

Keywords

• nature’s imagination
• sustainability
• material semiotics
• symbiosis
• becoming
• onto-ecology
• ecosystems