Category: Ecology

An Ecology of Ecclesiastes

You can stand on the bank at Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg and watch water become air, the vapor lifting where the current slows over rocks, thinning as the light strengthens, and then gone quickly in a hot July morning. The ancient Hebrew has a term for what the eye is doing there. It’s the word the book we have mistranslated for four centuries sets at its own head, הֶבֶל, hevel, meaning something like “breath” or “vapor.” The mist that stands off the warm water on a cool morning and then is nowhere at all.

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains for ever.

Lots of us hear it in sermons, slogans, or rhetoric as “vanity.” הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים, havel havalim, “vanity of vanities” is the superlative that the King James built into a commentary itself on the worth of our world. The whole book of Ecclesiastes has come down to us under that supposition, as though its author, קֹהֶלֶת, Qoheleth, had surveyed the creation and pronounced it worthless.

However, hevel isn’t a moral judgment but more of a perceptual term. Before it can be made to mean emptiness, it means the fog you saw over the water on a cool July morning before the heat of the day sets in, the visible brevity of a form that holds its shape for a span and then disperses. Qoheleth here isn’t condemning the world as vain or worthless, but is describing what it is to be a creature inside time (which sounds like a Bob Dylan album title).

This is why the book belongs to ecology and has been left, mostly, on the devotional shelf of the rarely used church library or used sparingly by a pastor in a funeral sermon when they really weren’t familiar with the recently deceased. Its opening chapter is a phenomenology of return so interesting that I don’t know a better one outside of Henri Bergson’s work.

The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south,
and goes round to the north;
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.

The sun rises, and the sun goes to its place and rises there again (also one of my favorite books is The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway… I know we’re not supposed to like him these days, but I’m a massive Hemingway fan still). The wind turns to the south, then to the north, and comes back around on its circuits.

All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they continue to flow.

And then the line that any of us who have stood in a river already know in the body: כָּל־הַנְּחָלִים הֹלְכִים אֶל־הַיָּם, all the streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full; to the place where they flow, they flow again. Sounds a good bit like Heraclitus’ (maybe… probably wasn’t him despite what Plato says) famous quip. Qoheleth is watching the water cycle (or “watching the wheels go round and round” to invoke Lennon in his prosaic phenomenology). They are watching the same water pass a fixed point and understanding that it is both the same and never the same, that the water I stood beside this morning is already in motion toward the Pacolet, a body of water (funny how we term that), the Fork will never carry past me again.

The philosophical name for what he sees is duration, and the ecological consequence of it sits one verse above the cycles, at the hinge of the whole passage: דּוֹר הֹלֵךְ וְדוֹר בָּא וְהָאָרֶץ לְעוֹלָם עֹמָדֶת. A generation goes, and a generation comes, and the Earth stands forever. Read often as a complaint, this is the futility of human labor against an indifferent world. However, read as observation, which is how I think Qoheleth means it here, it’s the exact structure of ecological perception.

The question Ecclesiastes is asking (and the question I have been reading toward all summer in Deleuze, Ruyer, Bergson, Stein, and Aristotle) is whether the return is the same thing coming back to mock us, or the world coming back in fidelity. Qoheleth answers with the ground. The generations that perceive the Earth are hevel, breath-brief, each one lifting off the surface and thinning into the light. The Earth, as well as The Dude, abides. What looks from inside a single lifespan like futility is, from the standpoint of the ground itself, faithfulness. The return is the world keeping faith, while those who watch it pass through do so.

And here the book touches the argument I have been pursuing this hot summer. A creature is hevel because its form is held in act only for a span. The black walnut in our backyard isn’t vapor because it’s worthless. It’s vapor because the shape it holds, the leafing, the fruiting, the whole standing fact of it against the July sky, is an act, ἐνέργεια, a being-at-work that the tree performs and cannot suspend, and every act of that kind is spent in the performing.

Aristotle’s word for the form fully realized, ἐντελέχεια, carries its own ending inside it, τέλος (telos or “end”), the completion toward which the walnut is always and only underway. To see the tree truly is to see it breathing out. Raymond Ruyer would say the tree is present to itself in that act, a self-survey with no observer standing over it, and that self-presence is real for exactly as long as the form lasts and not one morning longer. I think this is what Qoheleth saw and what later editors, scribes, and translators (later translators, some with theological or colonial agendas of their own) couldn’t forgive him for seeing. Creaturely form is breath. To be is to be spent.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

The translators who could forgive it were the legendary seventy who carried the book into Greek with the compilation of the Septuagint (from the term “seventy”… interesting story there for another time). When they came to hevel in the Hebrew, they went with ματαιότης, mataiotēs, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων in Greek at the start of the book. A couple of centuries later, Paul, writing to an assembly of Christ followers in Rome about the whole groaning creation, uses that term once and pretty decisively: τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα. For the creation was subjected to mataiotēs, to futility, to hevel, not willingly.

The “vaporousness” Qoheleth observes in Ecclesiastes from inside the water cycle is the same condition Paul says the entire κτίσις, the whole made order, has been placed under and groans to be delivered from. The two books use the same word across hundreds of years and a change of language. What Ecclesiastes sees, Romans delivers, I think.

Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.

There is one more incredibly interesting place that word hevel has been used. The second son born into the world is named הֶבֶל, Hevel, Abel, the breath, and he is the first of us to die, his life cut off in a field and his blood crying out from the אֲדָמָה, the ground, the very Earth that Qoheleth says stands forever. The first death/murder in scripture is named Vapor, and the Earth that abides is the Earth that received him. I can’t write the word hevel over a Piedmont morning without hearing that the brevity of every creature and the murder of the innocent are, in Hebrew, one syllable. This is the weight the Septuagint carried into Paul’s single word, and why the groan in Romans 8 isn’t meant as despair. Creation subjected to hevel is creation that holds Abel’s blood in the ground and the whole spent, breathing, dying order of things that the Cross gathers up.

Gathers is the right verb here, because it is Qoheleth’s own. The name means the one who assembles, from קהל, the gathering of the people, which the Greek made Ἐκκλησιαστής and the English Ecclesia (a favorite term of startup churches and themed Sunday schools), the speaker to the ἐκκλησία, the called-out assembly. The Preacher is the Gatherer, the one who collects the scattered breath of things into a single seeing. And the Cross is where that gathering is completed.

On the Cross, the form fully in act, Aristotle’s ἐντελέχεια, or completed work, of a human life, is spent completely and in the open, breath given out and taken up. My dissertation work, The Ecology of the Cross, has always meant, for me, that Christ enters hevel to its floor. He becomes the vapor over the water, the generation that goes, the brother in the field, and from inside that spending he makes the return faithfulness where it had been futility. The streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full, and they flow again. The Earth stands forever. And the breath that lifts off the Fork on a July morning, gone quickly, isn’t lost. Rather, it’s gathered.

Tomorrow, the vapor will still be lifting where the current slows. I’ve stood on that bank enough days to know it will do the same tomorrow and that I won’t. הֶבֶל, hevel. It is the truest thing Ecclesiastes, or perhaps the entire Bible, says about me, and standing there or under the black walnut, I don’t hear that as a verdict. I hear it as the sound the world makes, keeping faith.

I’m drawing on Ecclesiastes 1 (the hevel refrain and the cycles of sun, wind, and water), Genesis 4 (Abel, and the blood crying from the ground), and Romans 8:20–22 (the creation subjected to futility). The Greek terms come from the Septuagint of Ecclesiastes and Paul’s letter to Rome. Passages cited are from Oremus (in the NRSV).

A Life in Act: Edith Stein and the Education of Attention

Edith in Breslau from Wikitree

A photograph of Edith Stein, taken around 1920, has become very meaningful to me. She’s not a Catholic, a Carmelite, or the woman the Church will canonize as Teresia Benedicta a Cruce. She’s a philosopher in her late twenties who has already written the most careful phenomenological study of empathy, who has already been told, in ways both polite and structural, that the university has no chair for her. Her gaze in the photograph is level and unhurried. It’s the gaze of someone who has learned to look at things until they give themselves up, which is, in the end, what phenomenology asked of its practitioners and what very few of them managed. I’ve spent the better part of the last few years learning to look at a black walnut tree in my backyard with something like that patience, and I have come to believe that the discipline Stein practiced in Göttingen seminar rooms and the discipline I attempt under Piedmont shade are the same discipline, differently housed. This essay is an attempt to say why her life and her work have come to sit so near the center of my own, and to trace the company she kept along the way, because Stein is unintelligible apart from her conversations… with Husserl, with Reinach, with Scheler, with Conrad-Martius, with Aquinas across seven centuries, with Teresa of Ávila across four, and finally with John of the Cross in a Dutch monastery as the trains began to move.

Breslau

Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau, then a German city in Prussian Silesia, now the Polish city of Wrocław. The date was important to her mother and came to matter to Edith, as it was Yom Kippur that year, the Day of Atonement, and Auguste Stein always regarded her youngest child’s birth on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar as a kind of sign.[1] She was the youngest of eleven children, seven of whom survived. Her father, Siegfried, died of heatstroke on a business trip before Edith was two, and Auguste took over the family lumber business and ran it with the shrewdness and iron piety that Edith would later describe, with unmistakable love, in the memoir she wrote to preserve the texture of German Jewish life against the caricatures then hardening around it.[2] That memoir, Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie, is worth including here because it establishes something about Stein that her philosophical reputation can obscure: she was a writer of place and household, of lumber yards and holiday tables and the particular smell of her mother’s ledgers. When she set out, in 1933, to answer Nazi propaganda, she did not write a treatise. She wrote down what her family’s life had actually been like, trusting description over argument. Anyone who has tried to write about a home place under threat recognizes the move. Perception first; the ethics arrives through the seeing.

That piety, however, did not last. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen, by her own account, she deliberately stopped praying.[3] She would describe her adolescent and university self as an atheist, though a restless one, a young woman who had traded the God of her mother for what she called the search for truth, without yet suspecting that the two searches might converge. She began her studies at the University of Breslau in psychology under William Stern, and found the discipline, then in its experimental adolescence, unable to say what a psyche even was. Somewhere in those years she read Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, and the effect was the one Husserl’s early readers so often report: here was a philosophy that did not begin from theories about consciousness but from consciousness itself, patiently described, its structures allowed to show themselves. In 1913 she moved to Göttingen to study with Husserl directly. She was twenty-one.

Göttingen

The Göttingen that received her was one of the strangest and most fertile philosophical communities of the century. Husserl held court, working his way toward the transcendental turn of Ideen that would eventually estrange him from many of his best students. Adolf Reinach, Husserl’s brilliant assistant, taught the newcomers what phenomenology actually meant in practice; Stein always said it was Reinach, more than Husserl, who taught her to work.[4] Max Scheler moved through the area periodically, lecturing on sympathy, value, and, increasingly, on Catholic religious experience with the enthusiasm of a man in the middle of one of his several conversions. Stein later credited Scheler with removing her rationalist blinders: he did not persuade her of anything, but he made the world of faith visible to her as a world, a region of experience that a phenomenologist had no right to dismiss unexamined.[5] Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a few years ahead of Stein and already doing the realist ontology of nature that would occupy her whole career, became a close friend, and her farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern would later become the site of the decisive night of Stein’s life. The Göttingen circle believed, against the master’s developing idealism, that phenomenology’s slogan, zu den Sachen selbst, to the things themselves, meant the things were really there. Stein evidently belonged to that realist wing from the beginning, and the conviction that essences are discovered rather than constituted never left her. It is the thread that leads, twenty years later, to Aquinas.

Husserl assigned her a dissertation topic that he had left as a gap in his own work: empathy, Einfühlung, the act by which one consciousness apprehends the experience of another. World War I interrupted her dissertation work, and Stein left her studies in 1915 to serve as a Red Cross nursing aide in a lazaretto for infectious disease at Mährisch-Weißkirchen, tending Austrian soldiers with typhus and cholera, an experience of bodies in extremity that marks the dissertation on every page.[6] She completed the doctorate under Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, summa cum laude, and Zum Problem der Einfühlung was published the following year.[7]

The publication is the hinge of everything I take from her. Stein argues that empathy is a sui generis form of intentionality. It is neither inference by analogy, as if I reasoned my way from your grimace to your pain, nor a merging of selves, as the popular use of the word suggests. It is a direct, though non-primordial, givenness of foreign experience: I perceive your joy in your face the way I perceive the tree in its bark and leaf-flutter, immediately, though your joy is given to me as yours and never becomes mine. The other is disclosed as a living body, a Leib rather than a mere Körper, a center of orientation and sensation that I apprehend from outside while acknowledging an inside I can never occupy. And Stein presses the analysis beyond the human: the perception of livingness, of sensate and striving interiority, extends in her account toward the animal, and the question of how far down the ladder of life such apprehension reaches is left standing in the text like an open door.[8] I walked through that door years ago and have not come back. What I have termed ecological intentionality in my dissertation work is, at its root, an attempt to ask Stein’s question at the scale of a watershed on an ecological basis: what would it mean to say that Lawson’s Fork, or the black walnut, or the shoal that remembers its shad runs, is given to consciousness as living, as an interiority I apprehend without occupying? Stein supplies the rigor that keeps such a question from dissolving into sentimentality. Empathy, on her account, is a form of perception with its own evidence, its own fulfillments and disappointments, its own discipline. It can be practiced. It can be trained. It is, in the strict sense, an education of attention, and everything I write under the sign of the Ecology of the Cross begins from her demonstration that such an education is philosophically respectable.

The Assistant

From 1916 to 1918 Stein served as Husserl’s private assistant at Freiburg, a role that consisted largely of imposing order on the master’s mountain of shorthand manuscripts. She organized and substantially edited the materials that became Ideen II, Husserl’s great unfinished study of the constitution of nature, animal life, and spirit, and scholars have increasingly recognized how much of that volume’s architecture bears her hand.[9] It is one of the quiet ironies of the tradition that the phenomenology of the living body which Merleau-Ponty would inherit and transfigure came to him partly through pages Stein arranged. When I set Stein and Merleau-Ponty side by side in my own chapters, I am in some measure reuniting a text with its editor.

She attempted to habilitate, the German qualification for a professorship, and was refused. Göttingen would not consider a woman; Freiburg deferred, and her 1919 petition to the Prussian ministry helped prompt a 1920 circular declaring that sex should be no bar to habilitation. This ruling came too late to help her and stands as one of those bureaucratic monuments built on a particular person’s closed door.[10] She wrote Potenz und Akt in 1931 as a final habilitation attempt, and it too went nowhere institutionally with publishers or her correspondence network. The academy’s loss is difficult to overstate. I read it as the historical condition of her freedom. Denied the academic chair, she was spared the chair’s constraints, and the work that followed, the Aquinas translations, the Münster lectures, the Carmelite metaphysics, has an amplitude that the Ordinarius system of her day rarely produced.

The Spiritual Turn

Stein’s conversion has been told so often that it risks falling into legend, and the legend flattens what the record shows: a convergence of encounters over roughly four years, each one phenomenologically dense. The first was Anna Reinach. Adolf Reinach died in Flanders in November 1917, and Stein went to Göttingen expecting to console a broken widow and to help sort his papers. She found instead a woman held upright by the Cross, grieving fully and yet somehow already handing her grief over, and Stein said late in her life that this was the moment her unbelief collapsed… her first meeting, as she put it, with the Cross and its divine power, borne by someone who carried it.[11] Notice what kind of evidence this is. Rather than an argument, it’s a perception of another’s interiority, an act of Einfühlung, and what Stein perceived in Anna Reinach was a real power operating in a real soul. Her own dissertation had prepared her to trust this sort of givenness. The philosopher of empathy was converted through an empathic perception; the system, so to speak, executed on its author.

The second encounter came in the summer of 1921 at the Conrad-Martius farmhouse in Bad Bergzabern. Left alone one evening, Stein took a book at random from the shelf, the autobiography of Teresa of Ávila, and read it through the night. She closed it at dawn and said to herself, das ist die Wahrheit, that is the truth.[12] Teresa’s Life moves beyond the genre of apologetics. Instead, it’s a first-person description of an interior itinerary, the most sustained piece of phenomenology of prayer the sixteenth century produced, and Stein read it as a phenomenologist reads a protocol: here is a report of experience, coherent, differentiated, bearing its own evidence. She was baptized on January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s in Bad Bergzabern, with Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a Protestant, standing as her godmother, an ecumenical detail I hold onto for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows my own churchly arrangements.[13] Her mother wept when told. Edith knelt beside her in the synagogue afterward and prayed the psalms; she never regarded her baptism as a departure from the people of Israel, and everything that followed, to the very end, confirms that she was genuine in that belief.

She wished to enter Carmel immediately. Her spiritual advisors, sensibly, said no. Her mother’s grief was fresh, and her gifts were needed in the world. So from 1923 to 1931 she taught German language and literature at St. Magdalena’s, the Dominican sisters’ teacher-training school in Speyer, living semi-monastically, teaching adolescent girls by day and working through the nights on the project her Jesuit director Erich Przywara set before her: a German translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritate.[14] Przywara, whose Analogia Entis was taking shape in those same years, understood that the phenomenological school and the Thomist revival needed each other, and he engineered the meeting inside one mind. Stein’s Aquinas is a working philosopher’s Aquinas, rendered into the vocabulary of the phenomenologists so that the two traditions could actually converse, and her 1929 contribution to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift, a staged dialogue comparing Husserl’s phenomenology with the philosophy of St. Thomas, remains one of the great short documents of twentieth-century thought. The student, with perfect filial respect, informing the master that intentionality does not itself settle the question of being.[15]

Here’s where Stein’s biography enters my comprehensive exams. Husserl held that essence, Wesen, could be described in bracketed independence from existence; the epoché suspends the question of being precisely so the structures of givenness can appear. Stein came to hold, with Thomas, that the analysis cannot rest there, because essence in a finite being does not carry its own act of existing. What a thing is and that it is are really distinct in creatures, and the distinction opens finite being toward the One in whom essence and existence coincide. In the terms Aristotle bequeathed to both of them, δύναμις (dynamis, potency) is intelligible only from ἐνέργεια (energeia, actuality), and the ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia) of a living form, its being-at-work-staying-itself, is prior to every capacity it grounds.[16] Stein worked this out first in Potenz und Akt (Potency and Act) and then, in the Cologne Carmel, expanded it into her masterwork, Endliches und ewiges Sein, Finite and Eternal Being. This was an attempt, as she framed it, at an ascent to the meaning of being with phenomenology and Thomas as the two guides.[17] My present argument about ecological normativity, that the self-maintaining organism can bear normative weight only as form-in-act and not as bare autopoietic process, is Stein’s argument against Husserl transposed into the philosophy of the organism. Potency cannot norm itself. The criterion arrives with act. I found the lever in her, and I keep finding that when I press on Bergson or Ruyer or the autopoiesis literature, the argument in the material is wherever Stein has already been standing.

Münster, the Letter, and Carmel

In 1932 Stein was appointed lecturer at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, where she lectured on the structure of the human person and on the education and vocations of women, essays that anticipate, with a calm that now reads as courage, arguments about the full intellectual dignity of women that the Church would take another half century to begin catching up with.[18] The appointment lasted a year. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 1933, ended the teaching career of every German academic of Jewish descent, and Stein, seeing with terrible clarity what was coming, wrote directly to Pope Pius XI, asking the Church to speak publicly against the persecution of the Jews, warning that silence would be purchased at the price of complicity. The letter received a routine acknowledgment. It was sealed in the Vatican archives until 2003.[19] I don’t know a sharper parable of institutional religion in the modern era, and I say that as an ordained minister who loves the institution enough to keep writing it letters.

The closed doors had, by then, become a sort of corridor. In October 1933 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Cologne, and at her clothing in April 1934 took the name she had, in a sense, been carrying since Anna Reinach’s parlor: Teresia Benedicta a Cruce, Teresa Blessed by the Cross.[20] Her superiors, to their lasting credit, ordered her to keep writing. In the cell in Cologne she finished Endliches und ewiges Sein, whose publication was blocked because its author was, in the new legal fiction, non-Aryan. After the November pogrom of 1938 her presence endangered the Cologne community, and on New Year’s Eve she was driven across the border to the Carmel in Echt, in the Dutch Limburg. Her sister Rosa, herself by then a Catholic, joined her there as a portress. In Echt, at her superiors’ request, she began a study of John of the Cross for the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth: Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross, a phenomenology of the dark night in which the mystic’s itinerary of dispossession is read as the form of the soul’s conformation to Christ crucified.[21] The manuscript’s final pages were on her desk, unfinished, on the second of August, 1942.

The Dutch Catholic bishops had, the previous Sunday, read from every pulpit a pastoral letter publicly condemning the deportations of the Jews. The occupation’s reprisal was precise: the arrest of all Catholic Jews in the Netherlands, the converts, the ones the Church had claimed as her own. Stein and Rosa were taken from the Echt Carmel that afternoon. Witnesses in the transit camps at Amersfoort and Westerbork describe her moving among the distraught mothers, washing children, combing hair, a Leib among Leiber, doing what she had done in the typhus wards of 1915.[22] Her reported words to Rosa at the moment of arrest were, come, we are going for our people.[23] The transport reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on August 9, 1942, and she was killed in the gas chambers that day, with Rosa, among the people of her birth, under the sign of the name she had chosen. The Church beatified her in Cologne in 1987, canonized her on October 11, 1998, under Pope John Paul II, and named her, a year later, co-patroness of Europe, a Jewish philosopher standing in the calendar beside Benedict and Bridget and Catherine, which is either an astonishing act of ecclesial repentance or the beginning of one.[24]

Why She Holds Me

Stein instructs me at four depths, and the deepest is the one hardest to write about.

First, she gives me the philosophical warrant for the kind of attention my work depends on. Einfühlung, in her strict sense, is the perceptual act in which foreign interiority is given without being possessed, and her analysis is the strongest available foundation for what I have been calling ecological intentionality: the claim that creatures, watersheds, and living places can be apprehended as centers of striving and sensation, that such apprehension is perception rather than projection, and that it carries evidence and admits of discipline. When I stand under the black walnut in early May and register its leafing-out as an act it is performing rather than an event merely occurring, I am doing something Stein described in 1916, and her rigor is what lets me distinguish that perception from wishfulness. The tree is given as living. The givenness can be interrogated. That is her gift, and it is why perception precedes ethics in everything I write. She showed that the seeing itself, done honestly, already carries the claim.

Second, she models the route from phenomenology to ontology that my dissertation attempts to walk. Description was never enough for her, because the described essence kept raising the question of its own act of being, and she followed the question all the way to the real distinction and to the God in whom essence and existence are one. The organism that grounds ecological normativity in my work does so only as form-in-act, ἐντελέχεια, and I learned to make that argument from her long negotiation between Husserl and Thomas. She teaches that fidelity to the phenomena eventually requires metaphysics, and that the metaphysics must be earned, page by patient page, never imported.

Third, there is the Cross. My theological work gathers under the phrase the Ecology of the Cross, and I owe the grammar of that phrase to her Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross. Stein read John of the Cross’s dark night as a science (not in our current objective-minded understanding of what that term implies), a structured knowledge of dispossession, the soul unmade in its attachments so that it may be conformed to the crucified and rising Christ. Paul writes in Philippians that Christ ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν, emptied himself (the verb is κενόω; the noun tradition drew from it is κένωσις or kenosis), and Stein’s insight, the one I have carried into ecological territory, is that this self-emptying is a pattern legible in the structure of creaturely existence itself.[25] The fallow field, the leaf abscission of October, the flood that unmakes a channel so the channel can live, the whole creation that Paul says συστενάζει, groans together (Romans 8:22, from συστενάζω), in the futility, ματαιότης, to which it was subjected in hope: these are, I have come to believe, the science of the cross written in the book of “nature,” and Stein is the one who taught me that such a science could be rigorous.[26] She also, in the manner of her death, finished the teaching. The last thing she wrote was a phenomenology of dispossession, and the last thing she did was undergo one, freely construing it as an offering for her people. The work and the life close like two halves of a hinge on a door that swings open.

Fourth, and least articulable: she shows me that a life does not have to choose between the seminar room and the sanctuary, between the archive and the prayer bench, between the people of one’s birth and the faith of one’s conviction. Every institution she approached partially refused her… the university for her gender, the Reich for her blood, and even the Church, in her lifetime, gave her petition a form letter. She responded to each refusal by going deeper rather than elsewhere, and the depth turned out to be where the work was. I teach Sunday school in a Presbyterian church as a Baptist minister while writing a dissertation at an institute in California on phenomenology, trees, and mycorrhizal networks, and there are days when the arrangement feels less like a vocation than a filing error. Stein is the figure I consult on those days. Her life argues that the integrations the institutions cannot imagine are exactly the ones a person can live, provided the person is willing to let attention, rather than ambition, set the itinerary. She looked at things until they gave themselves up. Then she let herself be given. The order of those two sentences is, I think, the whole lesson from her work and life and faith, and I am still early in learning it, out under the walnut, where the light comes down through the leaves the way it must have come down through the grille at Echt, ordinary and unrepeatable, asking only to be seen.

Notes

[1] Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), 71–72. Stein records her mother’s attachment to the Yom Kippur birth in the memoir’s opening chapters.

[2] Stein began Aus dem Leben einer jüdischen Familie in 1933, framing it explicitly as testimony against National Socialist caricature; see her foreword, Life in a Jewish Family, 23–25.

[3] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 148. Her formulation is that she “deliberately and consciously” gave up praying.

[4] On Reinach’s pedagogical role in the Göttingen circle, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 58–74.

[5] Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, 260–261, where she credits Scheler with dismantling the “rationalistic prejudices” of her upbringing and opening “the world of faith” to her regard.

[6] Stein’s lazaretto service at Mährisch-Weißkirchen is narrated at length in Life in a Jewish Family, chaps. 8–9.

[7] Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917); English: On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, 3rd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989).

[8] Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 58–63, on the constitution of the living body (Leib) and the extension of empathic apprehension to animal life. For the systematic development of sentient and plant life, see also her Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, trans. Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000).

[9] On Stein’s editorial shaping of the Ideen II materials, see Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), esp. chaps. 5–6.

[10] The Prussian ministerial circular of February 21, 1920, issued in the wake of Stein’s petition, declared that membership in the female sex constituted no obstacle to habilitation. See MacIntyre, Edith Stein, 14–15.

[11] Stein’s testimony, reported by the Jesuit Johannes Hirschmann from her own account at Echt, names the encounter with Anna Reinach as “my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it.” See Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography, trans. Bernard Bonowitz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 56–57.

[12] Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 65. The night reading of Teresa’s Vida at Bad Bergzabern occurred in the summer of 1921.

[13] Stein was baptized January 1, 1922, at St. Martin’s Church, Bad Bergzabern, taking the baptismal name Theresia Hedwig, the latter in honor of Conrad-Martius, who stood as godmother despite her Protestantism. Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 68–69.

[14] Thomas von Aquin, Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate), trans. Edith Stein, 2 vols. (Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932). On Przywara’s direction, see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 82–86.

[15] Edith Stein, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino,” in Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929), 315–338; English in Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000). The published essay recast an original dialogue form in which Husserl and Thomas converse at night in the master’s study.

[16] Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Θ), 1049b4–1051a3, on the priority of ἐνέργεια to δύναμις; De Anima II.1, 412a19–b9, on first and second actuality and the soul as ἐντελέχεια of the organic body.

[17] Edith Stein, Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10 (Freiburg: Herder, 2005; composed 1931); Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12 (Freiburg: Herder, 2006; composed 1935–1936); English: Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt, Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).

[18] The Münster lectures and related addresses are collected in Edith Stein, Essays on Woman, trans. Freda Mary Oben, 2nd rev. ed., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).

[19] Stein’s letter to Pius XI, dated April 1933 and transmitted through Abbot Raphael Walzer of Beuron, was made public upon the 2003 opening of the relevant Vatican archives. For the text and circumstances, see the documentation of the Cologne Carmel and Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 104–107.

[20] Stein entered the Cologne Carmel on October 14, 1933, and received the habit and her religious name on April 15, 1934.

[21] Edith Stein, Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18 (Freiburg: Herder, 2003); English: The Science of the Cross, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D., Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002).

[22] The Westerbork testimonies, including that of the Dutch official Wielek and fellow prisoners, are gathered in Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 180–186.

[23] “Komm, wir gehen für unser Volk.” The words were reported by witnesses in the Echt community; see Herbstrith, Edith Stein, 177–178. As with most last words, the attestation is testimonial rather than documentary, and I report it as such.

[24] Beatified by John Paul II in Cologne, May 1, 1987; canonized in Rome, October 11, 1998; named co-patroness of Europe, with Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in the apostolic letter Spes Aedificandi, October 1, 1999.

[25] Philippians 2:7, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών (“but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”). The verb is κενόω, “to empty”; the theological noun κένωσις derives from it.

[26] Romans 8:20–22: the creation subjected to ματαιότης (“futility,” the Septuagint’s rendering of הֶבֶל in Ecclesiastes) in hope, and πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει, “the whole creation groans together and labors together” (συστενάζω, “to groan with”). I have traced this line at greater length in “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes,” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Harrelson, Sam. “The Ecology of Ecclesiastes.” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Herbstrith, Waltraud. Edith Stein: A Biography. Translated by Bernard Bonowitz. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.

John Paul II. Spes Aedificandi. Apostolic letter. October 1, 1999.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Sawicki, Marianne. Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997.

Stein, Edith. Endliches und ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 11/12. Freiburg: Herder, 2006.

Stein, Edith. Essays on Woman. Translated by Freda Mary Oben. 2nd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 2. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des heiligen Thomas von Aquino.” In Festschrift Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, 315–338. Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Ergänzungsband. Halle: Niemeyer, 1929.

Stein, Edith. Knowledge and Faith. Translated by Walter Redmond. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 8. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.

Stein, Edith. Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie über Johannes vom Kreuz. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 18. Freiburg: Herder, 2003.

Stein, Edith. Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 1. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities. Translated by Mary Catharine Baseheart and Marianne Sawicki. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000.

Stein, Edith. Potenz und Akt: Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins. Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe 10. Freiburg: Herder, 2005.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1917.

Thomas Aquinas. Untersuchungen über die Wahrheit (Quaestiones disputatae de veritate). Translated by Edith Stein. 2 vols. Breslau: Borgmeyer, 1931–1932.

PDF version available for download here:

Edith Stein – A Life in ActDownload

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas

As I’ve been working on my PhD Comprehensive Exams this summer, I’ve been frequently asking myself what it is I’m actually trying to write.

That sounds like the sort of question I should have answered a long time ago, especially after years of blogging, teaching, preaching, consulting, podcasting, and now reading for a PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion. But the truth is that sometimes you only recognize the shape of your work after you’ve been doing it for a while (which I often said to my middle and high school students as they journeyed). You look back over a few poems, a few essays, a few notes written in the early morning before the kids are fully awake, and you begin to notice the threads.

In the midst of this, a phrase came to me while working in the yard to gather oak, maple, and walnut branches after a summer thunderstorm:

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas.

I like that term because it gives an expression to something I’ve been working on for years without pinning it down too tightly. I don’t think of my poems as “nature poems” in the abstract. I’m not usually writing about nature as scenery or background, and frankly don’t like the term (or “wilderness”). I’m writing about places that have addressed me in some way.

Obviously, there’s the black walnut tree in our yard here in Spartanburg. Cedar roses gathered from the front yard for an anniversary with Merianna, tobacco fields giving way to pine. Red clay and rain in the Piedmont. The Pee Dee. The Lowcountry. Rivers, ditches, old roads, churchyards, school mornings, family errands, and the small objects children leave behind in the grass.

Those things aren’t decorative, but are part of the grammar of my life.

I grew up in South Carolina, left for a while, and have spent a good portion of my adult life trying to understand what it means to belong to a place without pretending that belonging is simple. The Carolinas are beautiful, but they certainly aren’t innocent. Every landscape here carries memory. Indigenous presence and erasure. Enslaved labor and tobacco money. Church bells with pine plantations. Family stories. Stormwater ditches. Kudzu. Development. Black walnuts and cedars. The land remembers more than we do, and much of my writing has become an attempt to listen (before I offer something of an explanation).

That’s probably why trees show up so often in my poems and essays. Trees have become, for me, a kind of theological tutor. Instead of rushing or arguing in the way we argue, they receive weather, injury, children, birds, insects, drought, and time. They aren’t passive as some Aristotelians might veer towards, though. They’re constantly negotiating relation.

Roots, fungi, water, light, decay, growth, fruit, shade. There’s a whole world of attention happening in a tree, and most of it takes place beneath the level of our human perceptions or notice.

My own daily practice beneath the black walnut in our yard has taught me that attention isn’t a mood any more than creativity, with all of its weirdness and fickle muse, is. Attention is a discipline. Some mornings, nothing dramatic happens. A squirrel fusses while a Northern Cardinal cuts across the yard. A walnut falls. A child’s toy sits where it was abandoned the day before. The grass is wet while my coffee gets cold. But given enough mornings, these small things become more than small things. They become a way of being instructed by the world.

That’s where the sacramental language comes in for me.

By sacramental, I don’t mean that every leaf is a sermon illustration, or that every tree needs to be turned into a symbol as quickly as possible. I mean (almost) the opposite. The sacramental begins when the world is allowed to be itself deeply enough that it discloses more than itself, as Merleau-Ponty has taught me. A walnut remains a walnut while a cedar cone remains a cedar cone, no matter how much I want to apply an abstract level of emotion like love onto it. Red clay remains red clay. But in their full presence, they also carry relation, memory, gift, wound, and grace.

That has shaped the way I think about theology, too. I’m an ordained minister, and I still believe that Christian language has something true and necessary to say about the world. But I’ve become much less interested in theology that hovers above place and more interested in theology that has dirt under its fingernails as I’ve aged. The cross, for instance, has become harder for me to imagine only as an abstract doctrine. It was actually wood before it was a symbol. It was tree before it was theology. The Cross belonged to the same creation that Christian faith too often treats as stage scenery for human salvation.

So when I write about the Cross as a ruined tree, or grace as something greening through what has already been given, I’m not trying to be clever. I’m trying to recover something that should have been obvious all along, in my opinion… faith happens somewhere. Salvation, if we are going to use that word (another one of those words I struggle with, much like nature and wilderness), cannot mean escape from this world that God loves. It must involve learning how to see, inhabit, repair, and love this world more truthfully.

That’s also why family appears so often in what I write. My poems are full of trees, but they are also full of children’s laughter, marriage, errands, school mornings, half-finished meals, books, socks in the grass, and the ordinary clutter of a house where life is actually happening.

I don’t want a spirituality that requires me to leave all of that behind in order to find depth. The depth is there already. The trick is learning how to notice it without sentimentalizing it.

A cedar rose gathered from the yard can become a way of thinking about marriage. A walnut falling in the grass can become an invitation. A child’s forgotten shovel near the fence can become part of the liturgy of a morning. These aren’t grand revelations in the usual sense. To me, they’re more like reminders that nothing here is only here.

The Carolina part matters, too. I don’t want to write as if place were interchangeable. The Piedmont is not the Lowcountry. The Pee Dee is not Appalachia by any means. Spartanburg is not Marion County, though both live in me now (and certainly not Greenville, despite how much some folks in elected offices here seem to want that to be the case). Each place has its own ecology of memory. Each place teaches attention differently. The Carolina landscape has formed my imagination in ways I am still trying to understand: the humidity, the pine straw, the old church Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist languages and songs, the roads between small towns, the sound of summer insects, the uneasy layering of beauty and violence, tenderness and history.

Maybe that is why poetry feels increasingly necessary to me in my present context. Prose can explain, and I do love prose for that. Essays let me follow an idea, trace a history, build an argument, and hopefully make a convincing case. But poetry lets me stay closer to the moment before explanation closes around it. Poetry gives me a way to let the walnut fall, to let the cedar open, to let ruin become river before I decide too quickly what any of it means.

I don’t know that I set out to become a person who writes poems of place. I had no idea I’d have numerous poems published in anthologies and literary magazines. I certainly didn’t set out to write “sacramental place poetry rooted in the Carolinas,” because that phrase only arrived rather unexpectedly after the work had already begun. But I can see now that much of what I write is an attempt to practice a kind of ecological attention. I’m trying to attend to the more-than-human world, to the household, to memory, to Christian faith, to the old wounds and stubborn grace of this region, and to the ways all of these keep speaking through one another.

That may be why I keep returning to the same images of trees, rain, children, ruin, roots, rivers, crosses, fields, and birds. The “ordinary” holiness of a yard in the morning.

I’m writing because I want to remember that the world is alive with address.

I’m writing because I want to learn how to receive that address without rushing to master it.

I’m writing because the Carolinas have made claims on me, and I suspect I will spend the rest of my life learning how to answer.

These days, that answer often comes as a poem.

And with that, here’s a poem I wrote:

The Walnut Keeps Time in Spartanburg

At the edge of the yard in Spartanburg, where the black walnut leans into its own weather, morning arrives without asking to be believed.

The children have left their small offerings behind: a sun-faded ball in the clover, a plastic shovel near the fence, one damp sock folded by rain into the grass.

The tree receives them all with the old patience of wood, lifting nothing, refusing nothing, making a chapel from shade and green husk.

I sit beneath it with coffee gone cool and a book open in my lap, trying again to learn what the world says before I ask it to mean something.

The walnut does not hurry. It darkens its fruit slowly, lets squirrels argue overhead, lets ants keep their bright roads through the red clay.

Somewhere beyond the yard, traffic gathers itself toward school and work, toward errands, bells, the ordinary liturgies of another Carolina morning.

But here, under this rough crown, time is not a line so much as a widening ring, the hidden labor of root and rain, the way a life grows inward before anyone sees what it has become.

I think of the cross, not polished and lifted high, but once a tree, once sap, once leaf, once a body drinking light from the same sun that warms my hands.

Maybe grace is like that, not arriving from elsewhere, but greening through what has already been given: this yard, this breath, these children growing louder, this marriage of errands and mercy, this Piedmont soil holding more memory than I know how to carry.

A walnut falls. Then another.

The sound is small, almost comic, a wooden knock against the day’s closed door.

Still, I hear it as invitation.

Pay attention, it says. Nothing here is only here. Even the bruised fruit splitting in the grass is busy becoming food, stain, shadow, and prayer.

Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception

Twenty years ago (2006), my first book, Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, was published by Yale University after my time there as a graduate student working at the Yale University Art Gallery. It’s a short study of how carved stones from the palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud came to New Haven and entered the religious, educational, and institutional imagination of nineteenth-century America. That earlier work focused on Assyrian palace reliefs, Protestant missionary culture, biblical archaeology, and the strange afterlives of objects once they are removed from the worlds that formed them. The original publication is available here, with catalog records available through Yale/WorldCat and the Smithsonian Institution.

This new work, “Displaced Forms: Assyrian Reliefs, Ecological Intentionality, and the Ethics of Perception,” returns to that earlier project from the standpoint of my current doctoral work in ecology, spirituality, and religion at CIIS. I ask what happens when a form is separated from its world, whether that form is an Assyrian relief, a sacred tree carved in gypsum, a black walnut in a Spartanburg yard, or a river translated into capacity. The essay brings the Assyrian reliefs into conversation with ecological phenomenology, Edith Stein’s account of form, and my ongoing work on ecological intentionality. Its central claim is simple, I think… displaced forms continue to make claims upon us, and to perceive them rightly requires more than possession, preservation, or admiration. It requires learning to receive the worlds still speaking through them.

Displaced_Forms_Assyrian_Reliefs_Ecological_IntentionalityDownload

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form

Ecological Intentionality and the Metaphysics of Living Form continues my ongoing work at the intersection of phenomenology, ecological theology, and process-oriented metaphysics. Beginning with sustained attention to the black walnut tree in our backyard here in Spartanburg, this paper asks whether non-human organisms can be understood as bearers of interiority rather than as merely complex mechanisms. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s account of duration, Raymond Ruyer’s theory of absolute survey, Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of embodiment and flesh, I work to develop “Ecological Intentionality” as a way of describing the living world as active, self-organizing, and meaningfully present. The paper argues that our ecological crisis is not only a failure of policy or management, but also a failure of perception, and that any deeper ecological repair must begin with learning to see living form more ontologically “true.”

Harrelson_Ecological_Intentionality_PublicDownload

Mexico City’s Sinking Problem

We’re going to see so much of this in the coming years as NISAR develops more standard models…

One of the planet’s biggest cities is sinking so rapidly it’s visible from space | CNN:

Between October 2025 and January 2026, during Mexico City’s dry season, NISAR mapped the movement of the ground beneath the city. Its findings reveal that parts of the city are sinking at a rate of around 0.8 inches a month — that’s more than 9.5 inches every year.

Areas most affected include the Benito Juarez International Airport, the city’s primary airport.

Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene

The paper is called “Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene,” and it starts close to home… literally. A $2.8 billion computing facility is going up on South Pine Street in Spartanburg, in the shell of an old Kohler plant. A few miles away, a different $3 billion proposal, Project Spero, named after South Carolina’s state motto, drew hundreds of residents to County Council chambers in opposition before the developer withdrew. A third site remains in the works.

The argument I’m making is that the crisis these proposals represent isn’t only an energy and water problem (though it is that). It’s a crisis of ecological perception, and the way the promotional apparatus around data center development is specifically designed to make planetary costs invisible while foregrounding jobs, tax revenue, and American competitiveness. The Tyger River watershed, the regional grid’s carbon intensity, the cumulative water withdrawals from the Broad River basin… none of that appears in a Governor’s press release.

Drawing on Yves Citton’s account of attention as a distributed, politically structured field, alongside Francis’s Laudate Deum, Donna Haraway’s contact zone concept, and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, I try to make the case that what happened in those County Council chambers, a community briefly and collectively organizing its attention against a machinery designed to prevent exactly that noticing, points toward something worth taking seriously. Not as a substitute for structural and regulatory transformation, but as its necessary condition.

You can’t protect what you can’t see. The paper tries to think through what it would take to keep these systems visible before decisions are made rather than after.

Attention as Ecological Practice- AI Data Centers and the Limits of the AnthropoceneDownload

Ecology (Without) Fields: Toward a Different Ontology of the Cosmos

I taught AP Physics and Physics and Physical Science (along with Environmental Science, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science) for almost twenty years. I’d introduce the field concept early in the course, and everything that notion seems to clarify. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, the wave collapse, and wave functions, etc., all work better as long as you have a playing field. Much like our sports today. There’s a value assigned to every point in space, smoothly varying, mathematically tractable, and extraordinarily powerful as a predictive tool. Students felt the elegance of it, and so did I. You could describe the behavior of matter across any scale with the same formalism. The cosmos, it seemed, was fundamentally a manifold of field values, and once you understood that, you understood something deep about reality itself.

I am no longer sure that’s true. Not because the physics is wrong (it isn’t, at least in our human understanding of the Cosmos with our current framing), but because I have come to suspect that the field picture, however useful, is describing something derived rather than something fundamental. And I think the place I’m standing right now, on the bank of Lawson’s Fork in the South Carolina Piedmont, is better evidence of what the cosmos actually is than any field equation.

That’s a large claim. Let me try to earn it or unpack this at least.

In 1980, the philosopher Hartry Field published a book called Science Without Numbers that caused something of a stir in the philosophy of mathematics. His argument was deceptively simple, I think. Basically, the fact that mathematics is indispensable for doing physics doesn’t mean that mathematical entities (numbers, functions, sets) actually exist. Mathematics might be extraordinarily useful without being true, much like some would claim about religion. Field called this position fictionalism, and he went on to demonstrate, technically, that you could reformulate Newtonian gravitational theory without any reference to numbers at all, replacing numerical values with purely relational predicates borrowed from geometry.(1) The numbers, he showed, were conservative over the underlying physical facts… they generated no new physical information beyond what the relational structure already implied. They were a powerful fiction, not a fundamental reality.

Field’s project was aimed at numbers. But the argument licenses something further. If indispensability for prediction is no guarantee of ontological fundamentality, then the same skepticism can be turned on the field descriptions that physics has inherited and extended since Maxwell (my favorite) and Einstein. The electromagnetic, gravitational, and quantum fields are extraordinarily useful for prediction. They are not, on that account alone, fundamental features of reality. They might be conservative over something more primordial… something that field theory represents without quite reaching. The question is what that something might be.

Henri Bergson spent much of his philosophical career pressing exactly this question against the physics of his own time, and his answer still appeals to many of us. For Bergson, the deepest problem with mathematical physics is not its precision but its treatment of time. A field value is assigned to a point in spacetime, a frozen coordinate, mathematically exact and stripped of duration. The continuous field is the smooth assembly of such frozen moments across an abstract manifold. This, Bergson argued, is the intellectualist distortion of real time, lived time, the time of actual processes, being not a coordinate. It is duration, qualitative, irreversible, thick with the past, that has accumulated in it. (2) A field value at a spacetime point doesn’t capture duration necessarily but does eliminate it.

In physics, this means the field of formalism is, in a specific and precise sense, conservative with respect to durational facts. It extracts from the living reality of process exactly what is measurable (such as position, magnitude, rate of change) while leaving the ontological substrate of durée untouched and undescribed. Bergson is not saying physics is wrong. He is saying it is a useful abstraction from something more realistic or deeper, and that mistaking the abstraction for the fundamental thing is a category error with consequences.

At Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg, duration is not an abstraction. The creek carries its own past in its channel morphology, its sediment load, its riparian forest, and the chemical memory of every storm and drought since the last ice age. What I encounter when I sit at the shoal is not a field value. It is the thickness, with the accumulated duration of a place that has been doing this longer than the Piedmont has been the Piedmont. You can assign temperature, velocity, and dissolved oxygen values to the water at this point. You cannot assign a field value to what it means for this water to be here, now, still.

Gilles Deleuze sharpens this. In Difference and Repetition, he argues that extensive quantities (like the kinds of quantities field theory assigns to points in space ) are actualizations of something more primordial, such as intensive difference. (3) A temperature gradient is intensive. It has direction, it drives the process, and it is the condition of heat flow before it becomes measurable as a rate. A temperature field value is the extensive representation of that intensity, which you get when you cancel the gradient into a number. The number is real and useful. But the gradient came first, ontologically. The difference is more fundamental than the magnitude.

For ecology, this is almost self-evident. What ecosystems run on is intensity from thermal gradients, hydrological pressure differentials, chemical potential differences across membranes and soil horizons, and trophic gradients from light-saturated surface to benthic dark. These intensive differences are what ecological work is about. They drive nutrient cycling, species distribution, evolutionary pressure, and succession. The field descriptions represent these intensities by extending them into magnitudes, thereby systematically concealing what is ontologically prior. Ecology, properly understood, is a science of intensive differences and similarities. Field theory is the science of extensive magnitude. Obviously, they are not describing the same level of reality.

Alfred North Whitehead made this argument in a different way, and Michael Epperson’s more recent work connecting Whitehead’s process metaphysics to quantum mechanics has recently given it new precision. Whitehead’s central claim in Process and Reality is that the extensive continuum, or the spacetime manifold that underlies field theory, is not primitive but derivative. (4) It is constituted by the mutual implication of what Whitehead calls actual occasions as irreducibly local events of experience in a broad sense, each taking account of its environment, each contributing its achieved definiteness to the world that follows. The field is the abstract pattern that emerges from the creative advance of actual occasions. It is real, but it is not where reality begins.

Epperson’s contribution is to show that this Whiteheadian picture is not merely a philosophical preference, but it resolves genuine problems in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. The wave function, in Epperson’s reading, is not a field in physical space at all. It is a description of potentiality, the structured possibility space of an actual occasion prior to its determination. The so-called collapse of the wave function is the creative advance from potentiality to actuality and the event in which an occasion achieves its definiteness in relation to its environment. (5) The field formalism is conservative over this event structure as it generates the right predictions without describing what is actually occurring at the level of individual occasions.

What Whitehead and Epperson together suggest is that the cosmos is made of events, not fields. Events that are irreducibly local, durational, relational, and in some broad sense experiential, events that take account of their context rather than merely occupying coordinates in it. This is ontologically closer to an ecosystem than to a manifold.

Here is where plasma physics enters, and the argument takes on a different weight.

Plasma is the dominant state of matter in the observable universe, accounting for something in the range of ninety-nine percent by volume. Stars, the interstellar medium, the vast filamentary structures of the cosmic web… all plasma. And plasma physics is, irreducibly, the physics of collective relationships. A plasma cannot be well described by treating particles as discrete entities moving through a background field. Its behavior is dominated by collective phenomena such as Alfvén waves, magnetic reconnection events, Debye sheaths, current sheets, and filamentary structures that arise from the simultaneous mutual interaction of charged particles at every scale. The plasma doesn’t have properties so much as it enacts them through a collective process(es).

Hannes Alfvén, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his work in magnetohydrodynamics, was himself sharply critical of the tendency to privilege mathematical elegance over the messy relational reality of plasma behavior. He thought cosmological models built on clean field equations were systematically misleading about what cosmic matter actually does. (6) Alfvén was a physicist making a philosopher’s complaint, as well, that the abstraction has been mistaken for the thing.

A plasma is, ontologically, more like a watershed than like a Newtonian gravitational field. It has memory in the sense that it is encoded in its magnetic field topology, the way Lawson’s Fork has memory encoded in its channel morphology. It responds to disturbance through cascading collective reorganization rather than smooth field-theoretic propagation. It is constitutively far from thermodynamic equilibrium, as are living systems, sustained by the continuous throughput of intensive difference. The Alfvén wave is not a perturbation of a background field. It is the medium itself moving, doing something together, the way a flood pulse is the creek itself responding to what has happened upstream.

If ninety-nine percent of the visible cosmos is plasma, then the “clean” physics of particles and fields is actually the physics of the exceptional cases, such as the cold, dense, low-energy corners of reality where matter settles into the forms our terrestrial instruments first encountered as we experience. The cosmos is not, predominantly, a manifold of field values. It is predominantly a tissue of collective, intensive, durational process. Which is to say, it is predominantly something more like ecology.

Let me try to state the thesis clearly, because I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming that field theory is false or that its predictions are unreliable. They are not. I am claiming, following Field’s nominalist license, that the indispensability of field descriptions for prediction is no guarantee of their ontological fundamentality. Field showed this for numbers. The same argument extends to the field descriptions themselves, I think. Fields are conservative about a more fundamental substrate they represent without quite reaching it.

That more fundamental substrate, I am suggesting, has the following features… it is intensive rather than extensive, durational rather than coordinatized, constituted by actual events of mutual encounter rather than persistent substances in a container space, and irreducibly place-specific rather than homogeneously law-governed. These are the features that Bergson recovers when he insists on duration against spatialization, that Deleuze recovers when he insists on intensity against extensive magnitude, that Whitehead recovers when he insists on actual occasions against the continuous manifold, and that Alfvén gestures toward when he insists on the relational complexity of plasma against the elegance of field equations.

They are also the features that ecology investigates. Not ecology as our current applied physics, as the working out of biochemical field gradients in living systems, but ecology as first philosophy and the study of how living systems constitute their places through intensive, durational, relational process.

What I encounter at Lawson’s Fork is not merely complex field theory. It is something ontologically prior to field theory as a tissue of encounters, each with its own duration, each irreducibly local, each constituted by the intensive differences that drive it. The watershed is doing what the cosmos is doing, at a scale I can stand beside and attend to. The cosmos is not, at its most fundamental level, a field. It is more like a watershed, with duration extending all the way down, an intensive difference expressing itself in process, place, and encounter.

That isn’t mysticism (maybe it is?). It is, I think, what physics is actually showing us, once we stop mistaking the conservation of the formalism for a description of what is fundamentally real.

(1) Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1–30. Field’s central demonstration is that Newtonian gravitational theory can be reformulated using only relational predicates, betweenness and congruence relations among spacetime points, without quantifying over real numbers or other abstract entities.

(2) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 1–45. The critique of spatializaton is developed most fully in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, but Creative Evolution gives the most direct statement of duration as irreducible to coordinate time.

(3) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222–261. The distinction between intensive and extensive quantity is central to Deleuze’s account of individuation and his critique of representational ontology.

(4) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 61–82. Whitehead’s account of the extensive continuum as derivative from actual occasions is developed in Part II.

(5) Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 145–187. Epperson’s most concentrated argument for wave-function collapse as Whiteheadian concrescence is in Chapter 5.

(6) Hannes Alfvén, “Cosmology: Myth or Science?” Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1984): 79–98. Alfvén’s critique of mathematical cosmology in favor of plasma-based observational models runs through much of his later work, including Cosmic Plasma (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981).

Einfühlung: Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson

There’s a moment (you’ve had it, I’ve definitely had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye. It’s something more interior than that. A stillness that isn’t empty and a kind of attention in the world that is not yours.

It could be a crow on a fence post, watching you with that particular corvid watchfulness that doesn’t feel like surveillance so much as being assessed. It could be a stand of white oaks at the edge of a parking lot, their roots negotiating some underground arrangement you’ll never see. It could be a box turtle holding perfectly still in the leaf litter while you stand two feet away, the two of you caught together in something that doesn’t quite have a name.

You feel it, and then you feel slightly embarrassed about feeling it, because the dominant story we’ve inherited says that whatever is happening over there is happening in the dark and that the lights of inner experience are a human franchise, or at best a mammalian one, and that the crow and the oaks and the turtle are performing the outward signs of life without anyone home to experience them. The embarrassment is cultural, but the feeling is older.

I’ve been thinking about Edith Stein lately, and about what she might say to this moment.

Stein’s contribution to philosophy, at its most concentrated, is a theory of how we ever know another mind at all. She called it Einfühlung, or empathy, though the German carries something richer than the English… literally, a feeling-into. Her 1917 dissertation (written under Edmund Husserl, in the phenomenological tradition, before WW1 had finished) asked a question that seems obvious until you try to answer it… how do I know that you have an inner life?

It’s not how I infer it, or simulate it, or project it from my own case. How do I know it in the primary, pre-reflective, perceptual sense that I know there is a table in front of me or that the light has gone warm and late? Her answer was that empathy is itself a mode of perception. I don’t reason my way to your interiority, but I perceive it, the way I perceive depth in a visual field. The perception can be mistaken, refined, or enriched. But it is perceptual first.

What interests me so much is that Stein was careful about something most readers slide past because she distinguished between empathy as an act (I reach toward you) and empathy as a structure (there is something there to reach toward). The act depends on the structure. I can only empathize with something that has an interior to meet. And she was explicit that this interiority is not identical to the consciousness humans experience. Rather, empathy is a more basic feature of what it means to be a subject at all, to have an inner life that is genuinely yours, from which you encounter the world.

The question she didn’t fully pursue, and I think this is because the intellectual world she was working in hadn’t yet given her the tools or even vocabulary in terms of ecological intentionality, is what it would mean to extend that structure beyond the human. What if the crow is a subject? Not a metaphor for subjectivity, not a cute approximation of it. Actually, a locus of interior life, capable of being met?

Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher working in the mid-twentieth century who was, for a long time (until very recently), almost unread outside of France, until Deleuze cited him, and then, later a group of philosophers, including Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux started to take him seriously, and then he was rediscovered again by thinkers working on biology and consciousness. His central claim is strange and precise in a way… every living form exercises what he called absolute survey or a kind of self-enjoying, self-forming awareness that cannot be reduced to spatial extension.

This sounds mystical, but it isn’t. It’s more of a biological claim. The embryo developing into an organism isn’t executing a genetic program the way a computer executes code. It is surveying itself, holding its own form in view, orienting its development toward what it is becoming. The cell is not merely processing information, but it has a kind of first-person orientation toward its own activity. This isn’t a capacity that emerges at some threshold of neurological complexity, but it’s a feature of living form as such. The amoeba surveys. The developing limb surveys. I’d argue the mitochondria do the same. There is no organism (or division or formative part of it) without some minimal version of this self-enjoying interiority.

What this means for Stein’s question is significant. If Ruyer is right, then there is genuinely something there, some interior to be met, in every living organism (and we can extend that to its parts and even down to the atomic or quantum level if thought out). Empathy isn’t being extended beyond its proper domain when we feel it toward a turtle or an oak. It is operating precisely as Stein described and perceiving an interiority that is actually present. The embarrassment was a category error.

Henri Bergson adds the temporal dimension. His notion of durée, or duration as lived time, describes how every living (maybe more-than-living) thing carries its past forward in a genuinely creative, not mechanically determined, way. The organism is not a static configuration that happens to move; it is a memory in motion, accumulating its history in a way that shapes its encounter with each new moment. The bird knows its territory the way your body knows how to ride a bicycle as a kind of lived past that has become part of what it is, rather than an explicit piece of information stored and retrieved.

This matters for empathy because it gives the encounter thickness. When you stop and feel that something is happening in the organism (or rock?) a few feet away, what you are meeting is not just a present configuration. You are meeting a duration, and an unfolding, an other with its own temporal interiority, its own accumulated past pressing forward into the present. The feeling of interiority you perceive is not a projection. It’s the trace of that duration registering on your own perceptual field.

Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson are not saying the same thing, of course. Stein is doing phenomenology and describing the structure of the perceptual act. Ruyer is doing philosophy of biology by describing the structure of living forms. Bergson is doing philosophy of time by describing the structure of living memory. But they triangulate on something that, taken together, amounts to a fairly serious challenge to the dominant story… that empathy across species is possible not because we are projecting human experience onto non-human life, but because interiority is a feature of life itself, graded and various, and the perceptual capacity to meet it is something we actually have.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that I can’t ignore or try to pass over without mentioning.

Stein herself became a Carmelite nun and was eventually martyred at Auschwitz along with her sister. She was killed as a Jew, having been born into a Jewish family and having converted to Catholicism after reading Teresa of Ávila in one long night of encounter with a text. She never treated phenomenology and spirituality as separate projects. For her, the capacity to perceive another’s interiority was not merely a cognitive achievement. It was a form of participation in the ground of being and a way that consciousness opens toward what is genuinely other, which she eventually understood in terms of the soul’s movement toward God.

I am not trying to import that theological framework wholesale. But something in it strikes me as exactly right when I stand in the Carolina Piedmont landscape and feel that quality of attention coming back at me from the world. The embarrassment I described at the beginning… the cultural reflex that says you are projecting, anthropomorphizing, romantically confused… that anxious embarrassment assumes that the proper direction of consciousness is inward, toward the self, and that any apparent opening toward the world is a kind of sentimental error.

Stein’s phenomenology and the biological philosophies of Ruyer and Bergson suggest otherwise. The opening toward the other is not an error. It is the structure of consciousness itself and the capacity to be oriented toward an interiority that is genuinely not yours, to receive it without collapsing the difference between you. And if that capacity extends, as I believe it does, to the more-than-human world… then what we wrongly call “nature” is not a backdrop to the drama of human consciousness but a field of genuine subjects, each carrying its own duration, each available in some degree to the kind of participatory perception Stein was describing.

This is where the spiritual layer or dimension becomes unavoidable, at least for me. Because if the world is structured this way, and if there is really something happening over there, and if we have a perceptual capacity to meet it, then the question of how we inhabit the Piedmont, how we attend to the shoals and the hemlocks and the red-tailed hawk quartering the field at dusk, is not merely an aesthetic or ethical question. It is something closer to a contemplative one. The attention itself is a form of participation. The capacity to stop and feel that something is happening over there, and to let that feeling be more than embarrassment, is a practice… not a conclusion.

Stein did not survive to work out the full implications of what she had begun. Ruyer died in 1987, still relatively obscure here in the United States universities and colleges, and in mainstream thinking. Bergson, at least, was famous in his time, though his reputation later suffered the usual eclipse that attends thinkers who insist on the reality of time and memory against the reductionist program (especially after the Einstein debate). But the three of them together sketch something I keep returning to in my own lived experience… the world is not dark. The lights are on in there. And we have always known how to read them; we just stopped trusting ourselves to do so.

The crow on the fence post is still watching you. The box turtle has not moved. The oaks have not stopped their underground negotiations.

What you feel, standing there, is not nothing. It is, if Stein is right, a genuine perceptual act, the meeting of your interiority with another. If Ruyer is right, there is something in the turtle that is doing something not entirely unlike what you are doing: orienting toward its own form, surveying its situation, being present to its own being. If Bergson is right, the turtle is carrying a duration, a history, a lived past that shapes this present moment of its encounter with you.

None of this requires you to believe that the turtle is having human thoughts, or that the oak is happy or sad when you walk by, or that the crow is pondering your moral character (though I am genuinely uncertain about that last one). It requires only that you take the feeling seriously, not as projection, not as sentimentality, but as perception. As the beginning of a different kind of attention to the world we actually inhabit.

The Piedmont here in South Carolina is full of subjects, their histories, and lived time. We have always lived among them. Learning to meet them, without collapsing the difference or dismissing the encounter, is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice there is.

What If AI Learned from Forests Instead of Empires?

I linked to a recent piece this week that highlighted the growing popularity of an open-source project called Edict, built on the ancient Chinese “Three Departments and Six Ministries” model. Instead of imagining AI agents as a kind of flat group chat where everyone talks at once and somehow arrives at a solution, these developers have looked to imperial bureaucracy for inspiration. They’ve built systems where agents deliberate through ordered layers, defined roles, and structured channels of authority.

There is something genuinely insightful there. Anyone who has spent time watching current multi-agent systems stumble around knows that simply putting five bots in a room and asking them to collaborate is not much of a theory of intelligence. It is often just noise dressed up as emergence. The appeal of a more ordered model makes sense. Hierarchy can reduce confusion. Structure can improve coordination. Clear roles can produce better outcomes than endless recursive brainstorming.

I find myself wondering whether both of these dominant models… the flat Silicon Valley “everyone brainstorms together” approach and the hierarchical “imperial court” approach… may be trapped inside the same basic mistake.

Both assume that intelligence is mainly a matter of well-organized agents. That assumption seems really too narrow to me.

My own work has led me again and again toward a different starting point. Through my studies in ecology, phenomenology, theology, and process thought, I keep returning to the possibility that intelligence does not begin with isolated entities that then enter into relation. It begins in relation itself. Perception is relational. Attention is relational. Meaning is relational. Even empathy, if we take it seriously, is not simply a private feeling inside one mind about another mind. It is an opening toward another center of experience through a shared world.

That matters for how we imagine and even construct AI.

If our models of machine intelligence begin with discrete agents, each assigned a role and operating as an independent unit, we may already be building on the wrong foundation. We may be importing assumptions from bureaucracy, management theory, and industrial organization into domains where those models can only take us so far. We may be constructing administrative systems and calling them intelligence.

What if a better model is not the boardroom or the court, but the forest?

I do not mean that in the lazy sense of saying “nature is good” or “technology should be more organic.” I mean something more specific. A forest is not simply a collection of individual trees standing near one another. It is a field of relations unfolding across time. Trees, fungi, soil microbes, insects, moisture, roots, decaying matter, shade, slope, heat, and season all participate in a dynamic web of exchange and constraint. Nothing is fully self-contained. Nothing simply commands the rest. At the same time, it is not chaos. It is patterned, but not centrally controlled. It is differentiated, but not rigidly bureaucratic.

That seems much closer to how real intelligence often works.

Recent research on mycorrhizal fungi has only deepened this intuition for me. These microscopic fungal threads move nutrients, carbon, water, and signaling compounds through the soil in ways that are astonishingly complex. A forest is not just what we see above ground. It is also the dense and largely invisible life below our feet. It is memory in the soil. It is exchange without spectacle. It is cooperation and competition held together in a larger field of becoming. If we are looking for models of distributed intelligence, ecosystems seem to have much more to teach us than most corporate org charts do.

This is where my own language of ecological intentionality starts to matter. I have been using that phrase to think about the ways intentional life is never merely private or self-enclosed. Consciousness is not a sealed chamber. Perception is not just data processing inside an isolated subject. We come into being through relation with other beings and with the worlds we inhabit. Attention is shaped by place. Meaning emerges through encounter. Even our ethical lives are formed through these layered fields of contact, dependence, and response.

If something like that is true, then perhaps intelligence should not be modeled primarily as command, planning, and execution. Perhaps it should be modeled as situated responsiveness within living networks of relation.

That possibility opens up some fascinating questions for AI design.

What would it mean to build systems where agents do not simply send messages to one another, but interact through a shared evolving substrate, more like soil than chat? What if some agents moved slowly, preserving long memory and stable patterns, while others reacted quickly to changing local conditions? What if resource limits were not treated as inconveniences to be engineered away, but as essential features that shape meaningful behavior? What if forgetting, decay, and succession were not failures, but necessary parts of a healthy cognitive ecology?

These are not just technical questions. They are philosophical and theological ones as well. The systems we build reflect the worldviews we carry. If we assume intelligence is best expressed through extraction, optimization, and control, then our tools will almost certainly reproduce those habits. If, on the other hand, we begin from interdependence, vulnerability, partial knowledge, and relational emergence, then different kinds of systems become imaginable.

I suspect this is one reason ecology has become so important to me as more than a scientific discipline. Ecology is not only about organisms and environments. It is also a way of seeing. It teaches us to pay attention to entanglement, to limits, to reciprocity, and to the unseen structures that make visible life possible. In that sense, ecological thought has something to say not only about forests and watersheds and soils, but also about computation, cognition, and the kinds of futures we are building.

I do not think we should romanticize ecosystems. Forests are not sentimental places. They are full of competition, waste, death, asymmetry, and contingency. But neither are they simple machines. They endure because they are adaptive, layered, and relational. They hold difference together without collapsing it into uniformity. They create the conditions for life through constant negotiation rather than total command.

That may be a better image for intelligence than either the group chat or the throne room.

I keep thinking here of the black walnut in my backyard in Spartanburg. Over the course of a year, I have spent a lot of time watching that tree, writing about it, tracking its changes, learning again how much of life unfolds at speeds we rarely honor. The tree itself is only part of the story. The real story includes the red clay, the fungal threads, the decaying leaves, the insects, the moisture, the other plants nearby, and the long memory of a place becoming what it is over time. Nothing there makes sense in isolation.

Perhaps intelligence is like that, too. Perhaps what we need next in AI is not flatter systems or stricter hierarchies, but deeper ecologies.

That would require more than a new engineering pattern. It would require a different imagination. We would have to stop thinking of intelligence as something that sits inside a unit and starts thinking of it as something that happens in the field between beings, across timescales, under conditions of mutual dependence and constraint.

That seems to me not only more faithful to the living world, but maybe more faithful to us as well.

If artificial intelligence is going to have a future worth inhabiting, I suspect it will not be because we taught machines to behave like emperors. It may be because we finally learned to build with a little more humility, from the patterns of soil, roots, trees, and the fragile worlds they make together.

“Completely off the scale for March”

We need to change our perception with ecological intentionality…

Western U.S. heat wave is historic. Here’s what scientists say:

In the modern era of routine weather balloon measurements, which stretches back to the 1940s, no March heat wave comes close to what unfolded across the Southwest this week, Schumacher said. Earlier March heat waves did occur, including significant events in 1907 and 1910, but neither appears to match this one in strength or duration.

The closest comparison, in terms of how far temperatures departed from normal, is the June 2021 heat dome that shattered all-time records across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Weather historian Christopher Burt called that event “probably one of the greatest anomalous weather events in world history, not just U.S. history.”

OpenClaw Soil

Maybe we should be looking to soil and microbial networks for our multi-agentic frameworks rather than human constructed (and flawed) org charts…

OpenClaw Emperors – by JingYu – ChinaTalk:

This brings us to one of the most fascinating phenomena currently tearing up the developer ecosystem: the wildly popular open-source project on GitHub known as “Edict” (三省六部).

While developers have spent the last year building Multi-Agent frameworks (like AutoGen or CrewAI) based on the principles of Silicon Valley flat hierarchies —throwing five AI agents into a “group chat” to brainstorm and hoping for the best — a community of Chinese developers took a radically different approach. They looked past the modern tech paradigms and drew inspiration from the zenith of classical Chinese political architecture: the Three Departments and Six Ministries (三省六部) system, pioneered in the Sui Dynasty and perfected in the Tang.

What the Soil Remembers

There is a black walnut tree in the backyard of our house here in Spartanburg. Every September, it drops its fruit, and the thick green husks split open, staining the ground (and the fingers of our children) dark. The squirrels know the timing better than we do. The tree has been doing this longer than anyone on the street has been alive.

But according to a growing body of research, it has been doing something else during that time too… something largely invisible and harder to name. Beneath the soil, networks of fungal threads connect the roots of the walnut to other plants and organisms in ways scientists are still working to describe. And the question those networks keep raising is not simply biological. It is perceptual. It is asking us whether we know how to pay attention to what is right beneath us.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Princeton University working across institutions in the United States and Europe published new findings on mycorrhizal fungi (the microscopic threads that link plant roots underground). Using imaging techniques refined over several years, they mapped not only how the architecture of these underground networks forms, but also the fluid motions occurring inside fungal tubes roughly one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, through which nutrients flow back and forth throughout the organism. These networks move carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus across remarkable distances through the soil, allowing plants and fungi to exchange resources through a shared infrastructure that predates our street, our city, and the entire textile economy that built it.

As one researcher put it simply, there are all these things happening underground that no one ever thinks about because they cannot see them.

That invisibility is part of what makes this hard to talk about in practical terms. We tend to extend moral consideration to what we can perceive… and the soil beneath the tulip poplars and white oaks lining the creek corridors through Spartanburg is not legible to us in ordinary ways. But legibility is not the same as presence.

The forests surrounding Greenville and Spartanburg sit at a remarkable ecological threshold. The southern Appalachians are considered one of the most biologically diverse regions of the temperate world, according to the South Carolina Native Plant Society, and the Piedmont foothills carry that diversity into the clay-heavy, iron-stained soils that anyone who has gardened here knows immediately. Those soils formed over millions of years as the ancient Appalachians weathered and eroded, leaving behind a mineral complexity that still shapes which species grow where, which fungi partner with which roots, which relationships persist, and which collapse under pressure.

The forests here also carry a complicated history. The mid-twentieth-century abandonment of row crops allowed forests to return to the Piedmont, though not the oak and hickory that typified earlier centuries. Loblolly pine colonized the abandoned cotton fields first. Sweetgum, tulip poplar, and red maple followed. The visible forest changed, but the deeper processes in the soil continued shaping recovery in ways the canopy did not reveal. Seedbanks persisted underground while fungal communities survived in fragments. Mycorrhizal networks that had supported older forests were interrupted but not entirely erased. When we walk through Croft State Park today, or along the Pacolet River corridor, we are moving through forests still rebuilding themselves after those earlier disturbances. The soil carries those histories in its structure and microbial communities. In that sense, the forest remembers… not through anything like human memory, but through ecological processes unfolding across decades.

Plants and fungi developed a partnership lasting over 400 million years, one that may have enabled plants to colonize dry landmasses and transform them into prolific habitats for terrestrial life (Springer). The relationship is not incidental to the forest, but is constitutional. Mycorrhizal fungal networks linking the roots of trees facilitate inter-tree communication via resource sharing, defense signaling, and kin recognition, influencing what researchers describe as sophisticated behavior among neighboring plants (ResearchGate). Some researchers have gone further, exploring what a recent paper in Symbiosis called “extended plant cognition” and the possibility that plants benefit from the cognition and behavior of mycorrhizal fungi to enhance their own survival, including foraging complementarity, expanded perception of the below-ground environment, and shaping the mycorrhizal community to meet survival needs.

The language here is careful and contested, and it should be. This is not the same as saying trees think in the way we do. But the underlying ecological picture is not nothing. Responsiveness within a forest does not appear to reside solely within individual organisms. It emerges through relationships linking plants, fungi, and soil communities in ways that begin to look less like isolated biological transactions and more like what phenomenologists might call a field of distributed perception… awareness that is not located anywhere in particular but present throughout the whole.

I have been exploring this idea in my own writing as ecological intentionality (the practice of attentive presence that recognizes humans as participants in, not observers of, the living world). What the mycorrhizal research keeps returning me to is how thoroughly that participatory logic runs through the forest itself. The sweetgums and beeches, the stands of loblolly along the old field margins, the black walnut in the backyard… each of these participates in a network of exchange that extends through the soil and across time in ways that our usual categories of “individual” and “organism” struggle to hold.

This matters for more than philosophical reasons here in the Upstate. As I wrote earlier this year about Project Spero (the proposed AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park), the questions it raised were ultimately about more than megawatts and gallons of water. They were about what kinds of relationships between land, water, and intelligence we are willing to normalize in this place. The project was eventually withdrawn after months of community opposition (a moment of civic attention worth studying carefully). But the broader pressure it represented has not disappeared. Proposals like it will keep arriving in communities like ours, asking us to decide how much of the landscape’s capacity (including its soil capacity, its fungal capacity, its slow-built ecological memory) should be redirected toward sustaining planetary-scale computation whose primary benefits flow elsewhere.

The question for a forest, if we can ask it that way, is not whether development will come. It is whether the networks beneath the soil can persist through what arrives. Those networks are not infinitely resilient. Mycorrhizal interactions play a foundational role in global patterns and structures of forest diversity, with mycorrhizal tree type systematically mediating the strength of competitive and cooperative dynamics within communities (Nature). What that means at the scale of a particular watershed is that the diversity and responsiveness of a forest depend not only on which species are present aboveground, but on the web of relationships in the soil (many of which are species-specific, many of which take decades to establish, and all of which can be severed quickly).

Donna Haraway has a word I keep returning to in this context, one I thought about recently when writing about the first signs of spring… composting. The idea that life continues through processes of breakdown, recombination, and transformation. Nothing simply disappears. Things are continually folded back into the living systems that surround them. The brown leaves underfoot right now on the trails at Croft carry last year’s sunlight and last year’s rain into the soil that is already shaping what grows next spring. The forest floor is composting memory into future life.

The black walnut in our backyard does not need me to make this argument. It has been making its own version of it for longer than the street has had a name, through a language of carbon, phosphorus, and fungal exchange that we are only beginning to have instruments sensitive enough to partially read.

The question is not whether that language is happening. The question is whether we are willing to develop the kind of attention it requires… and whether we can build that attention into the civic and ecological decisions we are already making about this place.

More Reading…

Simard, Suzanne W., Ryan, Teresa L., and Perry, David A. “Response to Questions About Common Mycorrhizal Networks.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change (January 2025). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1512518/full

Ma, Xiaofan and Limpens, Erik. “Networking via Mycorrhizae.” Frontiers in Agricultural Science and Engineering 12, no. 1 (2025): 37–46. https://journal.hep.com.cn/fase/EN/10.15302/J-FASE-2024578

“Research Reveals the Underground Traffic Between Fungi and Plants.” Princeton University, March 25, 2025. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/03/25/research-reveals-underground-traffic-between-fungi-and-plants

Leyval, C. et al. “How Mycorrhizal Fungi Could Extend Plant Cognitive Processes.” Symbiosis (2025). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13199-025-01065-y

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) — Global Mycorrhizal Mapping Initiative: https://spun.earth

South Carolina Native Plant Society — Upstate Chapter https://scnps.org/upstate

Elephant Time, Bergson’s Duration, and the Possibility of Empathy

I’ve always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids?

I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.”

Instead of assuming that animals experience time in ways that mirror our own, Rahmat asks a different question. What if elephants inhabit their own forms of duration? Not simply a faster or slower version of human time, but something structured through memory, ecology, and social life in ways that may not align with the rhythms we impose on the world.

Rahmat organizes her research around three overlapping dimensions: individual history, eco cultural identity, and what she calls human impacted time. The categories themselves are less important than what they point toward. Elephants are not simply products of biology or instinct. They accumulate experience across long lives. They inherit patterns of movement and orientation from older members of their herds. Their lives unfold within landscapes that hold memory across generations.

Rahmat is careful to say that we cannot claim direct access to how elephants experience time subjectively. Temporal experience cannot be observed directly. It appears through signs. Through behavior, social organization, and relationships with place. But those signs are not imaginary. The patterns they reveal are real.

One example from her work is particularly interesting to me. In the Belum rainforest of Malaysia, Indigenous communities have lived alongside wild elephants for centuries. The relationship is not built on management or control but on attentiveness. Local communities have learned which seasons bring elephants to particular fruiting trees. When those seasons arrive, people avoid those areas. The elephants come and feed. The humans yield space.

There is no contract and no shared language. Yet over generations something like an understanding has developed. Rahmat calls these patterns “agreements,” and the word is surprisingly precise. It describes a stable rhythm of coexistence that has formed through long mutual attention to each other’s movements through time.

For anyone familiar with Henri Bergson‘s work, this begins to sound very familiar (I’ve been doing a lot of work and research on Bergson lately, so it obviously stood out to me).

Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the way modern societies measure time is not the way time is actually lived. Clocks divide time into equal segments that can be counted and compared. Lived experience does not unfold that way (hence his famous or infamous debate with Einstein about relativity). Real time, he argued, is durée, or duration.

Duration is a flowing continuity in which the past remains present within the moment we are living now. Memory accumulates inside perception. Experience thickens rather than advancing in neat units. Time, in this sense, is not a series of separate instants but an ongoing movement in which past and present interpenetrate.

If Bergson is right, then it becomes possible that different forms of life inhabit different durations. Time is not a universal grid imposed equally on every living being. It is something lived through bodies, memories, relationships, and environments.

An elephant that remembers distant watering holes from decades earlier, that follows migration routes learned from older matriarchs, and that responds to slow ecological rhythms may be inhabiting a form of duration that looks very different from the accelerated schedules that structure much of human life today.

Rahmat’s three dimensions also explore this possibility. Eco-cultural identity describes the way elephants inherit patterns of movement and knowledge that function almost like cultural traditions. Individual history describes the accumulation of experiences each elephant carries throughout its life, including memories and trauma. Human-impacted time describes what happens when the temporal rhythms of industrial development collide with the slower durations through which elephants and ecosystems have evolved.

When a forest corridor disappears in a single generation, what vanishes is not only habitat. Something else is disrupted as well. The orientation of a herd toward a landscape that once held meaning for them.

Research by the psychologist Gay A. Bradshaw helps make this visible in unsettling ways. Bradshaw has studied elephant herds that lost their matriarchs to poaching and found behavioral patterns that resemble trauma responses observed in humans. Younger elephants in those herds exhibited heightened aggression, unstable social relationships, and behaviors that fell outside the normal patterns of elephant societies.

The matriarch was not simply the oldest member of the herd. She carried decades of memory. She knew where water could be found during drought. She remembered the histories of neighboring herds. She guided the group through landscapes using knowledge no other elephant possessed. When she was lost, something more than an individual life disappeared. A storehouse of collective memory was removed. Part of the herd’s temporal world collapsed with her.

This is where Edith Stein‘s phenomenology of empathy becomes helpful.

Stein argued that empathy is the way we encounter another center of experience without collapsing it into our own. When we empathize with another person, we do not literally enter their consciousness. Instead, we perceive expressions, gestures, and actions that reveal the presence of another subject who experiences the world differently from us.

Empathy is not projection. It is a disciplined attentiveness to the fact that another interior life exists.

What Stein describes philosophically, Rahmat approaches methodologically. She cannot step inside elephant experience. But she can follow the traces that point toward it. The matriarch’s memory. The seasonal agreements between elephants and human communities. The visible disruption that occurs when those relational patterns are broken.

These behaviors become the ways interior life shows itself. Seen in this light, careful attention to those patterns is not sentimentalism. It is a form of perception.

Rahmat describes moments watching elephants in the Belum rainforest as dusk settled along the roadside. The elephants would approach to warm themselves along the edge of the pavement. What struck her was how clearly they could assess her presence. If she turned off her headlights, they remained calm and continued feeding.

Without language, a kind of communication unfolded.

She struggled to describe what was happening without reaching toward words like subjectivity or shared understanding. Yet calling it elephant “personhood” did not quite fit either, since that still frames the animal world through human categories. What she sensed was something else. Another form of life unfolding alongside her own. Another duration moving through the same landscape.

This has implications for conservation that reach deeper than policy discussions usually allow.

Environmental policy tends to operate within relatively short human timeframes. Planning cycles extend across years or perhaps a few decades. Political systems often shorten those horizons even further.

Yet elephants and the ecosystems they inhabit operate within much longer durations. Migration routes can extend across centuries of learned behavior. Herd structures depend on matriarchs whose memories anchor the group’s survival strategies. Landscapes themselves develop through slow ecological processes unfolding across generations.

When those landscapes disappear within a single generation, something more than habitat is lost. Entire temporal worlds are disrupted. The knowledge embedded in migration routes no longer has a landscape in which to function. The accumulated experience within a herd loses the ecological context that once gave it meaning.

Even the quiet agreements that formed between species over centuries can vanish without anyone realizing they were there.

In that sense, conservation may require us to think not only about protecting space or population numbers, but about protecting duration itself. Living beings inhabit temporal relationships with places that extend far beyond our immediate planning horizons. When those relationships are broken, forms of life built on long memory and ecological continuity are fractured in ways we are only beginning to understand.

One of the quieter tragedies of modern culture is how completely mechanical time has shaped our perception of the world. Schedules, productivity systems, and digital calendars encourage us to treat time as a sequence of units to be managed and optimized. That framework has practical advantages, but it also narrows our awareness of the many temporal worlds unfolding around us.

Forests grow in decades. Rivers reshape landscapes across centuries. Elephant herds carry knowledge across generations. These are not poetic exaggerations. They are reminders that life unfolds within durations that clocks cannot fully capture.

If Bergson helps us recognize the thickness of lived time, and Stein helps us understand how empathy allows us to encounter other centers of experience, then Rahmat’s research invites us to extend those insights beyond the human sphere. Elephants are living within temporal structures that we only partially perceive, yet those structures are no less real for that reason.

Learning to notice those different temporalities may be one of the most important ecological skills we can cultivate. It requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit that the world contains many ways of inhabiting time.

And once we begin to notice that, it becomes harder to believe that the human clock is the only one that matters. Somewhere tonight a herd is moving toward water remembered decades earlier.

Further Reading

Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution
Bergson’s classic work introduces the concept of durée, or lived duration, and explores how life unfolds through continuous creative evolution rather than mechanical time.

Edith Stein – On the Problem of Empathy
Stein’s phenomenological study of empathy remains one of the most careful explorations of how we encounter the inner lives of others without reducing them to our own perspective.

Gay A. Bradshaw – Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
Bradshaw’s research on elephant societies and trauma reveals the depth of elephant social memory and the psychological consequences that follow when those structures are disrupted.

Khatijah Rahmat – Research on Elephant Temporality
Rahmat’s work explores how elephants experience time through individual history, eco cultural identity, and human impacted landscapes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s reflections on ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge traditions offer a powerful reminder that attentiveness to other beings and their rhythms has long been part of how humans learn to live with the land.

Eyes of the World and The Spiritual Discipline of Paying Attention

One of the hardest spiritual disciplines (for me at least) in the modern world is simply “paying” attention. I’m not sure why we use the word “pay” here. Interesting etymology if you’re into such things, though.

Not productivity. Not efficiency. Not the curated forms of “mindfulness” from TikTok and Instagram influencers that often end up just another optimization technique. I mean something simpler and more ancient with the slow, patient act of noticing the world around us.

Early this morning, before most of the neighborhood was awake, I stepped outside with my coffee for a brief moment and stood quietly in the backyard. The woods behind our house here in Spartanburg were still mostly gray from winter, and the time change has our morning hours dark again. The forest floor is covered in the same brown leaves that have been gathering there for months now, slowly breaking down into the soil and composting into new things that will soon be green while the billions and billions of microbes in the soil go about their work.

But if you linger for a few minutes, small changes start to appear. A shift in birdsongs, a few red maple buds are even beginning to emerge. The subtle warmth of the air that wasn’t there two weeks ago as our planet tilts and wobbles (in this part at least) back towards our closest star.

None of this is dramatic. Most of it would pass unnoticed if you were scrolling your phone while walking across the yard. But that quiet shift is exactly the sort of thing that attention makes visible.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested that perception is not a passive reception of information. It is a relationship. We do not simply observe the world from a distance. We are entangled within it, bodies among bodies, participants in a shared field of experience.

That idea alone is enough to challenge the way many of us move through our days. Because modern life trains us almost constantly to disengage from that relationship and look down at that black slab of glass, with components extracted from the planet in unscrupulous ways, all in the name of having us pay attention to it to extract our human data.

We move quickly. We skim. We multitask. Our devices offer an endless stream of stimuli that reward speed over depth. Even our forms of entertainment are often designed for rapid consumption and never-ending video loops that tickle our hippocampus (or amygdala).

But the living world does not operate at that pace.

To perceive it well requires something closer to patience.

Edith Stein, writing about empathy in her early phenomenological work, argued that encountering another being is never simply a matter of gathering data. It requires a kind of openness… a willingness to allow the presence of another to disclose itself gradually. That insight is usually discussed in the context of human relationships, but it applies just as much to the more-than-human world.

A tree does not reveal itself all at once. Neither does a landscape. And certainly not a season.

Anyone who has spent time listening to the Grateful Dead knows something about this kind of attention. Their music often unfolds slowly, building through long improvisations that only make sense if you are willing to stay with them. A song like “Eyes of the World” (my fav version) doesn’t rush toward its conclusion. It wanders, explores, returns, and gradually reveals patterns that were invisible at the beginning.

The same could be said of Wilco’s quieter moments. Songs that feel almost fragile at first listening begin to open up if you give them time.

Willie Nelson, in a completely different musical tradition, once described his phrasing as intentionally relaxed… letting the melody stretch and bend so that the listener has space to hear what’s happening between the notes. It’s fascinating to see Willie Nelson perform live because (like Dylan), his phrasing morphs and shifts and relaxes rather than sticking to a script like so many pop culture stadium shows today.

That space between the notes is where attention lives.

Carl Sagan famously wrote that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. It’s a beautiful line, often quoted for its sense of wonder. But it also carries a kind of responsibility.

If the universe becomes aware of itself through conscious beings like us, then our capacity for attention matters. The quality of our perception becomes part of the story of the cosmos itself.

And yet the ecological crisis we face today might be understood, at least in part, as a crisis of attention.

Species disappear quietly while rivers change course slowly, often not due to their natural inclination but human direction, and soils degrade over decades as we extract nutrients for monocrop agriculture.

These processes rarely produce the kind of spectacle that captures headlines or social media feeds. They unfold in subtle ways that are easy to ignore if we are not paying attention.

The result is that by the time we notice something has changed, the transformation has already been underway for years.

Ecology, at its root, is simply the study of our home. But to study a home well, familiarity is required. It requires noticing seasonal rhythms, life patterns, and the relationships between species and place.

In other words, ecology begins with attention.

Theologians have long understood this, even if they used different language. Many monastic traditions described attention as a form of prayer. Simone Weil famously suggested that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

To pay attention is to offer the world the gift of your presence… not as a detached observer, but as a participant within a living system of relationships. That might sound abstract, but it often begins with very ordinary practices.

Standing quietly in a backyard at dawn.

Learning the names of the trees in your neighborhood.

Listening to birds long enough to recognize the difference between their calls.

Watching how the light changes across the same patch of ground throughout the year.

These acts do not solve the ecological crisis, but they do something equally important. They restore our capacity to perceive the world we are trying to care for.

Because it is difficult to love what we do not notice, and it is impossible to protect what we have never truly seen. In the end, the spiritual discipline of paying attention is not about mastering a technique. It is about learning, slowly and imperfectly, to inhabit the world more fully. Like a good song that reveals itself only after repeated listening.

Or the first subtle signs of spring that appear quietly in the woods, long before the leaves return.

The world is always speaking.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
But the heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own
Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning brings
But the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own…”

What Spartanburg Learned About Data Centers and Why Marion County Should Pay Attention

Something remarkable happened here in Spartanburg this week. After months of debate, public meetings, and growing resident concern, the developers of the proposed Project Spero AI data center withdrew it. The company simply said, “Alignment ultimately has not been achieved.” Corporate language has a way of smoothing the edges of conflict, but the meaning here is not difficult to read. The community began asking questions, and those questions changed the story.

Over the past months many of us in Spartanburg began focusing less on the polished language that accompanies projects like this, words such as “innovation,” “investment,” and “economic development,” and more on the physical realities beneath the proposal. Water withdrawals, electricity demand, infrastructure strain, and long-term ecological impacts slowly entered the conversation. Once those realities became visible, the narrative began to shift. What had initially been presented as an inevitable step forward for economic growth began to look more complicated. Projects of this scale rely on momentum, and momentum depends heavily on public perception. When perception changes, momentum slows.

That shift in perception did not come from any single person or group. It emerged through conversations, public meetings, local reporting, and the steady work of people simply asking better questions. What began as curiosity gradually became scrutiny, and scrutiny eventually became hesitation among local leaders who realized that the community was no longer convinced that the project’s benefits clearly outweighed its risks.

Now a similar conversation is beginning to unfold elsewhere in South Carolina, including a place that is very personal to me.

Marion County and the Expansion of AI Infrastructure

In Marion County, South Carolina, where I grew up in Mullins, another major data-center proposal has appeared on the landscape. According to reporting from the Post and Courier, developers have proposed a facility associated with Stream Data Centers that would bring a large-scale digital infrastructure project to the region. For many residents, the announcement came quickly, and questions about the project’s scope and long-term impact began surfacing almost immediately.

For rural communities, projects like this can arrive with a sense of inevitability. The promise of economic development, construction jobs, and tax revenue often accompanies announcements of new industrial infrastructure. Yet residents in Marion County have already begun raising concerns about the speed of the process and the lack of clear public information about the project’s environmental demands. These concerns are not rooted in opposition to technology or economic growth. Rather, they reflect a deeper question that rural communities across the country are beginning to ask: what does this kind of infrastructure actually require from the land and water systems that sustain the communities where it is built?

That question becomes particularly important when the proposed infrastructure is designed to support artificial intelligence systems that require enormous computing power. Data centers are not abstract digital clouds floating somewhere beyond the horizon. They are intensely physical systems that depend on massive flows of electricity, water, and cooling infrastructure. The sleek digital services they support are grounded in very real ecological and material demands.

Why Rural Communities Are Being Targeted

Across the United States, large technology companies are increasingly looking to rural regions as potential sites for data center expansion. Several factors make these areas attractive. Rural counties often have large tracts of available land, proximity to high-capacity power transmission lines, and fewer zoning restrictions than major metropolitan areas. Local governments may also see such projects as opportunities to attract investment in regions that have struggled economically for decades.

Yet these same conditions can create vulnerabilities. Smaller local governments may have fewer resources available to evaluate the long-term environmental and infrastructural consequences of major industrial projects. Residents may not initially have access to the technical information needed to fully understand the scale of resource consumption involved. As a result, communities can find themselves navigating decisions that will shape their landscapes and water systems for generations with limited time and incomplete information.

This is why the conversation around data centers is beginning to shift nationally. Researchers and policymakers are increasingly acknowledging that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure is placing new demands on electricity grids and freshwater systems. These facilities require enormous energy inputs and significant water use for cooling processes, particularly in warmer climates. In regions where water resources are already under pressure from agriculture, drought, or population growth, those demands can become a critical factor in long-term planning.

The Real Resource Question: Water

When development projects are introduced to communities, the conversation often begins with jobs, investment, and economic opportunity. Those questions are important and deserve careful consideration. But in many cases they are not the most fundamental questions communities should be asking.

The most important question is water.

Freshwater is not simply another economic resource that can be substituted or relocated once it is depleted. It is the foundation of ecosystems, agriculture, and community survival. Rural landscapes like those in the Pee Dee region are shaped by the rhythms of rivers, wetlands, rainfall, and soil. Decisions about large-scale industrial water use can alter those systems in ways that persist long after the original economic promises have faded.

This is precisely why the conversation in Spartanburg shifted so dramatically once residents began focusing on water. People began asking straightforward but essential questions. How much water will the facility require each day? Where will that water come from? What happens during periods of drought? And who ultimately decides how water is allocated when industrial demand begins competing with agriculture, ecosystems, and residential use?

Once those questions entered the public conversation, the entire narrative changed. The project was no longer simply about economic opportunity. It became a discussion about long-term stewardship of shared ecological resources.

The Power of Perception

The most important lesson from the Project Spero debate is not simply that a data center proposal stalled. The deeper lesson is that perception changed. For generations many rural communities have been encouraged to see development as something that happens to them rather than something they actively shape. A corporation proposes a project, local officials negotiate incentives, and construction begins.

But communities are beginning to recognize that they have agency within these processes. They can ask questions. They can demand transparency. They can insist that decisions about land and water reflect the long-term well-being of the people who live there rather than the short-term interests of outside investors.

In Spartanburg, that shift in perception slowed the momentum that large infrastructure projects typically rely on. When residents began reframing the conversation around water, energy, and ecological responsibility rather than simply economic development, the project’s assumptions became less stable. Local leaders recognized that the community wanted more clarity and accountability before moving forward. In that space of uncertainty, the project lost its footing.

Rural South Carolina Deserves a Voice

The situation unfolding in Marion County deserves careful attention. Mullins and the surrounding Pee Dee region are not empty spaces waiting to be filled by industrial infrastructure. They are landscapes shaped by agriculture, rivers, forests, and generations of families who have built their lives there.

I grew up in Mullins. I know the fields, the creeks, and the quiet roads that run through that part of the state. Those landscapes carry histories that stretch far beyond the timelines of corporate development proposals.

Communities across rural South Carolina deserve the opportunity to decide what happens to their land and water. That does not mean rejecting every form of development. It means ensuring that decisions about the future of these landscapes are made with full transparency, careful ecological consideration, and meaningful public participation.

The story that has unfolded here in Spartanburg shows that communities are not powerless when they begin asking the right questions. Sometimes the most important shift begins not with a protest or a vote but with a change in how people see the land and water around them. When perception changes, the conversation changes, and once the conversation changes, the future becomes something communities can shape rather than simply accept.

What Marion County Residents Can Do Now

People in Marion County have already begun asking what they can do as conversations about the proposed data center continue. The experience in Spartanburg offers a few practical lessons.

The first step is simply paying attention to water. Large data centers depend on enormous volumes of water for cooling systems. Residents should ask local officials clear questions about how much water the facility would require, where that water would come from, and what contingency plans exist during drought conditions. Water withdrawals, discharge permits, and cooling systems are often where the most important long-term impacts appear.

Second, transparency matters. Many large development projects involve non-disclosure agreements between companies and local governments during early negotiations. While that is common in economic development deals, it can also leave communities without the information they need to understand what is being proposed. Residents have the right to ask for clear information about energy use, water demand, tax incentives, and infrastructure commitments before major decisions are finalized.

Third, local meetings matter more than most people realize. County council meetings, zoning hearings, and planning commission sessions are often where the most significant decisions take place. Even a small number of residents asking informed questions can dramatically change the tone of those discussions.

Finally, it helps to change the conversation itself. When discussions focus only on jobs or tax incentives, communities can feel pressured to accept projects quickly. When the conversation includes water rights, long-term land stewardship, and ecological responsibility, the decision becomes more balanced and thoughtful.

The lesson from Spartanburg is simple. Communities are not powerless when they begin asking better questions.

The Overstory

Reading The Overstory felt less like moving through a novel and more like being slowly re-schooled in perception. Which is something I study intently, so the book was an ongoing wonderful surprise (much as its structure itself).

Richard Powers does not simply tell stories about trees here, but rearranges the conditions under which we notice them at all through various timelines (some that fracture) and characters. I wasn’t sure what I was reading for the first few hours, but the unfolding leaves of the book flowered over time.

Early in the book, one of the most quietly destabilizing lines appears:

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind.”

That line could easily pass as a reflection on politics (especially currently) or culture, and became an entry in my own notebook. But within the arc of the novel, it becomes ecological. The crisis is not primarily informational. It is perceptual. We do not fail to act because we lack data. We fail because we do not see.

This is where the novel began to move into territory that those of us working in phenomenology and ecological theology will recognize immediately. Powers is not asking us to care more about trees, and this is not a tree-huggers’ guide to discourse. He is asking us to experience the field of relation differently, in which care might even arise.

Another moment comes when the text reminds us:

“This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees.”

That reversal landed with philosophical force for me. It unsettles the background assumption that the human is the measure of belonging on this planet. Trees are not an object of the landscape. They are participants in the very conditions that make landscapes, histories, and even narratives possible.

In this sense, The Overstory mirrors the kind of ecological intentionality I have been trying to tease out in my own work and writings. The novel dramatizes what Edith Stein might call the givenness of another’s reality, not as projection, not as abstraction, but as presence that precedes our categories. The trees in Powers’ narrative are never romanticized into human likeness. Nor are they reduced to inert matter. They are encountered as beings whose temporalities, communicative capacities, and communalities exceed our usual frames.

At one point, the novel observes:

“The tree is really a kind of massively branched, above-ground root.”

The sentence is biologically true. Yet, it also works metaphysically. It dissolves our habit of separating what is visible from what sustains. The forest becomes less a collection of individuals and more a process of relation.

Process thought and panpsychism came to my mind many times as well. Whitehead’s sense that reality consists of interdependent occasions rather than isolated substances finds narrative embodiment here, with connections appearing from the soil of the novel in curious ways. No character stands alone. Each life is drawn into wider systems of exchange, decay, regeneration, and memory.

Memory is central throughout the book. Powers repeatedly insists that trees are temporal beings whose scale stretches beyond our narrative patience. One of the most haunting insights comes in the simple observation:

“Trees pass messages to one another through the air.”

The novel treats this not as a metaphor but as an ecological truth. Chemical signaling, fungal networks, shared stress responses. Yet what matters is less the mechanism than the invitation. If communication extends beyond language, then relation extends beyond recognition.

This is where the book becomes moving rather than merely informative in my opinion (though the opening 1/3 with character vignettes is superbly done).

We begin to sense that our estrangement from the more-than-human world is not caused by distance but by habit in the phenomenological sense. We have trained our perception to notice speed, novelty, and control. Trees operate through slowness, repetition, and persistence. They are, in Powers’ framing, beings whose stories unfold on temporal scales that challenge narrative closure and who live much longer than humans.

In a line that feels almost like a thesis for the whole work, we are told:

“The seeds of things are in trees.”

Not just biological seeds, but imaginative ones. The possibility of another way of inhabiting the world.

The novel does not pretend that this shift of perception or attention is easy. The human characters struggle, fail, and fracture, as do some of the timelines. Some become activists, some become disillusioned, some turn inward, and some choose to end their human lives. Yet across these divergent arcs runs a shared realization that the world we inhabit has never been exclusively ours.

There’s a common refrain harkening back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

For me, the most powerful effect of The Overstory was the way it mirrors the experience of sitting with a particular tree over time. The black walnut I have been tracking in my own work comes to mind. Powers captures that strange sensation that the longer one attends, the less the tree appears as an object and the more it becomes a presence that gathers relations.

In one passage, the novel notes:

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are.”

The line is not accusatory. It is clarifying. It suggests that our dominance has always depended on a background we barely perceive.

What the novel offers, finally, is not an argument but a reorientation. It does not insist that trees are sacred in a theological sense. Yet it quietly renders them neighborly in a phenomenological one with a story to tell us if we have ears to hear.

And once that shift occurs, the ethical implications follow without coercion.

The brilliance of The Overstory lies in this restraint. It does not preach (as some reviewers on subreddits hold). It attends. It does not collapse human suffering into ecological process, nor does it elevate the nonhuman into sentimental purity. Instead, it invites us to inhabit a layered world where grief, endurance, and regeneration are shared conditions.

It leaves us with a sense that the crisis we face is not simply environmental but relational. We have forgotten how to perceive participation.

Powers helps us remember.

When Intelligence Becomes Land Use (or When the Cloud is Made of Land)

Much of the conversation around Project Spero, with the proposed AI data center here in Spartanburg, has revolved around a few similar questions that we keep hearing as a framework for processing development in general. How many jobs will it bring? How much tax revenue will it generate? Will it strain our power grid? Will it draw too heavily from our water systems? What are the environmental impacts?

These are certainly necessary questions. They are practical, measurable, and tied to the immediate realities of governance and infrastructure. However, they are not the only questions worth asking, nor are they the origin of where our concern or attention should stem from, despite the competing marketing messages meant to shape public discourse.

Beneath the debates about megawatts and gallons per minute lies a quieter transformation that is harder to see but just as consequential. Projects like this do not simply add another industrial facility to the landscape. They introduce a new kind of presence into a place. They materialize intelligence.

For generations, land use in the Carolina Piedmont has followed recognizable patterns. Fields became suburbs, forests became highways, and rivers became reservoirs, while textile mills rose and fell. Logistics hubs replaced smokestacks. Each phase reorganized the landscape around a dominant economic logic… agriculture, manufacturing, distribution.

Now something different is emerging. Proposed AI infrastructure here in Spartanburg and throughout the Southeast of the United States does not primarily produce goods, textiles, or even physical services. Its purpose is to process cognition. To store, refine, and distribute decision-making capacity and contribute to the global chain of commodifying intelligence.

In effect, this all turns land into substrate for thinking.

This may sound abstract, but its implications are intensely material. Data centers are among the most physically demanding infrastructures ever built. They require enormous electricity flows, steady access to water for cooling, stable transmission corridors, and continuous connectivity. They generate heat that must be managed. They demand redundancy and resilience. In other words, they reorganize ecosystems to support continuous computation.

The Piedmont is not being asked simply to host an industry, but to sustain a new layer of perceived planetary intelligence to meet the resource needs of large language models. I think that changes the conversation.

When farmland became suburbia, we asked whether roads could handle the traffic. When distribution centers arrived, we asked whether zoning permitted increased truck traffic. But when intelligence becomes land use, the questions shift in both ontological and material ways that we’re not processing.

How much river becomes cooling capacity? How much forest becomes a transmission corridor? How much atmospheric stability becomes heat dissipation? How much regional resilience is redirected toward maintaining uninterrupted cognition?

Human systems do not float above ecological limits. They are embedded within them. AI infrastructure does not escape this reality at all; rather, it intensifies it.

What we are witnessing in places like Spartanburg is not simply economic development. It is the localization of a global cognitive metabolism. Decisions made in distant financial centers or algorithmic markets are beginning to rely on landscapes like ours for their material continuation.

The cloud, it turns out, is made of land.

This does not make projects like Spero inherently good or bad. But it does make them more consequential than the language of “jobs versus environment” suggests.

We are no longer deciding whether to permit another factory or mill. We are deciding whether this landscape will participate in sustaining planetary-scale computation, and it’s a different kind of civic choice.

It asks us not only to measure output and impact, but to reflect on orientation. What kinds of futures are we grounding here? What relationships between land, water, and intelligence are we normalizing? And perhaps most importantly… what forms of attention will this infrastructure train us to attend to (or be attended by)?

Because once intelligence becomes land use, the question is no longer only what we build on the land. It is what kind of world the land is being asked to think into being.

Project Spero and Pauses… Real Questions Are Just Beginning

When I last wrote about Project Spero earlier this month, the proposed AI data center slated for the Tyger River Industrial Park here in Spartanburg County, the story felt like it was accelerating toward inevitability. However, something interesting has happened.

Momentum has slowed.

According to recent reporting, Spartanburg County Council now appears weeks away from a third reading and final decision on whether to grant the tax incentives needed to bring TigerDC’s massive facility here. Yet a council member who previously supported the project is now signaling that it may not move forward at all, following widespread public opposition and mounting questions about infrastructure readiness.

Thousands of residents have signed petitions opposing the project, and hundreds have shown up at recent hearings to raise concerns about energy demand, water use, and long-term environmental impacts.

In other words, this is no longer just a development story or possibilities, but is becoming a community discernment moment about what kind of intentional development we want in the local context.

The Shape of the Project Is Becoming Clearer

We are finally learning more about what Project Spero entails.

TigerDC has indicated the facility could eventually reach up to 400 megawatts of energy demand, with an initial phase closer to 100 MW. For perspective, that level of power draw is often compared to the energy consumption of a mid-sized city like Spartanburg.

Company representatives say the project would rely partly on on-site natural gas generation (which, in itself, raises a number of issues) while also drawing from the regional grid, and they insist that the buildout would strengthen infrastructure rather than strain it. They also point to potential economic benefits, including a limited number of jobs (50?) and hundreds of millions in projected tax revenue over decades.

But the concerns voiced by residents cut to the heart of a deeper issue…even if this project is financially beneficial (for whom?), is our ecological and civic infrastructure prepared to absorb it?

Because data centers do not simply sit on land. They metabolize it.

The Infrastructure Question Has Come Into Focus

Opposition to the data center has wisely moved beyond the “is AI good or bad?” rhetoric, as far as I’ve been reading, to focus on whether Spartanburg’s systems are ready. Residents have raised concerns about electrical grid capacity, water use for cooling, air emissions from on-site generation, and noise from proximity to residential communities.

These are not abstract worries. Large-scale data centers are known to consume vast amounts of both electricity and water, and local critics are asking whether the Upstate’s systems, already under seasonal strain, can realistically support another industrial-scale load.

So the main infrastructure question (in my mind) should be “What will this require from the land and the people who live here long-term?”

A key turning point for moving ahead with Project Spero and receiving the County Council’s blessing may be the proposed tax arrangement. County leaders are considering allowing TigerDC to pay a reduced fee-in-lieu-of-taxes rate of 4% rather than the standard 10.5% for up to 40 years. That incentive appears crucial to the project’s viability and existence given the financial stakes for TigerDC.

If a project requires long-term public subsidy to arrive, who carries the long-term ecological cost once it does?

This Is No Longer Just About Technology

Across the political spectrum, residents are beginning to articulate a shared concern that growth is not neutral in our local communities. The siting of digital infrastructure is also the siting of energy systems, water systems, emissions, and land-use transformations. AI is often described as weightless or virtual or “cloud-based” in clever marketing and PR speak. But the reality is quite the opposite. Data centers are grounded in turbines, pipelines, cooling systems, transmission lines, and land that not-so-quietly consumes incredible amounts of water, power, atmospheric quality, and community well-being.

In other words, in ecology.

Questions That Still Need to Be Asked

Even as the project’s future remains uncertain, several key questions remain unanswered:

How much water will be required at full buildout?

What happens to regional grid stability during peak demand or extreme weather events?

How will emissions from on-site gas generation be monitored?

What guarantees exist regarding long-term infrastructure upgrades?

What happens if the project expands beyond its initial phase?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who gets to decide what kind of future Spartanburg is building?

Hope, in the Older Sense

It’s worth remembering the meaning behind the name Spero…

“While I breathe, I hope.”

Hope, in this older sense, is not optimism. It is attention.

The recent slowing of this project does not mean it will disappear. A final vote is still approaching, regardless of the third reading’s outcome. But it does suggest something healthy that our community pauses long enough to ask what kind of relationship it wants with the infrastructures shaping its future.

That pause may turn out to be the most important development of all!