Integral Plasma Ecologies

Here’s a paper on integral plasma thoughts that I posted over on Carolina Ecology… I’m deeply fascinated by this topic that weaves together my background as a physics teacher and my PhD work in Religion and Ecology…

Integral Plasma Ecologies – by Sam Harrelson:

Plasma is not just a category of physics; it is a discipline for attention. It forces our concepts to move with fields and thresholds rather than with isolated things. Thomas Berry’s old sentence comes back to me as a methodological demand rather than a slogan… the universe is “a communion of subjects,” so our ontology must learn how currents braid subjects, how membranes transact rather than wall off, how patterns persist as filaments rather than as points.[1] Plasma is one way the communion shows its hand.

Integral_Plasma_Ecology.pdf

Process Ecology of the Cross: Communion, Kenosis, and the Politics of Planetary Becoming

This paper proposes a Process Ecology of the Cross, a theological and philosophical reframing of the Christian symbol of the cross through the lens of process-relational metaphysics, ecological kenosis, and more-than-human cosmopolitics. Drawing from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Catherine Keller, Mihnea Tǎnǎsescu, Donna Haraway, and Indigenous fire stewardship practices, the paper explores how the cross can be reclaimed not as a juridical transaction or redemptive violence, but as a cosmopolitical threshold: a site of shared vulnerability, transformation, and planetary communion. The argument unfolds across seven sections, examining communion as an ontological principle, kenosis as an ethical-political descent, fire as a sacrament of regeneration, and ecological intentionality as a mode of participatory perception. Through phenomenology, posthuman theology, and lived ecological practices, this paper articulates a vision of salvation not as escape from the Earth but as a deepening within it. The cross becomes an altar of becoming-with, a liturgical site of composted grief, regenerative peace, and hope beyond the human.