Earth as a Material Process

= Excerpted from a book on Geokinetics

Discussion

Thomas Nail:

"THE EARTH FLOWS because the matter of the cosmos flows through it. In this chapter, I take the flow of matter as the starting point for a new theory of the earth. This is because I think the earth is much more like a process than it is like a stable object (Spaceship Earth) or autonomous subject (Gaia).

The earth is a material process continuous with the expansion of the universe that produced, and continues to produce, the earth. The earth is not a vacuum-sealed object cut off from the outside. Nor is it an unchanging or uniformly changing substance following autonomous processes. Geology flows from cosmology.

Flows of matter continually compose, cycle through, and flow out of the earth. The earth is only the regional circulation of a much larger kinetic and entropic process. Historically speaking, philosophy, politics, and much of geology have not taken this ongoing flow of cosmic matter seriously.

This has led to an inverted understanding of the earth and our relationship to it. We have posited ourselves and the earth as profound reversals of the general movement of the universe, which flows, cycles, and dissipates entropically.1 The crowning achievement of reversal is anthropocentrism. We look at the universe and think how wasteful it is. Against its waste, we think life, and human life in particular, is so special because it fights against the waste of cosmic entropy. We have cast ourselves as the heroes in a universal drama of life against death.

In this book, however, I offer a different perspective. The earth, I argue, is not so much a “planet” as it is a process of terrestrialization. It is the cosmos continually made earth. Every product presupposes a kinetic process, and this is where I propose to start with the earth. Part I of this book aims to rectify the missing theory of motion behind our thinking about the earth. It begins with the cosmos as the immanent material condition of the earth.

This accomplishes two significant moves. First, it abandons any notion of the earth as an absolute ground, of itself, of history, of humans, or thought. Geophilosophy and geoscience have both granted unjustified primacy and autonomy to the earth. This is why the instability of the Anthropocene has caught them so off guard. The earth is not behaving like the good ground it is supposed to be. The Anthropocene is less an age of humans than of the inhuman. And second, it provides a new conceptual vocabulary with which to talk about how indeterminate fluctuations of matter can produce and sustain emergent kinetic patterns continuous with the larger cosmos and with one another. If the matter that makes the earth is unstable, then so is the earth.

In Part I of this book I start with the idea that the earth is made of material flows."

(https://syntheticzero.net/2025/04/06/geokinetics-and-the-metastable-eaarth/)