{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Earthly Matters: An Ecosophical Approach","description":"We're back with The Subverse. In this episode of the season, host Susan Mathews talks to writer and ecological thinker Aseem Shrivastava about the current crises in modern cosmology. Ecosophy, which acknowledges the living earth, is a way to address this arrythmia and our current alienation from the earth to which we belong. Aseem Shrivastava is a writer, teacher, and ecological thinker with a doctorate in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has lectured across the world on ecological issues emanating from globalisation. Shrivastava speaks of the present moment as an existential crisis, not just an intellectual crisis or a crisis of culture. During this fundamental upheaval in human affairs, the first thing you need to do is look at where your feet are. We need to ask fundamental questions about how we got here, and also address the terminal crisis in modern cosmology itself. \u201cWithout Nature, we are not.\u201d- This is the start of an article Shrivastava wrote in The Open Magazine in 2021. He quotes Rilke and writes, \u201cit appears that in the process of arising within us, the earth has dreams for us!\u201d This earth is our only home, so he asks, \u201cAre we ready to abandon her for the greener pastures of another planet that the space fantasists never fail to promise us? In a gentle defiance of the European Enlightenment vision, let us seriously consider the possibility that Rilke is right, that perhaps the Earth does have dreams for us, in the manner that a mother has dreams for her children. And like a mother\u2019s dreams, the earth\u2019s hopes for us must have power.\u201d Ecosophy, unlike environmentalism or ecology, fundamentally tackles things like earth alienation and looks at the content of our vanishing relationship to the natural world in its full physical and metaphysical depth. We need a new mythos, and we can learn from Rabindranath Tagore in this context. Through his poetry, music, stories, plays and letter, the mythos is all there and you don\u2019t need to go to science to find the meaning of life. We have a world that is arrhythmic, out of sync, not to mention suffering from psychic, cognitive and spiritual arrhythmia too. We need to understand the real roots of the crises we face, the limits of our knowledge, question our need to dominate and control and, in the end, face some heart reckoning and atonement. Aseem Shrivastava has taught at prestigious universities in India and the West and offered courses on Global and Indian Ecosophy at Ashoka University. He has been guiding and mentoring a number of graduate students and young people working in the realms of Philosophy, Ecosophy, Ecology, and Economics. He is the author (with Ashish Kothari) of the books \u2018Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India\u2019 (2012), and \u2018Prithvi Manthan  (2016). He is currently at work on several books on Ecosophy:\u2018The Grammar of Greed:  Reflections on a Fatal Ecology\u2019, \u2018The Alphabet of Ecosophy: A Grammar for Twilight Modernity\u2019, and \u2018For Love of the Earth: Modernity, Ecosophy, Rabindranath Tagore\u2019. All these works dialogue with the ecological challenges of 21st century global modernity. The Subverse is the podcast of Dark \u2018n\u2019 Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes. ","author_name":"The Subverse","author_url":"https:\/\/www.darknlight.com\/podcast\/","html":"