The Living Earth and Its Ethical Priority

“Living Earth” means that Earth is the carrier of the vitalizing essence or animating principle here capitalized as “Life” to differentiate it from “life” as traditionally associated with organic things alone. Planet Earth exhibits cyclic processes of organic construction known as “aliveness” and of inorganic/organic deconstruction named “deadness,” and the various states or phases of these closely integrated processes have developed within and dependently on Earth’s air-water-land ecosystems—named “geoecosystems” because they are place-specific. Thus Earth, the Ecosphere, and its sectoral geoecosystems—resembling mega-terrariums and mega-aquariums with all their organic/inorganic contents—have from the beginning of time been the evolutionary source and purveyors of Life. Metaphorical language has equated life only with organisms. Ecological knowledge, by revealing the importance of context, shows that Earth is synonymous with Life in its larger sense. When the miraculous quality Life is located in Earth and its geoecosystems, a realistic foundation is established for a new kind of extra-human ethics: Ecological Ethics or Ecospheric Ethics. Axiomatic is the belief that organisms, including humanity, are secondary in importance to the creative Earth and its geoecosystems