ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on mapping some key moments in the popular conception of a violent Earth that seek retribution for human irresponsibility, staging a war between human beings and the agentic Earth. It argues that an alternative imagination of a rhetorical Earth, whose efforts to maintain its livelihood unfold as much through argumentative inducement as brute force, involves avoiding the subject-object split. The chapter explores popular and academic texts that imagine a violent Earth and present responsive rhetorical practice as the limit of the Earth’s agentic capacities. Earthly faculties for communication, strategy, and decision-making exist, but violence nonetheless becomes the preferred method for dealing with human beings and their behaviors. Collapsing the subject-object split, and thus the relation of exteriority, permits a different argument: namely that the Earth’s agency operates on multiple time scales, and it is precisely through modes of human representation that the Earth enacts one of its multi-temporal efforts at self-management.
