Biogea, by the French philosopher Michel Serres, is a book of unexpected twists, turns, and leaps. My first introduction to the book was on the web page of the publisher, The University of Michigan Press, where the book was described as “a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea.” Upon beginning the book I was uncertain how Serres work would tie into my own research on animism, but it was in the aforementioned twists, turns, and leaps that Serres exposes the true meaning behind this work.

Serres was born the son of a barge man who spent the majority of his early adult life as an officer in the French Navy.It is his close relationship with water that first makes itself apparent in Biogea. The book opens and is interlaced with stories of time spent on his father’s barge and in the Navy. The rational for including these stories, which relate to his love of water, only become apparent on p. 89, when Serres transitions from personal narrative to poetic call to arms. He writes “Oh, sailors, old comrades, you formerly had the mission of defending the nation at sea, a supremely noble calling. You now have defending the sea as your calling. Against whom? Against ten others, no doubt, but also sometimes against your own nation. Yes, the sea is dying, the sea is dead! Do you want to wander tomorrow on dead oceans? Make the sea be reborn.” This way of writing, using personal stories to set the tone for the larger ideas to come, is a powerful way of sharing a message. Serres isn’t dealing in abstractions, instead he addresses his own personal relationships with the biosphere to highlight the events which gave birth to his philosophy.

 In an earlier work, Times of Crisis, Serres introduces the concept of Biogea, “The game with two players that fascinates the masses and opposes only humans, the Master against the Slave, the left versus the right, Republicans against Democrats, this ideology against that one, the greens versus the blues…, this game begins to disappear when a third party intervenes. And what a third party! The world itself. Here quicksand, tomorrow the climate. This is what I call “Biogea,” an archaic and new country, inert and alive, water, air, fire, the earth, the flora and fauna and all the living species.”

This idea, of the biosphere as third player, is relevant in light of our current environmental obsession with technological solutions to issues such as climate change. The Earth, the third and most important player, has, as author Naomi Klein says, “ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.” Failure to recognize the Earth as a superior player in the web of ecology will certainly lead to our demise. Technological solutions such as solar panels and electric cars, that allow us to continue to live out the myth that consumption is more important than kinship, are at best band aids. It is only by humbling ourselves that we have any hope as a species.

Serres continues to follow this thread further by writing about his fascination with natural processes such as volcanoes and earthquakes. He writes that while viewing a total eclipse, he is not surprised that eclipses “had frightened certain of our ancestors” and then describes the sense of awe instilled in him by this primal fear of a world gone temporarily sideways. He writes “I haven’t looked at the Sun in the same way since. Without source, father, mother or life, I lived outside the world for that endless minute in which, worse than death, absolute absence occurred.”

As Serres brings his stories into sharper and sharper focus, what becomes apparent to the reader is that while acknowledging the importance of science, we need to see that what is more important is that both our science and our relationship with the biosphere come from a place of embodied awe. Serres speaks about the many subtle and not-so subtle ways in which the Earth and its inhabitants speak to us, reinforcing what I see as one of the more substantive arguments in modern environmental mental thinking, the idea that if humans do not learn to again listen to the whispers of the animate Earth, then it is we who are dooming ourselves.

Towards the end of the book Serres explores the matter that is the foundation of Biogea. He writes “By bursting its ancient pocket, joy flooded the living, transpierced the skin of the animals, the tree bark, the fish scales, the artichoke leaves, the ermine and marten fur, the nut shells, even the quills on the back of the porcupines, penetrated, liquid, into the arteries, the veins, the conduits for sap, the bladders; solid, strengthened the bones, the shells and the carapaces, stretched and hardened the muscles; air, inflated the bronchioles and the swim bladders; fire, raised the penises, inflamed the vulvae, made the hearts beat; soft, fired the intuitions and made the languages, fanfares and chimes ring out. Joy: the matter from which the Boigea is made.”

It is in moments such as these in which Serres message becomes most clear, for humans to survive ourselves we need to see the joy in creation for creations sake, what could be described as the imaginative impulses of the Earth. It is in this seeing that one can find a near religious state of rapture and ecstasy. What Serres is speaking to is a sense of wonder that requires us to look downward, towards the actual biologic and geologic processes taking place all around us, rather than gazing at the sky in search of a god made in our image. Everything is right here, along with us and all around us. We are it and it is us. This recognition of an all encompassing ecological kinship is the root of animism.