Tell me your Scientific Animist reading list!
🌝 Happy Full Moon! Let's tally the world's Scientific Animist art & literature.
Obviously, top of my list, The Overstory and Braiding Sweetgrass.
The trees, in The Overstory! I could read that tree poetry every day. Spiritual writing, if I ever knew the genre.
I’m still working through Braiding Sweetgrass on audio book. So many quotes jotted down.
This whole project flows out of these books. Or rather, this project is a response to them, an attempt to take them seriously, to explore ways we might regularly engage the world together with those as our vantage. And more: to recognize that their authors had been swimming in similar water for years, having similar conversations. These books didn’t emerge from nowhere. I’m suggesting we name that water, that set of conversations. Scientific Animism. The cultural stream (or one of the streams) from which both works sprang, unnamed though it had been at their inception. And then to ask: now that it has a name, what could it become? What do we want for it?
It’s like, our culture(s) have been in a big destruction phase for a while now, clearing space for something new. This is one new thing that seems to be growing.
Have you been swimming in that water, too? What other books, podcasts, poetry, artists, movies, even genres would you suggest as falling within this category?
Here’s my list so far. Let me know yours in the comments.
1. The Overstory & Braiding Sweetgrass
It’s worth saying again! These are great! Read them, listen to them, get them from your library, borrow them from a friend. You won’t be sad to spend time with them. (Or if you are, then maybe you’re not a Scientific Animist!)
If Richard Powers or Robin Wall Kimmerer discovered my little Substack and wanted control, I’d hand it over in a heartbeat. I’d love to see how it flourished under their guidance.
2. The Monk & Robot Duology
A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers. Fantastic solarpunk novels imagining a beautiful possible world and placing a relatable, delightful plot into that world.
Becky also invents a fun new mythology. While not exactly animist, it’s closer than most of us are probably used to. It took me a while of reading to figure out that when the characters say “gods around!”, it’s their version of “God above!” or “oh my god!”
3. The whole genre of “solarpunk”?
I mean, read the solarpunk Wikipedia page. It’s great.
A little odd to say that an entire genre fits within another? Yeah, probably. But so much commonality here. My guess is that solarpunk isn’t quite a subset of Scientific Animist lit, but that the Venn Diagram circles do overlap quite a bit.
Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the “punk” refers to the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial enthusiasm for creating such a future.
Maybe:
A differentiating characteristic of Scientific Animist writing/art, in my mind, would be that it attempts to mythologize, build meaning, and/or explore our human connection to the larger-than-human narratives already around us, specifically through the lenses of science (prioritizing empirical evidence over personal bias) and animism (perceiving an inherent “anima” or consciousness in all things). That is, that it attempts to build out the Experiential, Mythological, & Doctrinal dimensions of life that our religiously-hollowed-out societies now lack.
Is this a religion? Is a hot dog a sandwich?
The Seven Dimensions of Religion:
2. Experiential/emotional: “Personal experiences felt by the individual (joy, bliss, mystery, anger, despair, etc) in relation to a religious experience... Encounters with… an unseen world, sources of inspiration, and moments of revelation”
3. Mythological: “the storytelling aspect of religion, whether the stories are believed to be true, fictitious, historical or mythological.”
4. Doctrinal/philosophical: “formal ideas about the world and logical systems of meaning.”...
Some solarpunk lit/art does this, too. Maybe a lot of it. But probably not all.
And obviously, lots of other stuff like those in this list fit within Scientific Animism, but they’re not solarpunk. That’s why I draw the Scientific Animist circle larger.
4. Ezra Klein interviewing Richard Powers
Yes, this is a reading and a listening list now.
We could probably go ahead and add all of Richard’s suggested books to this list, too, but I haven’t read those yet.
I quoted this episode in my first post:
Scientific Animism: let's invent a religion!
Richard reflected on the researchers who demonstrated “the literal interconnectivity between different species in [the forest floor]:”
“The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable we are of feeling a kind of spiritual awe. It certainly makes it easier for me to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don't think these are incompatible ways of kn...
5. This episode of The Rich Roll podcast that a friend sent me interviewing Zach Bush
Nature is constantly moving forward on this planet for 4 billion years to the next better iteration of life. And it seems, if we just look at the genomics of the planet, nature's version of "what is better" is "more diversity." At every single moment, this nature is pressing, discovering, reinventing, creating new life on this planet. We've gone from a few species of slime molds to thousands of species of butterflies over the last 4 billion years. There's such a pressure in nature to create the next thing: more beauty, more diversity, more intelligence. And it's been climbing that way for 4 billion years.
6. Everything from The Green Dreamer?
Maybe start with this episode with Dekila Chungyalpa about engaging faith leaders for planetary healing. A quote, edited for length and clarity:
The amazing thing after we decompose is that we give life to something else. We recycle into one another constantly. There doesn’t have to be this tight distinction, this clinging to identity and self, this idea that the body is the boundary, that this is where we end. We are in fact completely interdependent, in a relationship of flow with everything around us.
7. All nature poetry?
When I’ve asked friends for poetry contributions to this project, I loosely explain the idea of Scientific Animist poetry as poetry that “uses earth/nature/evolution/science metaphors.”
I think that’s a decent summary, though in theory somewhat too broad. Again, I think the distinguishing characteristic would be the same as I mentioned for solarpunk above:
…that it attempts to mythologize, build meaning, and/or explore our human connection to the larger-than-human narratives already around us, specifically through the lenses of science and animism
In practice, though, as a looser genre, you could reasonably consider a lot nature poetry as making this attempt.
8. Jordan O’Jordan’s “Carbon Cycles”
Check it out wherever you stream music. Here’s three exemplary tracks from it:
Surely this is Scientific Animist music. There must be more, but I can’t think of anything else that fits so well. Can you?
Okay, that’s enough for now, what’s your list?
Does this category make sense to you? What else do you think fits?
“How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell comes to mind, as well as her newer book “Saving Time”. She advocates the practice of focusing on a point in space, like a tree branch, and watching it for a long time. Sounds like meditation to me!
Leaves of Grass makes me wonder how American Transcendentalism fits into the geneaology of Scientific Animism texts…is it esctatic poetry?
I read Jessica Hernandez’s book “Fresh Banana Leaves,” which is a good one to add to the list. And Riane Eisler’s “Nurturing Our Humanity,” which might be more adjacent to all of this but I think is really important!