Abstract

In 2017, Bruce Clarke proposed that Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope, and later adapted for twenty-first century environmental discourse by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, is a vital resource in the cultivation of a “planetary imaginary” which attends to “our systemic entanglements”. Contemporary forms of Gaia discourse, Clarke argues, are “fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch”. In an era marked by scalar and communicative disjunctions, Clarke’s claim is significant. Whilst ultimately he deviates from Stengers and Latour, arguing that neither addresses “the cybernetics of Gaia” and...