Conceptualizing Nature

Abstract

This chapter explores how astrobiology invites us to reconceptualise ‘nature.’ It explores how the constitutive mutuality the Anthropocene opens for our environmental imagination—between nature and human being—‘corroboartiavely’ taps into the intra-action of astrobiology and symbols used in theological anthropology. To do this, it examines the flexibility inherent to the use of the term ‘nature’ as it has been developed within a typology of American environmental imagining. It characterizes how the story of human being and nature interacting has slipped away in light of the call to recognize intra-action: how the Anthopocene symbolizes a disorientation implicit to astrobiological ways of framings a human relationship to world.