In the Beginning Was the Wort: A New Natural Theology of Meaning for Ecological Catastrophe

Abstract

This paper builds upon a recent corpus of popular science that has elevated previously unsung members of the biosphere—“worts.” It argues that the corpus constitutes a new natural theology, a search for meaning in the biosphere, and suggests a theological underpinning to what its authors intuit: that worts give meaning. To do this, the paper draws on Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013) and its examination of meaning as a ubiquitous feature of the multispecies ecosystem. Following on from Kohn, two key arguments are made. First, Kohn’s posthuman anthropology is compatible with a Thomist treatment of organisms in terms of their distinct, life-orientated telos. Second, the current context of potential human extinction puts a life-orientated telos in a new light, reviving the validity of teleological thinking. Sharing the fate of nonhuman subjects, rather than treating them as scientific objects, authors and readers of the new natural theology find meaning among worts.