**1. Introduction**

A necessity animates the argument in this essay: to expand the horizon of our thinking about earth beyond the opposition between Ptolemean (geocentric) and Copernican (heliocentric) worldviews. The Copernican worldview undergirds modern science and technology in approaches to the environmental crisis today. By contrast, the Ptolemean worldview is relegated to outdated beliefs. Yet the both run a version of centrism, a claim that there always is a center or a number of them. Opposing Ptolemy and Copernicus too strongly takes any other (call them "a-centric") approaches to earth off the table. These tacitly suppressed approaches can promise more in how one goes about environmental crisis today.

The argument is also responding to a much more obvious but much harder to face necessity: The environmental crisis is political and human in nature; as such, it cannot be fully addressed—let alone understood—by technology. Instead, a critical rethinking of the fundamental assumptions about politics and about humanity in approaching earth becomes due. The essay contributes to such rethinking by asking how thinking earth as "environment" preempts one from thinking earth1 Attempting to manage the crisis is always only the second step. The logically first step is in having committed to the terms in which one thinks of the crisis. One has to rethink the first step before getting too far into second.

Facing the contemporary "environmental crisis," one therefore needs "to step back" both in time and in the conceptual scope, in order to revisit the notion of environment as defining and possibly also blindfolding one's approach to the crisis. This essay commits such a stepping back to rethink the relationships between earth and environment. By necessity to become clear below, that evokes "old" bodies of text and thought, not only from the last century, when environmentalism was first taking shape, but also from the late antiquity, from the long durée of the Western thought. The working assumption is that a simple passage of time does not automatically render "old" irrelevant, but rather that placing a modern issue into a framework of an "older" tradition of thought yields a double new result. It invites "to step back" in thinking through a modern issue and also to rethink the pertinence of the "old" corpora of thought in a new light.

To provide an in-advance outline of the argument-structure and result of this essay: The analysis first turns to Edmund Husserl's (d. 1938) deductive-analytical mereology (a theory of whole as always more than its parts) of earth as a simple bodiless whole, from which all bodies split off. The essay further compares Husserl's mereology with Augustine with structurally (but not thematically) similar mereology of "mind" in Augustine (d. 430 C.E.), for whom mind is an equally simple whole without parts. That in turn allows to juxtapose both approaches to the the nineteenth to twentieth centuries mereologies of organic and complex bodily wholes, from which modern notions of environment and environmentalism stem. That delineates the origin and the limit of organicist mereologies and of environmentalism having stemmed from them. This framework of analysis allows to show that environmentalist crisis is not only a crisis of preserving environment but also and more foundationally a crisis spurred by environment as a notion purporting to regulate human attitude toward the earth.

<sup>1</sup> Although history of thought about humanity, politics and earth in the twentieth century is not the focus of this essay, a fragment of that history can help illuminate the necessity to which this essay attends; and to illustrate the importance of turning back to history in order to rethink our current condition. The essay will engage Edmund Husserl's text of 1934 about Copernican, Ptolemean and Husserl's own approaches to earth [1]. Suggestibly, Husserl's argument was a search for an intellectual, political and ethical alternative to the "blood and soil"-approach to earth in Germany of the time, as if the earth were one's "native," "local," and therefore "true" environment. Husserl's mereology of the singular bodiless earth (which this essay articulates) can also be seen as Husserl's response to Heidegger's political-philosophical thought about earth via *being* and *locality*. Husserl's argument is ultimately suggesting: approaching earth as locale does not get down to earth. Husserl among many other intellectuals of the time is in search of a new conservatism in the wake of nationalist and globalist approaches to earth and environment. The strength and weaknesses of his results are heuristically important today. In the given framework, I only intimate these connections, leaving a full-fledged analysis for another occasion.

#### *Down to Earth?: A Crisis of the Environmental Crisis DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.104595*

My argument arises in rethinking Edmund Husserl's 1934 work about earth2 as a way to address limitations of the notion of environment as the constitutive notion for any discussion of "environmental crisis." After a preliminary exposition of such limitations, I will first of all show how, in thinking the earth, Husserl committed a more radical move than either environmental localism3 or environmental cosmopolitanism (or globalism) can afford. Husserl was offering a more demanding and, in his view, more precise notion of the earth than any locality-driven nationalist environmentalists did, as they sported the specter of "blood and soil." (I take the most extreme version of this kind of political thought, which also manifested itself in the magnanimous figure of "the Soviet Land" and in a miniature of "the little motherland," each one was to love.) Husserl was not a localist. Nor was his notion of the earth a cosmopolitan one: The cosmopolites' specter of the "citizen of the world" would only negate and thus still depend upon (even if only negatively) on the locality-driven politics of "blood and soil." Effectively leaving both the locality-oriented and cosmopolitical versions of environmentalism behind, Husserl offers what I interpret as a holistic approach to earth—a mereology of the earth, which both localism and cosmopolitanism fail to account for properly.

After outlining Husserl's mereology of the earth, I will second of all introduce its structural (rather than thematic) parallel, Augustine mereology of the *mens* (mind), and draw a connection between Husserl's "earth" and Augustine mind as two mereologies of a whole without parts—in contradistinction from modern mereologies of organic wholes. To articulate the structural differences and limitations of Augustine and Husserl's mereologies, I will third of all introduce a broader context for the two thinkers, having to do with Philo's interpretation of the Biblical G-d *via* a philosophical neologism, *huparxis* (G-d's involvement with the world without being a part of that world), which I will further juxtapose with the Palestinian Rabbinic mereology of the divine law arising, as I will show it is, from the sense of impossibility and necessity to cite the divine law of the past. I will fourth of all chart an implication of this analysis for a conceptual critique of modern environmentalism, its disproportional belief in science as both cause and remedy of environmental crisis, and its reduction of the humanitarian core of the crisis to an opposition between national locality and cosmopolitan universality. This reduction, I will ask to show, precludes an understanding of environmental crisis as a crisis of mereology, that is to say as the advent of the mereology of organic wholes (the wholes with organs) at the expense of the more foundational mereology, that of a bodiless whole without organs, which and only which promises a fuller and more sober access to earth.

<sup>2</sup> Ref. [1], pp. 305–327. Husserl did not publish this text (probably because of as we will see a very radical return to geo-centrism that the work was advancing). The work predated and prepared his very radical but still more conform position in the *Crisis of European Sciences* [1]. The relation of the two works, however, is beyond the scope of this essay. On a slightly different note: Suggestibly, Husserl 1934 argument [1] was a search for an intellectual, political and ethical alternative to the "blood and soil"-approach to earth in Germany of the time, as if the earth were one's "native," "local," and therefore "true" environment. Husserl's mereology of the singular bodiless earth (which this essay articulates) can also be seen as Husserl's response to Heidegger's thought on earth via being and via locality. Husserl's argument is ultimately suggesting: approaching earth as locale does not get down to earth. In the given framework, I can only intimate these connections, leaving a full-fledged analysis for another occasion.

<sup>3</sup> In the context, the most important examples of a localist approach to environment would be geociticism and geopoetics, approaches insisting on inextricably human connection to a locale—the connection technological language can neither account for nor fully eliminate. See respectively: Refs. [2–4].
