This book takes its motive force from our contemporary climate crisis. It seeks to reorient human (and especially Christian) understanding, towards a more ecologically-focused, indigenously-informed way-of-living. James W. Perkinson argues that our current eco-climatic and socio-political emergency is the culmination of a 5, 000-year history of supremacist settlement, in which city-states first emergent in Mesopotamia and Egypt not only begin coercively organizing labor into surplus production and ecosystems into inordinate and destructive yields of goods, but in the process, also simultaneously deform the Spirit-World haloing of natural phenomenon into outsized service of imperial reach. Perkinson recognizes globalized humanity as an emerging monstrosity destroying both human culture and the world. How we re-envision and revalue, at our critical juncture, our inescapable interdependence with the more-than-human world as peer and teacher and even elder, is the central theme that throbs below the surface of the very disparate topics commanding attention in each chapter.
