This page is referenced by:

• 1 2019-01-12T21:52:58+00:00 Stone is the New Green is Old 6 plain 2019-01-12T22:35:22+00:00 "Stone is the New Green" heralds the recognition of stone as "vibrant matter" (Bennett). Posthumanism privileges animals, plant life, ecological systems and the environment, while calling for the protection and conservation of the earth and its inhabitants. It is only logical that the 'geologic turn' in theory would extend this ecological equalizing to stone. The sense that the earth is a volatile rather than stable ground awakens an awareness of lithic energies and human interactions with stone. In Stone: An Inhuman Ecology, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that “Stone’s force is exorbitant yet intimate, engendering or renewing or interrupting relations among bodies, objects, and milieu, eroding the boundary between organic and non-organic” (171).
  
  Samuel Butler predicted this turn over a century ago, writing in his notebooks that "It is generally held that animals feel; it will soon be generally held that plants feel; after that it will be held that stones also can feel. For, as no matter is so organic that there is not some of the inorganic in it, so, also, no matter is so inorganic that there is not some of the organic in it.  We know that we have nerves and that we feel, it does not follow that other things do not feel because they have no nerves—it only follows that they do not feel as we do" (110).
  
  This academic blurring of the boundary between organic and non-organic reverts to or recycles long-held truths among peoples across the earth. Carolyn Dean documents the sacred status granted rocks among Inka peoples in A Culture of Stone (2010), and also points out that "The Ojibwa language of North America … distinguishes between animate and inanimate objects; stones are grammatically animate, and Ojibwas sometimes speak to stones as if they were persons, recognizing the potential for animation in particular rocks under certain circumstances" (Dean, 6). Graham Parkes points out that in ancient Chinese cosmology “our sharp distinction between animate and inanimate (with rocks falling on the lifeless side of the divide)” never obtained (89). Parkes cites Du Wan’s 12th century treatise Yunlin Shipu (The Cloud Forest catalogue of rocks): “The purest energy of the heaven-earth world coalesces into rock. It emerges, bearing the soil…. Within the size of a fist can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs” (Parkes, 92). (This vision of a rock channeling energies of a mountain is evident in the Ceremonial Rock at Machu Picchu.)