In Praise of the Earth

The Earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds and a pair of sturdy boots to realise it.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the Earth and for its enchanting beauty.

Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to a still utterly strange and exuberant nature.

Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the Earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.