David Abram'sBecoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

The word “earth” appears often in the pages that follow. Today many writers choose to capitalize this term whenever it appears. Such a gesture feels overly facile to me, since it leads us to imagine we are respecting this wild planet, and according it appropriate honor, simply by capitalizing its name. In this work I have generally chosen to keep the term in lower case, in order to remember that the earth is not just the round sphere in its entirety but also—first and foremost—the humble ground beneath our feet, the winds gusting around us, and the local waters flowing through us.
Nonetheless, in a few instances I have found it necessary to capitalize Earth. Such capitalization indicates less a shift in meaning than in tone, occurring only at those moments when a certain emphasis is called for, or when a sort of astonishment breaks through the calm surface of the text. At one point in this volume, even the spelling of the name alters, becoming Eairth. If you find yourself perplexed by such variation, unable to discern any clear logic behind it, my apologies: rest assured that it follows a rhyme and reason perfectly evident to the author.