Water, wind, wildfire... wastes?
Water, air, fire, earth – the four elements with which ancient Greek culture, as well as that of India, China and Japan with similar systems, sought to explain the physical world. Our modern science doesn’t subscribe to such an explanation, but these four elements continue to exercise a hold on our ways of thinking, as four elements that are manifestly present in our daily lives. In the age of climate change and environmental crisis, they have taken on renewed significance and renewed characteristics, so that today we might reformulate them as water, wind, wildfire… wastes? Is the last what will be left of the earth, the soil, our land and our landscapes?
Aristotle added the fifth element, aether, to explain the motion of celestial bodies, but in a more ancient Greek thought – with cognates in for example Hinduism and ancient African thought – aether was associated with the void from which matter emerged. Are we faced with another kind of void, an intangible yet also all too physical sense of nothingness?
Under the heading of Water, wind, wildfire… wastes? we therefore present essays and poetic reflections that both address these issues and attempt to sense, to feel, new relations to the elements.