We Ask The Earth Where It Hurts

This document was written by Coral Russell, an independent writer and scholar based in Youngstown, Ohio, working outside academic and institutional structures.

I came to this work through my own plurality. My ancestry includes Indigenous Americas, England, Celtic, Gaelic, Jewish, Iberian Peninsula, French Canadian, Northern African, Western Mediterranean, Western European, West African, and Southeastern European origins, among others. I did not attempt this work until I understood this about myself. The plurality is not incidental to the document. It is the ground the document stands on.

The philosophical framework is Marguerite Young's, developed in her novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and analyzed in my book Radical Immanence. The extension of that framework to the geological witness and to pacifism as the ontological position that the plural self requires is mine. I take full responsibility for it.

This document requires readers from the communities it names before it reaches its final form. If you carry one of these histories and find something here that is wrong or insufficient or that requires your correction, I am asking for that accountability directly. The witness is not the authority. The Earth is the authority. We are all attempting to read what it holds.

Come in. The door is open.

Coral Russell