"The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying"
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Hoagland’s line turns a familiar pastoral cliché into a quiet panic attack. “God’s green earth” is the kind of phrase people use to end arguments, a verbal porch swing: reassuring, folksy, final. He yanks it into the harsh light by treating it as an open question, then twisting the comfort into a diagnosis. If the earth really is God’s, he implies, the ownership papers come with an unsettling update: the owner looks unwell.
The genius is in the offhand structure. “Not at center stage” sounds like a modest aside, but it’s a dodge that makes the spiritual stakes feel more credible, not less. Hoagland refuses to sermonize. He doesn’t declare God dead; he lets the world itself deliver the news “with some regularity” - a phrase that lands like a weather report, implying the evidence arrives in repeatable cycles: extinctions, poisoned rivers, thinning seasons, the slow administrative grind of ecological harm. The divine isn’t struck down in a single Nietzschean flourish. It’s worn out.
Subtextually, he’s also indicting the human desire to outsource responsibility. Calling it “God’s” earth can be a way to treat it as guaranteed - protected by metaphysics. Hoagland flips that: the more you insist on divine stewardship, the more grotesque the neglect looks. Context matters here: Hoagland is a nature writer with a reportorial eye, part of a late-20th-century American tradition that watches wilderness turn into “resource” in real time. The line reads like elegy disguised as small talk: a joke with its smile removed.
The genius is in the offhand structure. “Not at center stage” sounds like a modest aside, but it’s a dodge that makes the spiritual stakes feel more credible, not less. Hoagland refuses to sermonize. He doesn’t declare God dead; he lets the world itself deliver the news “with some regularity” - a phrase that lands like a weather report, implying the evidence arrives in repeatable cycles: extinctions, poisoned rivers, thinning seasons, the slow administrative grind of ecological harm. The divine isn’t struck down in a single Nietzschean flourish. It’s worn out.
Subtextually, he’s also indicting the human desire to outsource responsibility. Calling it “God’s” earth can be a way to treat it as guaranteed - protected by metaphysics. Hoagland flips that: the more you insist on divine stewardship, the more grotesque the neglect looks. Context matters here: Hoagland is a nature writer with a reportorial eye, part of a late-20th-century American tradition that watches wilderness turn into “resource” in real time. The line reads like elegy disguised as small talk: a joke with its smile removed.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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