Between theoretical reflection and the exploration of the paths of poetic discourse, Zisis Kotionis in Alliens in Blazing Earth rereads the lives and actions of earlier heroes of universal culture, placing them retrospectively, with a hypothetical anachronism, within the backdrop of contemporary environmental destruction. He proposes that we understand them as subjects whose itinerant life produced zero environmental footprint and that we see them as a genealogical reserve of discourse and work for the salvation of the terrestrial condition.

Empedocles and Diogenes the Cynic, Jesus of Nazareth and Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the Mediterranean basin, the poet Kobayashi Issa in Japan, and Friedrich Nietzsche in Central Europe all developed discourse programs and practices of life that were entirely compatible with the earthly condition. We can see their lives as examples of environmental ethics and sustainability precisely because they were subjects radically heterogeneous and alien to the framework of the social norms of their time, alien and victims of patriarchal power but also alien to the subsequent dominance of technology and the coming homo oeconomicus.

In a kind of negative theology, “destruction” becomes the indomitable, eschatological horizon, where each of them appears as a fighter for the Earth. They are fighters against an evil god, which is man, and they confront the coming destruction just before the end of the human world as we knew it.