EARTHQUAKES AND BUTTERFLIES by Kathleen Gallagher

This article examines Kathleen Gallagher’s Earthquakes and Butterflies – Ōtautahi Christchurch (2015) as an ecosophical and ecotheological reimagining of catastrophe. Focusing on the 2010–2012 Christchurch earthquakes, it argues that Gallagher represents disaster not merely as material destruction, but as an epistemological rupture: a moment in which Western assumptions of stability, human centrality, and control over the environment collapse. Through a hybrid form combining prose, photography, Māori language, waiata, scientific discourse, and spiritual reflection, the novel transforms seismic trauma into a meditation on planetary vitality, memory, and renewal. The article shows how Gallagher frames the earthquake as a crisis of the imagination, forcing characters and readers to rethink the boundaries between human and nonhuman life. Drawing on Māori cosmology, especially the figures of Papatūānuku and Rūaumoko, the novel challenges anthropocentric readings of disaster and presents the Earth as a living, agentic body rather than inert matter. Geological violence thus becomes both wound and revelation: it exposes human fragility while opening the possibility of a renewed relational consciousness. In dialogue with theorists such as Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, and Jane Bennett, the article highlights how Gallagher’s text dissolves binaries between body and land, matter and spirit, science and myth, self and world. Particular attention is paid to the novel’s polyphonic structure, its use of Māori conceptual thresholds, and its recurring imagery of birds, insects, water, mud, cracks, and butterflies. These elements articulate a post-disaster imaginary in which survival depends on metamorphosis, humility, and ethical reconnection with the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the article argues that Earthquakes and Butterflies turns catastrophe into a transformative event: a painful but necessary change of vision through which human beings are invited to inhabit the Earth not as masters, but as vulnerable participants in a shared ecology of becoming.