This lecture focuses on three diverse thinkers--Sophocles, Mary Shelley, and Bernard Williams. Writing in different times and places they advanced overlapping insights that, if widely absorbed in major Eurocentric theories, may have advanced insights sooner into the unruliness of the earth. Sophocles—through the vehicle of gods--appreciates periodic eruptions of plagues, quakes, volcanoes, and raging seas that tear into the fabric of social life and civic spirituality. Mary Shelley, upon encountering a mysterious "year without summer" in Europe, populates Frankenstein: Prometheus Unbound with radical shifts in terrain, changing weather systems, thoughts about evolution, and dangers of scientific hubris. Bernard Williams is consulted as a later humanist who made one of the crucial moves needed. An unwieldy counterfactual question is posed: What would (or might) have happened if--rather than being transfixed by secular philosophies, evolutionary theories, and divine theologies anchored in planetary gradualism--more voices in the humanities and sciences had drawn inspiration from a few thinkers in the minor tradition. The essay closes with an exploration of intersections between a volatile planet and extractive capitalism.