|
||
|
|
|
Ecocriticism |
|
|
1 Pages 1-10 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.1 Page 1 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.2 Page 2 |
▲back to top |
ECOCRITICISM
Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and portray
the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas
of cultural production, from Wordsworth and Thoreau to Disney
and BBC nature documentaries. It is inspired by, but also critical
of, modern environmental movements. Greg Garrard’s accessible
volume traces the development of the movement and explores the
concepts that have most occupied ecocritics, including:
• Pollution
• Wilderness
• Apocalypse
• Dwelling
• Animals
• The Earth
Featuring a glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading,
this is an invaluable introduction to one of the most exciting recent
developments in literary and cultural studies.
Greg Garrard is a Lecturer in English at Bath Spa University College.
|
|
1.3 Page 3 |
▲back to top |
THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
Series Editor: John Drakakis, University of Stirling
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to
today’s critical terminology. Each book:
. provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the term
. offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and
. cultural critic
relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible
breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to
key topics in literary studies.
Also available in this series:
Autobiography
by Linda Anderson
Class by Gary Day
Colonialism/Postcolonialism
by Ania Loomba
Culture/Metaculture
by Francis Mulhern
Discourse by Sara Mills
Dramatic Monologue
by Glennis Byron
Genders by David Glover and
Cora Kaplan
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran
Intertextuality by Graham Allen
Irony by Claire Colebrook
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form
by Philip Hobsbaum
Modernism by Peter Childs
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Narrative by Paul Cobley
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Realism by Pam Morris
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Science Fiction by Adam Roberts
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
Subjectivity by Donald E. Hall
The Unconscious
by Antony Easthope
|
|
1.4 Page 4 |
▲back to top |
ECOCRITICISM
Greg Garrard
|
|
1.5 Page 5 |
▲back to top |
First published 2004
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2004 Greg Garrard
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Garrard, Greg.
Ecocriticism / Greg Garrard.
p. cm. — (New critical idiom)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
2. Nature in literature. 3. American literature—History and
criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Conservation of natural resources in
literature. 5. Environmental protection in literature. 6. Philosophy
of nature in literature. 7. Forests and forestry in literature.
8. Wilderness areas in literature. 9. Outdoor life in literature.
10. Criticism—Great Britain. 11. Criticism—United States.
12. Landscape in literature. 13. Ecology in literature.
14. Ecocriticism. I. Title. II. Series.
PR143.G37 2004
820.9′36–dc22
2004003429
ISBN 0-203-64484-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-67401-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–19691–4 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–19692–2 (pbk)
|
|
1.6 Page 6 |
▲back to top |
For Holly
|
|
1.7 Page 7 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.8 Page 8 |
▲back to top |
CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
1 Beginnings: Pollution
1
2 Positions
16
3 Pastoral
33
4 Wilderness
59
5 Apocalypse
85
6 Dwelling
108
7 Animals
136
8 Futures: The Earth
160
GLOSSARY
183
FURTHER READING
185
BIBLIOGRAPHY
187
INDEX
197
|
|
1.9 Page 9 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.10 Page 10 |
▲back to top |
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to
extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical changes
which have taken place in the study of literature during the last decades of
the twentieth century. The aim is to provide clear, well-illustrated
accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use, and to evolve
histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where there
is considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminology. This
involves, among other things, the boundaries which distinguish the
literary from the non-literary; the position of literature within the larger
sphere of culture; the relationship between literatures of different cul-
tures; and questions concerning the relation of literary to other cultural
forms within the context of interdisciplinary structures.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic and
heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual volumes on terms
which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of
perspective and a breadth of application. Each volume will contain as part
of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the definition
of particular terms is likely to move, as well as expanding the disciplinary
boundaries within which some of these terms have been traditionally
contained. This will involve some re-situation of terms within the larger
field of cultural representation, and will introduce examples from the
area of film and the modern media in addition to examples from a variety
of literary texts.
|
|
2 Pages 11-20 |
▲back to top |
|
|
2.1 Page 11 |
▲back to top |
|
|
2.2 Page 12 |
▲back to top |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first and foremost acknowledgment is to all my splendid and unusual
family, for their support and encouragement, especially during the long
years of PhD study. Specifically, Mum and Dad rushed in where the
British Academy feared to fund, Pa provoked my interest in environ-
mental issues and gave me someone to argue with, and Fliss shared my
gardening obsession and sent Michael Pollan books to give it intellectual
weight. And I am blessed with brilliant brothers and sisters.
Jon Bate was an exemplary supervisor, and suggested my name to
Routledge for this series. I am deeply grateful for the practical conse-
quences of his faith in me, such as having a job that I love immoderately.
Amongst my many excellent colleagues at Bath Spa University College,
Richard Kerridge has given me the benefit of his intelligence and insight
in many a long argument, Tracey Hill has tried to save me from myself,
and Paul Edwards has supported my research and commented on a first
draft. Moreover, I have learned a great deal from our students, especially
those on ‘Writing and Environmental Crisis’, ‘Reading Texts’ and
‘Utopias’. In particular, John Gaskin read and commented on an early
draft. The College has also provided me with some vital teaching relief.
Beyond Bath, the members of ASLE have been an inspiration to me,
especially Molly Westling and Terry Gifford.
John Drakakis was an extremely thorough and challenging editor,
whose debates with me over successive versions greatly improved the
eventual outcome. Liz Thompson was patient and supportive even when
the manuscript was late for its late, revised deadline, and undertook
further crucial editing.
Closest to home, much love and thanks must go to Caroline, who read
most of the drafts and provided invaluable intellectual and stylistic
comments. The discussion of the feminine sublime in Chapter 3 is
specifically indebted to her. Thanks also, although they’ll never know it,
to Bryn, Hamish and P’ars’ley, whose seemingly constant demands for
food, walks and games provided an ironic counterpoint to the writing of
the ‘Animals’ chapter.
|
|
2.3 Page 13 |
▲back to top |
xii acknowledgments
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
While it is usual in academic writing to refer to ‘Native Americans’ rather
than ‘American Indians’, I have used both terms interchangeably in this
book. Neither is wholly satisfactory, and my understanding is that many
Native Americans prefer the traditional term.
|
|
2.4 Page 14 |
▲back to top |
1
BEGINNINGS: POLLUTION
It is generally agreed that modern environmentalism begins with ‘A
Fable for Tomorrow’, in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s
fairy tale opens with the words, ‘There was once a town in the heart of
America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings’
and, invoking the ancient tradition of the pastoral, goes on to paint a
picture of ‘prosperous farms’, ‘green fields’, foxes barking in the hills,
silent deer, ferns and wildflowers, ‘countless birds’ and trout lying in clear,
cold streams, all delighted in by those who pass through the town (1999:
21). Concentrating on images of natural beauty and emphasising the
‘harmony’ of humanity and nature that ‘once’ existed, the fable at first
presents us with a picture of essential changelessness, which human
activity scarcely disturbs, and which the annual round of seasons only
reinforces. However, pastoral peace rapidly gives way to catastrophic
destruction:
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to
change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious
maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened
and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death.
In the ensuing paragraphs, every element of the rural idyll is torn apart
by some agent of change, the mystery of which is emphasised by the use
|
|
2.5 Page 15 |
▲back to top |
2 beginnings: pollution
of both natural and supernatural terminology of ‘malady’ and ‘spell’. The
most impassioned passage concerns the collapse in bird populations:
‘On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of
robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there
was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh’
(1999: 22). The ‘silent spring’ of the title alludes, on one level, to this loss
of birdsong, although it also comes to function as a synecdoche for a more
general environmental apocalypse.
So the founding text of modern environmentalism not only begins
with a decidedly poetic parable, but also relies on the literary genres
of pastoral and apocalypse, pre-existing ways of imagining the place of
humans in nature that may be traced back to such sources as Genesis
and Revelation, the first and last books of the Bible. Silent Spring ini-
tially suggests that the mythical eco-catastrophe of the fable might be
supernatural, and emphasises this by including an epigram from Keats’
poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, in which the magical power of a
beautiful woman blights the environment: ‘The sedge is wither’d from the
lake, / And no birds sing.’ But then the fable concludes: ‘No witchcraft,
no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world.
The people had done it themselves.’ The rest of the book sets out to prove
that such an apocalypse was already going on in a fragmentary way all over
America, so that the doom befalling this mythical town of the future
could be seen as a composite of lesser tragedies already known, and
scientifically validated, in 1962.
The real culprits, according to Carson, were the new organic pesticides
such as DDT, aldrin and dieldrin that had been introduced after the
Second World War and had already proven highly successful in control-
ling pest insects. Silent Spring marshalled an impressive array of scientific
evidence to show that this very success constituted a serious threat both
to wildlife and to human health, confronting the utopian claims of
agricultural scientists on their own ground. Carson’s scientific claims have
since been largely confirmed (although there is still no evidence that DDT
is harmful to humans), leading to increased public awareness of pesticide
pollution, firmer state regulation and development of less persistent
agricultural chemicals.
Environmentalist claims like these make crucial contributions to
modern politics and culture, and many of us respond to them to some
|
|
2.6 Page 16 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 3
degree, yet for the student of the humanities they can be difficult to
assess on their own terms. Academia has been organised into relatively
autonomous ‘disciplines’ and scientific problems seem to require scientific
expertise. Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategies, use of pastoral and
apocalyptic imagery and literary allusions with which Carson shapes her
scientific material may well be amenable to a more ‘literary’ or ‘cultural’
analysis. Such analysis is what we will call ‘ecocriticism’. This book is a
critical introduction to the field of ecocriticism today.
Let us look, then, at some provisional definitions of the subject. The
first is from the ‘Introduction’ to The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), an
important anthology of American ecocriticism:
What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the
relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just
as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-
conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness
of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts,
ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies.
(Glotfelty 1996: xix)
Glotfelty goes on to specify some of the questions ecocritics ask, ranging
from ‘How is nature represented in this sonnet?’ through ‘How has
the concept of wilderness changed over time?’ to ‘How is science itself
open to literary analysis?’ and finally ‘What cross-fertilization is possible
between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines
such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethics?’
Ecocriticism is, then, an avowedly political mode of analysis, as the
comparison with feminism and Marxism suggests. Ecocritics generally
tie their cultural analyses explicitly to a ‘green’ moral and political agenda.
In this respect, ecocriticism is closely related to environmentally oriented
developments in philosophy and political theory. Developing the insights
of earlier critical movements, ecofeminists, social ecologists and envi-
ronmental justice advocates seek a synthesis of environmental and social
concerns.
It is worth noting also that the questions posed by ecocriticism
in Glotfelty’s account follow a clear trajectory: the first question, for
example, is very narrow and literary, tending to favour the student of
|
|
2.7 Page 17 |
▲back to top |
4 beginnings: pollution
Romantic verse. Thus, two of the most important works of ecocriticism
in the 1990s were studies of Wordsworth and Shelley (Bate 1991 and
Kroeber 1994). The questions grow in scope as the list continues, with
several of the later ones suggesting gargantuan interdisciplinary studies
such as Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995).
Richard Kerridge’s definition in the mainly British Writing the Envi-
ronment (1998) suggests, like Glotfelty’s, a broad cultural ecocriticism:
The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations
wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be
taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces.
Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of
their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis.
(1998: 5)
We will have reason to question the monolithic conception of ‘envi-
ronmental crisis’ implied here, and perhaps to resist the evaluation of
‘texts and ideas’ against a seemingly secure ecological yardstick: both as
a science and as a socio-political movement, ‘ecology’ itself is shifting
and contested. However, the emphasis on the moral and political orien-
tation of the ecocritic and the broad specification of the field of study are
essential.
From the point of view of academics, ecocriticism is dominated by
the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE),
a professional association that started in America but now has signifi-
cant branches in the UK and Japan. It organises regular conferences and
publishes a journal that includes literary analysis, creative writing and
articles on environmental education and activism. Many early works
of ecocriticism were characterised by an exclusive interest in Romantic
poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing, but in the last few years
ASLE has turned towards a more general cultural ecocriticism, with
studies of popular scientific writing, film, TV, art, architecture and other
cultural artefacts such as theme parks, zoos and shopping malls. As
ecocritics seek to offer a truly transformative discourse, enabling us to
analyse and criticise the world in which we live, attention is increasingly
given to the broad range of cultural processes and products in which, and
through which, the complex negotiations of nature and culture take place.
|
|
2.8 Page 18 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 5
Indeed, the widest definition of the subject of ecocriticism is the study
of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human
cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself.
This book will reflect these trends by giving space to both literary and
cultural ecocriticism. However, at this point there is a caveat: I will be
dealing principally with British and North American literature and
culture, although the principles of ecocriticism would of course admit of
more general application.
Ecocriticism is unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural
theories because of its close relationship with the science of ecology.
Ecocritics may not be qualified to contribute to debates about problems
in ecology, but they must nevertheless transgress disciplinary boundaries
and develop their own ‘ecological literacy’ as far as possible. I therefore
provide brief discussions of some important environmental threats faced
by the world today. To consider these in detail is beyond the scope of
this book, but it is essential for ecocritics to recognise that there are serious
arguments about the existence of the problems, their extent, the nature
of the threat and the possible solutions to them. So, for example, in
Chapter 5, I consider the problem of ‘over-population’ from a demo-
graphic point of view, before going on to explain how the issue has been
refracted through apocalyptic rhetoric.
It may seem obvious that ecological problems are scientific problems
rather than objects of cultural analysis. Indeed, when Silent Spring was
published the agro-chemical industry reacted by criticising the book
for its literary qualities, which, they implied, could not coexist with the
appropriate scientific rigour. Would we not be recapitulating the propa-
ganda published by the pesticide producers if we read Carson’s book
using literary-critical tools? John Passmore has proposed a distinction that
may help to negotiate the problem. ‘Problems in ecology’, he maintains,
are properly scientific issues, to be resolved by the formulation and testing
of hypotheses in ecological experiments, while ‘ecological problems’ are
‘features of our society, arising out of our dealings with nature, from
which we should like to free ourselves, and which we do not regard as
inevitable consequences of what is good in that society’ (1974: 44). To
describe something as an ecological problem is to make a normative claim
about how we would wish things to be, and while this arises out of the
claims of ecological scientists, it is not defined by them. A ‘weed’ is not a
|
|
2.9 Page 19 |
▲back to top |
6 beginnings: pollution
kind of plant, only the wrong kind in the wrong place. Eliminating weeds
is obviously a ‘problem in gardening’, but defining weeds in the first place
requires a cultural, not horticultural, analysis. Likewise ‘pollution’ is
an ecological problem because it does not name a substance or class
of substances, but rather represents an implicit normative claim that too
much of something is present in the environment, usually in the wrong
place. Carson had to investigate a problem in ecology, with the help of
wildlife biologists and environmental toxicologists, in order to show that
DDT was present in the environment in amounts toxic to wildlife, but
Silent Spring undertook cultural not scientific work when it strove to
argue the moral case that it ought not to be. The great achievement of the
book was to turn a (scientific) problem in ecology into a widely perceived
ecological problem that was then contested politically, legally and in the
media and popular culture. Thus ecocriticism cannot contribute much to
debates about problems in ecology, but it can help to define, explore and
even resolve ecological problems in this wider sense.
One ‘ecocritical’ way of reading is to see contributions to environ-
mental debate as examples of rhetoric. I have already suggested that
Carson deploys both pastoral imagery and apocalyptic rhetoric, and will
return to these subjects, but there are many other applications of formal
rhetorical analysis. For example, Ralph Lutts has attempted to account for
the impact of Silent Spring by drawing attention to the underlying analogy
Carson uses between pesticide pollution and another kind of pollution
that was strong in popular consciousness in 1962:
She was sounding an alarm about a kind of pollution that was invisible
to the senses; could be transported great distances, perhaps globally;
could accumulate over time in body tissues; could produce chronic,
as well as acute, poisoning; and could result in cancer, birth defects, and
genetic mutations that may not become evident until years or decades
after exposure. Government officials, she also argued, were not taking
the steps necessary to control this pollution and protect the public.
Chemical pesticides were not the only form of pollution fitting this
description. Another form, far better known to the public at the time,
was radioactive fallout. Pesticides could be understood as another form
of fallout.
(2000:19)
|
|
2.10 Page 20 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 7
So Carson combined ancient ways of imagining nature with contem-
porary ways of imagining a threat derived from ‘fallout hysteria’, with a
view to establishing particular normative claims about pollution. Detailed
rhetorical analysis shows how Silent Spring is constructed in order to
achieve certain political results: not only the concrete measures described
in the final chapter, but also a subtle revision of the concept of ‘pollution’
itself.
Reading Silent Spring as rhetoric has a number of advantages for an
overtly politicised critical practice, some of which are set out by Marxist
critic Terry Eagleton:
What would be specific to the kind of study I have in mind . . . would be
the kinds of effects which discourses produce, and how they produce
them. Reading a zoology textbook to find out about giraffes is part of
studying zoology, but reading it to see how its discourse is structured
and organised, and examining what kind of effects these forms and
devices produce in particular readers in actual situations, is a different
kind of project. It is, in fact, probably the oldest form of literary criticism
in the world, known as rhetoric.
(1996: 205)
I will be reading culture as rhetoric, although not in the strict sense
understood by rhetoricians, but as the production, reproduction and
transformation of large-scale metaphors. Each of my chapters will
examine one such metaphor, thought to have specific – though sometimes
ambivalent – political effects or to serve particular social interests. Some,
like ‘pastoral’, are established literary tropes, whilst others name more
heterogenous materials that one can provisionally unify under a single
title. Since all are, in some sense, ways of imagining, constructing or
presenting nature in a figure, I will call my chapter headings ‘tropes’.
Each trope will gather together permutations of creative imagination:
metaphor, genre, narrative, image. This introduction explores the
trope of ‘pollution’ as an example. The basis upon which each trope is
defined and limited is worked out in each chapter, with the constant
proviso that, as ecocritics like to say, ‘the map is not the terrain’. My
tropology is not definitive or exhaustive; it is intended to be enabling, not
limiting.
|
|
3 Pages 21-30 |
▲back to top |
|
|
3.1 Page 21 |
▲back to top |
8 beginnings: pollution
Rhetorical analysis suggests that the meaning of tropes is closely related
to their wider social context. They are therefore not fixed entities but
develop and change historically. ‘Pollution’, for example, derives from the
Latin ‘polluere’ meaning ‘to defile’, and its early English usage reflects its
theologico-moral origins: until the seventeenth century it denoted moral
contamination of a person, or acts (such as masturbation) thought to
promote such contamination. This essentially interior or subjective
definition was gradually transformed into an exterior or objective – in fact,
specifically environmental – definition between the seventeenth and
nineteenth centuries, to the point where today only its later definition is
widely known. The process is exemplary in that it highlights how people
had to learn to hate their detritus, as well as indicating the deep cultural
roots of the fear attaching to such immoral emissions. Most of the tropes
in the book are traced to ancient origins before I explore their modern
inflection.
The first citation of the modern sense of ‘pollution’ in the Oxford
English Dictionary is from Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning
(1605), a founding text of modern scientific methodology: ‘The Sunne
. . . passeth through pollutions, and it selfe remaines as pure as before.’
Bacon seems here to be writing about a material, not a moral, phenom-
enon, which constitutes a crucial shift in meaning, and the very birth of
a new way of seeing and thinking. Yet a key text in ecocritical history,
Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), ascribes to Bacon a
pivotal role in the construction of an environmentally destructive world
view where ‘the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth
at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature
was reconstituted as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled
by humans’ (1990: xvi). Thus the trope of ‘pollution’ is historically
implicated in both environmental destruction and salvation since Bacon
both ‘discovered’ pollution in the modern sense and, according to
Merchant, helped make much more of it. From an ecocritical perspective
this reflects the ambivalent role of science as both a producer of
environmental hazards and a critical analyst of them. All the tropes
examined in this book show some such ambivalence.
Another crucial feature of rhetoric is that tropes are assumed to
take part in wider social struggles between genders, classes and ethnic
groups. Cultures are not shaped equally by all their participants, nor are
|
|
3.2 Page 22 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 9
the many world cultures equally powerful, and we must remain aware that
even tropes that might potentially confront or subvert environmentally
damaging practices may be appropriated. So although wilderness might
seem to form a bulwark against an industrialised, materially progressive
world view and social order, elements of that order such as manufacturers
of four-wheel-drive Sports Utility Vehicles have still been able to
appropriate the wild as the ‘natural home’ of their products in their
advertisements (see Campbell 1998). Since these vehicles virtually require
their own oil well to feed their huge engines, the irony of the juxtaposition
might suggest to us that ‘wilderness’ has an ideological function in this
case, helping to legitimise the conspicuous consumption of a privileged
class and nation.
In ordinary usage, ‘rhetoric’ suggests language that substitutes for
literal truth: it is all ‘hot air’. The sense intended in this book, however,
is emphatically interested in literal meaning. This would be a negligible
point were there not important trends in literary and cultural theory
that would seem to marginalise the role of literal truth in literature and
culture, even in science itself. Structuralism and post-structuralism,
for example, have emphasised the linguistic function of signs that relate
to each other rather than refer to real things. Developments in other areas
have reinforced this separation of language from reality; post-colonial
and feminist literary theorists have shown that apparently real or ‘natural’
categories such as race and sex are better understood as ‘cultural con-
structions’ that covertly substitute normative claims about how, for
example, women ought to be for how women actually or necessarily are.
Feminist critics have distinguished between sex, which is a biological
category, and gender, which is a social construction, and shown how a
male-centred world view and social order have tried to legitimise changing
gender constructions by referring them back to a supposedly fixed
‘natural’ sexual identity. ‘Femininity’ is not, according to many feminist
theorists, a natural or necessary consequence of being genetically ‘female’,
but rather a set of culturally prescribed behaviours. This argument largely
or wholly detaches the female sex from a ‘constructed’ feminine gender
identity that lives only in language and culture. Whilst this strategy
provides opportunities for women to escape repressive stereotypes, it also
represents a marked prioritisation of the claims of culture over those of
nature.
|
|
3.3 Page 23 |
▲back to top |
10 beginnings: pollution
‘Constructionism’ is a powerful tool for cultural analysis, and indeed,
I have relied on it above in my discussion of the construction of ‘pollu-
tion’. But it does suggest that ‘nature’ is only ever a cover for the interests
of some social group. The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on
the ways in which ‘nature’ is always in some ways culturally constructed,
and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and,
albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse. Lawrence Buell calls this ‘a
myth of mutual constructionism: of physical environment (both natural
and human-built) shaping in some measure the cultures that in some
measure continually refashion it’ (2001: 6) The imprecision of that
phrase ‘in some measure’ is entirely necessary since such reciprocal
‘shaping’ networks of nature and culture are bound to be complex to the
attentive eye. Throughout this book, the aim is to balance a construc-
tionist perspective with the privileged claims to literal truth made by
ecology. Ecocritics remain suspicious of the idea of science as wholly
objective and value-free, but they are in the unusual position as cultural
critics of having to defer, in the last analysis, to a scientific understanding
of the world.
Buell’s phrase is certainly neat and useful, but part of the problem lies
in the metaphor of ‘construction’ itself, which even in his revised version
suggests an artefact like a building or machine, an autonomous work of
minds and hands. I doubt many readers would automatically imagine
a natural construction such as a termite mound. But if any building
or machine, however technologically advanced, must be made by evolved
animals (Homo sapiens) of materials of natural origin in accordance
with natural ‘laws’ of mechanical physics, then it follows that all our
vaunted cultural constructions are, in a sense, natural constructions.
Perhaps the architectural metaphor obscures, or mystifies, the natural
basis of all human culture and exalts only our own powers as a species.
The excessively culturalistic implications of ‘construction’ are not easily
avoided by a substitution of terms, but I tend to use ‘shaping’, ‘elabo-
ration’ or ‘inflection’ to describe the complex transformations and
negotiations between nature and culture, or between real and imagined
versions of nature.
Returning to pollution with this in mind, we might observe that
the rhetorical history of the term has been very closely aligned with the
truth claims of ecologists and environmental toxicologists. Techniques of
|
|
3.4 Page 24 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 11
chemical analysis have developed to the point where unimaginably small
amounts of chemicals can be detected in the environment:
In dealing with environmental reports or policies or regulations we
must always keep in mind that what was zero today will no longer be
zero tomorrow. We have already moved from measuring micrograms
in the 1950s to measuring picograms in the 1980s and 1990s. . . . At the
same time, we must keep in mind that there is no relationship between
toxic effects and our ability to detect a chemical. Small amounts only
matter if they do effect living organisms.
(Baarschers 1996: 46–7)
Baarschers is highly critical of environmentalist ‘hysteria’ surrounding
the presence in the environment of amounts of chemicals far below levels
of observable toxicity. His frustration at widespread misunderstanding
and ignorance of environmental science is reasonable, given that people
regularly accept the very high risks involved in, say, smoking, whilst
demanding the elimination of infinitesimal risks associated with high-
anxiety technologies. Environmental pressure groups may also promote
ignorant paranoia rather than educated critique (see Chapter 5).
At the same time, Baarschers does not account for the possibility
that public anxiety is a response to precisely the extent and degree of
environmental surveillance that he describes. Rather than simply
divorcing the ‘real risk’ as defined by toxicologists from the ‘perceived risk’
felt by the public, then criticising people for not trusting the experts, we
ought to see perceived risk as, paradoxically, a consequence of increasingly
sophisticated surveillance. The more accurately the expert measures
hazards, the greater the disjunction between official estimates of risk and
any conceivable lay assessment based on personal experience, a process of
alienation sociologist Ulrich Beck describes as ‘expropriation of the senses’
(1999: 55). Furthermore, nuclear, biological and chemical ‘megahazards’
undermine the traditional guarantors of industrial safety such as pri-
vate insurance, compensation and State regulation of measurable and
calculable risks precisely insofar as the threat revealed by environmental
surveillance dwindles below the point of statistical determinability. We
cannot, by ourselves, assess risks, and industrial safety scientists actually
render risks less knowable and more fearful the more they minimise them.
|
|
3.5 Page 25 |
▲back to top |
12 beginnings: pollution
The result, Beck argues, is that security claims produced by mega-hazard
industries themselves produce public insecurity. Carson’s reconstruction
of ‘pollution’ to include minute quantities of pesticides as well as the
gross, observable pollution of traditional industrial production was
the continuation of an historical process of redefinition that contin-
ues in contemporary culture. The proliferation of types and sources of
‘pollution’ means that artificial light and noise may now be considered
pollutants and carbon dioxide defined as a climatological pollutant even
though it occurs naturally in vast quantities. Baarschers’s attempt to
rationalise and minimise this continual extension cannot reckon with
the political and media culture that Beck’s constructionist analysis
illuminates.
This generalisation and, from an ordinary sensory perspective,
dematerialisation of pollution has significant ramifications in our culture,
constituting a ‘world risk society’ of impalpable, ubiquitous material
threats that are often in practice indissociable from their cultural
elaborations. ‘Pollution’ has seeped into our culture in many areas and on
various levels of representation, from the implicit environmental concern
of Sylvia Plath’s poetry (Brain 1998) to explicit environmental thrillers
such as Hollywood ‘green thriller’ On Deadly Ground (1994) (Kerridge
2000; Ingram 2000). Buell has set out four criteria of such ‘toxic
discourse’ as a cultural genre: a ‘mythography of betrayed Edens’ (2001:
37) based, like Carson’s parable above, in pastoral; horrified, ‘totalizing
images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration’ (p. 38) founded
most probably in the postwar fear of radioactive miasma from nuclear
weapons; ‘the threat of hegemonic oppression’ (p. 41) from powerful
corporations or governments as contrasted with threatened communities;
and the ‘gothicization’ of squalor and pollution characteristic of the
environmental exposé. These criteria, and the genealogy of ‘pollution’ set
out above, enable a vital modern ecocritical trope to be identified in slum
gothic such as Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), environmental lawsuit
dramas like Erin Brockovich (2000), and the exploration of contamination
of place and family in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge (1991). Andrew
Ross identifies New York as Hollywood’s perfect toxic landscape: ‘On the
other side of authority lies a city teeming with biological perils. Surely no
other city has had such a fantastic bestiary of historical residents – from
alligators to ninja turtles – in its sewage tunnels’ (1994: 135).
|
|
3.6 Page 26 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 13
However, in the postmodern world of media saturation, the modern
trope of ‘pollution’ can become dangerously separated from its referent in
ways that Baarschers would not recognise. In Don DeLillo’s White Noise
(1986) the protagonist and narrator Jack Gladney strives to come to terms
with the proximity of an unexpected ‘toxic airborne event’:
Smoke drifted from red beams of light into darkness and then into the
breadth of scenic white floods. The men in Mylex suits moved with a
lunar caution. Each step was the exercise of some anxiety not provided
for by instinct. Fire and explosion were not the inherent dangers here.
This death would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies
not yet born.
(1986: 116)
In one way this seems to confirm Beck’s argument that the risk anxiety
cannot be relieved or even addressed by ‘instinct’, the lack of definite
threat itself making it all the more pervasive. Even so, the narrative
struggles to characterise the ‘event’ in terms of other, pre-existing narra-
tives, such as the ‘conquest of space’ with its spectacular imagery and
military-industrial brand names. Pollution has become a spectacle that
is almost detached from any real sense of threat thanks to the ubiquity
of such images: ‘the cloud resembled a national promotion for death,
a multi-million dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print
and billboard, TV saturation’ (p. 158). People living close to the emission
rely on the media for its definition: at first, ‘a feathery plume’, then ‘a
black billowing cloud’ and finally ‘the airborne toxic event’. Reversing
Baarschers’s priority of fact over representation, the symptoms of victims
change as the media risk reports are updated. The radical disproportion
between saturation of imagery and paucity of fact marks the toxic event
out as the kind of postmodern crisis with which ecocriticism must
increasingly engage. Environmentalism and ecocriticism both rely on and
produce exactly the sort of univeralising truth claims or ‘grand narratives’
that postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard regard as untenable. As
historian Peter Coates argues:
According to universally disempowering postmodernist logic, the belief
in the existence of a global environmental crisis is just another grand
|
|
3.7 Page 27 |
▲back to top |
14 beginnings: pollution
narrative, for cultural theory insists that environmental threats (like
everything else) are socially constructed and culturally defined: there
are no shared, universal threats – different groups privilege those
confronting their own particular interests.
(1998: 185–6)
Nevertheless, appeals to scientific truth claims as a counter to post-
modernism are complicated by the fact that the science of ecology is itself
undergoing transformation. Long-cherished notions of nature’s inherent
harmony are challenged by postmodern ecology, as set out in Chapter 3.
We need to distinguish between postmodernist theory, which is mainly
inimical to ecocriticism, and postmodern ecology, which will increasingly
become its scientific reference point.
So these are the basic propositions of this book: environmental
problems require analysis in cultural as well as scientific terms, because
they are the outcome of an interaction between ecological knowledge
of nature and its cultural inflection. This will involve interdiscipli-
nary scholarship that draws on literary and cultural theory, philosophy,
sociology, psychology and environmental history, as well as ecology. The
study of rhetoric supplies us with a model of a cultural reading practice
tied to moral and political concerns, and one which is alert to both the
real or literal and the figural or constructed interpretations of ‘nature’
and ‘the environment’. Breaking these monolithic concepts down into
key structuring metaphors, or tropes, enables attention to be paid to the
thematic, historical and geographical particularities of environmental
discourse, and reveals that any environmental trope is susceptible to
appropriation and deployment in the service of a variety of potentially
conflicting interests. Ecocriticism makes it possible to analyse critically the
tropes brought into play in environmental debate, and, more tentatively,
to predict which will have a desired effect on a specific audience at a
given historical juncture. To confront the vast, complex, multifarious
agglomeration of ecological crises with the apparently flimsy tools of
cultural analysis must be seen by the ecocritic as a moral and political
necessity, even though the problems seem perpetually to dwarf the
solutions.
The next chapter gives a brief account of the various political and
philosophical orientations within the broad spectrum of environ-
|
|
3.8 Page 28 |
▲back to top |
beginnings: pollution 15
mentalism, in part to make clear that no single or simple perspective
unites all ecocritics. From Chapter 3 onwards, the analysis is arranged
under the names of important ecocritical tropes, starting with ‘Pastoral’,
the most deeply entrenched, and concluding with the construction of the
‘Earth’ as a unified whole. Within each chapter, the development of the
trope is traced historically and, in some cases, geographically, and I mix
discussion of canonical texts and critics with more marginal materials in
order to indicate the depth and breadth that the field has already assumed.
The chapters follow a rough trajectory from traditional concerns with the
local to contemporary concepts of the global: from place to space, from
earth to Earth. Throughout the book I will return to the implications of
postmodern ecology for ecocriticism.
Chapters 3 to 5 examine a linked series of tropes that are heavily
indebted to the Euro-American Judaeo-Christian narrative of a fallen,
exiled humanity seeking redemption, but fearing apocalyptic judgement
– ‘Pastoral’, ‘Wilderness’, ‘Apocalypse’ – and assess the significance of
the shapes these tropes have acquired in the modern world. Chapter 6
compares two quite distinct conceptions of ‘dwelling’ upon the Earth: the
European ‘georgic’ tradition of writing about working on the land,
and the more recent identification of indigenous ways of life as potential
models for a harmonious existence. To discuss these constructions of
humanity’s relationship with the natural world, however, takes for granted
the problematic distinction between our species and other animals.
Therefore Chapter 7 looks at the different ways in which animals, wild
and domestic, are represented and conceptualised. I argue that recon-
sideration of the idea of ‘the human’ is a key task for ecocriticism, tending
to drag it away from pastoral and nature writing towards postmodern
concerns such as globalisation and ‘cyborg’ interfaces of humans with
technology. In the final chapter, I explore the meanings that have
clustered around the extraordinary images of the whole Earth from space,
ranging from global marketplace to precious super-organism.
|
|
3.9 Page 29 |
▲back to top |
2
POSITIONS
‘Environmentalism’ is relatively young as a social, political and philo-
sophical movement, but already a number of distinct eco-philosophies
have emerged that seem as likely to compete with each other as to
combine in any revolutionary synthesis. Each approach understands
environmental crisis in its own way, emphasising aspects that are either
amenable to solution in terms that it supplies or threatening to values it
holds most dear, thus suggesting a range of political possibilities. Each
one, moreover, might provide the basis for a distinct ecocritical approach
with specific literary or cultural affinities and aversions.
CORNUCOPIA
Despite the remarkable degree of consensus that exists amongst scientists
about the environmental threats posed by modern civilisation, there are
nevertheless some who argue that most, if not all, such dangers are illusory
or exaggerated. This ‘cornucopian’ position is therefore, in an impor-
tant sense, not environmentalist at all, and is in some cases financially
supported and disseminated by anti-environmentalist industrial pressure
groups. Free-market economists and demographers are amongst its
most outspoken intellectual proponents, arguing that the dynamism of
capitalist economies will generate solutions to environmental problems as
|
|
3.10 Page 30 |
▲back to top |
positions 17
they arise, and that increases in population eventually produce the wealth
needed to pay for environmental improvements.
The key positive claim put forward by cornucopians is that human
welfare, as measured by statistics such as life expectancy or local pollution,
has demonstrably increased along with population, economic growth and
technological progress. They point out that, in the long run, the supposed
scarcity of natural resources is belied by falling prices of food, minerals
and commodities relative to wages; as a specific resource becomes harder
to obtain, the price increases, leading capitalist entrepreneurs to search for
substitute sources, processes or materials. The discovery of alternatives
leads to a fall in price of the original material, such as the drop in real
copper prices brought about by the widespread substitution of fibre-optic
cables for copper wires. ‘Scarcity’ is therefore an economic, not an eco-
logical, phenomenon, and will be remedied by capitalist entrepreneurs,
not the reductions in consumption urged by environmentalists: ‘The
fact is that the concept of resources itself is a dynamic one; many things
become resources over time. Each century has seen new resources emerge’
(Beckerman 1995: 60). More people on the planet means more resource-
ful brains, more productive hands, more consumption and therefore more
economic growth. The confidence of economist Julian Simon in the
‘virtuous circle’ of economic and demographic growth was such that he
issued a standing bet:
You pick (a) any measure of human welfare – such as life expectancy,
the price of aluminum or gasoline, the amount of education per cohort
of young people, the rate of ownership of television sets, you name it;
(b) a country (or a region such as the developing countries); (c) any
future year, and I’ll bet a week’s or a month’s pay that that indicator
shows improvement relative to the present while you bet that it shows
deterioration.
(Myers and Simon 1994: 21)
Simon won one bet, with ecologist Paul Ehrlich, over the scarcity of
mineral resources as measured by prices during the 1980s. Ehrlich in turn
has attacked Simon for ‘brownwashing’, which he describes as the use
of spurious science to attack environmentalism (Ehrlich and Ehrlich
1998).
|
|
4 Pages 31-40 |
▲back to top |
|
|
4.1 Page 31 |
▲back to top |
18 positions
Alongside the claims of an endless cornucopia of wealth, growth and
commodity production, Beckerman, Simon and others bring criticisms of
environmental ‘scare-mongering’, pointing to inaccurate projections
of global cooling and worldwide famine made by ecologists in the 1970s.
They point to the acknowledged uncertainty in, for example, species
extinction rates or global climatic modelling, and argue on this basis for
inaction or, at best, further research.
It is certainly important to remember the vast improvements in
measurable human welfare brought about in both developed and devel-
oping countries, albeit terribly inequitably, by economic growth and
technological progress. Capitalism mobilises problem-solving capacities
in humans that it would be wise not to underestimate. However, this
position suffers from a major inconsistency: many of the environmental
improvements enjoyed by post-industrial nations have not only been
achieved by moving damaging industries to developing countries,
but have been driven by the political agitation of the environmental
campaigners cornucopians now claim are obstructing economic and
technological progress. It is not capitalism alone that produces the
solutions cornucopians identify, but entrepreneurs responding to morally
motivated consumers and government regulations.
A more serious objection is that cornucopians take little or no account
of the non-human environment except insofar as it impacts upon human
wealth or welfare. Nature is only valued in terms of its usefulness to us.
Many environmentalists argue that we need to develop a value system
which takes the intrinsic or inherent value of nature as its starting point.
This fundamental distinction is evident in the debate between Simon
and conservation biologist Norman Myers, from which I have quoted
above.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
The very broad range of people who are concerned about environmental
issues such as global warming and pollution, but who wish to maintain or
improve their standard of living as conventionally defined, and who
would not welcome radical social change, will be described hereinafter as
‘environmentalists’. Many value rural ways of life, hiking or camping, or
are members of one of the mainstream environmental organisations such
|
|
4.2 Page 32 |
▲back to top |
positions 19
as the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and Audubon Society in the
USA, or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Council
for the Protection of Rural England in the UK. They may be concerned
about natural resource scarcity or pollution but would look to gov-
ernments or non-governmental organisations such as charities to provide
solutions, usually technological ones. Their hopes for curbing population
growth, mainly seen as a problem for developing countries, would lie in
family-planning campaigns rather than, say, State-sponsored sterilisation.
Activism may range from recycling bottles and buying organic food to
major commitment to conservation activity. In terms of philosophical
and religious orientation, environmentalists still regard Western traditions
such as liberal democracy, human rights, Christianity and notions of
historical or scientific progress as valuable, to a greater or lesser degree,
even in the light of environmental crisis. So characterised, a substantial
proportion of the populations of developed countries would count as
environmentalists. Political and consumer pressures wielded by environ-
mentalists are responsible for many concrete improvements such as the
rapid expansion in organic agriculture in recent years.
Environmentalism, then, is widespread and, in certain respects, very
powerful. Political parties must at least pay lip service to it, and industries
respond in ways that range from costly modifications to production
processes to merely cosmetic ‘greenwashing’ to appeal to or appease it. At
the same time, environmentalism, or ‘shallow environmentalism’ as it has
been called, has been attacked by radical critics for the compromises it
makes with the ruling socio-economic order. Each of the following
approaches accuses environmentalists of failing to address the allegedly
more fundamental malaise it has identified.
Many of the most prominent scientific proponents of environmental
protection, such as Rachel Carson, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, E.O. Wilson
and Stephen Schneider, espouse this position for the most part, although
in terms of environmental philosophy and criticism, environmentalism
has found few systematic defenders. Martin Lewis’s Green Delusions
(1994) combines a vigorous attack on radical environmentalism with a
reformist programme that emphasises the role of science, technology and
government policy change. Against the ‘Arcadian’ approach of radicals
advocating de-urbanisation, use of non-synthetic products and low-
technology solutions, Lewis’s ‘Promethean’ environmentalism promotes
|
|
4.3 Page 33 |
▲back to top |
20 positions
the ‘decoupling’ of human economy and natural ecology as far as possible,
in order to protect nature. He points out that cities are not only centres
of cultural vitality, but less environmentally costly than suburban sprawl
or exurban flight, and argues that capitalism guided by educated voters
and consumers can provide technological solutions to many problems of
resources and pollution. The anti-interventionist, ‘nature knows best’
approach that Lewis ascribes to eco-radicals is inadequate: ‘Prometheans
maintain . . . that for the forseeable future we must actively manage the
planet to ensure the survival of as much biological diversity as possible.
No less is necessary if we are to begin atoning for our very real envi-
ronmental sins’ (1994: 251). Richard North’s Life on a Modern Planet
(1995) adopts a similar position, setting out a moderate ‘manifesto for
progress’.
It may be said that this technocratic, managerial approach has already
failed if we accept both the long-standing popularity of the cause and
the continuing pace of environmental destruction. At the same time, the
mainstream environmental movement not only has significant successes
on specific issues such as ozone-depleting CFC emissions to its credit,
but also represents the constituency to which radicals must appeal either
for conversion or coalition. Successful radical organisations, such as
Greenpeace, have attempted to maintain their reputation for radical
activism whilst simultaneously promoting recycling and ‘green con-
sumerism’. The future of any of the more radical positions outlined here
will probably depend upon a similar balancing act. Moreover, since
most ecocritics espouse radical views, they will likewise seek to exploit
environmentalism amongst readers whilst tempting them towards a
politics or philosophy more adequate to the environmental crisis as they
perceive it.
DEEP ECOLOGY
Of the four radical forms of environmentalism, deep ecology is the most
influential beyond academic circles, inspiring many activists in organi-
sations such as Friends of the Earth, Earth First! and Sea Shepherd. This
position, and its variants, will recur most often in this book as the explicit
or implicit perspective of ecocritics, and aspects of it will be discussed
further in several chapters. The ‘poet laureate’ of deep ecology is Gary
|
|
4.4 Page 34 |
▲back to top |
positions 21
Snyder (b. 1930; see Chapter 4) and its philosophical guru is Arne Naess.
Naess sets out eight key points of the deep ecology platform in George
Sessions’s definitive anthology Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (1995).
The crucial ones are as follows:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on
Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent
worth). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-
human world for human purposes.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a
substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of non-
human life requires a smaller human population.
(Sessions 1995: 68)
The second of these points refers not only to developing but also to
developed countries, whose populations consume far more per capita.
Deep ecologists argue for long-term population reduction throughout
the world. The lethal combination is that of rapid population growth
in developing countries, which exacerbates environmental problems
associated with poverty such as land pressure and deforestation, accom-
panied by rapid economic growth in developed countries, which
exacerbates problems associated with wealth, such as domestic waste
disposal and greenhouse gas emissions.
Many deep ecologists see the first point as distinguishing their position
from environmentalism; whereas ‘shallow’ approaches take an instru-
mental approach to nature, arguing for preservation of natural resources
only for the sake of humans, deep ecology demands recognition of
intrinsic value in nature. It identifies the dualistic separation of humans
from nature promoted by Western philosophy and culture as the origin
of environmental crisis, and demands a return to a monistic, primal
identification of humans and the ecosphere. The shift from a human-
centred to a nature-centred system of values is the core of the radicalism
attributed to deep ecology, bringing it into opposition with almost the
entirety of Western philosophy and religion:
Deep ecology is concerned with encouraging an egalitarian attitude
on the part of humans not only toward all members of the ecosphere,
|
|
4.5 Page 35 |
▲back to top |
22 positions
but even toward all identifiable entities or forms in the ecosphere. Thus,
this attitude is intended to extend, for example, to such entities (or
forms) as rivers, landscapes, and even species and social systems
considered in their own right.
(Sessions 1995: 270)
This remarkable even-handedness might well seem to empty deep ecology
of any substantive content: if value resides everywhere, it resides nowhere,
as it ceases to be a basis for making distinctions and decisions. It is not
being alive or being sentient that qualifies an entity or form for intrinsic
value, but rather, it would seem, whatever kind of purposive organisation
one could claim to find equally in a single bird, a river, an entire species,
a distinct ecosystem or an ethnic group. The considerable debates about
the concept of intrinsic value may be traced in the influential journal
Environmental Ethics or in one of several anthologies (Elliot and Gare
1983; Cooper and Palmer 1992; Elliot 1995).
One major, recurrent objection to deep ecology is that ecocentrism is
misanthropic, and indeed certain advocates such as Dave Foreman and
Christopher Manes have made inhumane and ill-informed statements
about population control, for example. But alongside this ‘hard’ wing is
the ‘soft’ mainstream for whom ecocentrism is merely an ‘orientation’
within which major differences of opinion will always subsist. It is
specifically allowed by Naess, for example, that ‘vital’ human needs may
take priority over the good of any other thing, thus ruling out difficult
conflicts between the interests of humans and the interests of a man-
eating tiger or a bubonic plague bacillus. In fact, when it comes down to
specifics, deep ecologists often reaffirm the conventional priorities they
criticise in environmentalists, not least because they risk the charge
of misanthropy if they do not. Moreover, it seems likely that any given
concerned individual will probably have both eco- and anthropocentric
attitudes at different times, under different conditions. At the same time,
it is important to distinguish both perspectives from the animal rights
philosophy that argues for the extension of the moral consideration
accorded humans to certain higher mammals (see Chapter 7).
The notion of ecocentrism has proceeded from, and fed back into,
related belief systems derived from Eastern religions, such as Taoism and
Buddhism, from heterodox figures in Christianity such as St Francis of
|
|
4.6 Page 36 |
▲back to top |
positions 23
Assisi (1182–1286) and Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), and from
modern reconstructions of American Indian, pre-Christian Wiccan,
shamanistic and other ‘primal’ religions. Alongside this strongly spiri-
tualistic dimension subsists, somewhat uneasily at times, the scientific
ecology from which the movement takes its name. In fact, not one of the
essays in the substantial Sessions anthology is written by an ecologist, and
‘ecology’ appears there, if at all, as a laudable background activity that
need never be discussed directly, but can rather be used to validate existing
‘intuitions’. Where intuition and science clash, the former typically wins
out, so that scientifically informed attempts to manage ecosystems, for
example, are seen as part of the ‘problem’. Ecologists can be accused of
being ‘anti-ecological’, not because their projects might accidentally inflict
damage, but because the undertaking of such projects betrays an
anthropocentric managerialism at odds with the true, ecocentric promise
of the discipline. In fact, developments in postmodern ecology would
seem fatally to undermine deep ecology, if it would only attend to them.
It would be absurd if ‘deep ecology’ were in the end not only to question
but indeed to contradict the science of ecology from which it must
ultimately derive.
ECOFEMINISM
Deep ecology identifies the anthropocentric dualism humanity/nature
as the ultimate source of anti-ecological beliefs and practices, but eco-
feminism also blames the androcentric dualism man/woman. The first
distinguishes humans from nature on the grounds of some alleged quality
such as possession of an immortal soul or rationality, and then assumes
that this distinction confers superiority upon humans. The second
distinguishes men from women on the grounds of some alleged quality
such as larger brain size, and then assumes that this distinction confers
superiority upon men. Ecofeminism involves the recognition that these
two arguments share a common ‘logic of domination’ (Warren 1994:
129) or underlying ‘master model’, that ‘women have been associated
with nature, the material, the emotional, and the particular, while men
have been associated with culture, the nonmaterial, the rational, and the
abstract’ (Davion 1994: 9), and that this should suggest common cause
between feminists and ecologists.
|
|
4.7 Page 37 |
▲back to top |
24 positions
If women have been associated with nature, and each denigrated with
reference to the other, it may seem worthwhile to attack the hierarchy
by reversing the terms, exalting nature, irrationality, emotion and the
human or non-human body as against culture, reason and the mind.
Some ecofeminists, especially those promoting ‘radical ecofeminism’
and goddess worship, have adopted this approach. Thus, for example,
Sharon Doubiago asserts that ‘ecology consciousness is traditional woman
consciousness’; ‘Women have always thought like mountains, to allude
to Aldo Leopold’s paradigm for ecological thinking. (There’s nothing like
the experience of one’s belly growing into a mountain to teach you this.)’
(1989: 41, 42). Charlene Spretnak similarly grounds a kind of women’s
spirituality in female biology and acculturation that is ‘comprised of
the truths of naturalism and the holistic proclivities of women’ (1989:
128–9).
Yet, as suggested earlier, feminists have long argued against the
acceptance of some ‘feminine essence’ grounded in biological sex, show-
ing instead how gender is culturally constructed. Because this applies
regardless of whether the essence is construed negatively or positively,
radical ecofeminism would then appear to present us with a mirror-image
of patriarchal constructions of femininity that is just as limited and
limiting. Even a positive valuation of femininity as ‘closer to nature’
thanks to female biology or social experience neglects the reality that all
the gender distinctions we know have been constructed within patriarchal
societies. Radical ecofeminist essentialism has been rightly criticised by
ecofeminists with a philosophical or sociological orientation (Warren
1994; Biehl 1991), who point out that ‘a truly feminist perspective cannot
embrace either the feminine or the masculine uncritically, [but] requires
a critique of gender roles, and this critique must include masculinity and
femininity’ (Davion 1994: 9). This objection now seems to have been
generally accepted by ecofeminists.
If radical ecofeminism is questionable in terms of its feminism, it is
even more so in terms of ecology. The desire to reverse the androcentric
priority of reason over emotion leads to a striking anti-scientism (e.g.
Kheel 1989; Griffin 1978). Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1979) frankly
appropriates a vaguely ‘green’ rhetoric in the service of a sententious,
sustained and unqualified assault on the ‘phallic myth and language’ of
science, especially medical science. Yet, as Val Plumwood’s brilliant
|
|
4.8 Page 38 |
▲back to top |
positions 25
analysis shows, merely differentiating men from women, humans from
nature, or reason from emotion, does not itself constitute problematic
anthropo- or androcentrism. Rather, the underlying model of mastery
shared by these forms of oppression is based upon alienated differentia-
tion and denied dependency: in the dominant Euro-American culture,
humans are not only distinguished from nature, but opposed to it in ways
that make humans radically alienated from and superior to it. This
polarisation, or ‘hyperseparation’, often involves a denial of the real rela-
tionship of the superior term to the inferior (Plumwood 1993: 47–55).
So, for example, Plumwood shows how philosopher René Descartes
(1596–1650) proposed an influential account of the difference between
mind and body that struggled to eliminate all traces of the corporeal from
the mental domain of reason. He had to
reinterpret the notion of ‘thinking’ in such a way that those mental
activities which involve the body, such as sense perception, and which
appear to bridge the mind/body and human/animal division, become
instead, via their reinterpretation in terms of ‘consciousness’, purely
mental operations.
(1993: 115)
Descartes hyperseparated mind and body, and denied to animals not only
the faculty of reason, but the whole range of feelings and sensations that
he had associated with thought. As a result, he saw animals as radically
different from, and inferior to, humans. They were bodies without minds,
effectively machines.
Plumwood’s most important contribution is a critique of the gen-
dered reason/nature dualism. She presents it as ‘the overarching, most
general, basic and connecting form’ of a historically varied series of
dualisms. It can serve this general analytical function because ‘reason’ has
so often been called upon to hyperseparate both men from women
and humans from animals, and so can stand in for both dominant terms.
She does not argue for a rejection of either science or reason, but rather
a qualification of the philosophies that would polarise reason and nature
in opposition: whereas scientific ‘objectivity’ decrees that any talk
of intention or purpose in nature constitutes unscientific anthropo-
morphism, Plumwood advocates a recognition of both similarity and
|
|
4.9 Page 39 |
▲back to top |
26 positions
difference in the human–nature continuum. We can continue to
distinguish reason and emotion, man and woman, human and animal,
but without the neurotic obsessiveness of the mainstream philosophical
tradition. In doing so, the mastery model that legitimates anthropo- and
androcentrism is undermined (see also Plumwood 2001).
Reason, once rescued from its idealisation by androcentric philosophy,
can acknowledge and respect ‘earth others’, afflicted by neither ultra-
rationalistic alienation nor animistic assimilation: ‘We need to understand
and affirm both otherness and our community in the earth’ (Plumwood
1993: 137). This position rejects both cornucopian dualism, privileging
the rational economic subject above all else, and simplistic ecofemi-
nist and deep ecological monism, in which the distinctive capacities and
needs of the human species are in danger of being submerged in an
undifferentiated, apolitical ecosphere. Unfortunately, it may nevertheless
lead to the position espoused by Caroline Merchant in her influential
historical critique of ‘mechanistic’ science, The Death of Nature: a
somewhat pious recommendation of ‘holistic’ or ‘vitalist’ science based on
its moral, rather than its methodological or pragmatic, superiority over
‘reductive’ conventional science. The place of science in the two major
forms of radical ecology, then, remains vexed.
Ecofeminism emphasises environmental justice to a far greater degree
than deep ecology. The logic of domination is implicated in discrimi-
nation and oppression on grounds of race, sexual orientation and class as
well as species and gender. Whereas the Deep Ecology anthology contains
essays on ‘dead white males’ such as D.H. Lawrence, John Muir and
Henry Thoreau, a recent anthology of Ecofeminist Literary Criticism
(Gaard and Murphy 1998) includes work on East German, French,
Native American, Chicana and other writers, mainly but not exclusively
women. This diversity is thought to derive necessarily from ecology, as
argued here by Ynestra King:
A healthy, balanced ecosystem, including human and nonhuman
inhabitants, must maintain diversity. Ecologically, environmental
simplification is as significant a problem as environmental pollution.
Biological simplification, i.e., the wiping out of whole species,
corresponds to reducing human diversity into faceless workers, or to
the homogenization of taste and culture through mass consumer
|
|
4.10 Page 40 |
▲back to top |
positions 27
markets. Social life and natural life are literally simplified to the
inorganic for the convenience of market society. Therefore, we need a
decentralized global movement that is founded on common interests
yet celebrates diversity and opposes all forms of domination and
violence. Potentially, ecofeminism is such a movement.
(1989: 20)
We might feel that both biological and cultural diversity are valuable,
and ought to be defended, without accepting the move, made without
proper explanation, between these very different concepts of ‘diversity’.
No evidence is given for the similar view of Gaard and Murphy that
‘cultural diversity . . . is one dimension that enhances the survival of the
human species’ (1998: 6). Here, as in some other ecocritical work,
the terminology of ecological science is simply appropriated for political
ends without any acknowledgment of change in use or qualification
of meaning. Moreover, as Chapter 3 shows, the notion of ‘balance’ in
ecosystems is scientifically highly problematic, and ecologists no longer
assert that biological diversity is necessarily linked to stability.
Radical ecofeminism clearly functions as an inspiration to many
to change their lives, but as a critical philosophy its irrationalism and
essentialism are serious limitations. Ecofeminists such as Warren and
Plumwood, however, bring to bear social and philosophical insights that
give the position far greater depth, scope and rigour. This is reflected
in the growing significance of ecofeminist literary and cultural criticism
within the ecocritical field, and in the complex analyses ecofeminists
can make of, for example, population problems, which greatly exceed in
both diagnostic and prescriptive power the crude analyses of deep ecolo-
gists (Cuomo 1994). Ecofeminists have also provided sharp critiques of
globalisation, free trade and ‘international development’ that link their
project as much to the politically orientated positions associated with
social ecology and eco-Marxism as to ethically and spiritually orientated
deep ecology (Shiva 1989).
SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND ECO-MARXISM
Like ecofeminism, the positions discussed here do not suggest that
environmental problems are caused by anthropocentric attitudes alone,
|
|
5 Pages 41-50 |
▲back to top |
|
|
5.1 Page 41 |
▲back to top |
28 positions
but follow from systems of domination or exploitation of humans by
other humans. Focusing on these intraspecies relationships, they perpet-
uate, deep ecologists claim, the anthropocentrism that ought to be the
target of any earth-centred critique. At the same time, social ecologists
and eco-Marxists lament the individualism and pervasive mysticism of
deep ecologists, which, they argue, represent a retreat from rational
thought and real political engagement. Social ecology and eco-Marxism
are explicitly political, and have their origins in nineteenth-century radical
thought: the anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) and Pyotr
Kropotkin (1842–1921), the communism of Karl Marx (1818–33) and
Friedrich Engels (1820–95).
Social ecology and eco-Marxism share the crucial insight with the
cornucopian economists, whom they diametrically oppose politically,
that the notion of ecological ‘limits’ is a kind of mystification. The fear
of ‘overshoot’ of the capacities of natural systems to provide resources
and absorb waste informs both deep ecology and environmentalism,
but this analysis obscures the way scarcity is created by capitalistic forms
of production that depend on the manipulation of the dynamic of supply
and demand. Furthermore, technology modifies the dynamic, both by
initiating new demands, and, through changed extraction or production
processes, offsetting or exacerbating scarcity. In other words, ‘scarcity’ is
not simply an objective fact about the natural world, but a function of the
will and means of capital: the purposes that guide production, and the
technologies that facilitate it. Change the political structure of society so
that production to meet real needs replaces production for the accu-
mulation of wealth, it is argued, and the ecological problem of limits
produced by capital’s structural need for perpetual growth will disappear.
It is worth noting that, whilst this argument is persuasive in relation
to mineral resources, it is far less so when applied to non-substitutable
and economically invisible resources such as freshwater aquifers or
biodiversity.
Social ecologists, most of whom recognise political philosopher
Murray Bookchin as their intellectual guru, share with eco-Marxists a
distinctive view of the place of humans in nature. They claim the
ecocentric monism enjoined by deep ecologists is disingenuous because,
although humans are supposed to be ‘part of nature’, many of the things
humans do are still portrayed as ‘unnatural’, thereby reintroducing the
|
|
5.2 Page 42 |
▲back to top |
positions 29
dualism they were trying to overcome. Opposing this false monism is a
dialectical perspective that envisages the evolution of human culture, or
‘second nature’, from ‘first nature’, in an ongoing process in which each
defines and transforms the other:
Marx . . . recognised the priorness [sic] of an ‘external’ or ‘first’ nature,
that gave birth to humankind. But humans then worked on this ‘first’
nature to produce a ‘second’ nature: the material creations of society
plus its institutions, ideas and values. This process, as Bookchin . . .
stresses, is part of a process of natural evolution of society.
(Pepper 1993: 108)
Eco-Marxists and social ecologists are therefore neither monists nor
dualists. One of the consequences of this view is that environmental
problems cannot be clearly divorced from things more usually defined as
social problems such as poor housing or lack of clean water. It gives these
positions a clear affinity with environmental justice movements that
protest the common association of acute environmental degradation and
pollution with poverty.
In line with traditional Marxist thought, eco-Marxists argue that
there is a structural conflict between workers and the owners of the means
of production, in which the latter cream off the surplus value created by
the labour of the proletariat. This objective exploitation is at the heart of
all other forms of exploitation and oppression, as Pepper argues: ‘The
true, post-revolutionary, communist society will be classless, and when it
is attained the state, environmental disruption, economic exploitation,
war and patriarchy will all wither away, being no longer necessary’ (1993:
207–8). Against this vision of a planned economy based on need rather
than greed, social ecology promotes a decentralised society of non-
hierarchical affiliations avowedly derived from an anarchistic political
tradition:
A fundamental unit will be the commune, a closely knit, small
community based on love, friendship, shared values, and commitment
to a common life. . . . cooperative institutions in all areas of social life
will be formed: mutualistic associations for child care and education,
for production and distribution, for cultural creation, for play and
|
|
5.3 Page 43 |
▲back to top |
30 positions
enjoyment, for reflection and spiritual renewal. Organization will be
based not on the demands of power, but rather on the self-realization of
persons as free social beings.
(Clark 1990: 9)
If eco-Marxists identify class conflict as the key political issue, social eco-
logists oppose the power relations and hierarchy they see as afflicting all
kinds of societies, be they capitalistic or centrally planned socialist. In place
of a workers’ revolution, social ecologists promote exemplary lifestyles and
communities that prefigure a more general social transformation and give
people practice in sustainable living and participatory democracy.
Eco-Marxism seems at present to be a marginal force in the green
politics of rich nations, although its role in Third World environmental
justice movements may be more significant. However, it suffers from
association with the environmental horrors perpetrated by the former
Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. On the other hand,
social ecology and anarchism more generally, seem to be experiencing
a resurgence in the anti-globalisation and bioregional movements.
Anarchism has the advantage of not requiring an elusive revolutionary
proletariat for its realisation, and is clearly amenable to a range of counter-
cultural movements. Nevertheless, Marxists are right to emphasise the
pervasive power and reach of global capital, and the probable futility of
rebellious actions by individuals or small, loosely affiliated groups against
a handful of its symbols but none of its essential structures. Despite these
differences, in what follows, holders of both these positions will be called
‘social ecologists’.
HEIDEGGERIAN ECOPHILOSOPHY
Whilst it is undoubtedly marginal to green political thought, the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has inspired a number of
ecocritics. It is apparently impenetrable to the beginner, but some critics
argue that Heidegger’s thought is among the most profound critiques of
industrial modernity because it combines a poetic awe before the Earth’s
being with a savage deconstruction of the death-denying project of world
mastery that we are taught to call ‘progress’ (see Foltz 1995; Garrard
1998; Zimmerman 1990 and 1993).
|
|
5.4 Page 44 |
▲back to top |
positions 31
Heidegger’s starting point is the fundamental difference between
mere material existence and a revelation of ‘being’, or the thing-ness of
things. To ‘be’ is not just to exist, but to ‘show up’ or be disclosed, which
requires human consciousness as the space, or ‘clearing’ (Lichtung), in and
through which it is disclosed: ‘At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary;
it is extraordinary’ (Heidegger 1993: 179). Once again, the problem of
dualism is not so much resolved as displaced, as being only ‘is’ through
this clearing, and human being is in turn properly realised in the letting
be of beings in its ‘space’ of consciousness. The clearing and what shines
forth there have a mutual need for one another, as the sheltering Earth
provides the entities from which human being founds a world: ‘A stone
is worldless. Plant and animal likewise have no world; but they belong to
the covert throng of a surrounding into which they are linked. The
peasant woman, on the other hand, has a world because she dwells in the
overtness of beings’ (p. 170).
The relationship of being and clearing, or Earth and world, is not a
simple one, however, because the responsiveness or attunement between
them may be more or less responsible, and beings may or may not be ‘let
be’ (i.e. be disclosed, show up, emerge). Thus responsible humans have
an implicit duty to let things disclose themselves in their own inimitable
way, rather than forcing them into meanings and identities that suit their
own instrumental values. One of the crucial modes of proper letting be or
unhindered disclosure of being is poetry: language, especially archaic
or oblique poetic language, rightly understood discloses to us the act of
disclosure itself. It enables showing-up itself to show up. On the other
hand, Heidegger was dismissive of everyday chatter because it discloses
both language and beings to us as mere instruments of our will; disposable
words correspond to a world of disposable stuff. Worse still, things may
emerge as mere resources on call for our use when required, so that a living
forest may show up as merely a ‘standing reserve’ of timber (Bestand), no
longer trees even but just lumber-in-waiting, and even the mighty Rhine
may be disclosed as just a source of hydroelectric power. In meditation
upon the poetic word, however, we discover that ‘language is the house
of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling’ (Heidegger 1993: 237), and
Heidegger claims that the essence of beings, their autonomy and
resistance to our purposes, is disclosed by a similarly resistant language.
Through poetry, then, we learn that ‘Man is not the lord of beings. Man
|
|
5.5 Page 45 |
▲back to top |
32 positions
is the shepherd of Being’ (p. 245). We learn resistance to the instru-
mentalism or en-framing (Ge-stell ) that discloses beings always in its
narrow and reductive terms. We seek attunement to the demand beings
put on us to disclose them without constraint. We learn, that is, to let
beings be.
Thanks to the pivotal role he assigns to the work of art in what he
calls ‘saving the earth’, Heidegger’s philosophy has obvious attractions
to ecocritics. Yet many philosophers argue that Heidegger’s writings
are virulently anti-rational, besides being infuriatingly difficult to read.
Moreover, from 1934 to 1945, Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi,
believing that Hitler could lead Germany in saving the Earth. Some
philosophers consider that this has no bearing on his thought, whilst
others see a profound congruence between his philosophy and his politics.
The situation is complicated further by the claims of some historians that
early Nazism included environmentalist elements. The place of Heidegger
in ecocriticism is considered further in Chapter 7.
|
|
5.6 Page 46 |
▲back to top |
3
PASTORAL
Since the Romantic movement’s poetic responses to the Industrial
Revolution, pastoral has decisively shaped our constructions of nature.
Even the science of ecology may have been shaped by pastoral in its
early stages of development and we have seen that the founding text of
ecocriticism, Silent Spring, drew on the pastoral tradition. No other trope
is so deeply entrenched in Western culture, or so deeply problematic for
environmentalism. With its roots in the classical period, pastoral has
shown itself to be infinitely malleable for differing political ends, and
potentially harmful in its tensions and evasions. However, its long history
and cultural ubiquity mean that the pastoral trope must and will remain
a key concern for ecocritics.
What then is this ‘pastoral’ tradition, and what is its significance
for environmentalism? Terry Gifford distinguishes three kinds of pastoral:
the specifically literary tradition, involving a retreat from the city to the
countryside, that originates in ancient Alexandria and becomes a
key poetic form in Europe during the Renaissance; more generally, ‘any
literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast
to the urban’ (1999: 2); and the pejorative sense in which ‘pastoral’
implies an idealisation of rural life that obscures the realities of labour
and hardship. This chapter will explore these three manifestations of the
trope.
|
|
5.7 Page 47 |
▲back to top |
34 pastoral
The first of Gifford’s ‘kinds’ I will call ‘classical pastoral’, which I
take to include all pastoral literature up until the eighteenth century.
Classical pastoral precedes the perception of a general crisis in human
ecology by thousands of years, but it provides the pre-existing set of literary
conventions and cultural assumptions that have been crucially trans-
formed to provide a way for Europeans and Euro-Americans to construct
their landscapes. Gifford’s contrast of country and city comes to the fore
in Romantic pastoral, at a time when mass urbanisation made these
contrasts relevant to many more people than ever before. The later
popularisation of Romantic poetry has provided the language, imagery
and even locations for the subsequent generalisation of pastoral in such
diverse cultural forms as the novel, TV or promotional materials for
conservation organisations. Modern advertisements for wholewheat bread
featuring idyllic, rolling fields of grain in the sunshine, populated by ruddy
farmers and backed by classical music, would offer one example. Gifford’s
third, pejorative sense of the word emerges especially in Marxist critiques
of Romanticism, which provide a useful ground for contrast of this
tradition in cultural criticism with ecocriticism. Some ecocritics claim, for
instance, that the emergent environmental sensibility of Romantic pastoral
suggests a kind of radicalism not recognised by anthropocentric political
critics. Derivations from the Romantic model of course depend on the
contexts in which they have developed, and American pastoral has
followed its own distinct trajectory as a response to an environmental and
social history very different from that of Britain. At the end of the chapter
I discuss how ‘pastoral ecology’ promoted notions of nature’s essential
harmony that are still prevalent in environmental discourse today.
CLASSICAL PASTORAL
The genre of pastoral emerged in poetry of the Hellenistic period. The
Idylls of the Alexandrian poet Theocritus (c. 316–260), and the subse-
quent revisions, critiques and translations they engendered, enduringly
associated three terms: the ‘idyll’ was originally the ‘small picture’ or
poetic vignette, but came to mean the represented situation of rural escape
or repose itself; ‘bucolic’, deriving from boukolos meaning ‘cowherd’, one
of the typical singers of the idyll; and ‘pastoral’, a term of Latin origin
retrospectively applied to Theocritus’ work thanks to the shepherds (Latin
|
|
5.8 Page 48 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 35
pastor) who engaged in singing competitions with the cow- and goatherds
therein. The emergence of the bucolic idyll correlates closely with large-
scale urbanisation in the Hellenic period. There are two key contrasts
from this period that run through the pastoral tradition: the spatial
distinction of town (frenetic, corrupt, impersonal) and country (peaceful,
abundant), and the temporal distinction of past (idyllic) and present
(‘fallen’).
Many of Theocritus’ Idylls in fact seem tangential to the later trajectory
of pastoral poetry, but a few can provide us with initial bearings. From
the outset, pastoral often used nature as a location or as a reflection of
human predicaments, rather than sustaining an interest in nature in and
for itself. What is perhaps surprising, given that ‘pastoral’ and ‘idyll’ have
acquired such connotations of idealisation, is that the Idylls include both
hard work and earthy humour. Idyll V includes references to bestiality
and hetero- and homosexual lust, whilst ‘Reapmaster Milton’ of Idyll X
counters Boucaeus’ lovelorn song with some rather more pragmatic verses
of his own: ‘let the reapers rise with the rising lark, rest in the heat, and
not leave off till dark’ (1978: 100). At the same time, the joy and plenty
of a good harvest comes through in Idyll VII with compelling immediacy.
Chris Fitter’s fascinating historical account of the aesthetics of ‘landskip’
(sic) has shown how Theocritus combines learned literary allusion and
exact observation:
Throughout antiquity landskip will never fully escape the condition of
‘scaena’, of elaborated backdrop, yet with Theocritus such specificity
turns gain, as a ‘poetry of place’ is born. The Harvest Home (Idyll 7)
borrows the device of the bird-catalogue from Homer’s Calypso, and
the nightingale singing from the thicket is directly Homeric; but the
assiduous naturalism – the accurately reported positioning of the
landmarks along the eight-kilometre walk to Phrasidimus’ farm – and
the correct natural history (the rare tomb-crested lark, and the other
birds referred to, seem always to have been resident in Cos) embed a
paradisal tonality in the closely mapped familiar world.
(1996: 40–1)
So the Idylls also provide us with the first instance of a contrast of civilised
poetic artifice and a ‘naturalism’ to which it is conventionally opposed.
|
|
5.9 Page 49 |
▲back to top |
36 pastoral
Virgil (70–19 BC) alludes to Theocritus frequently in his Eclogues,
but in some ways his is a more systematic and self-conscious approach,
incorporating a pointed contrast of rural retreat and the harms consequent
on civilisation. At several points, moreover, Virgil alludes to environ-
mental problems associated with Roman civilisation, which have been
blamed by some environmental historians for its eventual decline (Hughes
1996a). One of the key factors, it is widely agreed, was deforestation.
Virgil’s shepherd, Menalcas, notes that ‘For gladness even the unshorn
[intonsi] mountains fling their voices / Toward the stars’ (1984: 65).
Pastoral often suggests that nature responds to human emotions, a poetic
conceit called ‘pathetic fallacy’ because it wrongly locates feeling (pathos)
in, say, mountains or trees; in this respect, Menalcas’ line is fairly typical.
However, he is also drawing attention to the ‘shorn’ state of Mediterranean
hillsides in his own time. Comparison might be made with comments in
Plato’s Critias (1920: 75) on the state of Attica’s hillsides, where the
connection between deforestation, erosion and loss of fertility is explicit.
This process may be traced back to Sumeria, the earliest civilisation in the
region, which left us the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest known literary
work. Numerous historians and ecocritics have examined this work and,
as Harrison notes: ‘What interests us about the epic above all is the fact
that the first antagonist of Gilgamesh is the forest’ (Harrison 1992: 14; cf.
Hughes 1996a; Oelschlager 1991; Westling 1996; Fitter 1996).
Virgil’s importance is obvious as progenitor of later pastoral poetry, but
it is also worth examining his significance for two major forerunners of
ecocriticism, both of which dealt with the pastoral tradition. The first of
these is Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (first published 1964), an
analysis of pastoral in American literature. This key text does not mention
ecology or environmentalism directly, but clearly situates its discussion in
relation to the increasingly problematic place of technology in the
American landscape. Virgil provides a crucial archetype in Eclogue I:
Lucky old man, the land will then remain your own,
And large enough for you, although bare rock and bog
With muddy rushes covers all the pasturage:
No unaccustomed feed will try your breeding ewes,
And no infection harm them from a neighbour’s flock.
(1984: 33)
|
|
5.10 Page 50 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 37
According to Marx, this is the ‘middle landscape’ that was eventually to
form the American ideal: ‘This ideal pasture has two vulnerable borders:
one separates it from Rome, the other from the encroaching marshland.
It is a place where Tityrus is spared the deprivations and anxieties
associated with both the city and the wilderness’ (1964: 22).
We will return to Marx’s claim below. In terms of British criti-
cism, Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (first published in
1973) profoundly influenced both Marxist readings of pastoral and the
ecocritical responses that arrived later to qualify or contradict them. One
of Williams’ key insights is that pastoral has always been characterised
by nostalgia, so that wherever we look into its history, we will see an
‘escalator’ taking us back further into a better past. At the same time, he
argues, ‘what seemed a single escalator, a perpetual recession into history,
turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old
England, settlement, the rural virtues – all these, in fact, mean different
things at different times, and quite different values are being brought into
question’ (1993: 12). In addition to the elegy and the idyll in Virgil, we
can also find a prophetic moment in Eclogue IV that suggests utopian
possibilities:
She-goats unshepherded will bring home udders plumped
With milk, and cattle will not fear the lion’s might.
Your very cradle will pour forth caressing flowers.
(1984: 57)
Williams argues that this ‘includes within its celebration the consciousness
of the very different present from which the restoration will be a release’
(1993: 18). Pastoral, then, need not always be nostalgic, but may be
utopian and proleptic. Both Leo Marx and Williams identify this pro-
gressive potential, and both critics later associated it with the emergence
of environmental politics (see Williams 1989).
We can set out three orientations of pastoral in terms of time: the
elegy looks back to a vanished past with a sense of nostalgia; the idyll
celebrates a bountiful present; the utopia looks forward to a redeemed
future. Once schematised like this, the relationship of pastoral and the
Judaeo-Christian conception of time becomes clear: Genesis 3, the story
of Man’s fall, is essentially an elegy of lost pastoral bounty and innocence.
|
|
6 Pages 51-60 |
▲back to top |
|
|
6.1 Page 51 |
▲back to top |
38 pastoral
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, an elaboration upon Biblical materials, pastoral
Eden is influenced by Graeco-Roman models, and Man’s Fall partakes
in a shared elegiac mood: ‘O unexpected stroke, worse than of death! /
Must I leave thee Paradise?’ (XI. 268–9). At the same time, the series
of covenants between God and Man offer the possibility of present grace,
as for example after the Flood, when God promises the continuance
of nature as part of a renewed covenant. This must be taken into
account alongside Lynn White Jr.’s claim, based mainly on Genesis, that
‘Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions
(except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man
and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature
for his proper ends’, and his conclusion that ‘we shall continue to have a
worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature
has no reason for existence save to serve man’ (1996: 10, 14). These
arguments will be considered in later chapters.
As Williams says, the meanings and values implied by pastoral elegy
and idyll vary according to the historical context in which they appear,
but we may nevertheless identify a marked tendency for the classical
English pastorals influenced by Theocritus to present a vision of rural life
so removed from the processes of labour and natural growth that they
constitute a persistent mystification of human ecology. In the work of
Williams, and later critics such as John Barrell and John Bull (1982)
we see the emergence of Gifford’s sense of ‘pastoral’ as a pejorative term
for an evasive or mendacious depiction of rural life. Reading the verse they
discuss makes it harder to dispute the case, because with few exceptions it
betrays two preoccupations: an interest in the conventions of pastoral
poetry themselves, and, with just as much self-regard and often syco-
phancy too, the celebration of the landed estate or ordered, productive
countryside generally. Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ (1640) compliments
a patron’s bounty so extravagant that even the animals come to the
slaughter joyfully, as in some butcher’s Eden:
The Pheasant, Partiridge, and the Larke,
Flew to thy house, as to the Arke.
The willing Oxe, of himselfe came
Home to the slaughter, with the Lambe,
And every beast did thither bring
|
|
6.2 Page 52 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 39
Himselfe, to be an offering.
The scalie herd, more pleasure tooke,
Bath’d in thy dish, then in the brooke.
(Barrell and Bull 1982: 173)
The obvious hyperbole is further exaggerated by the reference to Noah’s
Ark: after the Flood, a burnt ‘offering’ of fowl made by Noah induced
God to rescind the curse placed on Adam’s farming of the earth. Here,
not only is Saxham the Ark, but the offering is to its owner rather than
God, his beneficent rule seeming to represent a secular providence that
has little need of divine assistance. The cornucopian conceit of self-
sacrificing animals is, on one level, a piece of pure hypocrisy that denies
the facts of both rural labour and animal suffering. On another level,
though, Carew is representing the real distance between his patron and
the things that sustain him, in that the ox could well have offered himself
up for all the Lord might know. On yet another level, the conceit is so
absurd that the text may seem a witty comment on pastoral idealisation.
The pastoral poetry of the century after ‘To Saxham’ becomes even more
self-involved and I will not discuss it here, but Williams, Halperin,
Gifford and Alpers (1996) have conducted useful surveys.
Classical pastoral was disposed, then, to distort or mystify social and
environmental history, whilst at the same time providing a locus,
legitimated by tradition, for the feelings of loss and alienation from nature
to be produced by the Industrial Revolution.
ROMANTIC PASTORAL: WORDSWORTH VERSUS CLARE
For Williams, the interaction of Romanticism with the Industrial
Revolution brought about a decisive shift in the relations of the country
and city of the imagination. He identifies a new sense of sympathetic
interrelation of the creative human mind and the creative nature of which
it is a part, but from which it seems curiously, painfully, apart (1993:
127). According to Keith Thomas, during the early modern period and
the eighteenth century,
there had gradually emerged attitudes to the natural world which
were essentially incompatible with the direction in which English society
|
|
6.3 Page 53 |
▲back to top |
40 pastoral
was moving. The growth in towns had led to a new longing for the
countryside. The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds,
mountains and unsubdued nature. The new-found security from
wild animals had generated an increasing concern to protect birds
and preserve wild creatures in their natural state. Economic indepen-
dence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had
nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible,
to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people
lived.
(1984: 301)
Pastoral, which is part of the long shift that Thomas traces, graduates in
the Romantic period from a simple logic of compensation for progress to
the possibility of confronting it.
Williams’s work on pastoral did not produce Gifford’s pejorative sense
of the word by itself, but it did provide impetus for a succession of critics
who identified various forms and locations of the pastoral mystification
he so trenchantly exposed. Several important examples are collected in an
anthology of Wordsworth criticism that exemplifies the approaches
ecocritics initially set out to challenge ( J. Williams 1993). For example,
Roger Sales argues in ‘Michael, A Pastoral Poem’ that the depiction of
the hardship suffered by the shepherd Michael and his wife without
any specific allocation of blame or detailed socio-political diagnosis
amounts to a blatant example of what one might call ‘pastoral kitsch’.
He compares Wordsworth’s poem to cynical ‘advertising boys’ using
images of a cheerful farmer’s wife ‘at work on an antique spinning-
wheel’ to sell us ‘old-fashioned, hand-knitted socks’ then asks ‘What
is Wordsworth trying to peddle in “Michael”?’ (1993: 97–8). The answer
to the rhetorical question is: a harmonious vision of rural independence
and fortitude that hides a harsh world in which people are bought and
sold at hiring fairs, and where customary tenure keeps Cumberland
‘statesmen’ like Michael in a state of feudal vassalage to local aristocrats
who are nevertheless equally adept at capitalist, wage-based forms of
exploitation. Sales’s main evidence, apart from the complaint that
Wordsworth’s poem is not an economic treatise, is that things befall
Michael or his environment without anyone apparently being responsible
for them:
|
|
6.4 Page 54 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 41
The Cottage which was nam’d The Evening Star
Is gone, the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
In all the neighbourhood, yet the Oak is left
That grew beside their door; and the remains
Of the unfinished Sheep-fold may be seen
Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head Gill.
(Wordsworth 1969: 110)
Sales wants us to ask who drove the plough, who wrought the changes
and for what reasons? By attributing ‘change’ to mysterious forces or
‘Strangers’, no doubt from the ‘dissolute city’, Wordsworth is deliberately
obscuring the exploitation going on within his beloved Lakeland.
What is strikingly absent from Sales’s essay is any serious consideration
of either Michael’s profound attunement to his natural environment or
the poet’s admiration for his necessary fortitude. The latter functions as a
rebuke at the beginning of the poem, a reminder of the importance of ‘the
heart of man and human life’ in addition to the ‘power of Nature’. Sales’s
critique is wrong, as we can see from the poet’s elaboration of Michael’s
practised sensitivity to the weather:
Hence he had learn’d the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone, and often-times
When others heeded not, He heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of Bagpipers on distant Highland hills;
The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say
‘The winds are now devising work for me!’
(Wordsworth 1969: 104)
This is far from manipulative pastoral kitsch. The simile that brings
together wind and bagpipe in a ‘subterraneous music’ suggests the
bass drone of the instrument and the gale with a vividness unimagined
from Sales’s account. Moreover, the shepherd’s ability to take warning
from the ‘meaning’ he derives from the ‘music’ of the weather suggests a
responsiveness as sophisticated as it is crucial to the survival of his flock.
|
|
6.5 Page 55 |
▲back to top |
42 pastoral
It is with this sort of objection in mind that Jonathan Bate promoted
a return to the nineteenth-century conception of Wordsworth as a ‘poet
of nature’ in Romantic Ecology (1991), rejecting the reflex that made
Sales associate ‘nature’ with political obfuscation. Bate begins with the
end of Soviet communism, emphasising the huge environmental
problems which contributed to it and suggesting that, in this new era, the
old political models of left versus right are no longer useful. This starting
point has two functions. First, it establishes a concern for nature not, as
Marxist critics other than Williams have assumed, as a refuge from politics
but as a potential form of political engagement. Second, it suggests that,
prominent as they are in anthologies of ‘radical’ readings of Wordsworth,
Marxist and historicist critics are marginal in terms of modern politics and
perhaps reactionary with respect to progressive environmental politics.
Whereas Marxist critics see a concern with nature as a mystification of a
‘reality’ they define in socio-economic terms, ecocritics point out that
economics ultimately depends on ecology, and so it is arguably Marxism
that obscures reality by refusing to attend to the primary productivity of
nature.
Wordsworth’s poetry, Bate argues, can act as an initiation into a
utopian promise as well as an elegiac commemoration, such as ‘Michael’.
For the poet, as for his educated, alienated, mainly urban readership,
Michael’s inarticulate, unconscious bond with the land has consciously to
be sought out, which is accomplished, according to Bate, in the ‘Poems
on the Naming of Places’ at the end of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s
sense of being ‘at home’ in the Lake District is articulated in these poems,
producing ‘a truly ecological poetry. The word “ecology” is ultimately
derived from the Greek oikos and logos. What Wordsworth has produced
here is a logos of the oikos, the home. Man has come home to nature
and the place takes on a wholeness, a unity that is entire’ (Bate 1991:
103). Just as important, Bate insists that, as the title of Book Eight of
The Prelude suggests, ‘Love of Nature [Leads] to Love of Mankind’, rather
than being opposed to it, as Marxist critics had often claimed;
Wordsworth’s vision of the Lake District is a working paradise of rural
republicanism. Moreover, his fervent advocacy led, long after his death,
to the creation of a National Park there.
However, this claim to ‘ecological sainthood’ needs to be strongly
qualified. Bate’s attempt to use green politics to rescue a particular reading
|
|
6.6 Page 56 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 43
of Wordsworth may be challenged on both political and ecocritical
grounds. There are significant differences within the broad political
spectrum of environmentalism which correspond to the familiar left–
right continuum, even if they are not simply reducible to it, and in
any case it seems clear that Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for ‘nature’ does not
correspond to modern ecological concern. Wordsworth is, on the whole,
far more interested in the relationship of non-human nature to the human
mind than he is in nature in and for itself. Most of ‘Michael’, for example,
concerns the family relations and domestic affections of the human
protagonists; Wordsworth spends rather little time describing nature,
and rather a lot reflecting upon his own and other people’s responses
to it. This argument is acknowledged in Bate’s second major book of
ecocriticism, The Song of the Earth (2000), but appears as a virtue rather
than a vice: in the convoluted reflexivity of ‘Lines written a few miles
above Tintern Abbey’ the distinction between observing human subject
and observed natural objects is systematically undermined, leading to a
‘dissolution of the self from perceiving eye into ecologically connected
organism’ (Bate 2000: 145). A firmer sense of the contrast between
ecocritical and other reading practices could be obtained by comparing
Bate’s reading of this poem with competing readings of particular force,
such as John Barrell’s essay ‘The Uses of Dorothy’ ( J. Williams 1993)
and Marjorie Levinson’s reading in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems
(1986).
Moreover, the ‘nature’ that Wordsworth valorises is not the nature that
contemporary environmentalists seek to protect. Romantic nature is never
seriously endangered, and may in its normal state be poor in biological
diversity; rather, it is loved for its vastness, beauty and endurance. By
focusing attention upon sublime landscapes, mainly mountainous,
Wordsworthian Romanticism may have diverted it from places that are
more important and under more severe pressure ecologically but less
‘picturesque’, such as fens, bogs and marshes. Indeed, as Rod Giblett
shows in Postmodern Wetlands (1996), swamps have long been viewed
with fear rather than admiration in Western culture, to be filled or drained
where possible. On a practical level, drainage for agriculture and peat-
digging have reduced these wetlands so that few examples survive intact.
In the work of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, the bog at least seems to have
found a poet to speak for it. But perhaps the most catastrophic changes
|
|
6.7 Page 57 |
▲back to top |
44 pastoral
in the British countryside have occurred in the ordinary agricultural
landscapes of pasture, hay-meadow and arable field, as described in
Graham Harvey’s The Killing of the Countryside (1997). These quotidian
landscapes, where economic and ecological values coincide or clash on the
largest scale and with the greatest consequence, seem relegated by a
Wordsworthian aesthetic to the realm of the merely pretty, and so lacking
in the qualities which make for both beauty and fear. The relatively
barren landscape of the Lake District could function as inspiration and
education, in contrast to the fat, complacent but biologically diverse
lowlands.
Compared to Wordsworth, John Clare (1793–1864) has a much better
claim to be the true poet of nature. John Middleton Murry proclaimed
that ‘The intensity with which he adored the country which he knew is
without a parallel in English literature; of him it seems hardly a metaphor
to say he was an actual part of the countryside’ (Coupe 2000: 42).
In saying this, Murry was employing a distinction first proposed by
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) in his essay ‘On Naive and Sentimental
[or ‘Reflective’] Poetry’, a prototype of ecocritical theory. Schiller argues
that the ancients were so little alienated from nature that they treated
it as an extension of the human world, full of analogous conflicts,
loves and jealousies. They wrote with a naïve curiosity and joy that never
differentiated between ‘the scenes and characters of nature’ and a ‘descrip-
tion of a tunic, a shield, a suit of armour, some domestic article, or any
mechanical object’ (Schiller 1985: 189). Being, like Michael the shepherd,
immersed in nature, the naïve poet did not need to celebrate or mourn it
especially, whereas for the modern ‘sentimental’ poet, perceptions of
nature must always be suffused with either irony or regret: ‘Our feeling
for nature is like the feeling of an invalid for health’ (p. 190). Having
such an alienated, or ‘reflective’, relation to nature is an ambiguous
predicament, because by it we gain in freedom and perspective what we
lose in spontaneous immediacy and feeling. Moreover, whilst a naïve poet
may become, or be forced to become, reflective, the reverse trajectory
could only be an affectation. When Schiller claims that poets ‘will either
be nature, or they will seek lost nature’ (p. 191), he shows how deeply
ecocritical concepts remain indebted to Romanticism: the state of the
naïve poet might be redefined as biocentric, whilst the anxieties that might
attend anthropocentrism could be seen as distinctively sentimental
|
|
6.8 Page 58 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 45
yearnings. Schiller’s is a ‘poetics of authenticity’ in that he proposes that
the relationship of the ancients to nature was more authentic, because it
was intuitive, unalienated and inarticulate. Many ecocritics still adhere
implicitly to Schiller’s duality, and seek a naïve literature even as they
mourn its impossibility.
Critics have continued to think of Clare’s poetry as ‘naïve’, only each
has valued this differently. A major reason for this is the distinctiveness of
his poetic voice:
EMMONSAILS HEATH IN WINTER
I love to see the old heaths withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old Heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholly wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ash trees topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gipsey makes his bed
Up flies the bouncing wood cock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread
The field fare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again
(Clare 1986: 136)
This edition prints Clare’s poem in its naïve, unpunctuated form, idio-
syncratic in spelling (‘brig’ rather than ‘bridge’), frequently grammatically
incorrect and full of dialect words such as, here, ‘oddling’ (solitary),
‘bumbarrel’ (long-tailed tit), ‘awe’ (haw), ‘closen’ (small field). Yet we
might also note that this is a sonnet, which ought to remind us that he
was not the naïve, scarcely lettered ‘peasant poet’ his untidy verse and
his earlier critics might imply. He was, in fact, skilled in the artifice of
innocence, besides having a knowledge, based on agricultural labour and
study of natural history, of his natural surroundings quite unparalleled in
English poetry. Thus the hungry energy of the flock of tits, combing the
|
|
6.9 Page 59 |
▲back to top |
46 pastoral
hedges in a roving wave, is vivid and exact. We might note also the
unobtrusive presence of the gypsy, not glamorised or demonised as in
so much Romantic writing, merely present in this filthy, freezing, un-
Romantic landscape. And finally, we might note the way the poem begins
with unaffected love of a place treated as empty, wild or recalcitrant space
by agrarian improvers, a love complemented by rage in poems such as
‘The Mores’, ‘Helpstone’ and ‘To a Fallen Elm’ at the destruction of this
known landscape. Raymond Williams argues that:
Clare shared many of the insights of the modern ‘green movement’,
a name which would have pleased him. Like them, he insisted that man
does not own the earth and is not entitled to do whatever he likes with
it. Instead he must treat it as a responsible steward, for his own sake
and that of the other species (rabbits, elms, cattle) which also have a
right to exist.
(Clare 1986: 212)
In the light of the first chapter, where ecocentric and anthropocentric
approaches were contrasted, Williams’ claim seems confused. The rhetoric
of ‘stewardship’ belongs to the shallow, or environmentalist, approach, as
does the appeal to human self-interest, yet alongside this is a more radical
appeal to the ‘rights’ of nature. For example, ‘The Lament of Swordy
Well’ ventriloquises a voice that is specifically inhuman:
Though Im no man yet any wrong
Some sort of right may seek
And I am glad if een a song
Gives me the room to speak
(Clare 1986: 94)
Here we are to imagine an actual place, Swordy Well, speaking; elsewhere
we hear the ‘Lamentation of Round-Oak Waters’, of which Bate asks, in
The Song of the Earth:
Is the voice of Round Oak Waters to be understood only as a metaphor,
a traditional poetic figuration of the genius loci, or ‘an extreme use of
|
|
6.10 Page 60 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 47
the pathetic fallacy’? Or can we conceive the possibility that a brook
might really speak, a piece of land might really feel pain?
(Bate 2000: 165)
These questions are thrown out with something of a rhetorical flourish,
as Bate is clearly aware of the sceptical answers most readers will have
formed already.
Adopting the Heideggerian approach outlined above is one way
to circumvent the post-Romantic problem of a poetic voice which
is necessarily human and ‘reflective’ and yet almost naïvely open to
the natural ‘other’ in the way that Clare is always and Wordsworth
is sometimes. Whereas the ‘nature-lover’ tradition of Clare criticism had
claimed that he spoke a word (logos) for our natural home (oikos), some
more recent criticism has found in his poetry a fulfilment of Heidegger’s
notion that we must ‘let beings be’ precisely in and through language.
Implicitly reversing the usual formulation, Robert Pogue Harrison argues
that ‘logos [language] is that which opens the human abode [oikos] on the
earth’ (1992: 200). Somewhat at odds with the usual ecocritical emphasis
on the ways in which language refers to the world, Harrison is saying that
we dwell not on Earth but in language.
Although the philosopher gets a mention only in an endnote, Forests
is consistently Heideggerian, and Harrison’s book appears to have been a
crucial factor in shifting Bate from the green humanism of Romantic
Ecology to the dialectic of Heidegger and Adorno that plays through the
pages of The Song of the Earth. In Clare’s wonderful, copious poems on
birds’ nests, Bate finds a ‘clearing’ (Lichtung) in which, poetically, such
fragile things are allowed to ‘be’. Here Clare decidedly thought further
ahead of his fellow Romantics; in a fragile social and mental situation
himself, he was able to ‘think fragility’ with fewer of the tensions and
confusions engendered in the others by an abstract ‘nature’.
The converse of Clare’s sense of fragility is a kind of political resis-
tance that still eludes simple classification. Williams sees him as an
environmentalist with some leftist inclinations, Bate as a deep ecologist
speaking for unenclosed nature, and yet neither provides direct evidence
that the enclosure of common land, which Clare protested, had damaging
ecological effects. Indeed, enclosure may even have been beneficial by
preventing a burgeoning population from overexploiting the commons.
|
|
7 Pages 61-70 |
▲back to top |
|
|
7.1 Page 61 |
▲back to top |
48 pastoral
It certainly did continue a process of economic rationalisation that was
steadily converting the natural world into ‘standing-reserve’, and it is this
process that Clare wanted to resist. There is a desperation in some of
Clare’s writing that is often echoed in modern environmentalist writing,
and his occasional hopeless rage (see Bate 2000: 172) is reflected in
uncompromising activism in radical movements such as the Sea Shepherd
organisation. And yet this seems to occur at precisely the point where
pastoral has gone beyond the jarring encounter with rural labour to
a collision with a non-human nature no longer easeful, plentiful, pretty,
instructive or enduring. Just when it comes closest to being ‘ecological’,
answering most of the objections raised above, Romantic pastoral starts
to seem both un-Romantic and post-pastoral. Of course, pastoral poetry
and the more general phenomenon go on long after this, but in both
popular and literary forms pastoral has tended to function in British
culture in ways that are ecologically delusive; to the extent that envi-
ronmental movements have succeeded, it is as a result of the admixture to
the Romantic landscape ideal of scientific observations that are not, in a
strict sense, aesthetic at all. An aesthetic construct that, like English
pastoral, may be as good at exhorting men to go and fight in the trenches
in the First World War on the pretext that they are saving threatened
habitats must be treated with great caution by ecocritics, and may turn
out to be amenable today only to the promotion of ‘country’ products, as
the complex, conflicted pastoral of Romanticism descends over two
centuries to the status of a generic logo for pastoral kitsch.
AMERICAN PASTORAL
Although British Romantic models dominated early Anglo-American
literature, pastoral has a very different place in American literature,
criticism and culture. Both contrasts and parallels are instructive: where
British ecocriticism focused on Wordsworth in its early explorations,
American ecocriticism identified Henry David Thoreau as a key figure.
As Jonathan Bate re-opened the question of pastoral as posed, pre-
eminently, by Raymond Williams, so Lawrence Buell interrogated the
place of nature in an American canon shaped in part by the proto-
ecocritical work of Leo Marx. However, British ecocritics have had to
meet the Marxist challenge, whereas American readings of pastoral have
|
|
7.2 Page 62 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 49
responded to critique primarily by feminist and multicultural critics. It is
not the ratification of an oppressive social order, identified with a landed
aristocracy, that provides a pejorative edge to ‘pastoral’ for Americans,
but its identification with masculine colonial aggression directed against
women, indigenes and the land. Great differences of history and
topography ensure differing meanings of pastoral on either side of the
Atlantic.
Pastoral remains significant for an American ecocriticism, orientated
towards the revaluation of non-fictional nature writing, because it
continues to supply the underlying narrative structure in which the
protagonist leaves civilisation for an encounter with non-human nature,
then returns having experienced epiphany and renewal. Moreover, the
more domesticated forms of pastoral seem in American literature and
culture to emphasise agrarianism, a political ideology associated with
Thomas Jefferson that promoted a land-owning farming citizenry as a
means of ensuring a healthy democracy. As Chapter 6 suggests, American
writing about the countryside emphasises a working rather than an
aesthetic relationship with the land. At the same time, the British
Romantics’ more sublime versions of pastoral were sharpened into a
distinctively New World obsession with wilderness.
Nevertheless such distinctions have only recently emerged. Whereas
contemporary ecocriticism, driven by preservationist politics, sees the
wild as the ultimate destination of American pastoral, Leo Marx argued
that it seeks a neo-classical ‘middle landscape’ between civilisation and
true wilderness. Here American literature, emerging in the nineteenth
century in the midst of massive industrialisation, can attempt to mediate
between competing values, ‘the contradiction between rural myth and
technological fact’ (1964: 354). Marx focuses upon moments when
pastoral peace is interrupted by an actual or metaphorical machine, as
when the railroad impinges upon Thoreau’s retreat in Walden:
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and
winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s
yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within
the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other
side.
(Thoreau 1992: 91)
|
|
7.3 Page 63 |
▲back to top |
50 pastoral
When the cattle train passes, Thoreau comments wryly, ‘So is your
pastoral life whirled past and away’ (p. 97) and the metaphor of pene-
tration above might indicate his resistance to this incursion. The sojourn
at Walden Pond is clearly designed to make possible a revaluation of
modernity, if not its outright rejection, and Thoreau’s intense concen-
tration upon the virtues of silence and contemplation of nature, models
for so much nature writing thereafter, suggests that the noisy passing of a
train would be most unwelcome. However, as Marx points out, the quote
above naturalises the sound of the train, comparing it to the call of a hawk,
and throughout his meditation Thoreau betrays a profound ambivalence
towards technology:
The image of the railway on the shore of the pond figures an ambiguity
at the heart of Walden. Man-made power, the machine with its fire,
smoke and thunder, is juxtaposed to the waters of Walden, remarkable
for depth and purity and a matchless, indescribable color – now
light blue, now green, almost always pellucid. The iron horse moves
across the surface of the earth; the pond invites the eye below the
surface. The contrast embodies both the hope and the fear aroused by
the impending climax of America’s encounter with wild nature.
(Marx 1992: 251)
In fact, Thoreau betrays a certain wondering delight in the presence of
the railroad, even a cosmopolitanism at odds with the persona developed
in most of Walden, that of an ornery sage retreating from the bustle of
civilised life to rediscover the fundamental truths of human existence: ‘I
am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and
I smell the stores which go dispensing their odours all the way from
Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral
reefs, and Indian oceans’ (p. 97) (see Garrard 2000). Marx explains this
apparent contradiction by arguing that its resolution is not to be sought
in the reconciliation of nature and culture through social or political
change, but in literature, specifically in the pages of Walden itself. In
effect, Thoreau returns pastoral hope to its classical origins, as a witty
and learned literary game. It can be nothing else, in Marx’s view, for an
‘intricately organized, urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society’ (p. 354)
where the machine is reality and the future, and pastoral merely a myth
|
|
7.4 Page 64 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 51
about history. Later ecocritics would find fault both with this reading
of Thoreau and the confident simplicity of the analytical dichotomy
applied to it.
The crucial gender implications of pastoral were first explored in
Annette Kolodny’s psycho-historical study The Lay of the Land, which
argued that pastoral was more than an imaginary construct for American
pioneers because
at the deepest psychological level, the move to America was experi-
enced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating
metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the
primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape. And when
America finally produced a pastoral literature of her own, that literature
hailed the essential femininity of the terrain in a way European pastoral
never had . . . and . . . took its metaphors as literal truths.
(1975: 6)
The gendered landscape that seemed to be the fulfilment of Old World
fantasies of endless plenitude generated a fundamental ambivalence,
however, with a kernel of irremediable guilt. As a nurturing maternal
presence, the land could be the object of puerile but essentially harmless
regressive fantasies. However, as a desirable Other of a self-consciously
virile frontier society, the land might well become a lover to be subdued
by aggression. In the conflict between these versions of the pastoral
metaphor, between the idyllic world they found and the hard, brutal work
required to win and to work it, American writers found a rich source
of tension between ‘the dream and its betrayal . . . [of] guilt and anger’
(p. 8). Moreover, the seeming literalisation of the stale Old World
pastoral convention was a promise perennially situated just the other side
of a frontier that was always receding westwards. The closing of the
frontier was therefore not the end of the impulse, but its final, irrevocable
frustration: ‘What appears today as the single-minded destruction and
pollution of the continent is just one of the ways we have continued to
express that anger’ (p. 137). Without fundamental change, androcentric
conceptions of pastoral are doomed to shuttle endlessly between the
regressive and aggressive poles of an essentially adolescent masculine
symbolic order.
|
|
7.5 Page 65 |
▲back to top |
52 pastoral
Perhaps the most influential work in American ecocriticism to
date, Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995) provides
a thorough critique of pastoral ideology in American fiction, with
an extended treatment of Thoreau that moves from the evaluation of
Walden’s ‘environmental projects’ through an analysis of the author’s
canonisation in American literary history and, later, ecocriticism, to
a reconsideration of the role and significance of nature writing in
the literary canon. Walden is crucial to Buell’s argument because it
is a transitional work, at the midpoint of a movement from youthful
anthropocentric transcendentalism to the mature, biocentric perspective
revealed in the late essays on wilderness, the dispersion of seeds and the
succession of forest trees. Thoreau’s trajectory, and the polyvalence of his
nature writing under prolonged critical scrutiny, makes him an exemplary
figure whose posthumous career reveals much about the changing place
of the environment in American culture and the literary academy. The
‘ecological saint’ is but one of his reincarnations:
During one ten-year span from the mid-sixties through the mid-
seventies . . . Thoreau was acclaimed as the first hippie by a nudist
magazine, recommended as a model for disturbed teenagers, cited by
the Viet Cong in broadcasts urging American GI’s to desert, celebrated
by environmental activists as ‘one of our first preservationists,’ and
embraced by a contributor to the [extreme right-wing] John Birch Society
magazine as ‘our greatest reactionary.’
(Thoreau 1992: 314)
This position as culture hero contrasts strongly with the vague piety
and general indifference surrounding Britain’s Wordsworth, and adds
a certain urgency to Buell’s argument. Moreover, although the Lake
District suffers a massive annual influx of contemporary Romantic
tourists of the picturesque, this has little of the distinctive character of the
‘Thoreauvian pilgrimage’ to the ‘sacred’ Walden Pond. More striking,
albeit opposed to Thoreau’s warning that he ‘would not have any one
adopt [his] mode of living on any account’, is the tradition of ‘home-
steading experiments’, both solitary and communal, that are often
explicitly attributed to the inspiration of Walden.
Yet if Thoreau’s flawed masterpiece can be reread without disturbance
|
|
7.6 Page 66 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 53
to the received canon of American literature, Buell argues further that an
environmental crisis ought to prompt a re-evaluation of the very criteria
by which such a list is drawn up. In particular, nature writing, which
enjoys considerable popularity in the USA, has tended to be downgraded
by academic prejudices favouring fiction over non-fiction, and human
dramas over narratives of interaction of humanity and nature. Buell warns
that ecocritical criteria are apt to seem either too broad, incorporating any
of the vast array of literary works in which ‘nature’ figures at all, or far too
narrow, excluding all but the most clearly ecologically orientated work.
Nevertheless, he suggests the following four criteria:
1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing
device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history
is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate
interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical
orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a
constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.
(Buell 1995: 7–8)
Clearly pastoral would often struggle to fulfil several of these criteria,
but arguably it would also fail the tests brought to the debate by eco-
feminists. Buell gives some prominence to feminist arguments, but it is in
Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World (1996) that they
provide the basic theoretical framework. Taking her lead from Kolodny
in some respects, Westling analyses ‘the strange combination of eroticism
and misogyny that has accompanied men’s attitudes toward landscape
and nature for thousands of years’ (1996: 5). From a speculative account
of attitudes to nature implied by Palaeolithic art, discussion moves rapidly
through Sumerian and Biblical narratives to the central issue; Westling
agrees that Emerson and Thoreau ‘consolidate the imperialist nostalgia
that has always been at the heart of American pastoral – a sentimental
masculine gaze at a feminized landscape and its creatures that masked the
conquest and destruction of the “wild” continent’ (p. 52), then explores
a number of twentieth-century novelists, including Ernest Hemingway,
|
|
7.7 Page 67 |
▲back to top |
54 pastoral
Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, to see whether they ‘find a way to
project a more realistic and responsible sense of Americans in their land’
(p. 53).
For example, Hemingway, whose fascination with such virile pursuits
as big-game hunting and bull-fighting is well known, founds his narratives
of masculine initiation and self-discovery very firmly in a destructive
opposition between the feminised landscape and his ‘narrow and primi-
tive’ male protagonists. On the other hand, Willa Cather in her early work
grafted sturdy ‘Amazon’ heroines onto this androcentric stock, as in her
story of the first farmers of the Nebraska prairies, Oh Pioneers! (2000).
Alexandra Bergson’s perspectives on the landscape she loves and exploits
are shifting and contradictory. Here Cather carries out a pastoral mysti-
fication worthy of Carew:
She had never known before how much the country meant to her.
The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the
sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were in hiding down there,
somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things
that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she
felt the future stirring.
(2000: 71)
In one respect, this reflects a radical departure from the androcentric
tradition, as Alexandra identifies herself with the land. Yet ‘the future’
she senses as immanent there is, in fact, the catastrophic destruction of
the prairie ecosystem under her pragmatic and capable direction.
Westling argues that Cather creates ‘an exclusively female dynamic of
erotic attraction and identification in which the Nebraska landscape and
Alexandra Bergson are dual protagonists in a passionate interplay that
move from strife to yearning, to ecstatic conjunction’ (1996: 65) This
lesbian eroticism, however, is overbalanced by the novel’s participation in
an androcentric pastoral tradition that ‘encodes a benign version of the
conquest of the Plains, erasing its violence’ (p. 81).
Destructive ‘hyper-separated’ and hierarchical gender oppositions are
fundamental to the pastoral vision, but it also has a highly problematic
racial dimension. The indigenous American perspective is shaped by the
fact that, whether as idealised ‘noble savages’ or as savages pure and
|
|
7.8 Page 68 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 55
simple, Indians have historically been reduced to a mere feature in the
pastoral landscape or even eliminated from it. As Buell points out,
colonised peoples in Australia and South Africa may have a similar
ambivalence towards ‘settler pastoral’, while Francophone African writers
developed the ‘indigene pastoral’ of the Négritude movement. For African
Americans, the meanings of pastoral are different again, reflecting
the historical experience of plantation slavery and, later, rural lynchings.
As Michael Bennett shows in his study of Frederick Douglass’s auto-
biography:
The kinds of spaces that most mainstream environmentalists and
ecocritics validate – the pastoral and the wild – were not likely to be
appreciated by Douglass and other slaves whose best hopes lay with
negotiating an urban terrain. Slavery changed the nature of nature
in African American culture, necessitating a break with the pastoral
tradition developed within European American literature.
(2001: 205)
Social ecology, with its analysis of the social and environmental injustices
meted out to ethnic minorities, therefore seems a more promising
theoretical model than deep ecology for multicultural critics.
Despite Bate’s defence of Wordsworth, then, ecocritics have tended to
be highly suspicious of pastoral, albeit unwilling to dispense entirely with
the implicit critique of contemporary society it may offer. As ecocriticism
has developed through collections on specific writers such as John Ruskin
and Henry Thoreau, pastoral remains one of the tropes necessarily
explored (Wheeler 1995; Schnieder 2000).The ambivalence of pastoral
will not be eliminated but rather enhanced by ecocritical readings.
A thorough cultural critique of the contemporary meanings of pastoral
in film, TV, popular fiction and advertising has yet to be written, but
Alexander Wilson (1992) analyses its influence on the development of
suburban housing, with its endless lawns requiring fantastic amounts of
high-technology upkeep, and Michael Bunce shows how the pastoral
landscape ideal has commodified and altered the rural environments onto
which it has been projected:
In the process of realising their own particular version of a country
|
|
7.9 Page 69 |
▲back to top |
56 pastoral
retreat, the country gentry, exurbanites, weekend cottagers, even back-
to-the-landers have profoundly altered the character and the meaning
of the rural landscape. They have fabricated a landscape which has
transformed both natural environments and productive spaces into
areas which conform to the idealisation of countryside as a place
of leisure, refuge and alternative living. For the most part it is an
amenity landscape, designed to provide pleasure rather than economic
sustenance. It is also a predominantly private landscape controlled by
the power and exclusivity of property ownership.
(1994: 110)
The ways in which our cultures of nature might move beyond this core
pastoral inflection will occupy the remainder of this book.
PASTORAL ECOLOGY
It may be that one contemporary pastoral refuge lies within the discourse
of ecology itself. At the root of pastoral is the idea of nature as a stable,
enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human
societies. Both Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions imagine a
divinely ordained order of nature, and find proof in the remarkable fitness
of the Earth as a habitat for its various species. Cicero (106–43 BCE), for
example, observes how well suited the elephant’s trunk is to its dietary
needs, and how the bark of trees protects them from the elements. The
Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
accepted the pastoral conception of nature, but refracted it through a
new view of the Universe as a great mechanism designed by God. This
metaphor of Nature as a harmonious and stable machine remained at the
heart of the new science of ecology as it emerged in the early twentieth
century, and shaped the rhetoric of later environmental movements even
as scientific ecologists became increasingly sceptical of the ‘balance of
nature’. In this instance we must use contemporary ecology to critique a
supposedly ‘ecological’ rhetoric that draws on outmoded and poorly
understood scientific models.
The plant ecologist Frederick Clements (1874–1945), for example,
proposed that ‘associations’ of plant species would necessarily evolve
together in a particular habitat towards a ‘climax’ stage. Clements devel-
|
|
7.10 Page 70 |
▲back to top |
pastoral 57
oped the idea of ‘succession’, in which disturbed ecosystems would be
quickly colonised by fast-growing, hardy ‘pioneer’ species, to be succeeded
by slow-growing species with longer life-spans and sometimes a tolerance
for the conditions produced by the pioneers (see Brewer 1994: 373–405).
He argued that succession tended to lead from an immature state, with
large numbers of a few pioneer species, towards a complex, highly organ-
ised state of balance and stability with more diverse species. The long
transition from abandoned cropland through shrubby birch woods to
a mature, climax deciduous woodland would be typical. Historian Peter
Coates argues, ‘Early twentieth century US ecologists such as Frederick
Clements firmly believed in nature’s original and intrinsic identity’
(1998: 143). This identity was essentially a version of pastoral, since it
postulated a stable, harmonious state of nature in the absence of human
‘interference’.
Clementsian theory was rejected by ecologists in the 1940s, but its
rhetoric continues to shape environmental discourse. The association
between biological diversity, ecosystem stability and an ideal, mature state
of nature is an article of faith for most ecocritics and philosophers, not
least because it appears to provide an objective basis for criticising
the impoverished, single-species ecosystems of modern agriculture.
However, Colleen Clements has dismissed this ‘fairy tale ideal of an
ecosystem of achieved and unchanging harmony’ (1995: 215), claiming
that stasis is unusual in natural systems. She points out that succession
is a continuous process over time, from which no static norm or ideal
end-point of plant associations can be derived. Ecosystems do maintain
a kind of equilibrium, but it is characterised as much by change as
by stasis: ‘Equilibrium, or balance, or stasis is not . . . a well-meshed,
smoothly-working, serene system but one representing many stasis
breakdowns compensated for by new inputs which keep the oscillations
within certain critical limits’ (p. 218). Richard Brewer is less dismissive,
but points out that the evidence of a correlation between stability and
biological diversity is mixed, since ‘there are very simple communities that
are apparently very stable, such as those of hot springs’ (1994: 404).
Moreover, some unstable ecosystems, such as wetlands with fluctuating
water levels, seem to generate diversity precisely because of their change-
ability.
Since ecocriticism has both to deploy and to critique scientific
|
|
8 Pages 71-80 |
▲back to top |
|
|
8.1 Page 71 |
▲back to top |
58 pastoral
concepts, several of the succeeding chapters will employ the contrast
between popular pastoral ecology, wedded to outmoded Clementsian
models of harmony and balance, and the new postmodern ecology
exemplified by the work of Daniel Botkin, who stresses ‘that nature
undisturbed is not constant in form, structure, or proportion, but changes
at every scale of time and space’ (1992: 62). Clearly, not all changes are
desirable, but unlike Clements’s climax concept, postmodern ecology
looks to human values to discriminate between them, rather than appeal-
ing to the illusory objectivity of a supposedly authentic or pristine state of
nature.
|
|
8.2 Page 72 |
▲back to top |
4
WILDERNESS
The idea of wilderness, signifying nature in a state uncontaminated
by civilisation, is the most potent construction of nature available to
New World environmentalism. It is a construction mobilised to protect
particular habitats and species, and is seen as a place for the reinvigoration
of those tired of the moral and material pollution of the city. Wilderness
has an almost sacramental value: it holds out the promise of a renewed,
authentic relation of humanity and the earth, a post-Christian covenant,
found in a space of purity, founded in an attitude of reverence and
humility. The wilderness question is also central to ecocriticism’s chal-
lenge to the status quo of literary and cultural studies, in that it does not
share the predominantly social concerns of the traditional humanities.
Unlike pastoral, the concept of wilderness only came to cultural promi-
nence in the eighteenth century, and the ‘wilderness texts’ discussed
by ecocritics are mainly non-fictional nature writing, almost entirely
neglected by other critics. Much work in this area might easily count
as intellectual history or philosophy, thus stretching the bounds of
traditional literary criticism.
Wilderness narratives share the motif of escape and return with the
typical pastoral narrative, but the construction of nature they propose and
reinforce is fundamentally different. If pastoral is the distinctive Old
World construction of nature, suited to long-settled and domesticated
|
|
8.3 Page 73 |
▲back to top |
60 wilderness
landscapes, wilderness fits the settler experience in the New Worlds –
particularly the United States, Canada and Australia – with their
apparently untamed landscapes and the sharp distinction between the
forces of culture and nature. Yet settler cultures crossed the oceans with
their preconceptions intact, so the ‘nature’ they encountered was
inevitably shaped by the histories they often sought to leave behind. To
understand current conceptions of wilderness, then, we must explore
the Old World history of ‘wilderness’. Nor can we take for granted the
politics of the wild: for many critics, after all, the ‘wildness’ we should
seek is epitomised in the American West, which was assumed to be an
untrammelled realm to which the Euro-American has a manifest right.
OLD WORLD WILDERNESS
If pastoral has a dual origin in Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman
cultures, the meanings with which wilderness was endowed at the
beginning of the eighteenth century seem to be based almost entirely on
Judaeo-Christian history and culture. The word ‘wilderness’ derives from
the Anglo-Saxon ‘wilddeoren’, where ‘deoren’ or beasts existed beyond
the boundaries of cultivation. So useful is the word ‘wild’ to designate the
realms of the ‘deoren’ that neither its spelling nor its simple meaning have
changed in a millennium and a half, although as the forests receded and
the wilds were colonised the word attracted new connotations.
Wilderness is, in the history of our species, a recent notion. To
designate a place apart from, and opposed to, human culture depends
upon a set of distinctions that must be based upon a mainly agricul-
tural economy: for the hunter-gatherer, concepts such as fields and
crops, as opposed to weeds and wilderness, simply would not exist (see
Oelschlaeger 1991: 28). If farming people define ‘home’ as opposed to the
‘wilderness’ and are inclined to view the fruits of their labour as the
consequence of a struggle against nature rather than its blessings, the
transition from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer to Neolithic farmer is for
many wilderness advocates a crucial turning point, marking a ‘fall’ from
a primal ecological grace. Agriculture becomes both the cause and the
symptom of an ancient alienation from the earth that monotheistic
religion and modern science then completed. Certainly the Paleolithic
ways of life of Eurasia deserve respect for sustaining human populations
|
|
8.4 Page 74 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 61
under extremely difficult climatic conditions for an almost inconceivable
period, during which extraordinary spiritual, technological and artistic
developments occurred. Snyder speaks of ‘a 25000-year continuous
artistic and cultural tradition’ (1999: 391). However, it is worth noting
some inevitable difficulties in the reliance of wilderness advocates on
a notion of the ‘primal mind’, which they contrast with the alienated
‘civilised mind’. In the absence of written records, Oelschlaeger’s confi-
dent reconstruction of the ‘Paleolithic mind’, for example, is based on a
highly contentious interpretation of European cave art.
Whatever might be argued about the Palaeolithic mind, the very
earliest documents of Western Eurasian civilisation, such as The Epic of
Gilgamesh, depict wilderness as a threat, and by the time the Judaic
scriptures were written it is viewed with ambivalence at best. After
the ejection from Eden, the wilderness is the place of exile. Yet, just as
Abraham led his people into the wilderness to found a nation, Moses
led the people of Israel through it to return home, finding it a more
hospitable place than the civilised but enslaving Egypt. The wilderness
is associated with Satan: ‘Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into
the wilderness to be tempted of the devil’ (Matthew 4:1). But it is
also identified with early monastic traditions: to escape both persecu-
tion by Roman authorities and the temptations of the world early
Christian hermits went to the deserts. The Judaeo-Christian conception
of wilderness, then, combines connotations of trial and danger with
freedom, redemption and purity, meanings that, in varying degrees, it still
has.
For many ecocritics, the next crucial point in the fall from grace of
Western Europeans is the advent of the scientific revolution. For both
deep ecologists and ecofeminists, the view of the universe as a great
machine put forward by, among others, Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
René Descartes (1596–1650) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) represents
the decisive blow to the organic universe inhabited by our ancestors. If,
as Westling claims, Palaeolithic people venerated a fecund Magna Mater
or Great Mother figure, these men were to complete the process of her
annihilation begun by the dominance of the male Judaeo-Christian sky
god. In place of the Earth as nurturing mother, natural philosophers
posited a universe reducible to an assemblage of parts functioning
according to regular laws that men could, in principle, know in their
|
|
8.5 Page 75 |
▲back to top |
62 wilderness
entirety. Descartes, like Bacon, sought the basis for a new, practical
philosophy, in which ‘knowing the force and action of fire, water, air,
the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us’ he and
his contemporaries might become ‘masters and possessors of nature’
(Descartes 1986: 49). Reason became the means to achieving total
mastery over nature, now conceived as an enormous, soulless mechanism
that worked according to knowable natural laws.
Ecocritics attack this view as ‘reductionist’, claiming that it substi-
tutes a fragmented, mechanical worldview for a holistic, organic one.
Plumwood points out that once the human mind is seen as the sole source
and locus of value besides God, nature ceases to have any worth or
meaning beyond that assigned to it by reason and argues that ‘It is no
coincidence that this view of nature took hold most strongly with the
rise of capitalism, which needed to turn nature into a market commodity
and resource without significant moral or social constraint on availabil-
ity’ (Plumwood 1993: 111). Moreover, the critique of the scientific
revolution has gender implications. Carolyn Merchant sees in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the feminine Magna Mater finally
disenchanted and set upon by a rationalising, masculine reason, and
perhaps her last followers, Europe’s ‘witches’, being brutally rooted out
(Merchant 1990: 172).
This critique also coincides with Heidegger’s attack on ‘en-framing’ or
instrumentalism, in which beings are made to show up as mere instru-
ments of our will. The metaphor Heidegger uses to describe a world
reduced to mere resources is a forestry term: Bestand, or ‘standing timber’.
Yet the scientific revolution literally affected forestry, as Harrison shows.
Where forestry had traditionally concerned itself with protection of the
legal domains called ‘forests’ as both sites of production and as habitats,
the advent of scientific principles banished their traditional value and
symbolic resonance:
For this sort of enlightened humanism . . . there can be no question of
the forest as a consecrated place of oracular disclosures; as a place
of strange or monstrous or enchanting epiphanies; as the imaginary site
of lyric nostalgias and erotic errancy; as a natural sanctuary where wild
animals may dwell in security far from the havoc of humanity going
about the business of looking after its ‘interests.’ There can be only the
|
|
8.6 Page 76 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 63
claims of human mastery and possession of nature – the reduction of
forests to utility.
(Harrison 1992: 121)
The ultimate extension of scientific forestry was the German Forstgeometer,
or forest geometer, who ‘enframed’ the woods with mathematics,
reducing them to calculable ‘standing timber’, eliminating the ancient,
mysterious Wald or forest of German history and legend. Thus deep
ecologists, ecofeminists and Heideggerian ecocritics identify the scientific
revolution as an ecological disaster in and through which a primal
authenticity was lost.
However, it is very doubtful whether the mechanistic world view
has ever been as pervasive or as pernicious as these writers suggest. Keith
Thomas and Simon Schama have shown that mixed, perhaps conflicting
attitudes have persisted throughout modern times – even Bacon
recommended including a bit of wilderness in one’s garden – and we
should not underestimate the attraction of the practical benefits wrought
by science to people of any world view. In any case, even as the wild places
were being disciplined by reason, an emergent Romantic sensibility was
urging a revaluation, and in the eighteenth century wilderness was given
a new inflection with the popularisation of the idea of the sublime.
THE SUBLIME
The ambivalence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition towards wilderness
had been resolved in early modern philosophy and literature into
something approaching outright hostility. Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory
of the Earth (1684) explained mountain ranges as being the physical
outcome of God’s displeasure with mankind, scars inflicted upon a
previously unwrinkled globe by the ‘Great Flood’ that Noah and his
family survived. The crust of the world had burst open, he argued,
releasing a terrible deluge from within the planet that left the Edenic
Earth battered and broken. However, Burnet’s readers found the apoc-
alyptic terror of this ruined world strangely appealing, including a young
man later known for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund
Burke (1729–97). His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of
the Sublime and the Beautiful represents, Schama demonstrates, a counter-
|
|
8.7 Page 77 |
▲back to top |
64 wilderness
current in the philosophy of the ‘Enlightenment’, with Burke setting
himself up as ‘the priest of obscurity’. For Schama, Burke’s sublime was
found in ‘shadow and darkness and dread and trembling, in cave and
chasms, at the edge of the precipice, in the shroud of cloud, in the fissures
of the earth’ (Schama 1995: 450). Whereas the merely beautiful arouses
feelings of pleasure, Burke claims that ‘the passion caused by the great and
sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state
of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of
Horror’ (Burke 1990: 53). The beautiful is loved for its smallness,
softness, delicacy; the sublime admired for its vastness and overwhelming
power. Feminist critics have shown that the qualities associated with the
sublime and the beautiful are gendered, and concluded, perhaps with less
justice, that ‘the sublime moment is peculiarly male’ (Day 1996: 188).
Just as the feminine and beautiful is denigrated by comparison with the
masculine sublime in Burke’s definitions, it is argued, so women were
excluded from encounters with the wild.
Burke’s Enquiry was published in 1757, but it was in Romantic poetry
that sublime wilderness found its literary apotheosis. The most familiar
of Romantic landscapes such as the Scottish Highlands and the Lake
District derive their fame from their resemblance to the archetypal locus
of the European sublime, the Alps. William Wordsworth, for example,
takes the climbing of English mountains as an apprenticeship in awe,
although it is specifically a female who is addressed in ‘To — on her first
Ascent to the Summit of Helvellyn’:
Lo! the dwindled woods and meadows;
What a vast abyss is there!
Lo! the clouds, the solemn shadows,
And the glistenings, heavenly fair!
And a record of commotion
Which a thousand ridges yield;
Ridge, and gulf, and distant ocean
Gleaming like a silver shield!
Maiden! now take flight; – inherit
Alps or Andes – they are thine!
(Wordsworth 1987: 173)
|
|
8.8 Page 78 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 65
Nor had this awe left behind its religious dimensions, although
Wordsworth’s piety was not, in his early work at least, conventionally
Christian. ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ finds the
poet moved by a ‘presence’:
. . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought.
(1987: 164)
His sister, Dorothy, contributed sublime descriptions to William’s Guide
to the Lakes, and both the Wordsworths learned their appreciation in
part from A Short Residence in Sweden (1796) by the feminist radical
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97). She seems as moved by the ‘wild
beauties’ of Sweden as her male contemporaries:
The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities
which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind:
my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was
chained to life and its misery? Still the tumultuous emotions this
sublime object excited, were pleasurable . . .
(Wollstonecraft and Godwin 1987: 153)
The categories may be gendered, but the experience is circumscribed
neither by gender nor by place. In Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, the
Alpine original inflames the imagination. For ecocritic Karl Kroeber,
‘Shelley’s poem intensifies the Wordsworthian literalized interactivity
of mind and landscape’ (Kroeber 1994: 127). It exploits the oxymoron
of the mountain’s ‘silent voice’, reflecting on its contrast with both
the poet’s mind ‘which passively / Now renders and receives fast influ-
encings’ and the larger political world whose pettiness and deceits it
exposes: ‘Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of
fraud and woe’.
|
|
8.9 Page 79 |
▲back to top |
66 wilderness
However, if the sublime required a degree of terror to induce the
requisite spiritual or even political be-wilderment, it would always be
vulnerable to technological and cultural change. European civilisation
largely mastered its mountains with trains, roads and ski-lifts, whilst the
exploration of the American West brought news of the Grand Canyon
and the Rocky Mountains, making the wildernesses of the Old World
look decidedly tame.
NEW WORLD WILDERNESS
Thoreau’s Walden can be regarded as the terminus of Old World pastoral
in American literature, as it collides with both the technology and
autonomous cultural confidence of the young republic. His Maine Woods
(1864) can, with a similar degree of oversimplification, be highlighted as
an early example of the wilderness tradition that borrows the ancient
rhetoric of retreat and applies it to the endless miles of sublime landscape
in America. After climbing Mount Ktaadn, Thoreau writes:
It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually
presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not
seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and
inhuman . . . Nature was here something savage and awful, though
beautiful. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of
Chaos and Old Night.
(1983: 71)
His insight is achieved while standing on a peak of just 5,300 feet. Yet
it leaves him in awe of his own body, as well as the wilderness about
him:
this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear
not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, – that my body might, – but I fear
bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession
of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown
matter, to come into contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!
the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!
Who are we? where are we?
|
|
8.10 Page 80 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 67
The sublime provocation of the mountain scenery, and the near-hysteria
at the moment of ‘contact’ it enables, tends to belie the permanently
threatening proximity of that other wilderness, the human body. The
anxieties attending the boundary of human intelligence and animal
matter will be discussed in Chapter 8.
One of Thoreau’s most enthusiastic disciples, the Scottish immigrant
John Muir (1838–1914) contributed more than any other single writer
to the establishment of wilderness as a touchstone of American cultural
identity, and a basis for conservation activities. He is best known for
hymning the virtues of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and for his
political campaigns on behalf of wilderness. In My First Summer in the
Sierra, Muir’s journal entry for 15 July 1869 recounts a view of ‘sublime
domes and canyons, dark upsweeping forests, and glorious array of white
peaks deep in the sky, every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours
into our flesh and bones like heat rays from fire’ (Muir 1992: 232). Paul
Brooks, in Speaking for Nature, positions Muir alongside John Burroughs
as one of the two fathers of American conservation. Explaining how Muir
chafed at his domestic responsibilities, he exclaims: ‘How different his
voice sounds when he is back in his beloved mountains!’ (Brooks 1980:
21–2). Muir’s extravagant prose is the mark of one of nature’s spokesmen
for Brooks, whose critical approach verges on worship. Yosemite Valley
had already been the first place in America protected by an Act of
Congress in 1864. Muir’s writings and personal activism would lead to
the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890 and the formation of a
wilderness protection organisation in 1892, the Sierra Club, which
Brooks calls ‘the most powerful conservation organization in the western
hemisphere’ (Brooks 1980: 23).
Daniel Payne claims that ‘it is hard to overstate the importance of
John Muir’s contribution to the wilderness preservation movement’
(1996: 85), citing his tireless lobbying, participation in Congressional
debates and commissions, his prolific writing and even the camping trip
he took with President Theodore Roosevelt. For Max Oelschlaeger, Muir
also has a contemporary role assisting us in the development of a new
‘Palaeolithic consciousness’ that will supersede the mechanistic world
view: ‘his wilderness theology – a profoundly insightful evolutionary pan-
theism – is a complementary development that revivifies an archaic sense
of the sacrality of all being’ (p. 173). This would seem to be contradicted
|
|
9 Pages 81-90 |
▲back to top |
|
|
9.1 Page 81 |
▲back to top |
68 wilderness
by the apparently conventional piety of Muir’s experience of the sublime
on North Dome, where he offers himself ‘humbly prostrate before the vast
display of God’s power’ (p. 238). Elsewhere, though, Muir asserts that
‘when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must
be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak
to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers’ (p. 248). He
is an incisive and sardonic critic of anthropocentrism, as in a diary entry
ridiculing the ‘numerous class of men’ who ‘are painfully astonished
whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which
they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves’
(p. 160). Muir argues that alligators, lions, poisons and diseases are all
ample proof that Creation is not prefabricated for human use and
comfort, and that every living thing down to the ‘smallest transmicro-
scopic creature’ has intrinsic value. He even avers that ‘if a war of races
should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted
to sympathize with the bears’ (p. 155). Such ecocentric piety nevertheless
coexisted with a thorough scientific knowledge of botany and geology.
‘THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS’
Although Oelschlaeger draws attention to the ways in which Muir attacks
the arrogance of ‘Lord Man’ and espouses a more inclusive spirituality,
it might be argued that he does not succeed in showing the usefulness of
such a pantheistic theology. He criticises playful, sceptical, fragmented
‘postmodernism’, as it is usually understood, as an indulgent extension of
ecocidal, mechanistic modernism and offers as the only alternative to a
solipsistic obsession with human sign systems his notion of a genuinely
postmodern ecocentrism that would resanctify nature, unifying ‘holistic’
science and wilderness religion. In common with many deep ecological
critics, he assumes that ecological problems stem from a single moral or
spiritual source, and that the adoption of pantheism would therefore solve
them. But if God is identical with the universe, arguably that eliminates
the distinction, basic to traditional theology, between how things are and
how divine providence would have them be: a pantheistic theology would
have to worship not only the pure streams of Yosemite Valley but also
toxic waste dumps, which would be quite at odds with Muir’s rhetoric of
|
|
9.2 Page 82 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 69
the purity of wilderness and its essential opposition to the filthy realms of
‘Lord Man’. For the literary critic, a further objection is that Muir’s prose
alternates between tedious enumeration of species and repetitive sublime
hyperbole in which every other phrase is an exclamation. There are
moments of intriguing philosophical insight and visionary intensity, but
in the mass his writing is stultifying.
In terms of the representation of the wilderness of the Sierras, Muir
wrote the book but Ansel Adams (1902–84) took the pictures. He
returned to Yosemite at least once a year from his childhood on, learning
to take and process photographs at the Sierra Club lodge there, and
publishing them in the Club’s Bulletin. After his death, the State of
California designated over 100,000 acres of the Sierra the ‘Ansel Adams
Wilderness Area’. Although Adams took around 40,000 photographs, of
still-life and documentary subjects as well as caves and canyons, his best
known images are his black and white shots of mountains and valleys,
in which wilderness attains an iconic status. His images epitomise the
purity of the wild in their reduction of landscape to starkly defined regions
of sky, rock, water and forest, while their epic scale and eerie stillness
conjoin to suggest stoic self-reliance. Adams was a technical perfectionist
and developed a sustained mature style that emphasised depth of field and
a wide tonal range. He typically took photographs in winter or early
spring in only the clearest weather conditions, and used red or green filters
for enhanced contrast of rock and snow, sky and cloud. The overall effect
is to give the mountains a stark, monumental quality, allowing them to
retain the sublime, immeasurable otherness Muir had praised in the Sierra
Range: ‘In general views no mark of man is visible upon it; nor anything
to suggest the wonderful depth and grandeur of its sculpture’ (Muir 1992:
614).
Yet William Cronon has identified this ‘otherness’ as part of ‘the
trouble with wilderness’. Promoting a more sceptical, less pious ecocritical
perspective, Cronon argues that wilderness ‘quietly expresses and
reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject’ (1996: 80). This
construction of alienated urbanites, who buy the works of Muir and his
followers but seldom attempt to emulate him, sets up a sacred ideal:
Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization
that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover
|
|
9.3 Page 83 |
▲back to top |
70 wilderness
our true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial
lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity.
(Cronon 1996: 80)
This vision has pernicious consequences for our conceptions of nature
and ourselves since it suggests that nature is only authentic if we are
entirely absent from it. Such ‘purity’ is often achieved at the cost of an
elimination of human history every bit as thorough as that undertaken by
pastoral literature. In the case of Yosemite, this myth of an ‘uninhabited
wilderness’ meant that both the Ahwahneechee Indians and the white
miners who had lived and worked there were expelled.
Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1990) exemplifies Cronon’s myth
of wilderness purity. In the past, he argues, pollution and devastation
were localised phenomena and even widespread contamination by DDT
or fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests would eventually
disappear. But the advent of anthropogenic climate change, or ‘global
warming’, has changed the situation, fundamentally contaminating the
whole planet:
We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the
weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-
made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and
that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning;
without it there is nothing but us.
(McKibben 1990: 54)
From now on, there will be nothing truly wild and ‘a child born now
will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter, or spring’
(1990: 55). McKibben’s horror is justified by the scientific evidence thus
far, but it is shaped by an inflection of ‘nature’ that is by no means
universal or inevitable. It might be pointed out, for example, that the
methane emitted by termite mounds is substantial enough to make a
calculable contribution to global concentrations of greenhouse gases, but
these insects have not ‘ended nature’. However, McKibben’s construction
of nature reinforces an idea of wilderness, in which any modification of
the environment is a form of contamination.
A further problem is apparent: the ideal wilderness space is wholly pure
|
|
9.4 Page 84 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 71
by virtue of its independence from humans, but the ideal wilderness
narrative posits a human subject whose most authentic existence is located
precisely there. This model not only misrepresents the wild, but also
exonerates us from taking a responsible approach to our everyday lives:
our working and domestic lives are effectively irredeemable alongside
this ideal, so the activities we carry out there escape scrutiny (see
Cronon 1996: 81). Wilderness, then, is ideological in the sense that it
erases the social and political history that gives rise to it, extending into
reactionary politics as well as Thoreau’s occasional misanthropy. At best,
the wilderness experience and its deep ecological philosophy risks
identification with privileged leisure pursuits that sell authenticity while
mystifying the industrialised consumerism that makes them possible. If
we correlate the wilderness consciousness with the social forms of life, or
social classes, in which it has taken hold, we have the grounds for some
of Timothy Luke’s cynicism:
It makes sense for deep ecologists to condemn human overpopulation
or resacralize the bioregion they wish to enjoy. Unfortunately, nomadic
grub eaters cannot produce high-tech composite surfboards, eighteen-
speed bicycles, or sophisticated hang gliders. Who will make such
goods or produce food while others seek self-realization and biocentric
equality? The antimodern, future primitive condemnation of industrial
human civilization by many deep ecologists is not really total, but its
contradictory partialities are mystified in the social forms of life that
generate this consciousness.
(Luke 1997: 21)
To the extent that it extols the idea of wilderness and the writers who
explore it, ecocriticism risks complicity with this ideology. Deep ecology,
it might be argued, has conspired with some American ecocriticism to
promote a poetics of authenticity for which wilderness is the touchstone.
To critique this is not to argue for the abandonment of wilderness to the
tender mercies of ranchers and developers, but to promote instead the
poetics of responsibility that takes ecological science rather than pantheism
as its guide. The choice between monolithic, ecocidal Modernism and
reverential awe is a false dichotomy that ecocriticism can circumvent
with a pragmatic and political orientation. The fundamental problem of
|
|
9.5 Page 85 |
▲back to top |
72 wilderness
responsibility is not what we humans are, nor how we can ‘be’ better,
more natural, primal or authentic, but what we do. Ecocriticism would
not then be seeking a more truthful or enlightening discourse of nature,
but a more effective rhetoric of transformation and assuagement.
AUSTIN, LEOPOLD AND ABBEY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY
NATURE WRITING
The modern canon of American wilderness writing is quite extensive,
but the key figures are Thoreau and Muir in the nineteenth century,
Mary Austin (1868–1934), Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) and Edward
Abbey (1927–89) mainly or wholly in the twentieth. Of these, Leopold
is perhaps the least vulnerable to Cronon’s argument because he is
wary of religious language and imagery, preferring to communicate his
natural history observations and philosophical arguments in a relatively
self-effacing, low-key idiom. His major achievement for philosophers
and historians is his formulation of a biocentric ‘land ethic’ at the end of
A Sand County Almanac (1949), where having examined recreational,
economic, scientific and other human-centred reasons for preserving
wilderness, he concludes that, important as these are, an ethical defence
is needed that is not hampered by human chauvinism: ‘[A] land ethic
changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community
to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-
members, and also respect for the community as such’ (Leopold 1968:
204). His formulation of the land ethic is elegant and apparently simple,
bringing together normative criteria that are both aesthetic and scientific:
‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and
beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’ (pp.
224–5). It is not the individual organism that attracts moral consid-
eration, but the ‘community’ as a whole, a community in which human
beings are neither more nor less than ‘citizens’.
Beguiling as it may seem, Leopold’s dictum raises substantial
philosophical and ecological problems. The metaphor of ‘citizenship’ is
appealing, but human societies attach reciprocal rights and duties to
citizenship and our duties are exclusively to the wilderness; we do not
derive any in return. Also, the formula only asserts the moral value of,
rather than arguing for, say, a stable biotic community. While it may
|
|
9.6 Page 86 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 73
seem obvious that we should prefer a healthy environment, the non-
chauvinistic grounds for wanting one are not supplied. Perhaps more
problematic still, the very idea of a ‘biotic community’ as an identifiable,
stable locus of value is extremely problematic from the perspective of
modern theoretical ecology. The language of Leopold’s ecology is nowa-
days treated with some caution since it suggests a degree of predictability
that is seldom found in natural systems. The idea of a ‘community’
suggests the ecological whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but,
as Brennan argues, ‘The possibility remains that when we encounter an
apparently stable ecosystem manifesting diversity of species and apparent
self-regulation, we . . . may be confronted with an item that just happens
to be the way it is’ (1995: 211). Many species transgress ecosystem
boundaries, and some species benefit from change while others are
harmed or eliminated: an entire ecosystem does not stand or fall together.
Not only is it very difficult to establish the boundaries of ecosystems, the
word itself misleadingly suggests ‘the physical concept of the stability of
a mechanical system’ (Botkin 1992: 42). If the community cannot
be properly delineated, and if the ideal stable condition for it cannot be
established, then neither ‘integrity’ nor ‘stability’ are the objective criteria
we need for moral action. It would seem that only beauty remains, which
is scarcely easier to define, but which Leopold seeks to exemplify in a series
of analogies between the arts of humans and nature.
In Parts I and II of the Almanac, Leopold, a professional ecologist and
professor of game management, exploits his scientific knowledge to
construct a wonderful series of narratives of natural artistry: how the river
paints its own landscape; how the tree encapsulates its own history; how
the hunting dog reads ‘the olfactory poems that who-knows-what silent
creatures have written in the summer night’ (Leopold 1968: 43). The
swampy epic of the whooping crane, the tragedy of the passenger pigeon
and even the odyssey of atom X through complex, wilderness biota and
simplified, agricultural ones are narrated. In some respects Leopold’s idea
of wilderness as a retreat or proving-ground for male hunters remains close
to the dualistic vision that Cronon criticises. But at the same time,
Leopold is the only professional scientist amongst the canonical writers,
and he writes for a sceptical audience who work in and with the wilds. His
radical land ethic admits the benefits of modernity and the inevitability
of human intervention:
|
|
9.7 Page 87 |
▲back to top |
74 wilderness
By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements.
We are remodeling the Alhambra [desert] with a steam-shovel, and we
are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which
after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more
objective criteria for its successful use.
(1968: 225–6)
Despite sharing with Leopold an ecocentric perspective, and the
admiration of many ecocritics and activists, the writings of Edward Abbey
perfectly exemplify the trouble with wilderness. His sojourn as a Park
Ranger in the Arches National Monument in Utah is justified in Desert
Solitaire (1968) as follows:
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and
confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately
and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental
and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. . . . To meet God or
Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in
myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self
merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact,
individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
(Abbey 1992: 6)
Thoreau’s ascent of Ktaadn embodied a similar paradox. The desire for
‘contact’, for ‘reality’, conflicts with the cultural enframing of Thoreau’s
‘Titan’ and Abbey’s ‘God or Medusa’. Both writers maintain a rigorous
individualism at both a political and stylistic level, although Abbey veers
at times into vicious paranoia. Nevertheless, Abbey’s work is littered
with learned literary and philosophical allusions, and, as Daniel Payne
comments: ‘Although Abbey presented himself as a blunt, straightforward
speaker, much of his writing is in fact a complex mixture of personal
narrative, journalism, philosophy, natural history, political commentary,
and story-telling . . . full of paradox, irony, and humor’ (Payne 1996:
153).
Don Scheese, who credits Desert Solitaire with changing his life, states
approvingly that Abbey is the ‘most radical, iconoclastic figure’ in the
wilderness canon, enjoining us to ‘Afford the time to allow for prolonged
engagement with and meditation on nature. Enter the wilderness and
|
|
9.8 Page 88 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 75
experience freedom. Be alive to the redemptive possibilities of the wild’
(1996: 315). Abbey induces us to delight in the apparently unpromising
landscapes of the sandstone deserts he inhabits, and brings justified rage
to his polemics against ‘Industrial Tourism’ and the damming of Glen
Canyon on the Colorado River. His later novel The Monkey-Wrench Gang
(1982) inspired the formation of Earth First! and other direct-action
groups. At the same time, his enthusiasm for guns, paranoia about federal
government and ‘big business’, and support for violent resistance to
authority risks appearing to ally environmentalists with survivalist
militias. SueEllen Campbell alerts us to some disturbing absences from
Abbey’s wilderness; the local Indians, for example, are only briefly and
disparagingly noticed. More strikingly, Abbey does not mention the
atmospheric nuclear tests going on in Nevada at this time, although
Arches was affected by fallout. Campbell’s questions reflect Cronon’s
concerns: ‘What notion of the elemental ignores nuclear fallout? Why
think it’s necessary to leave society to find reality? What’s lost by opposing
wilderness and culture?’ (Campbell 1998: 24).
Abbey not only opposes wilderness and culture, he plainly genders
the distinction and eroticises the landscape, wanting to ‘embrace the scene
intimately, deeply, totally, as a man desires a beautiful woman’ (1992: 5).
But actual women are almost entirely absent from this wilderness, except
as the other end of the ‘bloody cord’ of civilisation that wilderness helps
a man to cut: ‘(My God! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we put up with
most of our lives – the domestic routine (same old wife every night),
the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of
elected officials, [etc.]) (1992: 155). This despite the fact Abbey married
five times. Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that the idea of wilderness
intrinsically excludes women, any more than the sublime was reserved
for male Romantic poets: Mary Austin, in particular, provides a useful
counterpoint to Abbey, and even the prospect for a reconfiguration of
‘wilderness’.
Austin’s landscape is Southwestern, arid and thinly populated like
Abbey’s, and she shares his facility for vivid, descriptive prose. In her best-
known work, Land of Little Rain (1903), she seems highly attuned to the
presence of birds:
About the time the burrowers and all that feed upon them are
|
|
9.9 Page 89 |
▲back to top |
76 wilderness
addressing themselves to sleep, great flocks pour down the trails with
that peculiar melting motion of moving quail, twittering, shoving,
and shouldering. They splatter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake
out small showers over their perfect coats, and melt away again into the
scrub, preening and pranking, with soft contented noises.
(Austin 1996: 13)
According to Buell, ‘her protagonist is the land, more particularly the
geography of its watercourses and the patterns of life created by water
scarcity’ (Buell 1995: 80). The extraordinary challenges of the environ-
ment lead its inhabitants into strange exigencies: ‘There was a fence in
that country shutting in a cattle range, and along its fifteen miles of posts
one could be sure of finding a bird or two in every strip of shadow;
sometimes the sparrow and the hawk, with wings trailed and beaks parted,
drooping in the white truce of noon’ (Austin 1996: 7).
Yet this is a wilderness for inhabiting, not, like Thoreau, Muir and
Abbey, for sojourning, and ‘The manner of the country makes the usage
of life there, and the land will not be lived except in its own fashion’
(Austin 1996: 26). For ecofeminist critic Vera Norwood, this shows that
‘Nature and culture are interactive processes: human culture is affected by
the landscape as well as effecting change on it’ (Norwood 1996: 334). She
argues that women write wilderness differently, experiencing immersion
rather than confrontation, ‘recognition’ rather than ‘challenge’. Part of
the justification for this lies in Austin’s self-effacing idiom and narrative
structure, which, as Buell observes, ‘allows the book to be taken over by
other people’s stories and her speaker to imagine the desert as it might
look through the eyes of birds and animals’ (Buell 1995: 176). Whilst
Austin’s style might be a function of an androcentric prejudice that simply
expected reticence of women writers, it might also be seen as a device that
decentres the human subject not, as in Muir, by mere assertion, but by
subtle insinuation at the level of narrative.
One of the most intriguing, though flawed, works in recent eco-
criticism claims that Austin deconstructs the concept of wilderness itself.
Combining autobiographical sketches, literary criticism, philosophical
reflection and a discussion of desert land management, Barney Nelson’s
The Wild and the Domestic (2000) shows how Austin challenges the
myth that wilderness is ‘no place for a woman’, rewriting the gendered
|
|
9.10 Page 90 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 77
dichotomy of masculine wilderness and feminine domesticity. For
example, she notes that the vaunted ‘self-reliance’ of the heroic Western
male consists mainly in the ability to undertake ‘feminine’ domestic tasks
such as cooking and mending clothes themselves, that Western states
granted women suffrage long before the East, and that Austin found
freedom and self-confidence at home in the rural Southwest.
The centrepiece of Nelson’s argument is a contrastive study of Austin
and Muir in which she argues that his construction of Yosemite as
a pristine wilderness paradise was not only a falsification of history, but
also led to the exclusion of working people, white, Hispanic and Indian,
from upland pastures that had been in use for as long as 400 years.
Whereas Muir betrays contempt for both shepherds and sheep, Austin
respects the practical knowledge and philosophy of the people, and the
intelligence and hardiness of their animals. Since Muir lost large numbers
of sheep during his brief tenure as shepherd in the Sierras (200 ewes and
100 lambs on one occasion) he may have been making a virtue of
adversity in constructing Yosemite as a sublime landscape of ‘leisure and
study, not work’, while Austin ‘believed land should be valued as home’
and fought to protect residents’ rights against urban demands for land,
water and leisure space (Nelson 1996: 75). Nelson argues that Muir
promulgated a ‘myth’ that ranched sheep and cows were environmentally
damaging, calling them ‘hoofed locusts’ and adversely affecting federal
and state policies until the present day.
Nelson’s case is far from watertight, since Austin too wonders ‘how
much the devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants
to the shelter of the prickle-bushes’ (p. 40). Nevertheless, connecting
Austin’s literary creations to the specific environmental question of arid
land ranching, rather than to very general ecophilosophical issues, makes
for refreshing reading, and it emphasises the need for ecocriticism
to question even the tropes deployed by environmental organisations.
When the Sierra Club argues for more ‘wilderness’, they are in practice
representing the interests of wealthy suburbanites rather than rural work-
ing people, and leisure industries rather than extractive or agricultural
ones. This attention to the politics of wilderness is especially important
in American ecocriticism, which has until recently tended to stress the
spiritual and moral, while neglecting the ways in which wilderness is a site
of class and gender struggle.
|
|
10 Pages 91-100 |
▲back to top |
|
|
10.1 Page 91 |
▲back to top |
78 wilderness
BEYOND WILDERNESS?
An updated wilderness canon would include the work of Annie Dillard,
Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen and Gary
Snyder, which has been the subject of much American ecocriticism,
particularly in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment (ISLE). It would also address other New World literatures
that arguably inflect wilderness in culturally and geographically specific
ways: Australia’s ‘outback’ as an interior wilderness space, for example,
and Canada’s ‘North’ as both a powerful signifier of an irreducibly ‘wild’
geography and climate, and a site of contested high-technology industrial
and military activities.
In the early 1970s, Canadian cultural nationalism deployed wilderness
as a mark of difference as well as an article of ecological faith. Bruce
Littlejohn and Jon Pearce claimed in the Introduction to an anthology
that ‘If there is one distinguishing element that sets Canadian literature
apart from most other national literatures, it is the influence of the wild’
(1973: 11). Margaret Atwood’s early work both reflected this preoccu-
pation with wilderness and, thanks to her talent and success, strongly
reinforced it. The unnamed protagonist of Surfacing (1979) returns to
the landscape of her childhood in Northern Quebec, ostensibly to find
out what has happened to her father. The threats to this wilderness from
logging, hydroelectric projects and commercial tourism are coded as
‘American’, driving the protagonist into an increasingly alienated and
paranoid state. She sees this ‘border country’ (p. 20) later as ‘occupied
territory’ (p. 115): ‘In the bay the felled trees and numbered posts showed
where the surveyors had been, power company. My country, sold or
drowned, a reservoir; the people were sold along with the land and the
animals, a bargain, sale, solde’ (p. 126).
Her unresolved grief over an enforced abortion ‘surfaces’, colliding
with her discovery of her father’s drowned body in a lake. She eventually
leaves the cabin and her friends, denying that she has a name and ‘through
pretending’ to ‘be civilized’ (p. 162). Ultimately, however, the protagonist
feels the need to return, hoping that ‘the Americans’ can be ‘watched and
predicted and stopped without being copied’ (p. 183).
In the 1970s the paintings of the Group of Seven and Thom
Thomson, made in many cases in the first half of the century, had gained
|
|
10.2 Page 92 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 79
fresh appreciation, not only for their striking painterly techniques, but
as powerful appeals to emergent Anglophone Canadian nationalism.
For example, Thomson’s ‘Pine Island’ (1914) represented the forests
and lakes of Ontario as beautifully pure and defiantly hardy, clinging
to the rock of the Canadian Shield. In ‘Death by Landscape’, a short story
from Wilderness Tips (1991), Atwood layers memories of a childhood
wilderness camp with adult meditations upon Group of Seven paintings:
‘They are pictures of convoluted tree trunks on an island of pink, wave-
smoothed stone, with more islands behind; of a lake with rough, bright,
sparsely wooded cliffs; of a vivid river shore with a tangle of bush and two
beached canoes, one red, one grey’ (p. 110). The attraction the adult
protagonist Lois feels for these paintings derives from her uncanny sense
that ‘there is something, or someone, looking back out’. It emerges that
her friend Lucy inexplicably vanished in her company at Camp Manitou,
and that she was blamed. The adult Lois has refused to return to the
North, but regards her paintings with a fond obsession:
these paintings are not landscape paintings. Because there aren’t any
landscapes up there, not in the old, tidy European sense. . . . Instead
there’s a tangle, a receding maze, in which you can become lost almost
as soon as you step off the path. There are no backgrounds in any of
these paintings, no vistas; only a great deal of foreground that goes back
and back, endlessly . . .
(pp. 128–9)
The twist is that ‘Every one of them is a picture of Lucy’; she lives in them,
glimpsed only at the edge of vision. Equivocating between the artistic
and environmental meanings of ‘landscape’, and exploring a morbid
fascination with the way both paintings and forests recede endlessly,
Atwood shows an ironic awareness of the construction of wilderness that
was absent from the earlier novel.
Atwood’s fiction demonstrates that wilderness can be productively
explored in relation to genres other than nature writing. Recently
ecocritics have sought to expand the field, as in Adam Sweeting and
Thomas Cochunis’s analogical study of ‘realist’ theatrical and wilderness
spaces. For example, they observe that the traditional theatre space is
sharply demarcated from the audience space by the proscenium arch, just
|
|
10.3 Page 93 |
▲back to top |
80 wilderness
as ‘wilderness zones . . . are bureaucratically distinguished from the land
from which they have been carved’ (p. 326). Both realist theatre and
wilderness experience disingenuously ‘efface the cultural assumptions
and structures that shape our performances, encouraging audiences
or wilderness visitors to observe events as though they simply unfold on
their own’. This shared ‘representational aesthetic’ reduces theatre and
wilderness to emotive spectacle, preventing recognition of their wider
social and ecological context. The authors argue that modern drama
theory, which challenges the notion of a fixed, pre-given theatrical space,
might help address some of the problems with wilderness spaces that
likewise deny their own history and deflect the active agency of their
‘audience’. Critics including Andrew Light, David Teague and Michael
Bennett have contributed equally innovative essays on the construction of
urban ‘wilderness’ in film and urban planning to the anthology The
Nature of Cities (1999).
Within nature writing, considerable controversy has been stirred by
the work of Rick Bass, especially his discomforting book Fiber (1998).
The narrator leads us through the four stages of his life, which suggestively
parallel Bass’s own: oil geologist, literary artist, environmental activist,
then an eccentric kind of logger. He inhabits the Yaak Valley in Northern
Montana, where Bass lives, and which he has fought vigorously and
publicly to preserve from clear-cutting forestry. Yet the narrator also
opens up spaces between his persona and Bass, claiming to have an arrest
warrant out for one of his earlier incarnations. Gradually the fourth
persona emerges, the familiar sojourner ‘sinking deeper and deeper into
the old rot of the forest’ until, he predicts, he becomes one with it. At the
same time, unlike most wilderness sojourners, the narrator works in the
forest, selectively logging, selling some timber to mills and spooking other
local loggers by leaving occasional logs by their trucks. This ‘log fairy’
persona reflects on the wearying work of the activist, and its corrosive
effect on the artist. Then suddenly, in Part IV, this elaborate artifice
abruptly disintegrates: ‘There is, of course, no story: no broken law back
in Louisiana, no warrant, no fairy logs. I am no fugitive, other than from
myself. Here, the story falls away’ (p. 45). The rest of the narrative seems
an enraged rant against the federal government, the Sierra Club and the
logging companies, but it still keeps changing tack: ‘If you think I’m
going to say please after what they’ve already done to this landscape, you
|
|
10.4 Page 94 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 81
can think again’ (p. 49). Then, ‘I am going to ask for help, after all’
(p. 50). Then: ‘The valley cannot ask for anything – can only give – and
so like a shell or husk of the valley I am doing the asking, and I am saying
please, at the same time that I am saying, in my human way, fuck you’
(p. 50). The story concludes: ‘Somebody please help’, with an appendix
giving addresses for readers to write letters requesting the protection of
the Yaak as a wilderness area.
Scott Slovic has argued that nature writing texts may be characterised
as either ‘rhapsodic’ celebration of natural beauty and wildness, or
jeremiad, the ‘warning or critique’ that challenges the reader to political
action and self-reform (1996: 85). Carson’s Silent Spring, for example, is
primarily jeremiadic, while Land of Little Rain is mainly rhapsodic.
Michael Branch’s contribution on Bass to an important ecocritical anthol-
ogy applies this typology to what he calls Bass’s ‘Yaak-tivist’ writing,
showing that it causes ‘readers to consider just how much environmental
invective they will accept’ (2001: 224). The high-powered jeremiad
of Fiber deliberately unsettles readers who are culturally unused to
expressions of open anger, being ‘more concerned about good behaviour
than about justice’ (p. 231). Some readers consider that the literary quality
of the work is thereby compromised, but Bass’s evocations of rage and
grief are artistically sophisticated and sanctioned by a long literary
tradition of corrective rhetoric. Branch calls this fusion of fury and almost
inconsolable loss ‘elegaid’.
Unlike traditional nature writers who assume righteous moral or
political positions, Bass is highly self-conscious about his authority
as writer. As Karla Armbruster explains, even the title provokes the reader
to consider the materiality of the book, and its dependence upon the
industry Bass attacks. Bass rigorously interrogates his own rhetorical
position, acknowledging his complicity with the activities he castigates
and avoiding ‘a simplistic, black-and-white version of the situation that
would rule out compromise and inevitably end in a stalemate between
holier-than-thou environmentalists and the loggers they would see as
enemies’ (Armbruster 2001: 208).
The ‘poet laureate of deep ecology’, Gary Snyder, has worked for a
long time among such tensions. He achieved fame in the 1950s as one of
the Beat Generation, alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, then
took the arduous path of initiation into Zen Buddhism in Japan before
|
|
10.5 Page 95 |
▲back to top |
82 wilderness
moving to Northern California, where he writes, teaches and lectures.
Oelschlaeger expresses almost unlimited admiration for his work, arguing
that his ‘shamanic vision’ brings the Great Mother back to life in the
postmodern world. Snyder’s work is interpreted specifically as a series of
injunctions:
Listen! the poet tells us. This is the Eastern axis of Snyder’s spiritual
ecology: by listening one quiets the mind, calms the senses, and
reestablishes contact with the earth. . . . Go into the wilderness; stand
on the rock of granitic truth. Hear the Ur syllables, the seed syllables, of
mother earth: the wind! the moving water! the sighing boughs! We are her
children, she is our mother, we are it, the flowing land . . .
(Oelschlaeger 1991: 274)
In a similar vein, David Robinson applauds Snyder’s promotion of a ‘new
cultural ethic of the wild’ made up of four normative claims:
1) the necessity of a commitment to the potentialities and limitations
of place; 2) the belief in the wild and its processes as the best teacher
for humanity; 3) the identification of the wild with the sacred; and 4)
the use of the wild as a guide for a diverse, inclusive, participatory
democracy.
(1999: 21)
The reader should not, however, be entirely put off by such praise. Much
of Snyder’s poetry is marred by earnest ecopieties and hectoring
propaganda (‘For the Children’, ‘Mother Earth: Her Whales’, ‘Front
Lines’, ‘Control Burn’), but his adapted translations of Oriental poems
are vivid, spare and brilliant, and his own poetry, at best, is rescued
by playful eroticism, sharp humour, beautiful language and a degree of
self-deprecation. Snyder’s youthful experiences of working as a logger, and
contact with socialists as well as Buddhists and Native Americans, give his
writings a breadth of reference and sensitivity to people’s social and
material needs that is unusual amongst wilderness writers. His critique of
poet Robinson Jeffers in ‘Word Basket Woman’ might well be extended
to many others discussed in this chapter:
|
|
10.6 Page 96 |
▲back to top |
wilderness 83
Robinson Jeffers, his tall cold view
quite true in a way, but why did he say it
as though he alone
stood above our delusions, he also
feared death, insignificance,
and was not quite up to the inhuman beauty
of parsnips or diapers, the deathless
nobility at the core of all ordinary things
Snyder explicitly and repeatedly rejects the inflection of wilderness
as solely a landscape of recreation, recognising the risk and likelihood of
commodification, where ‘wild and free’ as easily evoke ‘an ad for a Harley
Davidson’ as they do ‘a long-maned stallion racing across grasslands’. For
Snyder, ‘Both words, profoundly political and sensitive as they are, have
become consumer baubles’ (1999: 168). One way of guarding against this
risk is to subvert the dualistic construction of wilderness and civilisation
that Cronon criticises, and Snyder’s most effective technique for accom-
plishing this is to bring the ‘wild’ closer to home. For example, he asserts
that our bodies are wild, highlighting ‘universal responses of this mammal
body’, such as ‘the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch
of the breath’ (p. 176). In ‘Song of the Taste’, he restores to us a sense of
the wild in our everyday diet:
Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds
the fleshy sweetness packed
around the sperm of swaying trees
Even human language, the supposedly unassailable marker of culture,
is wild in the sense that it ‘rises unbidden’ and ‘eludes our rational
intellectual capacities’. It may be domesticated for educational or other
purposes, but fundamentally language ‘came from someplace else’
(p. 177).
Snyder effectively argues that civilisation is the locus of chaos and
disorder, while wildness epitomises the free self-organisation of nature.
Rather than being simply opposed, the wild ramifies through the civilised
|
|
10.7 Page 97 |
▲back to top |
84 wilderness
and sustains it. The ‘etiquette of freedom’ this realisation ought to encour-
age is probably the best we can hope for from wilderness ethics: part
deep ecology, part Beat Generation hedonism, and all gentle, humane
injunction:
We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its
social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more
and no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept
each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can
give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off
mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them. . . . The wild
requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and
birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when
we get home.
(p. 182)
|
|
10.8 Page 98 |
▲back to top |
5
APOCALYPSE
For at least 3,000 years, a fluctuating proportion of the world’s population
has believed that the end of the world is imminent. Scholars dispute its
origins, but it seems likely that the distinctive construction of apocalyptic
narratives that inflects much environmentalism today began around 1200
BCE, in the thought of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra.
Notions of the world’s gradual decline were widespread in ancient
civilisations, but Zoroaster bequeathed to Jewish, Christian and later
secular models of history a sense of urgency about the demise of the world.
From the Zealots of Roman Judaea to the Branch Davidians who perished
in Waco, Texas in 1993, Judaeo-Christian believers have fought and died
in fear and hope of impending apocalypse, whilst Nazis, communists,
Native American Ghost Dance cults, Muslim Mahdists and the Japanese
adherents of the Aum Shinrikyo sect have adopted and adapted apoc-
alyptic rhetoric, again with catastrophic results as prophecies of crisis and
conflict inexorably fulfil themselves. Yet arguably very similar rhetorical
strategies have provided the green movement with some of its most
striking successes. With this in mind, it is crucial that we consider the past
and future role of the apocalyptic narrative in environmental and radical
ecological discourse.
|
|
10.9 Page 99 |
▲back to top |
86 apocalypse
APOCALYPSE AND MILLENNIUM
Eurasians have not always believed that their world will end some day.
The prospect of an imminent eschaton or End of Time opened up for
Judaeo-Christianity in the two centuries on either side of the Christian
Year Zero:
It was mapped out in a new literary genre called apocalypse, from
the Greek Apo-calyptein, meaning ‘to un-veil’. Apocalyptic literature
takes the form of a revelation of the end of history. Violent and
grotesque images are juxtaposed with glimpses of a world transformed;
the underlying theme is usually a titanic struggle between good and
evil . . . Apocalypticism has been described as a genre born out of
crisis, designed to stiffen the resolve of an embattled community by
dangling in front of it the vision of a sudden and permanent release
from its captivity. It is underground literature, the consolation of the
persecuted.
(Thompson 1997: 13–14)
This definition suggests the following features: the social psychology of
apocalypticism that has historically inclined such ‘embattled’ movements
to paranoia and violence; the extreme moral dualism that divides the
world sharply into friend and enemy; the emphasis upon the ‘unveiling’
of trans-historical truth and the corresponding role of believers as the ones
to whom, and for whom, the veil of history is rent. But most importantly,
for our purposes, apocalypticism is inevitably bound up with imagination,
because it has yet to come into being. To use the narratological term, it
is always ‘proleptic’. And if, sociologically, it is ‘a genre born out of crisis’,
it is also necessarily a rhetoric that must whip up such crises to proportions
appropriate to the end of time. This dialectic in which apocalypticism
both responds to and produces ‘crisis’ will be important in our evaluation
of it as an ecocritical trope.
To the modern reader, millennial and apocalyptic beliefs may
seem bizarre, but even the most lurid anticipations of the fulfilment of
scriptural prophecy are based upon interpretations that possess their
own argumentative logic. Drawing upon a distinction first suggested
by Kenneth Burke, rhetorician Stephen O’Leary has suggested that the
|
|
10.10 Page 100 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 87
drama of apocalypse is shaped by a ‘frame of acceptance’ that may be
either ‘comic’ or ‘tragic’. The choice of frame will determine the way in
which issues of time, agency, authority and crisis are dramatised:
Tragedy conceives of evil in terms of guilt; its mechanism of redemption
is victimage, its plot moves inexorably toward sacrifice and the ‘cult
of the kill’. Comedy conceives of evil not as guilt, but as error; its
mechanism of redemption is recognition rather than victimage, and its
plot moves not toward sacrifice but to the exposure of fallibility.
(O’Leary 1994: 68)
If time is framed by tragedy as predetermined and epochal, always
careering towards some final, catastrophic conclusion, comic time is
open-ended and episodic. Human agency is real but flawed within
the comic frame, and individual actors are typically morally conflicted
and ambiguous. The tragic actor, on the other hand, has little to do but
choose a side in a schematically drawn conflict of good versus evil,
since action is likely to seem merely gestural in the face of eschatological
history.
The contrast between comic and tragic modes may be exemplified
by the argument between early Christian millenarians and St Augustine
of Hippo. Mathematicians of the End Times such as Hippolytus of Rome
often appealed to the notion of a ‘Great Week’, in which each ‘day’ lasted
1,000 years. The Second Coming of Christ would occur on the cusp
of the Sabbath of the Great Week (6,000 years after Creation, or Anno
Mundi 6000), ushering in the 1,000 years of his reign on earth announced
in the Revelation of St John (Rev. 20:1–6). The mathematicians sought
to work back through the genealogies of the Bible to calculate the first year
of the world, AM 1, from which the date of the End could be extrapolated.
Augustine’s solution to the destabilising effects of such calculations was
to insist on the figurative nature of the Bible’s apocalyptic visions, and to
mock those who calculated their literal advent. The End would occur as
prophesied, but it was not for humans to second-guess God’s timetable.
The gradual shift from the Anno Mundi calendar to the Anno Domini
system further dampened Christian apocalypticism, to the point where,
according to recent studies, the year 1000 passed off without panic
(Thompson 1997: 35–55).
|
|
11 Pages 101-110 |
▲back to top |
|
|
11.1 Page 101 |
▲back to top |
88 apocalypse
Augustine’s eschatology is therefore comic and non-catastrophic,
emphasising a drawn-out moral struggle going on not between forces
of light and darkness, but within the faithful themselves. This ethical
subtlety, along with an emphasis upon free will, supplies a sounder moral
ideology for a church wary of millennial enthusiasms: if the End may or
may not be nigh, believers must live in the light of its possibility whilst
refraining from relinquishing their worldly duties in a fit of utopian
hysteria. Tragic narratives of the End, on the other hand, are radically
dualistic, deterministic and catastrophic, and have tended historically to
issue in the suicidal, homicidal or even genocidal frenzies.
Orthodox, Roman Catholic and, for the most part, Protestant
Christianity has promoted comic apocalypticism. The imperatives
of scriptural authority, history and popular enthusiasm have rendered
the trope indispensable, but a tragic frame tends to produce either schisms
or perpetual charismatic revolution, and seems unsustainable in the
long term. The implications for attitudes to the natural world, moreover,
seem worse in the tragic mode. We may recall Lynn White Jr.’s argu-
ment that Christianity is a dangerously anthropocentric religion, and
perhaps his parenthetical comment that only Zoroastrianism might be
comparable to it. White draws attention to the dualistic conception of
humanity and nature that the two religions share, but in addition they
are both apocalyptic, which may be the key to the question of Judaeo-
Christianity’s contribution to environmental problems. Established
Christianity balances the long-standing notion of the sanctity of Creation
against the dualistic idea of transcendence that White noticed, but
millenarian Christianity stresses radical discontinuity: ‘And I saw a new
heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed
away’ (Rev. 21:1). In its emphasis upon Christians as decisive actors
in an imminent epochal conflict, millenarians inevitably brush aside
the mild anthropocentrism of the established Christian ‘stewardship’
tradition, recommended by ecophilosopher John Passmore on account of
its long-term, conservationist ethic. Environmental crisis serves modern
American conservative evangelists just as natural disasters served medi-
aeval millenarians: as a sign of the coming End, but not as a warning to
avert it. The coincidence of radical anthropocentrism and millennial zeal
is epitomised by Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, James
Watt, who argued against environmental protection on the grounds that
|
|
11.2 Page 102 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 89
God would soon destroy the old earth. Al Gore criticises Watt in his own
apocalypse, Earth in the Balance, in the name of mainstream Christianity
and a comic eschatology that emphasises human agency. Gore first
indulges in tragic apocalyptic rhetoric, evoking Hosea’s Biblical prophecy,
‘They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’, in relation
to predictions of terrible hurricanes resulting from the accumulation of
greenhouse gases (1992: 263). However, he then attacks the use of such
rhetoric by reactionary evangelists as ‘an excuse for abdicating their
responsibility to be good stewards of God’s creation’, thereby restating
Augustine’s case with a ‘green’ inflection. Despite the temptation to read
weather patterns as portents of global warming, Gore acknowledges that
sophisticated computer climate models are our prophets now, rather than
millennial readings of hurricanes and ice storms.
THE SECULAR APOCALPYSE
Eschatological themes and language in fact escaped the discipline of
theology long before the twentieth century. The Romantic poetry
of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley (1792–1822) and William Blake
(1757–1827) appropriated apocalyptic rhetoric for secular, often politi-
cally revolutionary aims, as did Modernists of the early twentieth century
such as T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). For
the most part, these writers were preoccupied with the fate of human
culture, but in the work of D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) we find a
congruence of environmental themes and apocalyptic rhetoric. Hence
his writing has exercised a particular fascination over deep ecologists
such as Del Ivan Janik, who claims that Lawrence ‘saw man as part of an
organic universe, living best by acknowledging its wonder and rejecting
the temptation to force his will upon it. In this sense he stands at the
beginning of the modern posthumanist tradition and of the literature of
environmental consciousness’ ( Janik 1995: 107).
At college, D.H. Lawrence had studied botany and the work of Ernst
Haeckel. Friends and enemies alike noted his unusual knowledge of
natural history and sensitivity to his environment. Like many other
writers of the period, Lawrence was deeply influenced by the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who ironically appropriated the arch-
dualist Zarathustra as mouthpiece for his call for men to surpass mere
|
|
11.3 Page 103 |
▲back to top |
90 apocalypse
human being and become Übermenschen (‘Over-men’). Unlike the
Zoroaster of ancient history who called for transcendence of the earth,
Nietzsche’s prophet calls for a return to it: ‘Let your gift-giving love
and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. . . . Do not let
them fly away from earthly things and beat their wings against eternal
walls’ (Nietzsche 1982: 188). The Earth that these post-human over-
men inhabit, however, will not be that of Romantic poetry, nor even
the popularised ‘Darwinist’ earth of bloody struggle. Indeed, in striving
to avoid anthropomorphism, it seems difficult to say anything about it
whatsoever, as Nietzsche argues in The Gay Science (1882): ‘Let us beware
of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is
neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become
any of these things . . . None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply
to it’ (1974: 168). Nietzsche, like deep ecologists, seeks a biocentric
perspective, but unlike them finds only nihilism in the process.
Lawrence was a major influence upon Rolf Gardiner (1902–72), who
founded the Soil Association in 1945 to promote and monitor organic
farming. Historian Anna Bramwell claims that Lawrence ‘was not a
programmatic ecologist . . . but his intellectual background was saturated
with a mixture of nature-worship and anti-anthropomorphism’, and
credits the imaginative power of his ‘intuitive but detailed perceptions of
landscape, and the people embedded in that landscape’ (1989: 112, 113).
His unique position is evident from the first chapter of The Rainbow
(1915), which provides a pastoral depiction of the generations of
Brangwen farmers in the valley of the river Erewash. The reciprocity of
man and nature is evoked in vivid, rhythmic prose:
They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot
halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling
back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse
between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels,
the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the
wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. Their
life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the
soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth
and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight
that pulled like desire . . . They took the udder of the cows, the cows
|
|
11.4 Page 104 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 91
yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of
the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the
men.
(Lawrence 1988: 42)
In this, Lawrence’s Genesis, the exile from the original Eden recurs
through the generations at and around Marsh Farm; in the first
generation, true to the Biblical tradition, the men are awakened by the
search of the women for broader knowledge and life. From a world
of seasonal, cyclical time the Brangwens fall into linear history, depicted
as a disillusioning as well as a liberating process. In the second generation,
the despair engendered by modernity seems to demand an apocalyptic
resolution, and Will Brangwen welcomes a vision of ‘cities and industries
and civilisation’ swept away, ‘leaving only the bare earth with plants
growing and waters running’ (p. 235). Yet Lawrence is concerned to
locate his millennium beyond both this nihilism and the ‘blood-drowse’
of the first chapter. Ursula Brangwen, the third generation in the novel,
experiences an epiphany in a cellular biology class that draws upon
Haeckel’s idea of an organic ‘life force’:
Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense
light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly
she passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She
could not understand what it all was. She only knew it was not limited
mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation, and self-
assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was oneness
with the infinite.
(pp. 491–2)
Ursula’s reservations about scientific method are identical to those
expressed by deep ecologists:
firstly, that modern science works with an analytical method which is
reductionist and thereby reduces the natural world in various ways
which undermines its integrity, wholeness and interconnectedness;
secondly, that its metaphysics is dualist, so that whereas humans are
seen as not just physical but also mental and spiritual beings, the rest
|
|
11.5 Page 105 |
▲back to top |
92 apocalypse
of nature is seen in purely mechanical terms; and finally, that this
justifies a disregard for nature.
(Hayward 1995: 16)
Her acceptance of a holistic perspective is linked to the Revelation that
ends the novel:
And the rainbow stood upon the earth. She knew that the sordid
people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s
corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood
and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their
horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would
issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the
wind and the clean rain of heaven.
(Lawrence 1988: 548)
The Rainbow follows the development of three generations, focused
largely upon the women, in an extraordinary path which brings Ursula
back to the organic awareness of the first generation of men, only at
a higher level of consciousness that links it to a more general redemptive
vision. It self-consciously appropriates Biblical narrative structures, and
something of the poetry of the Authorised Version, whilst thematising the
critique of Christian anthropocentrism. Dolores LaChapelle’s ecocritical
study Future Primitive (1996) links Lawrence’s ecological vision to his
hope for reconfigured and revitalised sexual relation, arguing that ties
between Ursula’s new ‘awareness of the greater whole of nature’ and her
discovery of her ‘deepest sexual nature’ show us how ‘a fulfilling human
society could be built in harmony with the greater cosmos’ (1996: 48).
LaChapelle’s book is an excellent example of the pious strand of eco-
criticism: her detailed research has yielded intriguing results and her
enthusiasm and hope are appealing and infectious, but she takes her deep
ecological standpoint entirely for granted and seems inclined to minimise,
rationalise or ignore the less palatable aspects of Lawrence’s work. Her
faith in the power of Lawrentian sexual awakening to inaugurate a new
world of authentic human relations with nature is correspondingly
excessive.
Much of the remainder of Lawrence’s œuvre after The Rainbow
|
|
11.6 Page 106 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 93
substitutes for its utopian promise an obsession with masculine power
correlated to a blankly nihilistic apocalypticism. Thus Birkin, in the
pseudo-sequel Women in Love, envisages a millennium entirely without
humans, arguing ‘Man is a mistake, he must go’ (Lawrence 1989: 128).
It is this biocentric inhumanism that seems to appeal to deep ecologists,
although the character of Ursula Brangwen remains as a slight counter-
balance: ‘She herself knew too well the actuality of humanity, its hideous
actuality. She knew it could not disappear so cleanly and conveniently.
It had a long way to go yet, a long and hideous way’ (ibid.). The contrast
between a tragic and a comic apocalypticism is pointed, but there
is also a more subtle exposure of the inconsistency of Birkin’s view,
who is like a man imagining his own funeral, unable to comprehend
his own absence. Ursula’s perspective suggests that Birkin’s inhumanism
is self-contradictory, his brand of apocalypticism nihilistic. These limi-
tations afflict other forms of anti-anthropocentrism too, at least insofar
as they imagine a blank apocalypse: an eschaton without a utopia to
follow.
ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPTICISM
Buell has argued that ‘Apocalypse is the single most powerful master
metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at
its disposal’ (1995: 285). Several of the most influential books in the
environmentalist canon make extensive use of the trope, from Carson’s
Silent Spring through Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1972) to Al
Gore’s Earth in the Balance. Apocalyptic rhetoric is deployed in the activist
literature of Earth First!, the philosophical reflections of Bill McKibben
and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Even the commonplace notion of
‘environmental crisis’ is inflected by it.
The most influential forerunner to the modern environmental
apocalypse is the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas
Malthus, which set out to contradict the utopian predictions of endless
material and moral progress made by political philosopher William
Godwin (1756–1836). Malthus was the first thinker to insist that social
policy be guided by ecological necessity, and his theories of population
founded the science of demographics, providing the basis for the theories
of natural selection of Charles Darwin (1809–82) and Alfred Russel
|
|
11.7 Page 107 |
▲back to top |
94 apocalypse
Wallace (1823–1913) and, later, the emergence of ecology. Malthus
acknowledges the attraction of Godwin’s optimism, but points out
that ‘the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the
earth to produce subsistence for man’ (1982: 71). This is because each
generation of humans can beget a still larger next generation, whereas
increases in agricultural production by cultivation of new ground can
be achieved only incrementally: a contrast between a geometric, or expo-
nential progression, and an arithmetic one. Unchecked population
growth, in other words, would always outrun subsistence, as Malthus
demonstrates:
Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions,
for instance, the human species would increase in the ratio of – 1, 2, 4,
8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc. and subsistence as – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, etc. In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be to
the means of subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096 to 13,
and two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable,
though the produce in that time would have increased to an immense
extent.
(pp. 75–6)
Population will always increase to the point where ‘misery and vice’ halt
it, Malthus claimed, so even the most egalitarian utopia must eventually
revert to conflict and competition for scarce resources. Malthus’s Essay is
basically anti-apocalyptic in that population and food are supposed to
remain in permanent competition, rather than building to a dramatic
crisis. Nevertheless, its gloomy prognostications have since provided the
scientific basis for much more lurid eschatologies.
The apocalypticism of Carson’s Silent Spring goes beyond the ‘strange
blight’ that falls upon the pastoral scene in ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’. The
association of radioactive fallout and pesticide pollution mentioned in the
Introduction is exceptionally potent because the imagery of nuclear
detonation redefined popular conceptions of the end of the world, both
religious and secular, whilst the fear of lethal fission products such as
Strontium-90 undetectable to the senses provided a perfect model for
the all-pervasive insinuation of pollutants such as DDT, lindane and
dieldrin:
|
|
11.8 Page 108 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 95
The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the
contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even
lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the
chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but
in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal
contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-
recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world
– the very nature of its life.
(Carson 1999: 23)
Here we can see characteristic features of tragic apocalyptic rhetoric. The
warning is presented in terms of absolute authority; the material threat is
‘evil’, and so, by association, are the authors of it; the consequences of
failure to heed the warning are catastrophic, and the danger is not only
imminent, but already well under way. Another of Carson’s rhetorical
strategies is to radically dissociate key agents in the drama. As Randy
Harris has shown, the environmentally sensitive ‘Good Guys’ are named,
admired and cited without demurral, whilst the ‘Bad Guys’ who promote
pesticides are ‘faceless bureaucrats and salesmen’ whose claims are cited
sardonically, with frequent reference to their commercial sources of
research funding (Harris 2000: 138). Moreover, popular environmen-
talism has adopted her use of ‘scare quotes’ whenever industry safety
claims are made: ‘What then can be a “safe dose” of DDT?’ (2000: 209).
This powerful citational strategy casts doubt on the very idea of a ‘safe
dose’ and dissociates the author, her favoured experts and the implied
reader from compromised, unreliable industry scientists.
The precise function of Carson’s apocalyptic rhetoric is a matter of
debate. For Buell, she offers little hope that catastrophe may be averted
because the threat she outlines is so pervasive and irreversible. Jimmie
Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer, on the other hand, argue that ‘the
conflicting narratives of apocalyptic doom and millennial hope strive
for dominance in Silent Spring’ (2000: 190). They point out that the
book immerses the reader in the impending blighted world where
‘no birds sing’, whilst holding out the possibility of ‘the other road’.
Carson’s alternative is not an ecocentric or anti-interventionist vision,
but rather a pragmatic environmentalism in which limited, targeted
chemical pesticides combine with biological controls in an integrated
|
|
11.9 Page 109 |
▲back to top |
96 apocalypse
pest-management approach. Consequently her enlightened anthropocen-
trism has been criticised by deep ecologists for whom the crisis is vaster
and more intransigent. Like Birkin in Women in Love, such critics do not
necessarily even hope for the survival of the human species.
After Silent Spring, the most important environmentalist book was
Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, a neo-Malthusian classic that
relied on horrifying apocalyptic projections for its persuasive force: ‘The
battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds
of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes
embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial
increase in the world death rate’ (1972: xi). In the first of two ‘scenarios’,
Ehrlich imagined that overpopulation would bring about environmental
collapse, international instability and nuclear war in the mid-1980s.
In the second, overpopulation would facilitate an epidemic of Lassa
fever. Failure to regulate birth rates would result, according to Ehrlich’s
remorseless Malthusian logic, in rocketing death rates as population
pressure loosed ‘three of the four apocalyptic horsemen – war, pestilence,
and famine’ (1972: 48). What radically distinguishes Ehrlich from Carson
is that for the former it is the human species itself that represents
the teeming, burgeoning, eco-pathological threat, which he compares
to a cancer, with its ‘uncontrolled multiplication of cells’. ‘Treatment
of symptoms’ might offer temporary comfort, but ‘radical surgery’ is
the only real hope for the patient. Food aid and medical assistance, then,
would be replaced by compulsory sterilisation and a ‘triage principle’ in
famine relief, whereby countries deemed incapable of self-sufficiency
would not receive food, but ‘nature’ would be allowed to take its course
(1972: 156). The moral responsibility for such a tragic outcome would
rest, according to Ehrlich, with whoever had failed to prevent over-
population.
The neo-Malthusian approach to demography as a ‘numbers game’ is
actually deeply misleading. For example, bioregionalist Kirkpatrick Sale
presents the following Malthusian scenario:
For well over a century, year after steady year, the British encouraged
and the Irish developed a near-total dependency upon a single dietary
mainstay, the potato, and the population of the island grew from
2 million people to more than 8 million. Then suddenly in 1845 a natural
|
|
11.10 Page 110 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 97
competitor for the potato came along in the form of a parasitic fungus
that got to the tubers somewhat before the people did and turned the
potatoes into sticky inedible, mucous globs. Crash: within a generation
the country was devastated . . .
(Sale 1985: 27)
Sale’s facts are, in outline, correct. Over a million Irish people starved
to death or died of diseases of malnutrition during the famine of 1845.
What he fails to mention is that Ireland continued to export food
throughout the famine, but control of this surplus lay with British
and Anglo-Irish landlords. Irish peasants were not simply short of food,
but short of money, land and power. Scotland was similarly dependent
upon potatoes and was badly hit by blight, but there was no starvation.
In fact all modern famines might be seen as political and economic crises
rather than mere collisions of population increase and food production
collapse. The supposedly objective limit on population represented by
the ecological ‘carrying capacity’ of a region is meaningless when applied
to human societies that always mediate food supply with political, military
and economic power. On this point, cornucopians and social ecologists
agree, albeit from very different political perspectives (see North 1995:
11–94 and Ross 1994: 237–73). Neo-Malthusianism has been used to
justify stronger immigration controls in rich countries to protect their
threatened carrying capacity, as well as ending food aid to famine-struck
countries that have allegedly overshot their ecological limits. In both cases
biological models are applied to human situations with results that
directly corroborate an extreme right-wing politics even when they do not
derive from them.
Demographers agree that Malthus got his sums right as regards the
exponential growth possibilities of any population, from bacteria to
humans, but that his projections of possible increases in food produc-
tion were little more than speculations. He also failed to predict the
phenomenon known as ‘demographic transition’, whereby scientific
advances reduce death rates, populations soar and agricultural production
struggles to keep up. But then the process of modernisation gradually
produces economic and cultural incentives to reduce family sizes, and so
birth rates fall. Most developed countries now have stable or falling
populations, but they have paid for the transition in economic growth
|
|
12 Pages 111-120 |
▲back to top |
|
|
12.1 Page 111 |
▲back to top |
98 apocalypse
fuelled by non-renewable energy sources, first coal and then oil. Neo-
Malthusians argue that our finite planet cannot support such transitions
for all developing countries.
However, it may be that transition does not require economic growth
of the rate or extent experienced by developed countries. The 1994 UN
Conference on Population and Development exhibited remarkable
agreement that non-coercive population control is a priority both for
economic development and environmental sustainability, proposing that
education and primary healthcare, especially for women, were the most
effective means available. These would certainly seem to be the sort of
‘sugarcoated solutions’ that Ehrlich rejected in The Population Bomb
(1972) on the grounds that apocalyptic famine was imminent, although
he recently supported such measures in The Population Explosion (1990).
Perhaps this is because the most recent projections of global population
suggest that transition may occur earlier, and at a lower level, than pre-
viously feared.
The problems with The Population Bomb are in fact representative of
the more general difficulty surrounding dire predictions in environmental
literature. In October 1999, the estimated world population passed
6 billion, six times the world population in 1850. As Gore observes, most
of this increase has occurred recently:
from the beginning of humanity’s appearance on earth to 1945, it took
more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of
2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime – mine – the
world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 billion, and it is
already more than halfway there.
(1992: 31)
Just as Lawrence’s horrified rhetoric was influenced by the catastrophe of
the First World War (1914–18), so Ehrlich’s is explained by the rapidity
of the increase in world population, and the undeniable environmental
costs associated with it. At the same time, his projections of global anarchy
failed to be realised, and the famines that did occur in such countries
as Ethiopia and Somalia were a consequence of ethnic, political and
economic conflicts, not simply population pressure. Widespread and
worsening chronic malnutrition in some regions during this period,
|
|
12.2 Page 112 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 99
particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, did not prevent cornucopian critics of
Ehrlich such as Julian Simon from declaring victory.
Killingsworth and Palmer note that The Population Bomb is the most
popular environmental book ever published, which they attribute partly
to its shocking apocalypticism. However, they defend Ehrlich against
critics who point out the failure of his ‘scenarios’ to materialise, arguing
that ‘these writings are not to be taken literally. Their aim is not to predict
the future but to change it’ (1996: 40–1). This claim is bolstered by
Ehrlich’s own cautionary comment prefacing his scenarios: ‘Remember,
these are just possibilities, not predictions’ (1996: 52). Environmental
apocalypticism, on this view, is not about anticipating the end of the
world, but about attempting to avert it by persuasive means. Yet this
categorical distinction between prophecy and exhortation is one that
neither the history of apocalypticism nor rhetorical theory will sustain.
The classical distinction between ethos, logos and pathos sets out the three
contributory elements in a rhetorical stance, which might be crudely
rendered as moral authority, facts and arguments and the emotional
inflection an utterance is given. Ehrlich’s ethos derives directly from his
status as a scientist capable of extrapolating tested hypotheses into just the
sort of predictions, or logos, he undertakes so strikingly in the opening
pages of The Population Bomb. The affective power or pathos of the book
will not rely entirely upon falsifiable claims, of course, but nor can it be
completely severed from them.
Ehrlich’s strategic hyperbole might be justified in the interests of
successful persuasion, but the long-term dangers this approach poses for
environmentalist causes may outweigh its rhetorical usefulness. It is clear
that later eco-apocalypses have learned circumspection from the Ehrlich
example. Gore, as we have seen, flirts with tragic apocalypse only to retreat
to the more cautious claims that fit both scientific uncertainty and
mainstream green Christian thought, and Betrayal of Science and Reason
(1998), in which Anne and Paul Ehrlich set out to demolish cornucopian
claims, is a paragon of comic apocalyptic rhetoric. The book mounts a
rearguard defence of some of the claims of The Population Bomb whilst
acknowledging some of its failings, but the most striking change is that
while the facts or logos presented are little changed, both the ethos and
pathos of the book are dramatically altered. Whereas the implicit locus and
authority of the rhetor in the first book was that of a lone Jeremiah
|
|
12.3 Page 113 |
▲back to top |
100 apocalypse
sending back an incontestable warning from the wilderness, Betrayal
repeatedly calls upon the scientific truth claims of almost the entire
scientific community. Indeed, the Ehrlichs even append a list of scientists
and scientific associations that make up the consensus on environmental
crisis. The cornucopians, whose claims are cited in bold throughout, are
positioned as the crazy Polyannas and industry apologists. Furthermore,
the emotional tone is far less confrontational and dramatic, reaching out
to ‘loggers, miners, farmers and fishers’ and urging international action
to alleviate poverty, illiteracy and oppression of women in order to slow
population growth. The Ehrlichs claim that it was Paul’s decision to
include ‘scenarios’ in The Population Bomb that made it vulnerable to
criticism, but the rhetorical shift identified here suggests that it was the
tragic apocalyptic inflection of the population issue that produced both
its phenomenal success and enduring scandal.
Just like Christian millennialism, environmental apocalypticism has
had to face the embarrassment of failed prophecy even as it has been
unable to relinquish the trope altogether. Clearly there is much greater
latitude for reasonable disagreement in environmental science than there
is with divine intervention. However, religious and secular narratives of
the End in the tragic mode seem to share a propensity to lapse into either
unintentional comedy or self-fulfilling horror. As Buell points out, ‘in the
era of Cat’s Cradle, Doctor Strangelove and Star Wars it is hard for apoca-
lypticism to keep a straight face’ (1995: 300). And, conversely, the author
of The Population Bomb, proponent of the ‘triage test’ and ‘radical surgery’,
ought to admit indirect responsibility for coercive population control
strategies implemented in China and India in the wake of his revelation.
Environmental apocalypticism is not limited to popular scientific
publications. The American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) espoused
a philosophy of ‘inhumanism’ that was decidedly at odds with the
anthropocentric assumptions ingrained in literary critics and academics,
but clearly indebted to Nietzsche and Lawrence. The exact tenets of
inhumanism are debatable, but it seems to epitomise apocalyptic ecocen-
trism as a poetic creed. Oelschlaeger appropriates it as an affirmation of
wilderness pantheism that ‘turn[s] love outward from humankind to the
transhuman magnificence of the beauty of things, the cosmic whole that
enframes the human odyssey and, indeed, is itself divine’ (1991: 252).
Certainly the beauty of nature is frequently asserted, but less often shown
|
|
12.4 Page 114 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 101
than might be expected of an ‘ecocentric’ poet. Jeffers’s ‘The Purse-Seine’
admits as much, as the poet struggles to describe the terrible beauty of the
night-fishing of a phosphorescent shoal: ‘I cannot tell you / How beautiful
the scene is’. But then the trapped fish
. . . wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing
destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with
flame, like a live rocket
(Jeffers 1987: 55)
The inevitability of the analogy between trapped fish and human beings
is also acknowledged, as the poet looks over the lights of ‘a wide city’ and
cannot ‘help but recall the seine-net / Gathering the luminous fish’. The
‘inevitable mass disasters’ as the net of Progress tightens around us are not
the occasion for warning or mourning, but rather a grim satisfaction
at the working-out of an inexorable natural law. Jeffers’ poetry is in fact
full of apocalyptic imagery: ‘the dance of the / Dream-led masses down
the dark mountain’ (‘Rearmament’), ‘man . . . blotted out’ (‘To the
Stone-Cutters’), and the meteoric ‘mortal splendor’ of a doomed America
(‘Shine, Perishing Republic’). At times it is associated with a qualified
compassion for humanity, as when the earth itself dreams of a heavily
symbolic cleansing storm in ‘November Surf’ and imagines how ‘the
two-footed / Mammal’ might regain ‘The dignity of room, the value of
rareness’ (1987: 39). In ‘The Inquisitors’, a horrified human is depicted
observing as three mountain-like giants ‘inspect’ a handful of people.
Splitting open the skull of a young ‘female’ to reach the origin of the
problem, the giants debate the thermonuclear progeny of this brain:
‘A drop of marrow. How could that spoil the earth?’ ‘Nevertheless,’ he
answered,
‘They have that bomb. The blasts and the fires are nothing: freckles
on the earth: the emanations
Might set the whole planet into a tricky fever
And destroy much.’ ‘Themselves,’ he answered. ‘Let them.
Why not?’ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘life.’
(Jeffers 1987: 73)
|
|
12.5 Page 115 |
▲back to top |
102 apocalypse
The unimaginable threat of nuclear weapons, like a rocketing population,
is an ample stimulus to apocalyptic thinking. Lawrence was writing in
the midst of the most horrific war ever seen, and Jeffers’ republic had
just deployed the most devastating weapon ever devised. Nevertheless,
the misanthropic ecocentrism of Lawrence’s Birkin, Jeffers’s giants or
even Nietzsche’s over-men is ethically troublesome, as a truly ecocentric
perspective would arguably be morally neutral regarding human impacts
on the environment.
As a comparison, we might look at James Lovelock’s Gaia: a New Look
at Life on Earth, which argues that the Earth may be thought of as a kind
of super-organism thanks to its biochemical and climatic ‘homoeostatic’
self-regulation. The Gaia hypothesis seems to support an ecocentric
perspective, because it enjoins us to consider policies in terms of their
effects on the biosphere as a whole. However, Lovelock’s conclusions are
not necessarily amenable to radical ecologism; he argues that ‘large plants
and animals are relatively unimportant. They are comparable rather to
those elegant salesmen and glamorous models used to display a firm’s
products, desirable perhaps, but not essential’ (1982: 40). Lovelock
concludes:
It may be that the white-hot rash of our technology will in the end
prove destructive and painful for our own species, but the evidence for
accepting that industrial activities either at their present level or in the
immediate future may endanger the life of Gaia as a whole, is very weak
indeed.
(1982: 107–8)
Jeffers’s giants reach the same conclusion:
‘It is not likely they can destroy all life: the planet is capacious.
Life would surely grow up again
From grubs in the soil, or the newt and toad level, and be beautiful
again. . . . ’
(1987: 73)
The paradox, then, is this: the long view enjoined by radical ecologists
in fact favours fatalism as regards individual species, including our own.
|
|
12.6 Page 116 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 103
From the giants’ perspective, humans, dinosaurs and dodos are equally
dispensable. Only the ‘drop of marrow’ inside the human skull is capable
of caring about the fate of rhinos or redwoods, only we construct
apocalyptic narratives and therefore even a biocentric ethic must remain
anthropogenic. At this extreme, the sort of in- or post-humanism preached
by Nietzsche, Lawrence and Jeffers is simply self-contradictory, because
achieving it would at the same time render it pointless. Such implications
are discussed further in the final chapter.
Earth First!, which established itself during the 1980s as one of
North America’s most radical environmental organisations, combined
revolutionary inhumanism, apocalyptic beliefs and direct action to protect
wilderness areas. It was made up initially of activists from existing
mainstream groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society
who were fed up with the compromises demanded of them as
Washington lobbyists, and who decided that only resolute confrontation
with the forces of modernity could prevent ‘biological meltdown’.
According to M.F. Lee, Earth First! combined tragic apocalypticism and
deep ecological beliefs:
They . . . advocated biocentric equality, the belief that all species
are intrinsically equal and therefore have an equal right to life. Earth
First! transplanted these ideas from the realm of philosophical spec-
ulation to the realm of political action, adding to them the urgency of a
belief in an imminent apocalypse. It is this millenarian transformation
that directly motivated Earth First!’s actions and determined its
development.
(1997: 124)
These beliefs gave Earth First! an extraordinary zeal and courage in its
defence of wilderness areas. Its proponents also developed a millennial
vision of a future primitive world, where postmodern hunter-gatherer
‘tribes’ would subsist in the aftermath of industrial civilisation. Earth
First! grew rapidly, attracting ecofeminists and social ecologists as well as
wilderness advocates. But then, as Lee shows, the organisation began to
encounter tensions inherent in its core beliefs, as the original activists’
millenarian beliefs gave way to blank apocalypticism and Malthusian
nightmares of overpopulation gave rise to grotesque inhumanity, as
|
|
12.7 Page 117 |
▲back to top |
104 apocalypse
evidenced by the figure of Christopher Manes. Writing under the
pseudonym ‘Miss Ann Thropy’, Manes argued that AIDS should be
welcomed by radical ecologists for its contribution to population
reduction. Earth First! was riven by such disputes, with many of the
newer, socially orientated members and some deep ecologists attacking
the apocalypticism of the wilderness advocates. Eventually many founder
members such as Dave Foreman left Earth First!, claiming that it had
betrayed its early uncompromising stance. Lee argues on the basis of her
study that
the most radical of environmental doctrines may initially support,
but cannot sustain, a millenarian faith. The biocentric beliefs of Earth
First!’s apocalyptic faction deny the human species a pivotal role in
history. When it is pushed to its limits, this belief system provides a
justification for any action undertaken in defence of the wilderness,
regardless of whether or not human beings are harmed. Individuals who
hold such beliefs are capable of wreaking significant havoc on the
human civilization in which they live.
(1997: 133)
In the terms used earlier, the inhumanist faction of Earth First! were
distinguished from the social ecologists by their espousal of tragic, rather
than comic, apocalypticism. Their fears of imminent ecological cata-
strophe were articulated in terms of a dualistic moral schema that crudely
opposed humanity and the wild. Their opponents saw people as differ-
entiated in their responsibility for environmental problems according to
gender, class and ethnicity, and envisaged radical political change through
negotiation as well as direct action. The inhumanist faction were also
accused of fostering androcentric, paranoid and potentially violent
attitudes in the organisation.
THE TROUBLE WITH APOCALYPSE
Apocalyptic rhetoric seems a necessary component of environmental
discourse. It is capable of galvanising activists, converting the undecided
and ultimately, perhaps, of influencing government and commer-
cial policy. In the United States, in particular, it can draw upon deep
|
|
12.8 Page 118 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 105
wellsprings of popular and literary apocalyptic sentiment. The news
media often report environmental issues as catastrophes not only because
this generates drama and the possibility of a human interest, but also
because news more easily reports events than processes. Apocalypse
provides an emotionally charged frame of reference within which com-
plex, long-term issues are reduced to monocausal crises involving conflicts
between recognisably opposed groups, such as Greenpeace versus whalers.
John Hannigan’s study of the sociology of environmental conflict specifies
the most common inflection: ‘Employing a series of medical metaphors,
our planet is depicted as facing a debilitating, perhaps terminal, illness’
(1995: 72). Ehrlich’s Population Bomb is an early example of the rhetorical
link that is now commonly made between the ancient apocalyptic trope
and the inflection of ecology as a science of planetary health, as discussed
further in Chapter 8.
Eschatological narrative, then, brings with it philosophical and
political problems that seriously compromise its usefulness, especially in
its radical, tragic form. It tends to polarise responses, prodding sceptics
towards scoffing dismissal and potentially inciting believers to confron-
tation and even violence, a pattern familiar from conflicts between liberal
society and apocalyptic cults. On the other hand, while radical ecolog-
ical groups are rhetorically akin to traditional millenarians, they are
sociologically very different, stressing openness to diverse beliefs and
maintaining a solid resistance to charismatic leadership. Even if this
is allowed, however, the propensity of apocalypticism to turn ugly in
relation to population growth must be confronted.
A more general problem is that the rhetoric of catastrophe tends
to ‘produce’ the crisis it describes, as in the Malthusian depiction of
extreme poverty as ‘famine’. Moreover, as Richard North shows in two
detailed case studies, the political objectives of campaigning organisations
may dovetail too neatly with journalistic desire for scientific integrity
to be sustained in the reporting of ecological ‘disaster’. North analyses
media responses to the 1993 sinking of the oil tanker Braer, and claims
that they show a marked preference for apocalyptic comments from
campaign organisations over less dramatic assessments from government
or oil industry scientists:
A Greenpeace comment seems to have several prime journalistic
|
|
12.9 Page 119 |
▲back to top |
106 apocalypse
merits. It stresses the possibility of ecological disaster. It comes from
the heart. It is short and understandable. It comes from people who are
not part of ‘the establishment’. The media and Greenpeace share an
understanding of the world. Things go wrong because vested interests
are careless, and they stay wrong because of the cover-ups which vested
interests go in for. Neither the media nor Greenpeace ever admit that
they too are vested interests, with readers and supporters to keep
amused and excited.
(1995: 99)
North argues that environmental ‘doom merchants’ may literally be
selling bad news. Another example is the journalistic propensity to
interpret every drought or ice storm as a ‘sign’ of catastrophic global
warming, while climatologists consistently adopt a comic apocalyptic
rhetoric that denies the possibility of linking specific weather events
to global climate change. Such caution is compromised by the need for
authoritative pronouncements in the interests of policy, but also by the
danger that projections are often popularly interpreted as predictions.
Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, already discussed as a ‘Wilderness’
narrative, is haunted by both the ubiquity and unreliability of the ‘signs’
of climatic change. McKibben’s ‘nature’ is not merely threatened by the
possibility of apocalypse, but in some sense already beyond it, for if nature
is inflected as wilderness, the very thought of human interference is
enough decisively to contaminate its purity. In an inversion of blank
apocalypse, a world purified by human absence is replaced by one
irretrievably altered by human emissions, where we can no longer know
what a season or temperature is ‘supposed’ to be. For McKibben, the
end of nature is not the end of the world itself, but an apocalypse of
the imagination. This End is already behind us, leaving nothing more
than various options for managing a nature rendered thoroughly and
permanently domestic. However, not only is McKibben’s inflection of
nature as wilderness rather specific to the USA, but human activities such
as deforestation, hunting and farming have been crucial ecological agents
since the evolution of the species. McKibben’s apocalyptic rhetoric
effectively produces the irreparable crisis it claims only to identify.
Apocalyptic rhetoric furthermore fosters a delusive search for culprits
and causes that may be reductively conceived by conflating very varied
|
|
12.10 Page 120 |
▲back to top |
apocalypse 107
environmental problems within the concept of a singular, imminent
‘environmental crisis’. Deep ecologists, for example, attack ‘humanity’ or
‘civilisation’, or, at the conceptual level, ‘anthropocentrism’. Ecofeminists
criticise androcentrism or the dualistic logic of domination. Environ-
mental problems, whilst they should not be seen in isolation, might seem
more amenable to solution if they are disaggregated and framed by comic
apocalyptic narratives that emphasise the provisionality of knowledge, free
will, ongoing struggle and a plurality of social groups with differing
responsibilities. In this way, problems are not minimised, but those who
describe them become less vulnerable to the embarrassments of failed
prophecy and to the threat of millennial enthusiasms.
If radical ecologists and some environmentalists are apocalyptic, then,
is environmental ‘crisis’ unreal, a discursive construct worthy of decon-
struction but not millennial panic? Whilst the strategic dangers of such
rhetoric may be identified along with its somewhat disreputable geneal-
ogy, its validity must ultimately be judged by a careful consideration
of the evidence, derived from historical trends and from the variety of
projections of, say, global population or climate change that legitimate
scientific dissension will produce. Ecocritics must assess the scale and
import of scientific consensus, and in the final analysis defer to it, even as
they analyse the ways such results are shaped by ideology and rhetoric.
At present, the consensus accurately set out in the Ehrlichs’ Betrayal
of Science and Reason does not sustain a traditional tragic conception of
a singular, catastrophic ‘end of time’, or even the immediate doom
of Western civilisation, although their assessment is far from optimistic.
Nevertheless, it could be argued that the real moral and political challenge
of ecology may lie in accepting that the world is not about to end, that
human beings are likely to survive even if Western-style civilisation does
not. Only if we imagine that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely
to take responsibility for it.
|
|
13 Pages 121-130 |
▲back to top |
|
|
13.1 Page 121 |
▲back to top |
6
DWELLING
The tropes that have been examined so far contribute to the ways in
which we understand nature, but from an ecocritical perspective they are
all faulty in one respect: none suggests a mode of practical existence as
an immediate reality. Pastoral and wilderness tropes typically imply
the perspective of the aesthetic tourist, while the apocalypse encodes the
vision of a prophetic imagination. However, other literatures explore
the possibility of coming to dwell on the earth in a relation of duty and
responsibility. ‘Dwelling’ is not a transient state; rather, it implies the
long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry
and death, of ritual, life and work. This chapter will consider models of
dwelling in the literature of farming known as ‘georgic’, before turning to
the ‘primitive’ models supposed by some critics to be exemplary of an
authentic dwelling on earth.
GEORGIC
We have considered the claim that Judaeo-Christian monotheism
has provided modern European civilisation with ecologically damaging
attitudes. Lynn White Jr. argues that Genesis 1:26, ‘And God said, Let us
make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,
|
|
13.2 Page 122 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 109
and over all the earth’, constitutes a scriptural licence for whatever
exploitation we think fit within the framework of moral laws set out
elsewhere. Clearly much depends upon the force and meaning of the word
‘dominion’, however, and philosophers who argue against White’s thesis
claim that stewardship or ‘usufruct’, rather than despotism, is enjoined
(Attfield 1983; Passmore 1974). Jeanne Kay has argued that both
positions misread nature’s role in the Bible: ‘Nature is God’s tool of
reward and punishment, and its beneficence depends on human morality’
(Kay 1998: 214). Ecological catastrophe in the Old Testament descends
for a whole range of transgressions, on innocent and guilty, humanity
and nature alike. Kay proposes that the Bible is neither anthropocen-
tric nor ecocentric, but theocentric in a way and to a degree difficult
for the modern reader to fully accept: ‘A society which explains destruc-
tion of pasturage as the result of God’s anger over idolatry or insincerity
in Temple sacrifices rather than as the direct outcome of climatic fluc-
tuations or overgrazing may have little to offer modern resource
management’ (Kay 1998: 219). It is certainly difficult to sustain a direct
link between contemporary environmental problems and Judaeo-
Christianity as such, be it archaic or modern. As theologian Stephen Clark
sardonically observes, ‘Maybe “the West” has been more successfully
rapacious for the last few centuries, but not because we have been more
careful Christians!’ (Clark 1998: 46).
Virgil’s Georgics shares with the Bible an emphasis on the relationship
of agricultural productivity and ritual observance, although the Roman
obsession with astrology and augury differentiates it from the practices
represented in the Old Testament. All non-secular agricultural societies
ascribe religious significance to key agricultural practices, but Virgil
foregrounds the practical aspects of farming, such as the planting of
fertility-enhancing legumes before hungry cereals. His aim is not the
dispensation of sacred law to a chosen people, but the promotion of good
husbandry and the restoration of Roman social virtues in the countryside.
The Virgilian emphasis on agriculture is not depicted as a curse for
disobedience, as in the Bible, but rather as the god Jupiter’s challenge to
human ingenuity. Whereas the Old Testament gives advice of a highly
localised nature for inhabitants of a Promised Land, Virgil reflects the
scope and variety of the Roman Empire in his careful survey of soil types,
climates and crops. It is clearly advice for neither the unlettered peasant
|
|
13.3 Page 123 |
▲back to top |
110 dwelling
nor the absentee landowner, but for the citizen-farmer whom Virgil sets
up as the ideal Roman:
O farmers, more than happy if they’ve realised their blessings,
for whom earth unprompted, supreme in justice, pours out
a rich livelihood from her soil, far from the clash of armies!
. . . he neither
grieves in pity for the poor, nor envies the rich.
(2002: 52–4)
Such overt politicisation of the georgic finds clear echoes in the conser-
vative agrarianism of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), which idealises a
free, land- and slave-owning and farming citizenry as the foundation of
the American republic and extols the georgic virtues of industry, thrift and
measured self-interest.
The British radical William Cobbett (1763–1835) understood the
politics of farming very differently, taking the part of the agricultural
labourer and, with reservations, the English farmer against the depre-
dations of rural capitalism. Presumably it is also against such political
appeals that Thoreau inveighs in ‘The Bean-Field’ experiment in Walden,
during which he works his small plot with only meagre results as measured
in beans. He contemptuously dismisses helpful suggestions from his hard-
working neighbours since the true harvest is measured in wild animals and
birdsong, meditation and instruction, as well as in dollars and cents:
By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of
us is free, of regarding the soil as property . . . the landscape is
deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the
meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
(Thoreau 1992: 131)
The farmer, as Cobbett shows and Thoreau reminds us, is often an
enthusiastic agent of rural capitalism rather than a centre of resistance to
it, and is, therefore, ill-suited to the stabilising role suggested by Virgil and
assigned by Jefferson.
The political consequences of idealising the rootedness of rural folk in
place and ancestral time are illustrated most starkly by Martin Heidegger.
|
|
13.4 Page 124 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 111
In his 1935 lecture ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger criti-
cises various philosophical interpretations of ‘things’ for their abstraction
of objects from a context of life and work. Meditating on the shoes
depicted in Van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Shoes (1886), he finds that they
reveal the true ‘thingness’ of things at the heart of a way of life:
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome
tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the
shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the
far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind.
. . . In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the
ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation
of the wintry field. . . . This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is
protected in the world of the peasant woman.
(Heidegger 1995: 159–60)
The shoes provide the gathering nexus of the inhuman and the human,
the earth from which they are made and to which they hark, and the
world in which they have meaning and use. A temporal landscape of long
inhabitation and ancestry coincides here with a known physical landscape,
its soil and climate, placing the rural dweller in profound opposition to
the mobile, deracinated urbanite. If the shoes themselves disclose both
‘earth’ and ‘world’, Van Gogh’s painting reveals this revelation, opening
up for the viewer a silent attentiveness to Being that they, presumably,
lack. Nor is it insignificant that the peasant woman herself is inarticulate,
since words might reveal her as one of Thoreau’s grasping, chattering
neighbours. As Kate Soper points out, ‘Heidegger’s presentation of a mute
and earthy peasantry, as embodying the “pre-understanding” that is lost
to technological wisdom, has proved inspirational as a rallying cry to the
establishment of “authentic” relations with nature, but it functions only
by denying to this “peasantry” a Heideggerian consciousness of its own
participation in Being’ (1998: 237). The shoes, it turns out, were Van
Gogh’s own, which indicates the way in which Heidegger is able to
extrapolate a lengthy meditation from a basis that is, in this case, simply
false.
The timing of Heidegger’s lecture is significant, since the philosopher
was an enthusiastic Nazi. His georgic philosophy was all too congruent
|
|
13.5 Page 125 |
▲back to top |
112 dwelling
with the strand in Nazi ideology that stressed the relationship of German
blood and soil, or ‘Blud und Boden’. Anna Bramwell, the foremost
historian of the links between Nazism and ecology, explains ‘blood and
soil’as ‘the link between those who held and farmed the land and
whose generations of blood, sweat and tears had made the soil part of
their being, and their being integral to the soil’ (1985: 54). The Nazis
not only appealed to small farmers and georgic philosophers, but also
to conservationists, enacting the world’s first comprehensive nature
conservation and animal welfare laws. An enthusiastic proponent of
organic farming, Richard Walter Darré, was appointed Reich Peasant
Leader, and the town of Goslar was made into a national neopagan shrine
to and for the peasantry. The Nazis even tried to limit the environmental
cost of their massive autobahn-building project, establishing ‘strict criteria
for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically-sensitive areas’ (Biehl and
Staudenmeier 1995: 15). The pursuit of harmonious dwelling for the
German people was ultimately extended, in an obscene paradox, into
industrial total war and genocide, as the invasion of the East secured
Lebensraum or ‘living space’ for the implementation of a brutal imperial
georgic. Even the extermination of the Jews could be justified in part by
their internationalism and urbanism; not only by their ‘blood’ but by their
supposed lack of allegiance to German soil. The outcome was a hideous
hybrid of modern and antimodern elements; as Timothy Luke puts it:
A reenchantment of Nature in Nordic myth and new Aryan ritual
produced V-2s, Auschwitz, ME-262s, and nuclear fission, while covering
itself in fables of Teutonic warriors true to tribal Blut und Boden.
Industrial fascism in Germany openly proclaimed itself to be antimodern
and future primitive.
(1997: 13)
Both Nazi ecology and Heidegger’s Nazism are highly controversial
(see Ferry 1995). Clearly, the virtues of nature conservation and organic
farming are in no way compromised by their promotion by Nazis,
and there is no sign in any major part of the modern environmental
movement of fascist authoritarianism. Nevertheless, it is significant that
environmentally orientated georgic ideology should have been so easily
appropriated. Bate’s The Song of the Earth gives careful consideration to
|
|
13.6 Page 126 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 113
‘the question concerning Martin Heidegger: is the relationship between
the Nazism which he never renounced and the theory of dwelling which
he developed in his late essays contingent or necessary?’ (2000: 268). Was
it merely a personal mistake or, as Heidegger thought, a deep congruence
that might bear upon contemporary thinking? Whilst the virulent racism
of Nazi georgic is wholly contingent, and its nationalism easily substituted
with a regional or individualistic focus, the social conservatism of an
appeal to ancestry, family and tradition rooted in place seems intrinsic to
georgic in its familiar and traditional forms. Heidegger is important
to ecocritics because he set out to ‘think dwelling’, but in doing so became
a nexus of georgic philosophy and the vast destruction wrought by
German National Socialism.
MODERN GEORGIC: BERRY, BERGER AND SALE
The foremost proponent of georgic today is the Kentuckian Wendell
Berry, whose defiantly homespun, plain prose contrasts as much with
Heidegger’s violent portentousness as his eclecticism and humane values
show up the philosopher’s political myopia. His work is also distinct
from that of the American nature writers alongside whom he is usually
considered, since his landscape is not wilderness but farmland, and his
characteristic technique not the shock tactics of nature writers like Edward
Abbey but ‘repetition and reassurance, always intensifying descriptive
detail or adding layer upon layer of perception’ (Slovic 1992: 118). Berry
has explicitly situated himself within a Christian georgic tradition, seeking
a ‘practical harmony’ inspired by both the long-term demands of a
‘beloved country’ and a sense of sacred duty called ‘stewardship’ in the
abstract, but repeatedly promoted figuratively as a ‘marriage’ of man
and place, culture and nature. In the first place, Berry rejects the primacy
of science, even ecological science, in favour of a resolute emphasis on
the affections, since ‘To be well used, creatures and places must be used
sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well
known’ (1990: 116). This love, founded on daily working knowledge,
corresponds to a Christian adherence to ‘the idea of stewardship as
conditioned by the idea of usufruct’ (pp. 98–9). The ‘justice’ and ‘charity’
demanded of Christians are practical rather than merely abstract virtues,
and cannot be restricted only to man on scriptural grounds. Man’s
|
|
13.7 Page 127 |
▲back to top |
114 dwelling
divinely ordained dominion is not simply a dispensation of power, but a
demand from God that we take responsibility for the natural world. Berry
argues that the Christian denominations have failed adequately to
acknowledge this burden, let alone to exhort their followers to assume it.
At the same time, this duty carries with it the right of just and charitable
use of God’s ‘properties’, the usufruct ideally practised by a loving and
sustainable agriculture.
The slaughter of a hog, for example, that to modern industrial agri-
culture represents merely an economic and logistical problem within
the limitations set by welfare legislation, is, for Berry, a sacramental act.
‘For the Hog Killing’ adopts the antiphonal structure found, for example,
in Psalm 95, beginning with injunction:
Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the
shooter in the eye,
let them die while the sound of the shot is in the
air, let them die as they fall . . .
(Berry 1980: 5)
The preoccupation here is not the welfare of the animal in itself, but
rather the authenticity of the encounter and the gratitude and respect
evinced by the killer. Properly carried out, the slaughter does not erode
but enhances his humanity:
for today we celebrate again our lives’ wedding with
the world,
for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew
the bond.
(ibid.)
The injunction finds vindication in Berry’s master metaphor of marriage,
that unifies his social and ecological concerns under the banner of his key
virtue: fidelity. Berry’s poetry, fiction and essays continually ask us, not to
stand apart from the earth and one another, but to become part of a biotic
and human community.
Berry’s frank piety is apt to disarm cynics, and his practical vision can
probably be shared by non-Christians, although they would have to look
elsewhere for philosophical justifications. However, Buell is generous
|
|
13.8 Page 128 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 115
when he argues that ‘[Berry’s] favorite analogy of man:woman = culture:
nature is more problematic than he realizes, but he seeks to rehabilitate
and purify it with an idealistic passion that can only be called patriarchal
in the heroic sense’ (Buell 1995: 161). As if in recognition of this, Buell’s
later treatment of Berry’s communitarianism attempts to counterbalance
the implication that his is a ‘white backcountry enclave’ ruled by wise and
loving male farmers, with dialectical consideration of Gwendolyn Brook’s
black, urban, woman-centred equivalent (Buell 2001: 157–67).
Alongside marriage, Berry’s locus of literal and figural value is land,
and more specifically soil. In ‘The Work of Local Culture’, Berry recalls
the story of a bucket left hanging from a tree by his father’s black
labourers. Over a span of some fifty years, it has accumulated falling
leaves, insects and bird droppings, beginning gradually to make soil. Its
literal significance for Berry is that production and maintenance of soil
fertility is the most basic duty of a human community. Metaphorically
‘It collects stories, too, as they fall through time’ (1980: 154). These
two fields of meaning do not just coincide in the bucket accidentally,
however:
A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn
them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself . . .
that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil
and local culture, are intimately related.
(Berry 1980: 154)
To be fully human, then, is to be a part of such a community. More
ominously, the reverse is logically true too: not to belong to such a
community is to be less than human, although one might say so either as
a lament or an indictment. While it is not impossible to imagine an urban
equivalent of Berry’s neo-Jeffersonian utopia, it is somewhat easier to
imagine escapees from oppressive rural communities, be they female,
black, gay, Jewish, short on piety or keen on anonymity, wanting none
of it.
An instructive contrast with Wendell Berry is provided by the British
novelist and art critic John Berger, whose long residence in the French
Alps has resulted in the trilogy Into Their Labours. The first novel Pig
Earth (1979) exemplifies georgic dwelling as shaped by socialism, rather
|
|
13.9 Page 129 |
▲back to top |
116 dwelling
than Christianity and American agrarianism. It begins, strikingly, with a
frank, detailed and dispassionate account of the slaughter of a cow. Once
the animal has been shot:
The son pushes a spring through the hole in the skull into the cow’s
brain. It goes in nearly twenty centimetres. He agitates it to be sure that
all the animal’s muscles will relax, and pulls it out. . . . [He] cuts by the
throat and the blood floods out onto the floor. For a moment it takes
the form of an enormous velvet skirt, whose tiny waist band is the lip of
the wound. Then it flows on and resembles nothing.
(Berger 1979: 4)
The narrator’s blunt prose, offering a metaphor and then retracting it,
reflects the eminent pragmatism of farmer and butcher, an orientation
repeated in other stories involving animals. The relationships of humans
and domestic animals in Pig Earth are funny, compassionate and humane
without sentimentality or anthropomorphism. Furthermore, although the
work of both Berry and Berger implies criticism of factory farming, the
latter situates it within a political rather than a theological context. Thus,
whereas farming ideally offers Berry a blessed refuge from capitalism, for
Berger the peasant way of life is precariously balanced on its jagged edge:
‘The peasant checks the meter. He has agreed to nine francs a kilo. He
gets nothing for the tongue, the liver, the hooves, the head, the offal. The
parts which are sold to the urban poor, the rural poor receive no payment
for’ (1979: 6).
Berger does not simply oppose town and country, field and factory,
honest farmer and corrupt capitalist, but carefully traces their inter-
relations, transactions and transformations. In ‘The Value of Money’,
apple farmer Marcel, whose sons have left the land, explains why he
keeps planting trees that will outlive him in the classic georgic terms of
responsibility to the past as well as the future:
I dig the holes, wait for the tender moon and plant out these saplings
to give an example to my sons if they are interested, and, if not, to show
my father and his father that the knowledge they handed down has not
yet been abandoned. Without that knowledge, I am nothing.
(Berger 1979: 67)
|
|
13.10 Page 130 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 117
Resisting his sons’ attempts to replace the mare with a tractor, he concedes
that ‘Men have dreamed of machines like these for centuries’ (p. 69), but
goes on to enumerate the process by which capitalisation of agriculture
divides generations and neighbours, destroys communities and concen-
trates power and wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer agricultural
businessmen.
Marcel’s resistance is crystallised when the State tries to tax his home-
brewed cider brandy. This ‘gnôle’ has both practical benefits and deep
symbolic meaning, as has the distillation engine that produces it: ‘Its
secret is to transform work into spirit. What is emptied into the vases is
work; what comes out of the beak is imagination’ (Berger 1979: 80). But
when Marcel is caught in the act by the inspectors, he is driven to kidnap
them and lock them in a stable to teach them a lesson, informing them of
taxes to pay on ‘worry’, ‘pain’ and ‘shivering’ and asking ‘Have you filled
in the form for your pain?’ (p. 90). Ultimately, however, he releases them
and is imprisoned, realising that the inspectors could only see his act as a
bid to make money, and ‘would never know what [he was] avenging’.
Marcel’s defiance is not simply a gesture against a modern bureaucracy,
but an example of the long peasant resistance to the expropriation of
his ‘surplus’ production. The methods change with transformations in
the general political and economic system – from feudal tithes through
capitalist taxes and socialist production norms – but the demand is the
same.
Berger is far from idealising the peasant way of life. He vividly depicts
the oppressive narrow-mindedness of the Alpine community, and its
incessant labour on the boundary of a voracious, changing economy
and a harsh, unpredictable ecology. Moreover, he states plainly that, since
the peasantry is always a class produced by oppressive socio-economic
relations, ‘In a just world [it] would no longer exist’ (Berger 1979: xxv).
Yet he argues that the georgic inflection of nature can function as
a critique of both capitalism and modernising, industrial versions of
socialism:
Productivity is not reducing scarcity. The dissemination of knowledge
is not leading unequivocally to greater democracy. . . . The peasant
suspicion of ‘progress,’ as it has finally been imposed by the global
history of corporate capitalism and by the power of this history even
|
|
14 Pages 131-140 |
▲back to top |
|
|
14.1 Page 131 |
▲back to top |
118 dwelling
over those seeking an alternative to it, is not altogether misplaced or
groundless.
(p. xxvi)
Here Berger’s fiction might suggest an avenue as yet inadequately
explored in ecocriticism, in which environmental critique meets the post-
colonial politics of resistance to economic globalisation (see Chapter 8).
Nevertheless it remains essential to maintain a discrimination between
such democratic socialist ambitions and the genocidal ‘back to the land’
movements in China and Cambodia. Berger does not acknowledge it, but
Maoists have experimented with the centrally planned implementation of
georgic, with catastrophic results.
Berger exemplifies socialist georgic, but in the western USA a
movement has emerged that seeks to combine traditional agrarianism
with more radical social ecological or anarchistic leanings. The term used
to describe this movement is ‘bioregionalism’. Kirkpatrick Sale’s seminal
work Dwellers in the Land (1985) explains the idea of a bioregion as an
eco-political unit that respects the boundaries of pre-existing indigenous
societies as well as the natural boundaries and constituencies of mountain
range and watershed, ecosystem and biome. Opposing what they call
‘giantism’ at every level, bioregionalists promote decentralisation of the
economy, in the form of regional diversification and self-sufficiency, as
well as the anarchistic dismantling of the centralised nation-state in favour
of confederated self-governing communities of 1,000 to 10,000 people.
Sale asserts that ‘Here, where people know each other and the essentials
of the environment they share, where at least the most basic information
for problem-solving is known and readily available, here is where gover-
nance should begin’ (1985: 94–5). Bioregionalism is therefore a politics
of ‘reinhabitation’ that encourages people to explore more deeply the
natural and cultural landscape in which they already live.
Bioregionalism has a number of attractive features as a version of
georgic. First, it can act as a political nexus, bringing together indigenous,
vernacular and regional movements struggling against homogenising
global culture, with anarchistic and social democratic political movements
and transregional environmental organisations working at a local level.
Conflicts between such groups would certainly continue, but the biore-
gion might form a geopolitical context within which they might be
|
|
14.2 Page 132 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 119
addressed more meaningfully than at a state or national level. Second,
bioregionalism can counteract the cultural and economic concentricity
of urban cultures, emphasising the ecological dependence of cities on
countryside and wilderness and undermining the false oppositions
inherent in pastoral and wilderness myths. Third, it is demandingly
pragmatic. In an attempt to move away from an exclusive focus on Sale’s
influential book, Doug Aberley argues that: ‘Bioregionalism is best
understood from the “inside,” not from reading one or several texts.
Gatherings should be attended, ephemeral periodicals reviewed, restora-
tion projects participated in, and place-based rituals and ceremonies
shared’ (Aberley 1999: 31). He goes on to identify a wide range of, mainly
grass-roots American, bioregional initiatives. The creation of the ethnic
bioregion of Nunavut Territory in Canada in 1999 and ‘the restructuring
of regional governance units in New Zealand to match major watershed
boundaries’ (p. 34) are larger-scale examples.
However, bioregionalism is vulnerable to some important objections.
The problem of defining boundaries in ecological terms is usually coun-
tered by an appeal to the scientifically informed intuition of reinhabitants.
It is likely to be less problematic where, as in North America and
Australia, the sovereign state is larger than the bioregions that will com-
pose it, since this will ensure there are fewer collisions with pre-existing
jurisdictions. Bioregions based on, say, the River Jordan watershed or the
Congo, would have to incorporate hostile ethnic groups who are deeply
rooted in their geographical locations as presently defined. At the same
time, emerging conflicts over water extraction and pollution would
seem to necessitate some sort of bioregional consciousness even in these
places if water wars are to be averted. A further challenge is that many of
the indigenous societies whose knowledge and lococentric values
bioregionalists admire are already thoroughly deracinated. Forced and
voluntary ethnic migration has changed the world’s cultural landscape just
as the deliberate and accidental movement of plant and animal species
has transformed the world’s biogeographical landscape. As Mitchell
Thomashow explains, it will paradoxically be necessary to develop a
‘cosmopolitan bioregionalism’:
In the twenty-first century we face the prospect of multiple ecological
and cultural diasporas, millions of migrants attempting to salvage their
|
|
14.3 Page 133 |
▲back to top |
120 dwelling
ecological and cultural integrity. . . . In the twenty-first century, having
a homeland will represent a profound privilege. Living-in-place may
become a quaint anachronism, reinhabitation a yuppie utopian vision.
(1999: 123)
Bioregionalism may well represent a positive influence in the ecocritical
search for a culture of dwelling, or a viable modern georgic, but it is not
a panacea. In addition, its tendency to idealise indigenous cultures links
it to the other major ecocritical inflection of dwelling, the notion of the
Ecological Indian.
THE ‘ECOLOGICAL INDIAN’
The Georgic model of dwelling is of diminishing relevance for most
North Americans and Europeans. ‘We’ apparently cannot dwell in
working harmony with nature, but perhaps other cultures are able to
do so. Since the sixteenth century at least, ‘primitive’ people have been
represented as dwelling in harmony with nature, sustaining one of the
most widespread and seductive myths of the non-European ‘other’.
The assumption of indigenous environmental virtue is a foundational
belief for deep ecologists and many ecocritics. Native Americans, or
American Indians, are the locus classicus for this assumption, although
South American Amazonian Indians have more recently come to the
fore as exemplary dwellers in the rainforest (see Slater 1996). Most
particularly, the Plains Indian societies of the Lakota/Sioux, Blackfoot,
Crow, Cheyenne and others have been transformed from Western film
villains into noble-but-doomed heroes of a supposedly primal culture
attuned to the Earth and its creatures. When the environmental organi-
sation Keep America Beautiful, Inc. wanted to capitalise on the mass
environmentalist sentiment of the early 1970s, they produced an
advertising campaign in which a tear rolled down the furrowed cheek of
an Indian called Iron Eyes Cody, with the slogan ‘Pollution: it’s a crying
shame’. It implied that white people, not Indians, make pollution, and
that Indian ethics of respect for nature were needed to counteract white
greed and destructiveness. As historian Shepard Krech III has argued, this
advert helped to crystallise a cultural stereotype of ‘Ecological Indians’
that had deep roots in Euro-American culture. From book covers to
|
|
14.4 Page 134 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 121
movie screens to gallery exhibitions, ‘the dominant image is of the Indian
in nature who understands the systemic consequences of his actions,
feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve
so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in
doubt’ (Krech 1999: 21) The minimal ecological impact claimed for
Indians is not supposed to be based only on low population densities
or pre-Columbian material cultures lacking metal weapons, guns and
horses, but upon animistic belief systems that constrained their actions.
Environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott claims that:
the typical traditional American Indian attitude was to regard all
features of the environment as enspirited. These entities possessed a
consciousness, reason, and volition, no less intense and complete than
a human being’s. The Earth itself, the sky, the winds, rocks, streams,
trees, insects, birds and all other animals therefore had personalities
and were thus as fully persons as other human beings.
(1983: 243)
Callicott’s contrast between these ecocentric beliefs and practices and
destructively anthropocentric Euro-American beliefs and practices is
exemplified in the film Dances with Wolves (1990), in which cavalry officer
John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) joins a Sioux band and learns a deep
admiration for them. In a pivotal scene, they come across a field of buffalo
(more properly called ‘bison’) carcasses with only the hides and tongues
missing, leading Dunbar to muse that the white hunters who presumably
killed them were ‘without value and without soul, with no regard for
Sioux rights’. Later, when the Sioux hunt the buffalo, it is an heroic,
albeit brutal, struggle showing, as Ingram argues, ‘the Sioux hunting
buffalo for sustenance rather than for financial profit, within a ritual
context, and in an environmentally harmonious way’ (2000: 78). In
accordance with the Sioux’s seemingly timeless traditions, all the body
parts of the animals are utilised to make a vast range of artefacts. The film
ends with the cavalry closing in on the Sioux, their way of life in danger
of vanishing forever.
A more detailed and subtle depiction of Plains Indian life in the
late nineteenth century is found in James Welch’s novel Fools Crow
(1986), about a Pikuni (Blackfoot) leader struggling to keep peace with
|
|
14.5 Page 135 |
▲back to top |
122 dwelling
the Napikwans (whites) as the massacre of buffalo and invasion of Indian
lands gathers pace. The fate of animals and people is intertwined, since
‘Without the blackhorn [buffalo], the Pikunis would be as sad as the
little bigmouths [coyotes] who howled all night’ (1986: 47). This
profound interdependence is reflected in the magic realist conventions of
the narrative: it is written conventionally, told by an omniscient, third-
person narrator with a linear timescale and believable, rounded characters,
yet animal helpers and other spirit beings such as So-at-sa-ki (Feather
Woman) mingle with them as part of everyday reality. In the middle of
the novel, Fools Crow takes his wife Red Paint to the mountains for a
holiday, but then hears from Raven about a white hunter who kills
indiscriminately and does not butcher the animals:
For three more sleeps I followed this strange Napikwan that leaves
his meat. He killed a long-tail, a bighead, three real-dogs and five
wags-his-tails. He even tried to kill your brother, Skunk Bear [wolverine],
but I flew ahead and warned him. In anger, the Napikwan took a shot at
me, scared the shit out of me, so I left. But for many moons now the
hunter kills animals until they become scarce. I fear he will kill us all off
if something isn’t done.
(p. 164)
When Fools Crow hesitates over killing a white man, Raven taunts him,
claiming that ‘“he would see his brothers, the four-leggeds and the flyers,
perish and not put up a fight”’ (p. 165). Shooting the stinking, rapacious
Napikwan in a gripping struggle, the Indian is depicted as a fighter for
both ecological survival and the survival of his human kin. At the end
of the novel, Feather Woman grants to Fools Crow an appalling vision of
the decimation of his people by disease and war, their containment on
bleak reservations and betrayal by the US government, and the anni-
hilation of the buffalo, the key herbivore of the Plain.
Welch’s elegiac lament is justified. The absence of epidemic diseases
in the pre-Columbian Americas meant that Indians were appallingly
vulnerable to familiar Old World illnesses from the common cold to
measles. This, combined with the superiority of European military tech-
nology and the aggressiveness of the imperialist ideology that drove it, led
to a catastrophe of inconceivable proportions. James Wilson’s history of
|
|
14.6 Page 136 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 123
Native America, The Earth Shall Weep (1998), says of the survivors at the
end of the nineteenth century:
The emotions of Native Americans themselves are hard to imagine.
In under four centuries, disease, warfare, hunger, massacre and despair
had reduced their population from an estimated 7–10 million to less
than 250,000. As well as costing them their independence and more
than ninety per cent of their land, the long struggle against Europeans
and Euro-Americans had ruptured their sense of reality.
(1998: 283)
The onslaught on America’s wildlife was similarly awesome in scale: 40
to 60 million bison were reduced to fewer than 1,000 animals by the end
of the century, while the vast flocks of passenger pigeons, totalling an
estimated 5 billion birds, were wiped out completely (Ponting 1992:
168–9). America’s rapidly growing wealth in the nineteenth century
was based on destruction and consumption of forests and wildlife so
astonishingly voracious that, in places, it amounted to an ‘ecocidal’
campaign to exhaust and refashion whole habitats. Invariably Indians had
previously dwelt in the habitats under threat, transforming and managing
them in their own ways.
Therefore the history of the colonisation of America has to be seen,
at least in large part, in ecological terms. According to Alfred Crosby
(1995), European imperialism is not solely an ideological or even just
a human phenomenon; on every continent, environments with similar
climates to Europe were invaded by a ‘portmanteau biota’ including
domestic, feral and wild animals and plants as well as epidemic and
epizootic pathogens. On the Plains, a whole European biota ultimately
supplanted a native American one in a well-documented campaign of
what Crosby calls ‘ecological imperialism’: whites brought ploughs, cattle,
pigs, tough short-stemmed grasses, European weeds, smallpox, measles
and whooping cough and drove out, in a combined ecological assault,
Indians, tall grasses and bison. Wherever the climate was less temperate
or the native flora and fauna more resilient, as in most parts of Africa,
biological colonisation was less complete and slower. In North America,
New Zealand and Australia, it was extremely rapid, near-total and
incredibly destructive.
|
|
14.7 Page 137 |
▲back to top |
124 dwelling
The image of the Ecological Indian is certainly potent, but it does
not accurately represent the environmental record of historical Native
Americans. There seems little reason to question the destructiveness and,
at times, genocidal racism of the Euro-American culture that opposed it.
Yet the idealisation that would make Indians and other indigenous people
models of ecological dwelling arguably derives primarily from the latter,
not the former, culture. Wilson points out that Indians are subjected even
by sympathisers to a derogatory colonial vocabulary that substitutes ‘tribe’
for ‘nation’, ‘medicine man’ for ‘doctor’ or ‘priest’. He goes on to observe
that the romantic elegy for the ‘vanishing’ Indian assumes the colonist’s
viewpoint since ‘vanishing is a kind of innate quality, as in vanishing
cream, something you do rather than something that is done to you’
(Wilson 1992: xxii). One of the most famous texts in the history of the
Ecological Indian is the alleged speech of Chief Seattle, or Seathl
(Suquamish), that was widely promoted during the 1960s and after as a
testament to Indian ecological values. In 1854, Seathl accepted a demand
from the US Government that he concede more land. However, in the
version of the speech that became famous over a century later, Seathl also
said that ‘Every part of this earth is sacred to my people . . . We are part
of the earth and it is part of us’ (1994: np). He went on to castigate the
white man for his indifference to the land: ‘One portion of land is the
same to him as the next. For he is a stranger who comes in the night and
takes from the land whatever he needs.’ The contrast neatly epitomises
the putative difference between Native and Euro-American inflections of
dwelling.
It now seems, however, that the speech was first given during treaty
negotiations, translated into the trading jargon Chinook, then into
English, then reconstructed from notes over 30 years later by white
physician Henry Smith. Seathl’s original words cannot be determined
with certainty, but it is likely that a negotiation demand for access to
ancestral burial grounds and secure reservation boundaries was trans-
formed by a white sympathiser into a combination of ecological testament
and elegy for the vanishing ‘Red Man’. The enthusiastic appropriation of
this apocryphal speech by environmentalists in the twentieth century
demonstrates the sway of the Ecological Indian.
The idea of the ‘primitive’ from which the Ecological Indian descends
is an ideologically charged piece of rhetoric, although unlike the
|
|
14.8 Page 138 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 125
other tropes we have examined it seems not to have such important
Judaeo-Christian or Graeco-Roman antecedents. It is a construction of
intra-human difference, introduced by humanistic philosophers such as
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78),
that responded to, and in turn influenced, European encounters with
indigenous Americans. In their attempts to understand human nature
without the burden of irrational religious prejudices, philosophers such as
Rousseau tried to articulate a vision of man before the advent of civil
society. They took indigenous peoples as possible representatives of
such a state. Their desire to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by means
of ethnic or racial constructions of difference is not unique to Euro-
American culture. Often such distinctions are drawn geographically,
reflecting the territorial claims of the different groups. The metaphor of
‘the primitive’ is unique, however, because it transforms a geographical
differentiation into an historical or evolutionary one, so that Indians or
aborigines can be seen as being behind Europeans in an inevitable
progression from a natural to a civilised state. Since all contemporary
human societies are, in a sense, as modern as each other, this metaphor
of the primitive can be seen as an ideological mystification. It was shared,
from the seventeenth century until well into the twentieth century,
both by those who viewed Native Americans as noble savages and as
irredeemable heathens and cannibals. Rousseau and Montaigne to some
extent lamented progress rather than celebrating it, but they left the basic
polarity of civilised and savage man in place. In the nineteenth century,
romantic social commentary in the tradition of Rousseau found a
practical outlet in woodcraft and Scout movements that praised Native
skills and virility, and in the twentieth century the Ecological Indian
resulted from an alliance between this frontier primitivism and anti-
modernist environmentalism.
The Ecological Indian is clearly a stereotype of European origin,
although it provides some Indians with a source of pride and aspiration
for themselves and their societies. Many contemporary Native writers also
evince annoyance at the indiscriminate appropriation of Native cultures,
under the banner of ecology, by the New Age industry and its Euro-
American customers, and more generally the failure to recognise the
differences between tribes and bands. Critics try to avoid stereotyping by
identifying a writer’s origin by tribe and even village, as I do here, but the
|
|
14.9 Page 139 |
▲back to top |
126 dwelling
distinctive cultures of the Plains Indians are often assumed to be
representative of all Native Americans. ‘Adventures of an Indian Princess’,
an angry tale by Patricia Riley (Cherokee), sees an Indian girl fostered by
a white family dressed up in faux-Indian gear and made to pose with
a ‘cut-and-paste “Indian”’ at a tacky ‘Indian trading post’: ‘This man
had his tribes all mixed up. He wore a fringed buckskin outfit, with
Plains-style geometric beaded designs, a Maidu abalone shell choker, and
moccasins with Chippewa floral designs beaded on the toes’ (Trafzer
1993: 137). At its crudest, the Ecological Indian represents a homogeni-
sation of the 600 or so distinct and culturally diverse societies in
pre-Columbian North America, or even the 314 federally recognised
tribes in the USA today.
For similar reasons, writing about pre-twentieth century Indians
presents problems. Native writers assume a certain responsibility to bear
witness to their history in their writing, countering the distortions and
suppressions of the dominant culture. Yet to write about, especially,
nineteenth-century Plains culture is to risk collusion with it, as Native
Canadian Thomas King observes:
Feathered warriors on Pinto ponies, laconic chiefs in full regalia, dusky,
raven-haired maidens, demonic shamans with eagle-claw rattles and
scalping knives are all picturesque and exciting images, but they are,
more properly, servants of a non-Native imagination.
(King 1990: xiii)
At the same time, just as Indians are culturally and genetically mixed
up in Euro-American society, so Indian writing in English is inevitably
a ‘hybrid’ form. Neither the novel nor lyric poetry were part of traditional
Native cultures, meaning that writers have had to graft oral traditions
onto them. This often implies a sense of community response and respon-
sibility, where ‘Much oral storytelling conveys a religious sensibility that
stresses ideals of reciprocity, wholeness and beauty and so expresses a deep
sense of attachment between a people and the land they inhabit’ (Padgett
2001: 18). While some people might be especially talented story-tellers,
everyone contributed to and benefited from the formation of a communal
narrative memory. The ‘community’ implied, moreover, goes beyond the
tribe, even beyond the human; as King explains, Native Americans and
|
|
14.10 Page 140 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 127
Canadians express a widely shared perspective in the common phrase ‘all
my relations’:
[It] is at first a reminder of who we are and of our relationship with both
our family and our relatives. It also reminds us of the extended
relationship we share with all human beings. But the relationships
that Native people see go further, the web of kinship extending to the
animals . . . to all the animate and inanimate forms that can be seen or
imagined. More than that, ‘all my relations’ is an encouragement for us
to . . . [live] our lives in a harmonious and moral manner (a common
admonishment is to say of someone that they act as if they had no
relations).
(King 1989: ix)
WRITING ‘RELATIONS’: SILKO AND ERDRICH
Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977) exemplifies many of these
characteristics. This novel is about the ritual realignment of damaged
mixed-race war veteran Tayo with ‘all his relations’. It tries to enact such
an alignment by incorporating parallel stories from the oral Pueblo
tradition about culture heroes and spirits, such as Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought
Woman, who thought the world into existence. Tayo’s recuperation from
the horror of the war in the Pacific against the Japanese involves trying to
escape the shadow of his lost, drunk Indian buddies from the army, and
returning to the ways of the Laguna people. The medicine man Ku’oosh
tries to help him by explaining the people’s relationship to a world that
is, in English, ‘fragile’: ‘The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled
with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent
in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in
the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web’ (Silko
1986: 35). As Tayo starts to engage with his people, he comes to perceive
connections between, to Euro-American eyes, disparate events, such as the
drought on the reservation, his buddies’ alcoholism and violence and the
day in the Philippines he cursed the jungle rain. He sees the war as having
alienated the young men both from their own people and, when they
returned home to find racism just as prevalent as when they left, from
America beyond the reservation. Eventually he comes to see a great
|
|
15 Pages 141-150 |
▲back to top |
|
|
15.1 Page 141 |
▲back to top |
128 dwelling
spiritual conspiracy or ‘witchery’ at work, using white people in particular
as tools in an apocalyptic ceremony that links the uranium-bearing rocks
of the reservation to the nearby Trinity nuclear test site and thence to the
atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and also linking the war to global
environmental crisis, the crisis in the Pueblo and to Tayo’s own struggle:
the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light
sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand
painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united
by the fate the destroyers had planned for all of them, for all living
things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities
thousands of miles away, victims who had never known these mesas,
who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their
slaughter.
(Silko 1986: 246)
Against this, Silko sets the possibility of hybrid ceremonies combining
old and new, Pueblo and Euro-American elements designed to confront
the ‘witchery’ and save Tayo, the people and the world.
Ceremony powerfully represents the environmental racism directed
at Pueblo and other ‘borderland’ peoples since, as Killingsworth and
Palmer observe, Tayo overcomes his alienation in part by identifying with
a larger community of relations damaged by the war machine (1998:
203). Joni Adamson’s American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice
and Ecocriticism quotes a 1987 report that claimed that ‘60 per cent of
African Americans and Latinos, and more than 50 per cent of Asian/
Pacific Islanders and Native Americans were living in areas with one or
more uncontrolled toxic waste sites’ (2001: xvi). This book is part of
a movement in ecocriticism from a preoccupation with pastoral and
wilderness towards a social ecological perspective. Adamson points out
that:
novels such as [Silko’s] Ceremony . . . are not set in the ‘pristine
wilderness areas’ celebrated by many mainstream American environ-
mentalists and nature writers. They are set on reservations, in open-pit
uranium mines, and in national and international borderlands. These
novels question and confront our most popular assumptions about
|
|
15.2 Page 142 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 129
‘nature’ and ‘nature writing’ by inviting us to take a hard look at the
contested terrains where increasing numbers of poor and marginalized
people are organizing around interrelated social and environmental
problems.
(2001: xvii)
As Adamson acknowledges, Native Americans are often both victims
and employees of polluting industries. Her critique therefore represents a
shift away from the notion of the Ecological Indian towards a nuanced
appreciation of the complex ecopolitical issues that permeate con-
temporary Native American culture and literature; from a poetics of
authenticity towards a poetics of responsibility.
Lawrence Buell praises the ‘fusion of regionalism and globalism’
in Ceremony and its brilliant hybridisation of oral tradition, realist novel
and apocalyptic fable (1995: 286), but then criticises it for an almost
utopian ending. Whilst he is right to point this out, it is probably the
only workable ending to a novel that has so thoroughly imbibed Judaeo-
Christian apocalyptic motifs. A similar problem afflicts Silko’s story ‘The
Return of the Buffalo’, where the orator Weasel Tail interprets the ills
of modern society as a spiritual affliction caused by white guilt, and
predicts the vanquishing of Euro-American society: ‘You think there is
no hope for indigenous tribal people here to prevail against the violence
and greed of the destroyers? . . . You forget the earth’s outrage and the
trembling that will not stop. Overnight the wealth of nations will be
reclaimed by the Earth’ (Trafzer 1993: 492). By reducing social, national
and ecological conflicts to a dualistic spiritual confrontation of ‘witchery’
and ‘ceremony’, or ‘natives’ and ‘destroyers’, Silko forfeits the subtle
discrimination needed to respond to environmental justice issues in
favour of a one-off drama that can only issue in disaster or utopia.
Louise Erdrich’s novels present a far more complex picture of the
social and ecological interrelations of Indian and Euro-American societies.
She often uses two or more narrators, sometimes in disrupted historical
sequences, to explore the complex interrelationships of generations
of North Dakota Chippewa, dwelling with each other and their landscape
and, as Padgett comments, ‘She conjures an environment in which
an animistic world view prevails even as a growing proportion of the
reservation’s population distances itself from traditional Chippewa
|
|
15.3 Page 143 |
▲back to top |
130 dwelling
culture’ (2001: 38). But unlike the third-person narration of Silko’s novel,
Erdrich’s multiple perspectives include sceptical as well as credulous ones,
inviting the reader to position themselves self-critically in relation to
them. When in Love Medicine (1984, 2nd edn 1993) the glamorous Lulu
Lamartine adopts the attitudes and jargon of the American Indian
Movement, a radical civil rights group, and helps to bring buffalo back to
the reservation, her son Lyman mocks her well-fed primitivism. Looking
out at the animals, Lulu reflects on:
‘The four-legged people. Once they helped us two-leggeds.’
This was the way her AIM bunch talked, as though they were
translating their ideas from the original earth-based language. Of
course, I knew very well they grew up speaking English. It drove me
nuts.
She went on, musing, and I tried to listen. ‘Creation was all
connected in the olden times.’
‘It’s pretty much connected now,’ I said. ‘As soon as my plumbing’s
hooked in I’ll be part of the great circle of life.’
(Erdrich 1994a: 307–8)
The prequel Tracks (1988) reaches back to the end of the nineteenth
century through the conflicting narratives of neurotic, mixed-blood
Pauline Puyat, who is determined to deny her Indian heritage and con-
quer paganism with a horrific brand of Catholicism, and of Nanapush, ‘a
turn-of-the-century embodiment of the archetypal Chippewa trickster
Nanabozo’ (Westling 1996: 158). The lives of both narrators span
a period of intense change. Despite ending up as a tribal politician,
Nanapush was once a great hunter: ‘I think like animals, have perfect
understanding for where they hide, and in my time I have tracked a deer
back through time and brush and cleared field, to the place it was born’
(Erdrich 1994b: 40). In an extraordinary scene, he helps Eli, Fleur’s lover,
to track and kill a moose in midwinter by means of a ritual song. Eli then
ties the butchered flesh onto his own body in order to carry the meat and
protect himself from the cold. Pauline still believes in the power of such
old ways, but they are anathema to her. This hatred binds her to her
enemies, so that when Fleur, a character who sustains a close relationship
with the spirits, suffers a miscarriage, Pauline not only fails to help
|
|
15.4 Page 144 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 131
effectively, but also accompanies her on a strange journey to a frozen
limbo full of buffalo and dead Indians to try to win back the infant’s
life.
At the end of the novel, Fleur is betrayed and her allotment sold to a
white timber company. Outright warfare against people, animals and
landscape has been replaced by a more insidious, though no less effective,
kind of invasion led by federal Indian agents and extractive industries (see
Wilson 1998: 289–329). Nevertheless, when the lumber men come to her
property, Old Woman Pillager has the last word:
Around me, a forest was suspended, lightly held. The fingered lobes of
leaves floated on nothing. The powerful throats, the columns of trunks
and splayed twigs, all substance was illusion. Nothing was solid. Each
green crown was held in the air by no more than splinters of bark.
Each tree was sawed through at the base.
. . . With one thunderstroke the trees surrounding Fleur’s cabin
cracked off and fell away from us in a circle, pinning beneath their
branches the roaring men, the horses.
(Erdrich 1994b 223)
As Westling asserts, it is a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ but one that exposes
what Euro-American writers effaced in their pastoral visions of the closing
of the frontier: ‘Colonization, genocide, legal chicanery, and corporate
pillage’ (Westling 1996: 164). Adamson argues that Erdrich identifies
electoral and cultural politics, as well as animist spirituality, as the proper
weapons of Native Americans against environmental racism, and that
‘Tracks . . . is cultural critique that calls for change and participation in
altering the power relations at the root of social and ecological problems’
(Adamson 2001: 112). Moreover, Erdrich’s novels portray not simply an
inevitable annihilation of Indian ways of life, as in the myth of the
‘vanishing Indian’, but ongoing struggles against improbable odds in
which no conclusions can be taken for granted.
THE TROUBLE WITH ANIMISM
It is one of the most widespread, and least carefully examined, assump-
tions in American ecocriticism that the affirmation of community and
|
|
15.5 Page 145 |
▲back to top |
132 dwelling
spiritual tradition represents a quest for ecological dwelling that is relevant
today. Ecofeminist critics, in particular, have correlated Native animism
with both ecology and feminism, drawing in part upon matrifocal and
matriarchal traditions in some Indian tribes. For example, Westling
suggests that Erdrich’s novels solve the problem of gendered landscapes
that Euro-American pastoral had posed, and Greta Gaard’s account of
ecofeminist pedagogy ‘Hiking Without A Map’ (1998) traces the
responses of a seminar class to Ceremony, reflecting the importance
of Indian literature to the ecocritical canon, but making no mention of
critical questions about either its apocalypticism or the problematic
relationships of spirit, science and politics that it raises. Indeed, in
contemporary ecofeminist readings, spiritual ‘ecology’, or animism, not
only complements scientific ecology, but is at times posited as a superior
wisdom. Paula Gunn Allen suggests that Einsteinian physics approximates
to the Indian understanding of the identity of spirit and matter, but that
it ‘falls short’ of the latter because it fails to see energy as ‘intelligence
manifested in yet another way’ (1996: 246–7). In the assessment of J.
Donald Hughes, Indian traditions deserve to be seen as ‘an ethnic science’:
Indians were keenly observant and rational, but would make expla-
nations that would be excluded even as hypotheses by modern Western
science, because they were often subjective and mystical. But they were
always based upon empirical observation and experience.
(Hughes 1996b: 79)
The relationship between animistic beliefs and environmentally
sustainable dwelling is rarely questioned in historical, literary or ecocritical
contexts, despite very mixed historical and anthropological evidence.
There is no doubt that, until decimation, displacement and colonisation
supervened, Indians thoroughly knew and cherished the places they
inhabited, but this does not necessarily correspond to ecological under-
standing and responsibility in a modern sense. The famous example of
the buffalo hunt and its historical transformations exemplifies the
distinction.
Hughes, who explicitly prefers the accounts of contemporary Indians
to archaeological and other sources of evidence in his book North
American Indian Ecology, speaks for both white and Indian traditions
|
|
15.6 Page 146 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 133
when he says that ‘Indians were living in ecological balance with the herds
of buffalo’ (1996b: 42) before mass hunting by whites began. He also
tries to show that Native beliefs, rather than low population density or
lack of technological means, prevented them from overexploiting the
herds. However, the Plains Indian way of life that Euro-Americans both
feared and admired was only around a century old by 1850, a testament
to the adaptability of Indian societies rather than to their ‘timeless’
harmony with nature. Martin Lewis’s survey of the mixed environmental
record of ‘primal people’ argues that ‘No harmonious relationship
between prey and predator could have been established in this short,
demographically unstable period’, especially given the alacrity with which
some tribes catered to the Euro-American demand for buffalo products
(Lewis 1992: 65).
Shepard Krech III’s detailed account shows that Indians did indeed
view and treat buffaloes as ‘other-than-human persons’, surrounding
their hunts with elaborate rituals suggesting great respect for them, but
also that, in the case of Piegan and Cree, their beliefs included the fear
that buffaloes who escaped the hunt could warn the others. Before the
arrival of the horse transformed Plains societies, buffalo were often driven
into rivers or over bluffs to kill them, or forced into pounds to be
slaughtered, and the Indians’ belief therefore entailed killing all the
animals they could in order to prevent escapees foiling future drives.
Remains from bluffs used over hundreds or thousands of years suggest
that some drives produced far more carcasses than could be completely
butchered.
A more widespread and well-attested belief, held by Arapahoe and
Cheyenne, was that buffalo wintered in underground caves or pastures
underneath lakes, a factor that may have militated against conservation.
After all, ‘If buffaloes returned each year from the earth because they were
of the earth, how could they possibly go extinct?’ (Krech 1999: 149).
Respect was due primarily to the animals’ spirit master, ensuring that
rigorous regard for proper treatment of the creatures would never system-
atically align with modern notions of animal welfare or conservation.
Among some Cree in Canada, belief in animal reincarnation meant that
the more animals they killed, the more there would be, provided that the
correct ritual preparation of the hunter and treatment of the carcass were
observed (pp. 205–6).
|
|
15.7 Page 147 |
▲back to top |
134 dwelling
If animism is not necessarily ecological, neither is ecology the science
of harmony and balance that certain critics have assumed. The most
recent ecological theory is markedly wary of the rhetoric of classical
ecology since it too often fails to accord with observed reality. For
example, Michael Pollan discusses the destruction by a tornado of an old-
growth forest called Cathedral Pines. Classical theories of forest succession
would predict that, undisturbed, it would go through a predictable series
of intermediate states, eventually reverting to its ‘balanced’ condition
before the storm: the ‘climax’ forest. The reality is far more complex and
unpredictable, as ‘Nature may possess certain inherent tendencies, ones
that theories such as forest succession can describe, but chance events can
divert her course into an almost infinite number of channels’ (Pollan
2002: 198–9). Pollan’s claim is based in part on the work of ecologist
Daniel Botkin, who, in his controversial book Discordant Harmonies:
A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (1990), sets out a series of
scientific case studies that demand a fundamental philosophical reassess-
ment of ecology, arguing that the prevalent view of ‘a very strict concept
of a highly structured, ordered, and regulated, steady-state ecological
system’ is now known to be ‘wrong’ (Botkin 1992: 9).
The rhetoric of balance and harmony that sustained the Ecological
Indian is at least as problematic as, historically and politically, the stereo-
type is itself: ‘In a balanced, harmonious, steady-state nature, indigenous
people reproduced balance and harmony. In an open nature in which
balance and climax are questionable, they become, like all people,
dynamic forces whose impact, subtle or not, cannot be assumed’ (Krech
1999: 23). Such sceptical views of the overarching master narrative offered
by classical ecology, in which undisturbed nature inevitably sustains
a balanced ecology, are sometimes called ‘postmodern ecology’. This
perspective will be discussed further in the final chapter.
The analysis presented here should not undermine a proper respect for
the ways of life of Native peoples, although it does enjoin suspicion of any
attempts to make them figures of ecological piety and authenticity. The
figure of dwelling is crucial, as it inflects nature as the troubled ground of
work, knowledge, economy and responsibility, whereas the Ecological
Indian inhabits an improbable Eden untouched by ignorance, stupidity
or greed. Indians, we should assume, radically transformed landscapes
long before Europeans, as far as possible in their own interests, with
|
|
15.8 Page 148 |
▲back to top |
dwelling 135
considerable knowledge and skill but always within the terms of their
own cultural cosmos. Neither contemporary Indians nor other Americans
can readily understand that world, let alone inhabit it, as much of the
best Native writing affirms. Andrew Ross argues that overemphasis on
spiritual ideas obscures ‘the fact that a society bound together by a nature
philosophy holds no guarantee of ecological well-being if it is governed
by a pyramidal social hierarchy that depends upon selective access to
natural resources to maintain its power’ (Ross 1994: 71). Supposedly
‘primitive’ peoples may internalise the myths propagated about them,
but they may also manipulate and deploy them in their own economic
and political interests. According to this social ecological analysis,
circumventing primitivism may lead us to a new perspective altogether,
perhaps even to a society ‘in which conscious organization of political,
economic and cultural life is directed towards maximizing the diversity of
natural life by minimizing social inequality’ (1994: 72).
Interpretation and critique of the various inflections of dwelling is a
major task for ecocritics interested in a predominantly political, rather
than moral or spiritual, project of cultural critique that can take us beyond
pastoral and nature writing, from the landscapes of leisure to the uneven
terrain of real work.
|
|
15.9 Page 149 |
▲back to top |
7
ANIMALS
The study of the relations between animals and humans in the
Humanities is split between philosophical consideration of animal rights
and cultural analysis of the representation of animals. A remarkably recent
phenomenon, it derived impetus primarily from Peter Singer’s revolu-
tionary Animal Liberation (1975), which examined an issue until then
discussed in passing by moral philosophers but seldom fully explored.
Singer drew upon arguments first put forward by Utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who suggested that cruelty
to animals was analogous to slavery and claimed that the capacity to feel
pain, not the power of reason, entitled a being to moral consideration.
Singer gives the label ‘speciesism’ to the irrational prejudice that Bentham
identifies as the basis of our different treatment of animals and humans.
Just as, say, women or Africans have been mistreated on the grounds of
morally irrelevant physiological differences, so animals suffer because
they fall on the wrong side of a supposedly ‘insuperable line’ (cited in
Singer 1983: 8) dividing beings that count from those that do not. Yet it
turns out to be impossible to draw that line in such a way that all animals
are excluded and all humans are included, even if we turn, as many have
done, to the faculties of ‘reason’ or ‘discourse’: for Bentham ‘a full-grown
horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more
conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month
|
|
15.10 Page 150 |
▲back to top |
animals 137
old’ (1983: 8). The boundary between human and animal is arbitrary and,
moreover, irrelevant, since we share with animals a capacity for suffering
that only ‘the hand of tyranny’ (ibid.) could ignore.
The Utilitarian ‘principle of equality’ states that everyone is entitled to
equal moral consideration, irrespective of family, race, nation or species,
and for Singer ‘If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for
refusing to take that suffering into consideration’ (1983: 9). Differences
between the objects of our concern will make a difference to what, exactly,
we do, so it would be senseless to campaign for votes for animals, but
Singer contends that the suffering of a human should not automatically
count for more than the suffering of an animal. This argument derives
from the Utilitarian tradition in ethics, which holds that actions are not
right or wrong in themselves, but only insofar as they bring happiness
or cause pain. Singer’s inclusive version of it is presented in the first
chapter of his book, while the remainder is devoted to the promotion of
vegetarianism and the exposure of horrifying vivisection and factory
farming practices, arguing throughout for the liberation of animals.
A less radical position than Singer’s ‘liberationist’ stance is espoused by
Mary Midgley, whose book Animals and Why They Matter (1983) remains
an excellent introduction to animal ‘welfarism’. She qualifies the principle
of equality, arguing that we are sometimes right to prefer the interests of
our human kin, and criticises Singer’s analogy of racism and speciesism:
Overlooking somebody’s race is entirely sensible. Overlooking their
species is a supercilious insult. It is no privilege, but a misfortune, for
a gorilla or a chimpanzee to be removed from its forest and its relatives
and brought up alone among humans to be given what those humans
regard as an education.
(Midgley 1983: 99)
At the same time, she explores the concept of anthropomorphism. It is
worth noting here that the few who oppose the liberationist stance on
factory farming on philosophical, not economic, grounds (e.g. Leahy
1994) have criticised anthropomorphism, arguing that we mistakenly
ascribe human attributes, such as our own desire for freedom, to the
animals involved. Midgley looks back to the origins of the term, which
was first applied to the false attribution of human shape and qualities to
|
|
16 Pages 151-160 |
▲back to top |
|
|
16.1 Page 151 |
▲back to top |
138 animals
God. The problem for theologians who attacked anthropomorphism
was that their scepticism seemed to deny God any qualities whatsoever.
Similarly, the sceptical attack on sentimental views of animals risks
making it impossible to describe animal behaviour at all. The problem
therefore is to distinguish between kinds of anthropomorphism, which is
often a very practical matter. An example is the ‘mahout’ or elephant
handler:
Obviously the mahouts may have many beliefs about the elephants
which are false because they are ‘anthropomorphic’ – that is, they
misinterpret some outlying aspects of elephant behaviour by relying on
a human pattern which is inappropriate. But if they were doing this
about the basic everyday feelings – about whether the elephant is
pleased, annoyed, frightened, excited, tired, sore, suspicious or angry –
they would not only be out of business, they would often simply be
dead.
(Midgley 1983: 115)
Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy’s survey of evidence for animal
emotions suggests that scientific researchers insulate themselves from
moral qualms by rejecting as ‘inappropriate’ the descriptive language more
usually used for human behaviour, so that ‘A monkey is not angry, it
exhibits aggression. A crane does not feel affection; it displays courtship
or parental behaviour’ (Masson and McCarthy 1996: 45). This can
extend to a reluctance to give observed animals ordinary names: ‘Granted
that a number is more dehumanised than a name, does that make it more
scientific? Assigning names to them . . . can be called anthropomorphic,
but so is assigning numbers. Chimpanzees are no more likely to think of
themselves as F2 or JF3 than as Flo or Figan’ (1996: 47). Their study
gives remarkable examples of a variety of emotions in animals, including
hope, grief, happiness and rage, although their examples of very complex
emotions such as compassion and shame are less convincing. Liberationist
criticism seeks to enhance the status of animals by undermining the
‘insuperable line’ between humans and animals criticised by Bentham.
The ultimate implication is that even the opposition between technology
and nature is unsustainable, as electro-mechanical and biological processes
become ever more closely interfused. Contemporary ‘cyborg’ criticism
|
|
16.2 Page 152 |
▲back to top |
animals 139
takes Bentham’s argument to the extreme, claiming that postmodern
technologies such as artificial body organs are challenging the traditional
distinction between machine and organism, thereby threatening the
notion of the ‘human’ itself.
The activist orientation of liberationist criticism is formulated in
ethical debates, but the distinctive inflection of modern Cultural Studies
comes from John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1980), which
examines the animal question as a social and aesthetic issue. When we
look at animals, they return our gaze, and in that moment we are aware
of both likeness and difference. Hence the peasant ‘becomes fond of his
pig and is glad to salt away his pork’ (Berger 1980: 5). For the integrated,
pre-modern sensibility, the fondness and the slaughter are not contra-
dictory. It is only through industrialisation that most animals are removed
from everyday life, and the meat production process hidden away. Once
marginalised in this way, the few animals still visible to us can be only
‘human puppets’ as family pets or Disney characters, or else the objects of
spectacle, most often wildlife books and films, where
. . . animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us
has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending
knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and
thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the
further away they are.
(Berger 1980: 14)
If the pet is just a mirror, reflecting back our gaze with no autonomy,
TV wildlife is powerless to make its gaze register at all against our imperial
eye. To the morality of liberation, which he might regard as a further
symptom of our alienated distance from animals, Berger adds the rather
different politics of representation.
Neither of these is directly related to ecology, not least because
environmentalism and animal liberation conflict in both theory and
practice. Animal liberationists generally draw the line of moral consid-
eration at the boundary of sentience or feeling. For Singer, this is
somewhere between crustaceans and molluscs, leaving mussels on the
menu but taking crab and lobster off. Environmental ethics, on the other
hand, places far less emphasis on the individual organism, but demands
|
|
16.3 Page 153 |
▲back to top |
140 animals
moral consideration for inanimate things such as rivers and mountains,
assuming pain and suffering to be a necessary part of nature. These ethical
conflicts have practical consequences, in that liberationists are generally
opposed to hunting, whereas ecophilosophers argue that in some cases
exploding populations of a certain species must be culled if they threaten
a local environment as whole (see Callicott 1995: 39). Such conflicts have
become especially pressing in cases where non-native predators or
destructive herbivores threaten fragile ecologies. However, since much
livestock farming is objectionable on both environmental and welfare
grounds, liberationist cultural studies may be seen as an important ally of
ecocriticism if not strictly a branch of it.
We have seen how ‘pastoral’ and ‘wilderness’ function as tropes, but
‘animal’ too has a range of important functions as a trope. At the simplest
level, we are familiar with animal similes of the form ‘as stubborn as a
mule’. The play of likeness and difference in the relationship of humans
and animals in general may be analysed in terms of the distinction of
metonymy and metaphor:
The distinctive peculiarity of animals is that, being at once close to
man and strange to him, both akin to him and unalterably not-man, they
are able to alternate, as objects of human thought, between the
contiguity of the metonymic mode and the distanced, analogical mode
of the metaphor.
(Willis 1974: 128)
Humans can both be, and be compared to, animals. There is, there-
fore, an extensive ‘rhetoric of animality’, as Steve Baker calls it, that is as
functional in descriptions of human social and political relations as it is
in describing actual animals. Liberationist cultural critics typically focus
on the place of domestic animals within this rhetoric, whereas ecocritics
study the representation of wild animals, a difference in emphasis that
roughly corresponds to Berger’s family/spectacle dichotomy, and the
animal rights/environmental ethics contrast. These provisional distinc-
tions will form the basis for a separate consideration of the two strands in
the remainder of this chapter.
|
|
16.4 Page 154 |
▲back to top |
animals 141
DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND CYBORGS
An excellent example of liberationist criticism is Steve Baker’s Picturing
the Beast (1993), which analyses the use of animal stereotypes in political
contests and animal cartoon strips. Baker insists that the common-sense
distinction between actual animals and images of them, represented
earlier in terms of the different interests of Singer and Berger, ought not
to lead us to trivialise the image in favour of the actual, to prioritise ethics
over aesthetics, since:
much of our understanding of human identity and our thinking about
the living animal reflects – and may even be the rather direct result of –
the diverse uses to which the concept of the animal is put in popular
culture, regardless of how bizarre or banal some of those uses may
seem. . . . Culture shapes our reading of animals just as much as
animals shape our reading of culture.
(Baker 1993: 4)
One case is the use of animals in a ‘rhetoric of moral and social regula-
tion’ (1993: 89); for example, violent or sexually immoral behaviour is
routinely condemned as ‘bestial’ or ‘animal’. Baker wonders whether
this usage reflects, or sustains, the contempt for animals some modern
practices imply, and he shows how British Labour politicians were
discredited in the early 1980s by newspaper cartoons that metaphori-
cally likened them to animals. By contrast, Second World War cartoons
deployed metonymic images in which ‘the lion stands for Britain . . . the
bald eagle stands for the United States’ (Baker 1993: 108). The Labour
politicians were represented ‘therianthropically’, combining human and
animal characteristics for purposes of mockery, whereas the lion and the
eagle were ‘theriomorphic’ images of Britain and America. Theriomor-
phism is the reverse of anthropomorphism, and is often used in contexts
of national or racial stereotyping, such as when Nazis depicted Jews as
rats.
One of Baker’s major contributions to liberationist criticism is his
elaboration of ‘disnification’ as a critical term: ‘With regard to the animal,
the basic procedure of disnification is to render it stupid by rendering
it visual’ (Baker 1993: 174). Anthropomorphic animal narratives are
|
|
16.5 Page 155 |
▲back to top |
142 animals
generally denigrated as ‘childish’, thereby associating a dispassionate,
even alienated perspective with maturity. Disnification exacerbates this
existing association, as reflected in the colloquial use of ‘Mickey Mouse’
to describe something as trivial or worthless. The visual cue of disni-
fication is ‘neoteny’, or the set of characteristics we instinctively associate
with infant humans and animals: large eyes, a big head relative to the
body, short limbs and a generally rounded configuration. Both the real
panda and the WWF logo in which it appears exemplify neoteny, and
also the disnified ‘cutesy’ relation to nature that it implies. Baker claims
that ‘there is little point in complaining about this: it is simply how
disnification seems currently to operate’ (1993: 182), although his final
chapter suggests how non-disnified images of animals might be promoted.
Looking further back, Erica Fudge’s Perceiving Animals (2000) traces
in the early modern period, specifically 1558–1649, an overlapping
series of attempts, in theology, law and other disciplines, to define the
‘insuperable line’ between humans and animals. Fudge starts with an
anecdote: the visit of the Italian Alessandro Magno to the Bear Garden
on the South Bank in London in 1562. Her stated aim thereafter is to
account for the evidently considerable pleasure that he, and many others,
derived from watching animals being torn to pieces. Her explanation is
that people felt the need perpetually to reassert human dominance over,
and separation from, the animal kingdom by baiting horses, bears,
monkeys and bulls, but that this attempt was doomed to fail in a vicious
circle of anxiety and sadism: ‘To watch a baiting, to enact anthropocen-
trism, is to reveal, not the stability of species status, but the animal that
lurks beneath the surface. In proving their humanity humans achieve the
opposite. The Bear Garden makes humans into animals’ (Fudge 2000:
15) Fudge supports her argument by citing sixteenth-century critics
of baiting, who derided the people who enjoyed it as being ‘bestial’,
thereby rhetorically undermining the very ‘humanity’ it was supposed to
reinforce. Apologists for blood sports then and now assert that the
suffering of the animal is not their object, but Fudge points out that their
activities would be entirely meaningless were there no emotional reaction
from the animal at all. There could be no ‘sport’ in bear-baiting or fox-
hunting if the participants were insentient. However, it might be argued
that her attempt to deconstruct the boundary between human and animal
fails, as it wrongly assumes that when opponents of bear-baiting castigated
|
|
16.6 Page 156 |
▲back to top |
animals 143
those who enjoyed it as being ‘bestial’, their rhetoric of animality may be
taken to subvert a putatively superior ‘humanity’. Kate Soper argues, on
the contrary, that such abuse actually reinforces the notion of human
difference because it sustains what she calls ‘negative anthropomorphism’,
or in Baker’s terminology, theriomorphism:
The animal is here used to police rather than confuse the human–
nature divide; by associating all our ‘lowlier’ characteristics and bodily
functions with animality, we assert the importance of sustaining those
higher or more spiritual attributes that grant us human sovereignty over
the beast.
(Soper 1998: 86)
So while Fudge’s historical detail testifies to considerable debate about the
proper treatment and theological status of animals, it does not sustain
the more dramatic claim that ‘in each exercise of dominion the anti-
thetical position emerges: humans become the animals they attempt to
dominate’ (1998: 143).
There are many, varied ways of tracing the ‘insuperable line’, from the
possession of an immortal soul through existential freedom, neurological
differentiation and symbolic language use to the anatomy of the human
hand that enables sophisticated tool-making. Fudge shares with a number
of other liberationist critics the assumption that this plethora of claims
and arguments does not prove the unassailable security of our position as
top species. On the contrary, it betrays an anxious, self-defeating need to
construct and continually reinforce a difference that nature has not
supplied, so that our dominionist beliefs and practices may continue
unmolested. Singer’s notion of a moral overlap of ‘higher’ mammals and
‘lower’ humans translates in liberationist criticism into attacks on the
paranoid frontier mentality of successive generations of self-deluding
humanists. These derive much of their force from their subversion of the
boundaries of the human.
One of the most intriguing post-human critiques is Michael Shapiro’s
analysis of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
and the popular film adaptation Blade Runner (1982). In Dick’s novel,
bounty hunter Rick Deckard pursues escaped androids or ‘replicants’ in
a post-apocalyptic future where the few animal species that remain
|
|
16.7 Page 157 |
▲back to top |
144 animals
command exorbitant prices. With each replicant he ‘retires’, Deckard gets
closer to the day that he can replace his robot sheep with a real goat, but
as he tracks down and kills six of the advanced bio-electronic Nexus-6
type androids, his sense of human superiority is challenged and finally
shattered. As Shapiro observes, Dick’s novel explores the challenge posed
to human identity not only by animals but also by cyborgs. In the novel,
the standard Voigt-Kampff test used to expose replicants relies on
measuring empathetic responses, often to imaginary scenarios involving
injury to animals. The androids’ failure to respond to the pain of animals
both identifies them and legitimates their retirement, but precisely
because they are so realistic, they also threaten the bounty hunter’s own
sense of his animal-loving, empathetic humanity:
To dissociate themselves from androids, humans must associate
themselves with animals (which are in turn disassociated from androids
if they are ‘real’). Accordingly, Deckard attempts to retire rogue androids
in order to be able to afford a live pet, which he wants in order to
distinguish himself from androids.
(Shapiro 1993: 68)
In this world teetering on the edge of final collapse, the insuperable line
between human and animal is undermined in order to bolster the
boundary between human and android. Deckard is exposed to the
inconsistencies involved in his profession in the following conversation
with an opera-singing replicant called Luba Luft:
‘Do you have information that there’s an android in the cast? I’d be glad
to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?’
‘An android,’ he said, ‘doesn’t care what happens to another android.
That’s one of the indications we look for.’
‘Then,’ Miss Luft said, ‘you must be an android.’
That stopped him; he stared at her.
(Dick 1997: 79)
Deckard’s position is fatally compromised by a sexual relationship
with Rachael Rosen, a Nexus-6 sent by the manufacturers. She shows a
painful degree of self-consciousness about her being: ‘“ . . . We’re not
|
|
16.8 Page 158 |
▲back to top |
animals 145
born; we don’t grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age we wear
out like ants. . . . I’m not alive! You’re not going to bed with a woman.
Don’t be disappointed; okay?”’ (p. 146). Her words are somewhat
self-contradictory given that these androids combine biological and
electro-mechanical elements. Repeatedly in the novel, the boundaries
break down, and many humanity-confirming animals turn out, like
Deckard’s sheep, to be machines. Moreover, Deckard’s injured human
colleague Dave Holden receives a prosthetic implant to save him, making
him part cyborg, while another bounty hunter Phil Resch evinces a
callousness towards replicants that seems psychopathic in its own
right.
Animals play a far less prominent role in Ridley Scott’s film than
in Dick’s novel, with a greater emphasis falling on the pathos of the
replicants’ struggle for life and identity. Shapiro argues that this is
thematised from the opening moments of the film through the motif of
the eye, ‘representing both vision as the “eye” and identity as the “I”’
(Shapiro 1993: 75). The Voigt-Kampff test closely monitors involuntary
eye movements in order to gauge empathy, and therefore identity. When
the replicant leader Roy Baty confronts his maker, he kills him by gouging
out his eyes, and when he meets the subcontractor who manufactured the
Nexus-6 eyeballs, he comments, with superb ambiguity, ‘If only you
could see what I have seen with your eyes.’ As in the novel, Deckard’s role
as bounty hunter, or ‘blade runner’, ultimately clashes with precisely those
human sentiments that he is supposed to defend: ‘Replicants weren’t
supposed to have feelings, but neither are blade runners. What was
happening to me?’ In a climactic fight scene, Roy Baty injures and
mutilates, then rescues and redeems Deckard. Reflecting upon his all-too-
brief existence, Baty says, ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.’
Yet even as the witness of his eyes confirms an identity beyond the narrow
configurations of the human, he recognises his own mortality: ‘And now,
it’s time to die.’ This more than anything renders the human/cyborg
boundary impossible to sustain.
The implications of this second frontier for ecocriticism have not been
widely explored, despite the emergence of a vibrant field of ‘cyborg
studies’ founded principally on the work of Donna Haraway (see Gray
1995). In her seminal ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, she points out the ubiquity of
the cyborg in science fiction, modern medicine and high-technology
|
|
16.9 Page 159 |
▲back to top |
146 animals
warfare. The cardiac patient with a pacemaker and the attack heli-
copter pilot with a gunsight that tracks eyeball movement are becoming
monsters almost as familiar as the Terminators (1985, 1991, 2003). The
cyborg is quickly becoming autonomous, subverting an apparently
limitless number of dualistic schema, according to Haraway: animal/
human, organism/machine, male/female, physical/non-physical. It is
located at the nexus of change in both microelectronics and biology,
as computers begin to mimic and to incorporate biological processes, thus
transforming the science of living organisms into ‘a powerful engineering
science for redesigning materials and processes’ (Haraway 1991: 165).
The Internet emerges as the natural home of the cyborg, even as nature
loses its capacity to offer ‘a source of insight and promise of innocence’
(p. 153). This seems to leave us adrift in a compromised society bereft of
metaphysical consolation or despair, yet although Haraway demonstrates
the ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’, she nevertheless insists upon
the need for ‘responsibility in their construction’ (p. 150). In Haraway’s
case, the cyborg is a thoroughly political animal, committed to socialism
and feminism.
The cyborg will be a key figure in a poetics of responsibility because its
irreverence and keen sense of irony are quite incompatible with traditional
pastoral, wilderness and apocalyptic tropes: ‘The cyborg would not
recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream
of returning to dust’ (Haraway 1991: 151). Not having ‘fallen’, the cyborg
does not need to be redeemed, only to survive; it remains outside the
‘salvation history’ that underlies some ecophilosophical and ecocritical
positions. Haraway argues that cyborgs need to develop political strategies
of resistance that do not depend upon the kind of dualistic model of
technology versus nature found in Carolyn Merchant, Heidegger and
many deep ecologists. Her position acknowledges ‘that science and
technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a
matrix of complex dominations’ (p. 181). She even goes so far as to claim
it is necessary to ‘advocate pollution’ to the extent that such a tactic
undermines the principle of moral and material purity that was outlined
in the Introduction. Some of the most enthusiastic cyborgs are to be
found in youth cultures centred on music, dance and ‘neurotechnologies’
(formerly known as ‘drugs’) ancient and modern, ‘natural’ or not. Andrew
Ross claims that:
|
|
16.10 Page 160 |
▲back to top |
animals 147
From the electric boogie style of early breakdancing to the braindraining
energy worship of hardcore techno, hybrid species of high technology
have been a material presence in recent popular music, comfortably
coexisting with ancient oral traditions in rap, and with neopagan forms
of tribal communing among ravers.
(Ross 1994: 235)
For Haraway and Ross, the cyborg represents an opportunity to flout
the boundaries of gender and species, although as Ross points out,
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg incarnation in the first Terminator
film offers scant grounds for optimism given his violent, exaggerated
masculinity.
The example of the ‘Oncomouse’, a patented species of mouse that
spontaneously grows tumours and is therefore invaluable in cancer
research, clearly shows that cyborg biotechnologies transgress the animal/
technology boundary as well as the human/technology boundary, yet
Blade Runner reduces Philip Dick’s triangle to only the latter two terms.
Shapiro’s focus on the cyborg rather than the animal frontier seems to
reinforce the film’s exclusion of the animal, a move that Jhan Hochman
claims also occurs in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). In a series of more
or less tenuous associative links, Hochman describes the characters in
the film in terms of a ‘theriomorphic bestiary’; Hannibal Lecter is not
only a cannibal, but associated by name with control of animals, while
the killer Buffalo Bill is obviously associated with ruthless hunting and
skinning. Several female characters are associated with birds, as in the
surnames of the detective Clarice Starling and the victim Catherine
Martin. Although his prose is overheated and the argument sometimes
strained, Hochman offers a brilliant and surprising analysis of the role
of lambs in the film. In a pivotal scene, Hannibal Lecter extracts from
detective Clarice Starling the story of a childhood trauma in which she
tried to save a lamb from slaughter on her uncle’s farm. Hochman
contends:
Clarice grows up and accepts the killing of lambs . . . but not the
screaming that some associate with the mushy, childish, and effeminate
side of her constitution. The screaming inside her head must be stopped.
She attempts this through metaphor – Christian lambs and women in
|
|
17 Pages 161-170 |
▲back to top |
|
|
17.1 Page 161 |
▲back to top |
148 animals
need – for screaming lambs. If she rescues Catherine Martin, Clarice
might also save herself.
(Hochman 1998: 39)
Leaving the house of killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ near the end of the film, Clarice
carries Martin’s lamb-like poodle in her arms, and later confirms to
Hannibal that the lambs have stopped screaming. But as Hochman
reminds us, these are lambs of the mind whose fate displaces that of real
lambs, an erasure that eliminates the topic of animal cruelty that is
unwittingly revealed by the title of the film.
Ecocriticism therefore shares with liberationist and cyborg criticism a
sustained and sustaining interest in the subjectivity of the non-human,
and in the problem of the troubled boundaries between the human and
other creatures. All three critical discourses invite an encounter with the
pleasures and anxieties of a possible post-human condition. However,
animals and animal products have recently become the site of a new range
of concerns. As a result of the advent of BSE (‘mad cow disease’) and the
huge outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001, traditional
significations and narratives involving animals have come under threat.
Most obviously, the mass burning and burial of slaughtered livestock
severely damaged the pastoral image of modern farming. Moreover, as
Richard Kerridge argues, the BSE crisis seemed to elude traditional
narratives of catastrophe thanks to the scientific uncertainties involved,
since there could be no dramatic climax contained within a reassuring
narrative of resolution. Neither the warning given by the jeremiad nor the
confrontational excitement of the apocalyptic thriller were appropriate
since consumers were faced with a threat that might have existed long
before anyone had the power or knowledge to prevent it. The health risk
might either affect a very small number of people or virtually an entire
nation, so as Kerridge puts it, ‘The thriller works us up and then with-
holds its climax’ (1999: 118).
If the supposed infectious agent was a model of indeterminacy,
its probable origin in the practice of feeding sheep-based products
contaminated with scrapie, a natural disease of sheep, to cattle in the form
of anonymous, manufactured feed pellets epitomises the sinister side of
cyborg boundary-crossing. Furthermore the beef products in which the
pathogen might lie unseen turned out to be terrifyingly ubiquitous.
|
|
17.2 Page 162 |
▲back to top |
animals 149
Kerridge’s prose itself seems infected by breathless panic in the face of one
of the postmodern megahazards discussed in my Introduction:
In its imagery, BSE confronted the public with spectacles of bodies –
animal bodies – being rendered, bursting out of their limits and being
boiled down to an essence which would then disperse uncontainably.
The dissolution of bodies appeared first as a ruthlessly managed
process, but then, revealing the hubris of this notion of control, as an
unmanageable process, uncontainable. That which is dispersed ceases
to be containable and seems to be present everywhere: beef derivatives
were revealed to be ingredients of biscuits, yogurt, medicines, ice
cream. Semen, tallow and gelatin, the three beef derivatives whose
export was banned by the European Community in addition to the ban
on meat itself, seemed to stand for the uncontainable afterlife of the
body, after the extinction of the self. Against such dispersal, acts of
volition by the good old humanist unified self – mere resolutions not to
eat the stuff – were powerless. As were narratives giving primacy to that
self.
(Kerridge 1999: 120)
The sublime threat to received notions of the self, nature and culture
‘BSE stories’ inadvertently narrate might force us to develop alternatives,
Kerridge suggests, to established ways of presenting and containing
environmental crisis. These would have to cope with indeterminacy, long
timescales, complex problems of agency and responsibility and the
postmodern problem of the unseen, unquantifiable cyborg risk.
WILD ANIMALS AND BIODIVERSITY
Liberationist criticism typically attempts to undermine the moral and
legal distinctions between humans and animals, but it takes for granted
the difference between wild and domestic animals. We are rarely enjoined
to prevent the suffering of wild animals because our moral responsibility
principally applies to the animals we use for food, transport and compan-
ionship. Ecocritics also rely on the distinction, but tend to venerate wild
animals while treating cattle, sheep and cats as the destructive accomplices
of human culture.
|
|
17.3 Page 163 |
▲back to top |
150 animals
Earlier we argued that wilderness narratives deploy a gendered
hierarchical distinction between wild and domestic animals in which the
former are linked with masculine freedom, and often predation, while
the latter are denigrated as feminine servants of human depredation.
Barney Nelson shows that Mary Austin challenged this entire system of
associations and distinctions: ‘She finds wildness in both genders and
domesticity in both, just as she finds wild animals very domestic and
domestic animals very wild’ (Nelson 2000: 132). She argues convincingly
that the urban notion of ‘domestication’ barely describes many livestock,
with its connotations of docility, stupidity and lack of autonomy, while
protected bears and mountain lions habituated to humans are now
a serious problem in many ‘wild’ areas of North America. In many parts
of the world, dogs and cats move freely back and forward across the
conceptual divide, suggesting that a detailed analysis of ferality as both
theoretical construct and historical practice may be opportune in eco-
criticism. Nelson cites archaeological evidence that some animals, such as
gazelle and Barbary sheep, have been domesticated and then returned to
the wild again.
Zoo animals cross the same boundary as feral animals. As Berger shows,
they are the objects of the imperial gaze we turn on wild animals, in
which our alienated distance is proportionate to our power. Liberationists
claim that zoo confinement is cruel, which may be true in some cases,
but an ecocritical perspective is more concerned with the politics
of representation implied by the zoo experience. Randy Malamud’s
Reading Zoos (1998) is an exhaustive analysis of zoo stories, mainly from
English literature, that seeks to demonstrate that zoos distort our per-
ception of animals as well as being a spectacle of imperial or neocolonial
power:
In the same way that the nineteenth-century London Zoo was designed
to make visitors proud of vicarious engagement in their culture’s
imperial prowess, today’s zoos are marketed to flatter spectators’ roles
as active members of a gloriously affluent consumeristic society.
(Malamud 1998: 91–2)
This continuous role has been only slightly affected by recent attempts by
zoos to market what Malamud calls the ‘feel-good ecoactivism’ of captive
|
|
17.4 Page 164 |
▲back to top |
animals 151
breeding programmes to protect endangered species. He finds that many
writers have intuited and exposed the dominionist assumptions behind
zoos, and his survey is valuable for depicting a widespread sense of unease
surrounding the welfare and politics of wild animals in captivity.
However, Malamud becomes less convincing when his liberationist
convictions lead him into a general dismissal of the educational, scientific
and preservationist possibilities of zoos.
For most modern readers, it is not the zoo but the wildlife docu-
mentary or movie that predominantly shapes their perceptions of wild
animals. Informed critique of the way these productions shape our ideas
is perhaps the most important way that we can enhance our ecocritical
awareness beyond the realms of literature. There is no question that
wildlife films and documentaries have made important contributions to
environmental campaigns: Flipper (1963) is credited with creating a
constituency of young dolphin admirers who, as adults, joined the tuna
boycott that transformed fishing practices that are lethal to marine
mammals. At the same time, critics claim that nature programming may
misrepresent its objects in various ways, substituting error for ignorance.
In particular, the way the relationship of the viewer to the wildlife is
constructed may be highly problematic, narrowing our experience of
nature from full sensory, intellectual and political engagement to a purely
visual relation that is further distorted by overemphasis on violence and
sex. Nature programming, in other words, may be little better than ‘eco-
porn’.
No book-length treatment of the subject has yet been written, but
Alexander Wilson and David Ingram have provided outline histories
of documentaries and films respectively. The early Disney documentaries
are a source of appalling misrepresentation, sentimental anthropomor-
phism and outright fakery, as was the case when brown lemmings were
captured in large numbers, then driven over the edge of a cliff to illustrate
their ‘suicidal’ mass migrations. In fact, it is Norway lemmings who
occasionally migrate in this way, and it is inconceivable that they would
jump off cliffs unless forced over by a film crew. The examples Wilson
critiques often involve the use of wildlife to enforce social norms such
as monogamy and hard work, as in the 1950s films Bear Country and
Beaver Valley. They are deeply indebted to pastoral traditions, but also
draw on the stylistic devices of Disney cartoons, such as, in Wilson’s
|
|
17.5 Page 165 |
▲back to top |
152 animals
analysis, the ‘orchestrated vignettes of organic rhythms’ for instance:
‘Mud gurgles, frogs croak, blooms bloom. Grebes stage pageants, pelicans
perform classical ballet. It’s enthralling; the world hums and cooks to a
human choreography and middle-brow orchestral music’ (Wilson 1992:
129) Wilson charts a shift ‘from pastoralism to scientism’ from these
early efforts to the 1980s, as environmentalist values came to challenge
anthropomorphism. Audiences demanded more accurate information,
combined with a degree of conservationist advocacy. Nevertheless, the
demand for spectacle tends to lead to an obsessive interest in predation,
usually enhanced by the exciting music and slow-motion, fast-edited
sequences that audiences might expect of a thriller. The desire to inform
as well as entertain has created the sort of conflicts that Wilson finds in
the National Geographic production White Wolf (1989). He points out
that the overt, verbal message and the implicit meaning of the action
sequences are far from complementary, where ‘the biologists speculate
about wolf language and child rearing, play, security and feeding’, but ‘the
tension of the show is a dramatic tension, organized around an edited
hunting episode rather than the ideas set out by the biologists’. For
Wilson, ‘The structure of the movie undercuts the script’ (Wilson 1992:
141). Likewise, documentaries often carry the conservationist message
that an animal is rare, but then depict large numbers of them. Absent
animals do not make for exciting viewing.
The favourite location for wildlife documentaries is the African
savannah with ‘charismatic megafauna’ such as elephants and giraffes,
where the camera sometimes seems to stand in for the colonial figure
of the white game hunter. Despite the fact that Africans have coexisted
with these species since ours evolved there, humans are either totally
excluded from the scene, or introduced in one of two roles: destroyers or
saviours. All too often, black hunters are simply the demonised ‘poachers’
while white conservationists are valorised, and the complex economic and
political factors involved in poaching and game management are ignored.
Wilson praises some productions, such as the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation’s long-running The Nature of Things, that attempt to
incorporate conservationist advocacy, social commentary, natural history
and science, and anthropological programmes such as Millennium: Tribal
Wisdom and the Modern World (1992) that explore the creative and
destructive interrelations of human cultures and nature.
|
|
17.6 Page 166 |
▲back to top |
animals 153
In the 1980s, as documentaries were attempting to change perceptions
with more responsible and accurate reporting, Hollywood, however, was
producing films that exploited and reinforced theriophobia, or fear of
animals. Ingram argues that the Jaws series, for example, represents a
backlash against conservationist ideas in which an ‘evil, threatening nature
is eventually mastered through male heroism, technology and the blood
sacrifice of the wild animal’ (2000: 90). In the fourth film, Jaws: the
Revenge (1987), the marine biologist Mike Brody’s environmentalist
concerns are effectively ridiculed as his colleague is eaten by the enraged
fish; he joins the hunt for it and the shark in turn hunts him down.
The most useful discussion of wildlife programming thus far is
Karla Armbruster’s 1998 essay ‘Creating the world we must save’, which
draws on the work of both Berger and Wilson, in order to survey a range
of criticisms of TV nature documentaries. For example, Armbruster
points out that an hour-long documentary represents an extraordinary
compression of time and space, in which weeks of waiting and hours
of filming is edited down to a brief, enthralling spectacle. Far from
connecting us with nature, this is likely to contrast strikingly with direct
experience, as ‘a fulfilling experience with the natural world involves more
than passively sitting back to be informed and entertained’ (Armbruster
1998: 224). This rather fundamental objection aside, Armbruster’s essay
also criticises specific techniques and practices. Even the fantastic photog-
raphy of the recent BBC series The Blue Planet (2001), which captures
myriad species in numerous locations over eight programmes, may come
to represent a distinctly narrowed vision if we interpret it with her
strictures in mind. Some of the most extraordinary scenes are indeed
of mass predation, as in the ‘Open Ocean’ programme where a school
of sardines is set upon simultaneously by striped marlin, yellowfin tuna
and frigate birds, with a sei whale rushing up from the deep to engulf the
survivors.
Armbruster criticises the phenomenon of the absent narrator, claiming
that it encourages a sense of innocent unobtrusiveness in the viewer,
and argues that ‘By identifying with the narrator, and with the perspective
of the camera that so often appears to be the narrator’s eye, the viewer
is constructed as omniscient and capable of penetrating the most
inaccessible reaches of the natural world’ (Armbruster 1998: 232). As the
metaphor of penetration might indicate, the illusion of unrestricted access
|
|
17.7 Page 167 |
▲back to top |
154 animals
into a mysterious or forbidden space produces a relation of subject
to object that is structurally similar to that involved in pornography in
which the eye/I derives pleasure from an obtrusive gaze that its object
cannot challenge or return. The Blue Planet articulates an underlying
contradiction at its outset, first admitting that the vast oceans remain
barely explored and mysterious, but then promising us a privileged,
deeper, closer, ‘never before seen’ perspective. The narrator in this case is
Sir David Attenborough, a virtual culture hero in the United Kingdom,
whose familiar voice lends the programme the sense of omniscient
authority that Armbruster identifies. Nonetheless, he could hardly appear
on this programme, as he has on many land-based ones, and he has him-
self voiced some of the criticisms that Armbruster makes of irresponsible
documentaries.
In most respects, The Blue Planet is exemplary, starting off the series
with a contextualising overview of oceanic ecology that interrelates
wind, tides and currents, and stresses movements of nutrients as well
as massive migrations of species. This contrasts with documentaries
that isolate events or individual species, reducing the significance of
ecological connections and processes. The narrative wrestles with anthro-
pomorphism when a pod of killer whales capture a seal pup and torment
it for a prolonged period before leaving it to die, and Attenborough
openly struggles to account for their behaviour without condemning
it. For the most part, though, the documentary does tend to ‘naturalise’
its perspective. The people and sophisticated technology needed to obtain
the pictures remain unseen, thereby, Armbruster claims, undermining
environmental advocacy. She lauds documentaries that admit that they
are particular, and partial, constructions of nature rather than posing
as unmediated truth, and criticises ‘the seamless insertion of “technical
events”’ such as ‘passages of slow motion, changes in viewpoint such as
the shift from a close-up of a coyote hunting a weasel to a wider per-
spective that includes them both, and shots into hard-to-access locations
such as a nest of termites’ (Armbruster 1998: 231). In the case of The Blue
Planet, some of these events, such as the use of image intensifiers at night,
are obvious enough, and the programme on ‘The Deep’ could not help
but show the submersible, but most were seamless. Slow motion is
perhaps more misleading than its opposite effect, time-lapse photography.
Slow motion is generally used to enhance tension in dramatic scenes, adds
|
|
17.8 Page 168 |
▲back to top |
animals 155
little extra insight and may not be detectable as such by the viewer,
whereas time-lapse photography shows gradual processes under way to
great effect and is invariably obvious. ‘Tidal Seas’ made good use of the
latter to show changes at the ocean’s edge.
One of the key concerns of wildlife documentaries is that some
species may become extinct. Many wildlife biologists believe that we are
in the early stages of a mass extinction episode not seen since the
annihilation of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65
million years ago. Humans have been held responsible for many local
extinction episodes; for example, the arrival of human settlers in
both Madagascar and New Zealand was followed by the extinction of
numerous species of flightless birds. More controversially, Native
Americans have been blamed for Palaeolithic extinctions of American
camels, elephants, giant armadillos, ground sloths and many other species.
Such anthropogenic extinctions are thought to have risen rapidly in the
last 200 years from an estimated loss rate of one species per year (already
100 times the natural background rate) at the turn of the nineteenth
century, largely as a result of extensive destruction of biologically rich
tropical rainforests and coral reefs. Norman Myers, in his Scarcity or
Abundance? debate with cornucopian Julian Simon estimates that we
might be losing 27,000 species a year, but suspects that with a more
accurate reckoning the annual total might well become ‘a good deal larger’
(Myers and Simon 1994: 76).
The most accessible examination of the science of extinction is David
Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo (1996), which shows how and why
island ecologies are especially vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts.
As Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin found in their crucial field trips,
to the Malay Archipelago and the Galapagos Islands respectively,
evolution operates most obviously in the biological isolation afforded by
islands. They came independently to the conclusion that a single ancestor
species, arriving or becoming isolated on the island in the past, could
evolve by natural selection into a variety of different species, a process
known to modern ecologists as ‘adaptive radiation’. As Quammen shows,
island ecologies have given rise to an enormous range of odd species such
as the tree-climbing kangaroos of New Guinea and the giant lizard or
‘dragon’ of Komodo (1996: 137–8). Birds typify the combination of
variety of species and scarcity of individuals found on islands such as New
|
|
17.9 Page 169 |
▲back to top |
156 animals
Zealand, home to the kiwi, a flightless parrot called the kakapo, the large,
flightless takahe and the kea, a carnivorous parrot. The dodo (Raphus
cucullatus) of Mauritius is the most famous flightless island bird because
it is also the first species known to have been driven to extinction by
human activity in modern times. Quammen explains that the rarity of
such a species is exacerbated by hunting, habitat destruction, competition
from introduced species such as goats and pigs, and predation from aliens
such as rats, mongooses and cats. These ‘deterministic’ factors reduce the
population to the point where it is exceptionally vulnerable to random or
‘stochastic’ factors such as catastrophic weather events, normal variations
in birth and death rates, and inbreeding. In a series of detailed case studies,
Quammen shows how extensive island extinctions have been, and argues
that habitat destruction is now also forcing mainland species into ever-
diminishing ecosystems that are effectively ‘islands’. Of the 171 extinct
species and sub-species of bird counted since 1600, 90 per cent were from
islands, even though such species make up just 20 per cent of the total
number of bird species (Quammen 1996: 264). Quammen imagines the
death of the last dodo with moving immediacy:
Raphus cucullatus had become rare unto death. But this one flesh-
and-blood individual still lived. Imagine that she was thirty years old,
or thirty-five, an ancient age for most sorts of bird but not impossible
for a member of such a large-bodied species. She no longer ran, she
waddled. Lately she was going blind. Her digestive system was balky.
In the dark of an early morning in 1667, say, during a rainstorm, she
took cover beneath a cold stone ledge at the base of one of the Black
River cliffs. She drew her head down against her body, fluffed her
feathers for warmth, squinted in patient misery. She waited. She didn’t
know it, nor did anyone else, but she was the only dodo on Earth. When
the storm passed, she never opened her eyes. This is extinction.
(1996: 275)
The death of an individual is also the death of its kind. Quammen’s
elegy therefore shuttles uneasily between imaginative lament and eco-
logical explanations with lists of species lost, exemplifying the problem
of representing absence on such a scale. The narrative incorporates
scientific analysis and anecdotes from the history of ecology within a
|
|
17.10 Page 170 |
▲back to top |
animals 157
travelogue, in which Quammen functions as itinerant witness to the
extinction, past or imminent, of species, as well as heroic efforts to
conserve a few.
Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter (2000) represents extinction very
differently. The anonymous protagonist travels to Tasmania posing as a
conservationist in order to track down the last thylacine, a marsupial wolf
believed to be extinct but still occasionally reported (see also Quammen
1996: 279–306). His task is to kill the animal in secret and collect samples
for a biotechnology company that intends to capitalise upon its unique
DNA in the development of biological weapons. One of Leigh’s major
achievements is to associate believably the rhetoric of closeness to nature
with such a morally bankrupt individual. Out in the bush, the protagonist
seeks to identify totally with the creature as well as to understand its
environment fully, as in this scene in which a kind of shamanistic
transformation takes place:
Lying there on the hard ground inside his tent he performs his favourite
trick: he changes shape, swallows the beast. The eyes in his head are no
longer his own, short thick fur runs along the back of his neck, and his
spine grows thick and strong, right out of his back, out into a long still
tail. He hangs his body off this strong spine, hollows out his belly,
shrinks his gangly limbs. His arm is bent at the elbow, and a paw, not
a hand, rests against his bony convex chest. He sleeps and hopes to
dream.
(Leigh 2000: 91)
Ultimately the hunter’s quest is successful, and his dissection of the
last thylacine is thorough and efficient, though not without a hint of
tenderness. Richard Kerridge compares this powerfully depressing scene
with Quammen’s depiction of extinction, showing that while regret is
only implied by its distressing absence in Leigh’s novel, the inevitability
of the outcome is no more in question there than in the elegaic narrative
of the dodo’s demise. He points out that ‘conventional plot structures
require forms of solution and closure that seem absurdly evasive when
applied to ecological questions with their extremes of timescale and
complexities of interdependency’ (2002: 99). Writing extinction involves
not simply the problem of representing absence, but also the difficulty of
|
|
18 Pages 171-180 |
▲back to top |
|
|
18.1 Page 171 |
▲back to top |
158 animals
narrating ongoing systemic crises within intrinsically individualising
forms such as the travelogue and the novel.
The representations of animals discussed so far are predominantly
concerned with individuals or, at most, species. Likewise, much conser-
vation activism has in the past centred on pandas, say, or whales, with
regulatory frameworks ranging from early international measures to
conserve fur-bearing seals (1911) to the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (CITES, 1973) that maintains a list of
banned or controlled species. In the late 1980s, however, a new scientific
and political discourse emerged that sought to integrate various levels
of environmental concern within an overarching global framework.
The Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the UN-organised
Rio Earth Summit in 1992, codified a new understanding of the threat of
extinction that shifted from the conservationist, species-based model to a
concept of ‘biodiversity’. Stephen Yearley argues that there are three levels
of biodiversity: ‘diversity between and within ecosystems and habitats; the
diversity of species; and genetic variation within species’ (1996: 121–2).
This increasingly ecological, or systems-orientated, perspective aims to
reframe local conservation issues in the language of global biodiversity.
Yet, as Leigh’s novel shows, genetic diversity is increasingly seen as a
resource for biotechnology companies as well as the object of potentially
comprehensive protection. The ‘global’ discourse of biodiversity is highly
contested because of its complex and politically explosive relations with
economic and cultural globalisation. Many environmentalists from the
wealthy industrialised countries seek to protect biodiversity from both
local people (poachers, illegal loggers) and transnational corporations.
At the same time, commentators from ecologically rich Third World
countries, such as Vandana Shiva, see such environmentalism as neo-
colonialism, and suspect an unholy alliance between ecology and
biotechnology. As Suzanne Biggs observes:
The articulation of this new language of biodiversity is concomitant with
the new biotechnologies which can isolate genes from an organism,
manipulate them in the laboratory and insert them stably into another
organism. Nature is no longer a process embedded in space and time
expressing itself in natural living species through the process of
evolution taking place over time, within spatially delineated ecosystems.
|
|
18.2 Page 172 |
▲back to top |
animals 159
The component parts of nature can be disembedded and their relation-
ship to space and time appear likely to be overcome. . . . Biodiversity
and biotechnology are intimately connected.
(1998: 120–1)
Thus the figure of the cyborg is complemented by that of the genetically
engineered organism (GEO) within a new, globalised frame of reference.
Liberationist criticism, which had been concerned with the rights of
individual domestic animals, must cope with the emergence of boundary
figures such as the cyborg and the feral animal. Ecocriticism similarly
must come to terms with GEOs and global biodiversity, as well as indi-
vidual species. From a global perspective, an enlarged ‘common future’
might be envisaged alongside the prospect of worldwide ‘biopiracy’. It is
therefore the figure of the Earth itself that demands attention at the close
of this book.
|
|
18.3 Page 173 |
▲back to top |
8
FUTURES: THE EARTH
Jonathan Bate concludes The Song of the Earth with a Wallace Stevens
poem called ‘The Planet on the Table’ and a request to the reader:
As you read the poem, hold in your mind’s eye a photograph of the
earth taken from space: green and blue, smudged with the motion of
cloud . . . so small in the surrounding darkness that you could imagine
cupping it with your hands. A planet that is fragile, a planet of which we
are a part but which we do not possess.
(2000: 282)
As Stephen Yearley points out, ‘The photographic portrayal of the globe
viewed from an orbiting spacecraft has been used repeatedly to evoke
the Earth’s isolation in space, its fragility and wonder, and the sense that
the beings on it share a restricted living space surrounded by an
unwelcoming void’ (1996: 65). Media analyst John Hannigan, like Bate,
takes the meaning of the image for granted when he cites evidence that
‘the single most effective environmental message of the century was totally
inadvertent: the 1969 view from the moon of a fragile, finite “Spaceship
Earth”’ (1995: 62). Somehow this image, without commentary or design,
seems unambiguously to communicate a powerful message.
The history of the Earth image, however, does not sustain the notion
|
|
18.4 Page 174 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 161
that it has a single meaning. Repeating Bate’s experiment, we must
acknowledge that the same act of imagination could grasp the earth as
either a fragile totality ‘of which we are a part but which we do not pos-
sess’, or else a biological system for producing unlimited non-monetary
wealth given fully rational management, and that both inflections might
fairly claim to be ecological. The concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’ was in fact
proposed by architect, inventor and cosmologist R. Buckminster Fuller
(1895–1983), who took the Earth image as a figure for the possibility of
the total, cornucopian management of the planet in human interests (see
Fuller 1969).
Andrew Ross, one of the few ecocritics working on popular rather
than literary culture, counts a photograph of the Earth taken by Apollo
astronauts, amongst his ‘images of ecology’:
In recent years, we have become accustomed to seeing images of a
dying planet, variously exhibited in grisly poses of ecological depletion
and circulated by all sectors of the image industry, often in spots
reserved for the exploitation fare of genocidal atrocities. The clichés of
the standard environmental image are known to us all: on the one hand,
belching smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical sludge, fish
floating belly-up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and
clearcut forests; on the other hand, the redeeming repertoire of pastoral
imagery, pristine, green, and unspoiled by human habitation, crowned
by the ultimate global spectacle, the fragile, vulnerable ball of spaceship
earth.
(Ross 1994: 171)
We seem here to return to pastoral on an almost cosmic scale. Yet as Ross
demonstrates, it is also crucial to consider the ‘ecology of images’: ‘the
social and industrial organization of images’ and the ‘ecological arguments
to be made about those processes’ (p. 172). The astronauts’ pictures of the
planet were won at considerable cost to it, not only in terms of the
$25 billion space programme, or the £5.6 million of fuel on each Saturn
5 rocket, but also the interrelations between the Apollo programme and
the Cold War military-industrial complex. As Ross shows, the US military
has historically evaded environmental legislation, while preparing for wars
that wreak extraordinary ecological damage upon foreign lands.
|
|
18.5 Page 175 |
▲back to top |
162 futures: the earth
So the Earth image is contested and, arguably, compromised by the
institutions and practices that made it possible. It is, moreover, a false
perspective that allows us to see what only a handful of US astronauts have
actually seen, a ‘god’s eye view’ that promises a kind of transcendental
power that we, as individuals or as a species, do not possess (see Legler
2000: 245). Nevertheless, it is essential for ecocritics to give greater
consideration than they have thus far to the transformation in the
dominant meaning of the word ‘earth’: from the most immediate ground
of existence, the soil, to life’s largest relevant context, the biosphere. The
need not only to ‘think globally’ but to think about the globe demands
a politicised reading practice more akin to social ecology and Cultural
Studies than to deep ecology and traditional literary studies. Such a
practice would consider constructions of the Earth provided by eco-
nomics, politics and biology, as well as literature, TV and film. This
chapter will examine two key inflections of the Earth, in order then to
suggest possible futures for ecocriticism, beyond the problematic tropes
of pastoral and wilderness, place and locale. The first inflection stems
from the key concern of postmodern social thought, globalisation, and
gives us the Earth as a technologically and economically enframed globe.
The second is Gaia, which inflects the Earth as a living thing.
GLOBE
The Apollo photographs are just one means by which people all over
the world are now able to apprehend its form. This globalisation of
the imagination is powerfully reinforced by counterparts that operate,
according to Yearley, in finance, communications, culture, business and
politics. Transnational financial organisations demonstrated that they
could marshal greater resources than national governments on several
occasions during the 1990s: ‘As capital markets become global, the fate
of whole countries’ economies can fall prey to the fears and imaginings of
investors in the international money markets’ (Yearley 1996: 4). These
activities are made possible by global satellite-based communications,
including the Internet, which eliminate traditional considerations
of physical distance from transactions involving the communication of
information. The local communities beloved of anti-modern ecocritics are
being supplanted by ‘virtual’ communities brought together by shared
|
|
18.6 Page 176 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 163
interests, including environmental concerns. The globalisation of culture
is both a cause and an effect of this process, as transnational cultural
icons provide transnational talking points within and across these
communities.
Globalisation, for some, represents homogenisation in which diverse
local cultures are supplanted by ‘monocultures of the mind’ promoted
and sustained by transnational culture industries based mainly in North
America, Japan and Western Europe. The aspect of globalisation most
often targeted by environmentalist critics is the growth of companies
with turnover exceeding that of many nations and who possess a
commensurate political power. While many industries remain necessarily
locally or nationally based, the omnipresence of brand-based companies
such as Nike or Coca-Cola seems to produce, sustain and rely on a
homogenous global market. Cornucopian enthusiasts for globalisation
argue that this presents an opportunity for poverty-stricken countries to
develop economically, following the example of some Asian and South
American nations. They claim that deregulation of markets and the
elimination of trade barriers will encourage international investment, give
Third World countries access to foreign markets and liberate domestic
entrepreneurial capital, leading to a circle of wealth creation and the kind
of social and environmental progress seen mainly in rich countries. At the
same time, ‘structural adjustment’ policies imposed on Third World
countries by international financial institutions such as the World Bank
can have crippling effects on existing social and environmental pro-
grammes, forcing governments to end price controls on basic goods, cut
public spending and privatise nationalised industries. Even then, the
economic benefits of free-market solutions may not accrue because
of adverse domestic conditions or because transnational corporations
realise most of the profits from liberalised trade. This has led to vigorous
anti-globalisation resistance in both First and Third World countries.
While the proportion of people in the world enduring absolute poverty
is declining, population growth means that total numbers are continuing
to increase, and power remains unevenly distributed. The statistics lessen
neither the misery of the poor nor the scandal of First World wealth.
As ecocritics interpret the meaning of the Earth, they will increasingly
have to engage with globalised political conflicts.
The inflection of the globe as market place requires institutions to
|
|
18.7 Page 177 |
▲back to top |
164 futures: the earth
promote and enforce it. The most powerful of these are the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the recently formed
World Trade Organisation (WTO). All three are explicitly dedicated
to the promotion of international capitalism, although the World Bank
in particular incorporates questions of social development and environ-
mental protection into negotiations with Third World countries. Some
environmental organisations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature,
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace International have become sub-
stantial global actors, reflecting the scale and scope of the issues they
address. The planet is developing a meaningful, though fragmented,
political identity, in which a range of distinctively globalised social and
environmental issues are contested.
As discussed earlier, it was a global political meeting, the Rio Earth
Summit in 1992, that redefined the local or national problem of nature
conservation as the globalised issue of ‘biodiversity’. Yet the affirmation
of a common interest in the future of the world’s herring or rainforests
conceals considerable differences of interpretation and conflicts of inter-
est. Not only are there variations between countries in terms of method
and extent of data collection, but as J.A. Hannigan’s 1995 study shows,
the biodiversity agenda had to overcome several major problems before it
could become a ‘successful’ issue: accurate claims about extinctions are
difficult to sustain, there are no obvious villains or simple solutions and
few First World environmentalists would be affected directly by the losses.
Third World countries that are biologically rich but economically
impoverished can easily see the costs of preservation but, wildlife tourism
aside, may not be able to see substantial benefits (Hannigan 1995:
146–61). Moreover, the universalising scientific and moral discourse of
biodiversity is seen by some critics as a cover for First World pharma-
ceutical and agricultural corporations seeking to expropriate Third World
biological wealth.
From the fifteenth century onwards, new territories discovered by
European explorers were granted to national governments and their
agents by charters, patents and Papal Bulls, with little concern for the
rights of indigenous peoples. Vandana Shiva claims in Biopiracy (1998)
that this colonial appropriation of land by means of legal instruments,
which led to the domination, enslavement or extermination of non-
Europeans in the populated continents, has a modern counterpart in the
|
|
18.8 Page 178 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 165
patents on genetically engineered organisms granted by courts in the
developed world and assiduously protected by the WTO. Trade Related
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) are demanded by biotechnology
companies to protect their investments in research and development, but
Shiva claims that they represent a neo-colonial appropriation of the
traditional biological knowledge of indigenous peoples and the ‘inner
spaces’ of DNA, in processes that can be likened to ‘the second coming
of Columbus’ (Shiva 1998: 11). She argues that genetic modification is
misrepresented as a predictable, deterministic process of ‘engineering’
that creates organisms worthy of patent protection. On the contrary, this
mere ‘tinkering’ with DNA, as she calls it, involves both processes and
products that rely on nature’s own capacity for self-organisation and
reproduction, so that a patent effectively appropriates for biotechnology
companies the inherent creativity of nature. If, as Shiva believes, the latter
deserves reverence in itself, patenting even hybrid seed varieties would be
a form of blasphemy. She makes a strong case for the legal protection of
indigenous knowledge, albeit without explanation of how it differs from
biotechnology as an appropriation of nature. Shiva also shows that the
WTO and the Biodiversity Convention, which seem to represent opposite
poles of exploitation and protection, may not be quite so antagonistic.
The latter may lead to the identification and protection of Third World
biological resources in the name of ecology that the former then allows
First World companies to appropriate in the name of profit. Thus the
comforting Planet Earth of ecologists may collude with the exploitative
globe of transnational capital.
We have already observed that globalisation requires sophisticated
communications technologies, which in turn require satellites in space.
The various space programmes have not only supported commercial and
military ends, however: meteorological and hydrological satellites supply
vital information to scientists about global and local environmental issues,
from ozone thinning to soil erosion. This process arguably represents a
fresh inflection of the Earth as the object of new regimes of environmental
surveillance and disciplinary design. This rather paranoid-sounding view
derives from ecocritic Tim Luke’s critique of the influential environ-
mentalist organisation, the Worldwatch Institute, which is loosely based
upon the work of philosopher Michel Foucault. Worldwatch collects
environmental data from a vast array of sources, produces computer
|
|
18.9 Page 179 |
▲back to top |
166 futures: the earth
models and develops alternative future scenarios that are extrapolated
from various possible starting points. Each year they publish a com-
prehensive report on the State of the World, including ‘bioeconomic’
information on natural resources, biodiversity, water supplies, population
and so on.
Luke does not deny that Worldwatch is an effective environmental
organisation. Rather, he criticises the inflection of the planet implied
by Worldwatch’s quest for sustainable modernisation: no longer a wild,
mysterious Earth, but rather ‘an ensemble of ecological systems, requiring
human managerial oversight, administrative intervention, and organi-
zational containment’ (1997: 90). Lukes points out that Worldwatch
reports identify bioeconomic inefficiencies that can be rectified, and
individual or state policies that might be modified, but do not critique
global capitalism as such. In the process, the science of ecology is reduced
to a managerial or disciplinary role in the mitigation of environmental
problems. Luke argues that the Earth is thereby inflected as an errant
subject requiring techno-scientific correction, or ‘environmentalization’:
‘As biological life is refracted through economic, political and techno-
logical existence, “the facts of life” pass into fields of control for disciplines
of ecoknowledge and spheres of intervention for their management as
geopower at various institutional sites’ (1997: 91) From the social
ecological perspective of Luke’s analysis, world-watching leaves in place
the ‘basic logic of commodification and exchange that causes ecological
destruction’ (1997: 93). Because it fails to challenge the wealth of the First
World, world-watching ensures that the burden of attaining sustainability
will fall disproportionately on the Third World.
One of the most striking successes for world-watching was the 1987
Montreal Protocol that introduced global controls on ozone-depleting
chloro-fluoro-carbons (CFCs). This agreement is often cited as evidence
of the role science can play in addressing an emerging environmental
problem decisively and effectively. As one US negotiator put it:
The Montreal Protocol was the result of research at the frontiers
of science combined with a unique collaboration between scientists
and policymakers. Unlike any previous diplomatic endeavor, it was
based on continually evolving theories, on state-of-the-art computer
models, simulating the results of intricate chemical and physical
|
|
18.10 Page 180 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 167
reactions for decades into the future, and on satellite-, land-, and rocket-
based monitoring of remote gases measured in parts per trillion.
(cited in Yearley 1996: 107)
The protocol and later amendments achieved a complete phased
elimination of CFCs and related compounds in response to evidence
that they were destroying the ozone layer over Antarctica. Ozone is a
relatively rare form of elemental oxygen in which three atoms are present
rather than the more usual two. At low altitudes, ozone is a corrosive
component of smog and a greenhouse gas, but in the upper atmosphere
it forms a ‘layer’ that filters out ultraviolet radiation that would other-
wise be extremely damaging to animals and plants. In the 1970s it was
claimed that CFCs, chemicals used in aerosol sprays and refrigeration,
were capable of destroying atmospheric ozone. This claim was confirmed
when scientists in the Antarctic found that the ozone above them was
severely depleted during the spring, as a combination of atmospheric
conditions unique to the region led to rapid destruction of stratospheric
ozone.
This account makes it clear that the ozone problem is an objec-
tive, scientific phenomenon of global import that was successfully
addressed by scientifically informed global political action. Kate Soper in
What is Nature? assumes and propagates this view when she comments
that ‘it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer’ (151). This neat,
memorable phrase has been cited by a number of critics to exemplify the
emphasis on literal truth, rather than social construction, that marks
ecocriticism out from other literary critical schools (Barry 2002: 252;
Rigby 2002: 154). Ironically, Soper may have picked the wrong example
to make her point. The ‘hole in the ozone layer’ is actually a good example
of the scientific and cultural construction of global environmental
problems, since the terms ‘hole’ and ‘layer’ are strictly metaphorical in this
context. The latter is an area of increased concentration of ozone, which
is actually present throughout the atmosphere. As Hannigan observes,
images of the ozone hole are really simulated graphic maps:
The NASA satellite pictures of the ozone hole . . . transformed con-
tinuous gradations in real ozone concentration into an ordinal scale that
is colour-coded, conveying the erroneous impression that a discrete,
|
|
19 Pages 181-190 |
▲back to top |
|
|
19.1 Page 181 |
▲back to top |
168 futures: the earth
identifiable hole could actually be located in the atmosphere over the
South Pole.
(1995: 45)
These images raise the question of access to the means of representation
and policy formation. It was the rich nations that drove forward the
Montreal negotiations, demanding cuts in their own emissions and those
of Third World countries, even though the latter were much smaller and
had started more recently. Deploying science allowed developed countries
to claim to speak for the whole world, a process called ‘scientification’:
‘The conviction that science speaks objectively and disinterestedly means that
one need have no qualms about excluding other people from decision-making
since they would, in any event, have arrived at the same conclusions as oneself’
(Yearley 1996: 118; italics in original). The image of the ozone hole
suggests the possibility of undemocratic and even neo-colonial environ-
mental scientification. Ecocriticism demands attention to literal and
irreducibly material problems such as ozone depletion, but it also depends
upon the insight that scientific problems are never fully separable from
cultural and political ones. The ozone problem is real, but it is mediated
by a popularising metaphor, and framed within international political
discourses that are not scientific, but ideological. Such an insight is
congruent with the critical realism elaborated by Soper in her analysis as
a whole.
The problem is therefore to establish the role of simulation for an
ecocritical perspective on the globe. For the poetics of authenticity, it is
the unmediated encounter with the real world that rescues the subject
from the corrupt modern world of representation and simulation. In The
Age of Missing Information (1992) Bill McKibben, one of the most
persuasive of the proponents of this view, contrasts the insights provided
by 24 hours on top of a mountain in the Adirondacks with the torrent of
programming recorded from 100 cable TV channels in the same period.
The latter, McKibben concedes, provides occasional doses of knowledge
and a fair bit of entertainment, but at the same time fatally narrows our
range of perception and response. Far from an Information Age, he
claims, we live in a period of ‘Unenlightenment’, cut off from in the
lessons taught by nature: ‘Subversive ideas about how much you need, or
what comfort is, or beauty, or time, that you can learn from the one great
|
|
19.2 Page 182 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 169
logoless channel and not the hundred noisy ones or even the pay-per-view’
(McKibben 1992: 23). McKibben argues that TV promotes a violently
compressed sense of time, and that it substitutes a bland, minimal comfort
for the strife of exertion, discomfort, relaxation and sensuality that makes
real happiness possible. Putting on warm, dry clothes after a hike in the
rain is a pleasure fundamentally antithetical to immersion in the flickering
glow of the TV set, not least because it involves senses of touch and smell
that the latter simply does not address. Nonetheless, for ecocritics alert
to the implications of postmodernity, his dualistic view of TV versus
nature is unsustainable. The ozone hole is real and simulated, literal and
metaphorical; global warming is a phenomenon generated by complex
computerised climate models.
However, it is not only because climate change and ozone depletion
are simulated crises that the world of simulations cannot simply be
counterposed to the real world of nature. As we have seen, our encounters
with the natural world are inflected by metaphors and every perception
is, to some extent, a simulation. Conversely, as Katherine Hayles shows
in ‘Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations’, the functionality of
‘virtual reality’ (VR) programmes and other simulations depends on an
intimate fit between technology and nature, which implies a critique of
the poetics of authenticity:
If nature can be separated from simulation in a clear-cut way, then
we risk believing that nature is natural because it is unmediated,
whereas simulation is artificial because it is constructed. But there is an
important sense in which nature is constructed . . . and simulation is
natural . . . Only because simulation technologies employ precise and
detailed knowledge about human perceptual transformations can they
create simulations that strike us as compelling and realistic. A VR
simulation appears three-dimensional to us because the images are
offset, simulating the “natural” spacing of our eyes.
(1996: 418)
Yet even as Hayles argues that the real and the simulated are not simply
opposed and incommensurable categories, she takes for granted the
validity of the distinction between them. French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard claims in his influential ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (1981)
|
|
19.3 Page 183 |
▲back to top |
170 futures: the earth
that communications technologies, capable of infinite replication and
wide dissemination of information, have initiated a world of simulation,
that now functions to supplant the real world. Modernity was
characterised by growth in forms of representation, such as writing or the
map, in which the real thing and its representation could always be clearly
distinguished. In the postmodern world, however, mass-reproduced
representations lose their origins so that now ‘it is the map that engenders
the territory’ (2001: 169), and the real is scarcely discernible. Baudrillard
identifies four ‘phases of the image’:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum.
(2001: 169)
Disneyland exemplifies all four of these orders; it represents pirates,
and Main St USA (1), and also, obviously, misrepresents them (2). But it
also embodies a more subtle misrepresentation: ‘Disneyland is there to
conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which
is Disneyland’ (p. 175). In this third phase of the image, the unreality of
Disneyland obscures the more ominous unreality of America, although
the ‘unreality’ in both cases is due to a surplus of representations rather
than a lack of substance. Both Disneyland and America, then, are not less
than real, but ‘hyperreal’, since the distinction between the real and
simulated has collapsed, and what is left is a hall of mirrors of ‘simulacra’
(4). Michael Branch’s essay ‘Cosmology in the Casino’ (1999) exemplifies
this notion by examining the 2-hour cycle of day and night projected
inside the dome of the Silver Legacy Resort Casino in Reno, Nevada, and
expresses concern that this simulacrum may feed a desire for the hyperreal
as a satisfactory substitute for the real. Baudrillard’s scepticism towards
the ‘real’ diametrically opposes him, and his theoretical conception of
postmodernity, to most ecocritics.
Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, discussed earlier, explores the rela-
tionship between a postmodern world of simulations and environmental
crisis. For example, during the toxic airborne event, officials appear from
|
|
19.4 Page 184 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 171
a state emergency preparedness organisation, SIMUVAC, that simulates
catastrophes. For them, this actual emergency is an opportunity to
rehearse, although the real can disappoint, as one official remarks: ‘There’s
a probability excess. . . . You have to make allowances for the fact that
everything we see tonight is real’ (1986: 139). Jack’s exposure to the toxic
cloud leaves him adrift in uncertainty, as the SIMUVAC computer
attempts to calculate a projected risk to his health. The official’s
reassurance is indistinguishable from threat:
“It’s what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J.A.K. I punch in
the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your
computer history. . . . It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn’t mean
anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or
tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man
escapes that.”
Such a projected or simulated death seems somehow superior to the
subject’s own living reality. Jack reflects, ‘It makes you feel like a stranger
in your own dying’ (p. 142). Death and environmental disaster, which
might seem to exemplify the real, are subordinated to the order of
simulation in which every narrative of threat and resolution is hackneyed
and insincere. As Richard Kerridge argues:
White Noise positions its reader outside all the available narratives
which could process environmental disaster and stabilise it, leaving an
impasse, a condition of passive waiting. This novel dramatizes, more
unsparingly than any other I know, the impasse between environmental
consciousness and the inability of a culture to change.
(1998: 139)
Postmodernist theories of representation may provide accurate diagnoses
of environmental crises in the media, but they simulaneously disable the
possibility of activism. Baudrillard’s notion of simulation, as represented
in White Noise, tends towards a kind of hyperbolic paranoia, or as he calls
it, a ‘vertigo of interpretation’ (p. 178). Such implacable scepticism
towards stable truth claims must be antithetical to an ecocriticism that
|
|
19.5 Page 185 |
▲back to top |
172 futures: the earth
attends to problems of representation, but is founded ultimately in the
assumption of real environmental problems. We must distinguish
between an enervating scepticism towards truth in general, as typified by
Baudrillard’s postmodernist theory, and a revitalising scepticism towards
certain supposed ‘truths’ of popular ecological discourse, exemplified by
postmodern ecology.
Crucially, both Baudrillard’s enthusiasm for a simulated Earth and
deep ecological despair remain entranced by the failed promise of
authenticity. Orientated toward practical problems of responsibility, we
need not accept the dichotomy between backpacking in the Adirondacks
and a cyborg existence on a simulated Earth. The Baudrillardian
perspective implies the implosion of meaning in contexts of postmodern
ecological risk, but Ulrich Beck’s engagement with the same problem
yields a quite different conclusion:
Global ecological dangers, far from intensifying a general lack
of meaning in the modern world, create a meaning-filled horizon of
avoidance, protection and assistance, a moral climate that grows
sharper with the scale of the perceived danger, and in which a new
political significance attaches to the roles of hero and villain.
(1999: 45)
The operative myth is not necessarily paranoid apocalypticism, but
more like the boy David’s pragmatism faced with the giant Goliath.
As Beck points out, inflecting the planet through global risk generates
new political strategies as well as actors, such as the ‘judo politics’ of
Greenpeace, ‘designed to mobilize the superior strength of environmental
sinners against themselves’. Such politics, moreover, can mobilise their
own virtual inflections of the Earth.
GAIA
It was the novelist William Golding who suggested the name ‘Gaia’, the
ancient Greek Earth-goddess, for the inflection of the Earth developed
by his friend James Lovelock (see Chapter 5). It is now used by deep
ecologists and ecofeminists to counter the inflection of the Earth as a
technologically and economically enframed globe. Lovelock’s work began
|
|
19.6 Page 186 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 173
in the science of planetary ecology. His hypothesis was that the Earth
could be described as a self-regulating system, analogous to a living
organism. It has been known since the discovery of plant photosynthesis
that living organisms produce the atmosphere they need to inhabit, but
Lovelock took the argument a stage further, asserting that the planet has
been so thoroughly altered physically and chemically by living things that
the Earth itself has to be seen as kind of super-organism. Rather than
merely being a rock in space with life clinging to it, the non-living parts
of the planet are as much a part of the whole as the non-living heartwood
of a living tree.
According to Lovelock, the sun has been getting hotter as life on Earth
has evolved, but our planet has stayed cool to the point of experiencing
ice ages. This shows that Gaia has maintained a fairly stable global surface
temperature throughout its history. Solar radiation passes through the
Earth’s atmosphere just as it passes through glass, and warms the surface.
The heat produced would be lost to outer space but for the atmospheric
gases that absorb it on the way out, trapping it as though under a blanket.
Allowing light in, but stopping heat from getting out, is called the
greenhouse effect. It is enhanced by high proportions of carbon dioxide.
For Gaia to support life, the greenhouse effect must be regulated, since
either too much or too little would be lethal. ‘Global warming’ involves
an unacceptable degree of anthropogenic greenhouse effect, in addition to
what the biosphere naturally provides.
Lovelock pointed out that marine organisms use some of the carbon
dioxide dissolved in seawater to make their shells, which are then laid
down in vast numbers in sedimentary rocks such as limestone. Some
carbon dioxide is removed when dead plants decompose incompletely,
forming coal, oil and other sediments. By these means, living things
regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide in order to maintain a congenial
surface temperature. Michael Allaby’s Guide to Gaia (1990) explains how
analogous mechanisms sustain water, sulphur and iodine cycles, regulate
the salinity of the oceans and, perhaps, even affect continental drift. A
benign and wholly unconscious conspiracy of millions of species keeps
Gaia alive and stable, although the specific organisms and processes have
changed considerably during its history and may be expected to continue
to do so. Gaia is dynamic and unpredictable, not static and harmonious,
although the hypothesis claims that it tends towards a geophysiological
|
|
19.7 Page 187 |
▲back to top |
174 futures: the earth
balance of energy and chemical elements analogous to the physiological
balance of an organism.
Since Lovelock put forward the hypothesis, it has been strongly
disputed by other scientists (see Schneider and Boston 1993). Brewer calls
it a mere ‘charming metaphor’ (1994: 372). The debate may be difficult
to follow in detail, but the key issues are not forbidding for non-scientists.
Gaia has been attractive to deep ecologists and eco-spiritualists as well
as climatologists, hydrologists and philosophers of science. Ascribing
organismic unity to the planet and giving it the name of an Earth-goddess
allows Gaia to be appropriated as the object of global environmental
consciousness, and perhaps veneration too. But as Ernest Callenbach
asserts: ‘Gaia is not a conscious entity with a purpose or special concern
for humans. Those who think of it as a stand-in for a Supreme Being
or God are misinformed’ (1998: 62). Kate Rawles argues that the ethical
consequences of Gaia are not at all clear-cut. For example, it has been
assumed that Gaia proves our interdependent ‘oneness’ with the bios-
phere, and should therefore promote care of it, but Rawles observes that
‘while we are indeed inclined to look after ourselves up to a point, we are
also notorious for risking long-term damage to our own health for short-
term gains, or when the causal mechanisms of the damage are abstract or
obscure’ (1996: 318).
There are also political disputes concerning Gaia. Ecofeminist critic
Patrick Murphy has criticised Lovelock for ‘sex-typing the planet’. He
acknowledges that ‘Gaia has become an immediately recognized,
acceptable term for Earth’ and that the scientific hypothesis ‘works well
for changing consciousness’ (Murphy 1995: 61, 68), but he nevertheless
criticises Lovelock for remaining bound by patriarchal habits of language
and thought. Murphy argues that, by adopting a feminine stereotype,
Lovelock, in common with radical and Goddess-worshipping ecofemi-
nists (see Chapter 2), ‘reinscribes . . . patriarchal sex-typing’ because ‘the
conception of the fertile female as enchanting, sacred, and mysterious
is a perception that hinders the very healing they seek’ (pp. 62–3).
Like Plumwood, Murphy enjoins a non-hierarchical, or ‘heterarchical’,
differentiation of gender that accepts biological differences without
forcing them into hierarchical valuations. Gaia, he argues, elevates a
specific valuation of the female to a planetary level. Nevertheless, while
Murphy subjects Lovelock’s hypothesis to ecofeminist critique, his own
|
|
19.8 Page 188 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 175
normative rhetoric remains conspicuously resistant to critique from
a truly ecological perspective. He repeatedly measures writers against a
yardstick of commitment to ‘balance’ and ‘harmony’ that, as we have
seen, has little to do with modern ecology, and asserts wrongly (citing a
theologian rather than an ecologist) a ‘basic ecological principle that
diversity is a key component of systemic health’ (p. 67). Murphy is an
important figure in ecocriticism, having fostered ASLE, ecofeminism,
internationalism and greater literary theoretical sophistication, but his
basic ecological vocabulary is increasingly anachronistic.
Gaia is, in any case, not simply identical with the Earth. It is a
hypothetical construct of Lovelock’s theory, a simile for the planet grasped
‘as if’ it were an organism. As the theory is refined, Gaia ought to come
increasingly to resemble the Earth that we know and inhabit, but it will
remain indefinitely open to falsification by scientists. One way to test Gaia
is to try various computer models of its regulatory mechanisms, such as
Lovelock’s own Daisyworld simulation, versions of which are available on
the Internet (e.g. DaisyBall is at <http://www.gingerbooth.com/course
ware/daisy.html>). Simulations can show how Gaia works if it works at
all, but on their own they cannot prove its worth as a theory. By compar-
ison with Baudrillard’s hyperbolic paranoia, such sensible pragmatism will
seem dull, but understanding the responsible use of ecological modelling
is essential for understanding the nature of scientific ‘prediction’ in the
age of global ecology. Moreover, although I have analysed only its
scientific formulation, Gaian simulation might also provide a basis for
attempts to imagine the whole Earth in the literary and other media more
usually addressed by ecocritics.
THE FUTURE OF ECOCRITICISM: BETWEEN TWO
SIMULATIONS OF EARTH
This book has moved from the ancient trope of pastoral to the contem-
porary contestation of the figure of the Earth, from Romanticism to
postmodernism. The Bible and Graeco-Roman narratives were important
sources for the earlier tropes, and we saw that the notion of a pristine
original space lost by human misdemeanour runs through pastoral,
wilderness and some versions of dwelling, while the hope or fear of some
final destination for human struggles with nature saturates apocalyptic
|
|
19.9 Page 189 |
▲back to top |
176 futures: the earth
visions. However, Christian tropes are problematic for ecocritics,
originating in an other-worldly religion that legitimises environmental
destruction. The underlying narrative structure of Christian mythology
claims a coherence for the history of Creation that is utterly at odds with
evolutionary and ecological processes. Such ancient tropes, as adapted by
environmental discourse, have the advantage of deep roots in our culture,
but the liability of anachronism in the postmodern era. Only the relatively
novel constructions of the human animal and the whole Earth, both
profoundly shaped by scientific thought, seem to offer metaphors ade-
quate to the novelty of our predicament, and even these may be inflected
quite differently in different contexts.
Much ecocriticism has taken for granted that its task is to overcome
anthropocentrism, just as feminism seeks to overcome androcentrism.
The metaphysical argument for biocentrism is meant to sustain moral
claims about the intrinsic value of the natural world, which will in turn
affect our attitudes and behaviour towards nature. Wilderness experi-
ences, or apocalyptic threats, or Native American ways of life, are
supposed to provide the impetus or the example by which individuals
come to an authentic selfhood orientated toward right environmental
action. Whilst the importance of changing the minds and lives of indi-
viduals is undeniable, this book has aimed to show the political dimension
that this moralistic emphasis may occlude. However, the politicisation of
ecocriticism does pose its own problems. Dwelling on the troubling
example of Heidegger (Chapter 6), who espoused both Nazism and a
kind of deep ecology, Jonathan Bate asserts in The Song of the Earth that
‘The dilemma of Green reading is that it must, yet it cannot, separate
ecopoetics from ecopolitics’ (2000: 266). Environmentalism is compat-
ible with most political positions, and while we have seen possible dangers
inherent in this, it might also give us a clear argument for better, not less,
political attunement in ecocriticism. Bate rightly points out that poets are
not the engineers of the world, and that literature cannot provide specific
solutions, which means that ecocriticism must continue to adopt and
adapt theories from feminist and Marxist traditions, enabling positive
engagement in cultural politics.
I would argue that the promise of ecofeminist literary and cultural
theory has yet to be realised. With important exceptions such as Haraway,
Armbruster, Westling and Murphy, such criticism has been held back by
|
|
19.10 Page 190 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 177
the overstated anti-rationalism and gynocentric dualism of radical
ecofeminism. The work of Australian philosopher Val Plumwood offers
ecofeminism a sound basis for a much-needed critique of the dynamics
of domination as they operate in a range of cultural contexts. A mono-
lithically conceived root cause of environmental destruction, be it labelled
anthropocentrism or androcentrism is bound to misrepresent the com-
plexity of causation in the real world. Ecofeminism, modified by dialogue
with social ecological positions, can provide insight into the cultural
operations of environmental injustice. In this way, the fusion of envi-
ronmental and social development agendas that has occurred so strikingly
within and between global NGOs might come to ecocriticism; Beyond
Nature Writing (2001), edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen
Wallace, includes several essays in this emergent field of enquiry.
Ecocritics therefore continue to experiment with hybridised reading
practices, drawing on various philosophical and literary theoretical
sources. Bennett and Teague’s The Nature of Cities (1999) reveals a new
emphasis on bringing cultural theorists such as Cronon, Ross, Luke and
Haraway into dialogue with literary ecocritics, thereby consolidating the
field around a critical encounter between genres, perspectives and politics.
The work of Richard Kerridge is exemplary in this respect: he writes with
as much insight about postmodern risk as he does about Thomas Hardy.
Harrison’s eclectic Forests (1993), which ranges from Grimm fairy tales
to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, fosters the making of con-
nections between disparate cultural phenomena without eliminating
their peculiarities. Bate and Buell first published books that identified a
single ‘environmental tradition’ in Britain and the USA, stemming from
Wordsworth and Thoreau respectively. In later works, however, they
favour an explicitly dialectical approach. In The Song of the Earth,
Wordsworth’s piety is leavened with Byron’s wit, and Heidegger’s
portentousness gets a learned sneer from Theodor Adorno. For Buell,
Writing for an Endangered World involves juxtaposing urbanites like
Theodor Dreiser and Gwendolyn Brooks with the more obvious
candidates for ecocritical treatment, Jeffers and Berry. Drawing upon such
diverse resources of hope enables ecocriticism to connect with the urban
and suburban places in which most of us will continue to live, and will
add depth to the ecological critique of modernity; material and economic
progress is no more the root of all evils than it is an unalloyed benefit to
|
|
20 Pages 191-200 |
▲back to top |
|
|
20.1 Page 191 |
▲back to top |
178 futures: the earth
people or the natural world. By such means the risk of fostering
reactionary politics might be minimised.
There are two key challenges for the future. One is the relationship
between globalisation and ecocriticism, which has barely been broached.
Sustained attention to the idea of place as locale has provided us with no
sense of the place of the whole Earth in contemporary culture. The second
is the difficulty of developing constructive relations between the green
humanities and the environmental sciences. This is especially problematic
in the light of developments in ecology that expose the rhetoric of balance
and harmony as, in effect, versions of pastoral. This notion of nature’s
wisdom is so deeply ingrained in environmentalist discourse and eco-
criticism that only sustained research at the borders of the humanities and
the new postmodern biological sciences can disentangle it from our
systems of basic presuppositions. As Daniel Botkin observes:
As long as we could believe that nature undisturbed was constant,
we were provided with a simple standard against which to judge our
actions, a reflection from a windless pond in which our place was
both apparent and fixed, providing us with a sense of continuity
and permanence that was comforting. Abandoning these beliefs
leaves us on an extreme existential position: we are like small boats
without anchors in a sea of time; how we long for a safe harbor on a
shore.
(1992: 188–9)
Gaia, for example, implies unpredictability and dynamism rather than
predetermined harmony, but also comfortingly reasserts the tendency of
life to maintain equilibrium or balance. Botkin’s ecology places rather less
faith in the harmonious regulatory functions of living organisms. In both
cases, the inflection of Earth as a static, fixed image is shown to be terribly
misleading. The Earth is perhaps better seen as a process rather than an
object.
Postmodern ecology neither returns us to the ancient myth of the
Earth Mother, whose loss some ecocritics lament, nor supplies us with
evidence that ‘nature knows best’. The irony is that a future Earth-
orientated system of values and tropes will have to acknowledge
contingency and indeterminacy at a fundamental level, but this only
|
|
20.2 Page 192 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 179
increases the scope and extent of our liability as the most powerful species
on the planet. The poetics of authenticity assumes, against the evidence
of ecology, that there is a fixed external standard we ought to try and
meet. The poetics of responsibility recognises that every inflection of
Earth is our inflection, every standard our standard, and we should not
disguise political decisions about the kind of world we want in either the
discredited objectivity of natural order nor the subjective mystification
of spiritual intuition. Ecocriticism is essentially about the demarcation
between nature and culture, its construction and reconstruction. The
ultimate logic of pastoral would be the hope that culture might be sub-
sumed within nature, but we have seen the limitations of such idealism.
The opposite extreme would be the technological sublimity of simulation,
in which nature is no more than a cultural construct, but this world of
pervasive representation is a misrepresentation. Ecocriticism, I would
argue, will have to work with the shifting, pragmatic sense of the relation-
ship of culture and nature suggested in this book.
Ecophilosophers often criticise the arrogance of anthropocentrism,
sometimes using the Ancient Greek term ‘hubris’ for this fatal flaw of
overweening self-righteousness and wilful misuse of power. The history
of the world in the last 200 years, and especially the history of the
developed world in the last 50 years, supplies ample evidence of such
hubris. Yet the solution need not be, as deep ecologists would have it,
self-abnegating humility and submission to the presumed natural order.
The Ancient Greeks proposed a virtue that combined the proper pride of
a clever, resourceful animal with reasonable acceptance of the human
place in a world we can neither wholly predict nor control. They called it
‘megalopsuche’, which translates roughly as ‘greatness of soul’, and I
would suggest this as a worthy aspiration. We can understand the
distinction by contrasting two attempts to simulate planetary ecology.
In September 1991, eight people, called ‘bionauts’, were sealed into
an enormous structure in the Arizona desert. For the next two years, they
attempted to live and work in ‘Biosphere 2’, a simulation of the Earth’s
environment, the original Biosphere. Architecturally, Biosphere 2 is
dominated by two stepped tetrahedral pyramids, reminiscent of Meso-
American ruins, but built out of steel and glass like corporate buildings.
Inside these and associated buildings, there are seven biomes that bring
selected plants and animals from around the world together into a
|
|
20.3 Page 193 |
▲back to top |
180 futures: the earth
supposedly integrated, self-sustaining, total environment. Five ‘natural’
biomes – ocean, savannah, desert, tropical rainforest and marsh – sustain
two ‘artificial’ ones, including a microcity for the human bionauts and an
area for intensive agriculture. Outside the Biosphere itself, the site
includes control rooms, conference facilities, exhibition spaces, gift shops
and tourist conveniences. The initiative was supposed to provide a
functioning model of ‘Spaceship Earth’ that might not only serve as a
testbed for environmental engineering technologies, but also as an
example of the eco-simulation technologies we might need for eventual
space exploration beyond the limits of food, energy and oxygen supplies
brought from Earth.
The original Biosphere 2 mission failed dramatically. Technical
problems caused crop failures and elevated levels of carbon dioxide that
would have killed the bionauts were it not for external intervention.
Few worthwhile scientific results were achieved, and it largely failed as
an advertisement or laboratory for self-sustaining life support systems.
The second mission in 1994 was cut short, and Biosphere 2 has since
had a new lease of life without bionauts or extravagant ‘missions’ as a
research and educational facility of Columbia University. In its original
incarnation, Biosphere 2 seems a good example of tragic hubris, occa-
sionally bordering farce. Its 3.2 acres, whilst impressive in terms of
large glasshouses, were a ludicrously small compass for such grandiose
ambitions. Moreover, as Luke observes, the very basis of the project
was disingenuous; while human life and its ‘technosphere’ depends on
the sustaining ‘ecosphere’ out here in Biosphere 1, the simulated Earth
reverses this priority. Underneath the great structures, complex, hidden
mechanisms are needed to regulate environmental factors such as
temperature or air composition. The ecosphere, in other words, comes to
depend upon the technosphere. The biomes themselves are composed
of entirely artificial associations of plants loosely associated with partic-
ular nations or regions, with a tiny selection of insects and animals
included. This makes Biosphere 2 an excellent example of an ecological
simulacrum:
Here, ‘Nature’ is not Nature, but rather something that has been
digitally sampled, botanically colorized, zoologically compressed, and
ecologically scanned into a biospheric simulation of itself that could not
|
|
20.4 Page 194 |
▲back to top |
futures: the earth 181
and would not exist without the engineering needed to stage this odd
ecological experiment.
(Luke 1997: 102)
On 15 May 2000, the world’s largest greenhouses opened to the public
in Cornwall. The Eden Project, as it is called, is presently striving to cope
with its own extraordinary success as a tourist attraction. Superficially, the
Project resembles Biosphere 2: it incorporates two gigantic indoor biomes,
simulating humid tropic and warm temperate conditions with regional
botanical zones. It is brilliantly designed as a tourist attraction, seeming
to hide at the bottom of its enormous claypit until the paying customer
emerges onto the first viewing platform for an impressive panorama of its
eight geodesic domes surrounded by landscaped parkland, outdoor crops
and tourist services. The merchandise is of high quality, the Eden Project
brand name is everywhere and the designers have clearly learned a lot from
theme parks and similar leisure facilities.
Tim Smit, author of Eden (2001) and prime mover in the Project, is
candid about its commercial needs but deplores the theme park analogy.
He traces the laborious construction process, and explains that the
philosophy behind it was not to simulate ecosystems in the sense of
pretending to recreate them, but ‘to represent and interpret climate zones
which exhibited the maximum impact of man on the environment, thus
providing a canvas on which to explore the widest range of issues’ (Smit
2001: 129). Its ambition is not intergalactic and technophilic, but
resolutely terrestrial and educational, emphasising human dependence on
plants for aesthetic and spiritual sustenance as well as food, medicine and
industrial processes. Sculptures litter the inner and outer spaces, and the
site is patrolled by both scientists and performing artists. Technosphere
and ecosphere are constantly and explicitly interrelated, with service pipes
externally mounted on the domes, while within the biomes both creative
and destructive interrelations between culture and nature are explored:
Eden would be dedicated to inspiring people to reflect on the vital role
of plants and come to understand the need for balance between, on the
one hand, husbandry – growing them for our use – and, on the other,
stewardship – taking care of them on behalf of all living things.
(2001: 174)
|
|
20.5 Page 195 |
▲back to top |
182 futures: the earth
Perhaps ironically, then, the ‘Eden’ Project is anything but an exercise in
pastoral nostalgia, or a dualistic projection of humans in opposition to, or
exile from, the Earth. It is an experiment in imaginary human ecology that
flirts with utopianism, but ultimately epitomises something like global
georgic:
Eden isn’t about the environment; that’s like saying life is about air. It
is concerned, in partnership with others, with exploring development in
the fullest sense of the word: the sustainable development of human
potential and the achievement of the optimum quality of life for all,
across economic, social and cultural boundaries.
(2001: 302)
It ought not to be too pious, or too implausible, to associate the
ecocriticism of the future with Eden’s inflection of the Earth: attuned to
environmental justice, but not dismissive of the claims of commerce and
technology; shaped by knowledge of long-term environmental problems,
but wary of apocalypticism; informed by artistic as well as scientific
ecological insight; and committed to the preservation of the biological
diversity of the planet for all its inhabitants. It is a long way from the
pastoral we started with, and it is a great-souled vision with its feet planted
solidly on the ground.
|
|
20.6 Page 196 |
▲back to top |
GLOSSARY
Androcentric system of beliefs and practices that favours men over women.
Animism belief that natural objects and phenomena have spirits.
Anthropocentrism system of beliefs and practices that favours humans
over other organisms.
Anthropogenic caused by humans.
Carrying capacity maximum number of organisms of a certain kind that an
ecosystem can support. Sometimes dubiously applied to human popu-
lations, e.g. Callenbach 1998: 22–5.
Constructionism belief that apparently natural phenomena, such as gender
characteristics, are mainly or wholly enculturated or ‘socially constructed’.
Cyborg hybrid organism incorporating biological and electro-mechanical
elements.
Dialectic analysis pursued by means of incorporation of opposed
arguments or perspectives.
Dualism explanation of the world in terms of two opposed terms, e.g. mind
vs. matter, nature vs. culture.
Ecocide destruction of entire habitats, rather than just individual
organisms or species.
Instrumental value possessing value only in relation to human interests,
usually narrowly economic.
Intraspecies operating within, rather than between, species.
Intrinsic value possessing value in its own right, without reference to
human interests.
|
|
20.7 Page 197 |
▲back to top |
184 glossary
Jeremiad a discourse of warning or discouragement, often prophetic in
tone.
Matrifocal social system centred on mothers as possessors of wisdom and
creativity. Compatible with some forms of patriarchy.
Mechanism belief that the world is explicable in terms of mechanical
physical laws.
Monism explanation of the world using a single, all-encompassing term.
Normative proposing or maintaining a standard or norm.
Prolepsis narratological term for anticipation of future events.
Reductionism belief that phenomena can be explained in simple, or (by
implication) simplistic, terms.
Speciesism prejudice in favour of one’s own species.
Synecdoche figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, e.g.
‘hand’ instead of ‘worker’, or ‘hungry mouth’ instead of ‘poor person’.
Therianthropic representation of humans and animals in a single image,
usually as a form of caricature.
Theriomorphic representation of humans as animals, usually with satirical
purpose.
Theriophobia irrational fear of animals.
Trope any figure of speech, e.g. metaphor, metonymy, irony. Used in this
book to name large-scale, underlying cultural metaphors of nature.
Vitalism largely discredited scientific belief that phenomena possess a vital
spirit over and above qualities that may be described mechanistically.
|
|
20.8 Page 198 |
▲back to top |
FURTHER READING
The ASLE website is an excellent, growing source of theoretical, bibliographic
and pedagogical material, with an especially interesting section that
includes twelve different definitions of ‘ecocriticism’: <http://www.
asle.umn.edu/conf/other_conf/wla/1994.html>. This would be a
good starting point for further research, as are the following:
K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace (eds) (2001) Beyond Nature Writing:
Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, London: University Press of
Virginia. Examines a wide variety of authors and periods, with a
broadly social ecological and ecofeminist perspective.
J. Bate (2000) The Song of the Earth, London: Picador. A dialectical reading
of canonical literature, mainly British, using Heideggerean concepts.
M. Bennett and D.W. Teague (eds) (1999) The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism
and Urban Environments, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Not
only a new terrain for ecocriticism, but also a politically progressive
theoretical framework.
D. Botkin (1992) Discordant Harmonies: a New Ecology for the Twenty-First
Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. An accessible and thought-
provoking introduction to recent ecological theory that recognises the
importance of tropes.
L. Buell (2001) Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and
Environment in the U.S. and Beyond, London: Belknap Press. Together
with Buell’s earlier Thoreau book, constitutes a thorough basis for
American ecocriticism.
W. Cronon (ed.) (1996) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in
Nature, London: Norton. An excellent collection of work by writers
from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.
C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds) (1996) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks
in Literary Ecology, London: University of Georgia Press. Canonical
anthology with a broadly deep ecological approach and exclusively
American focus.
R. Kerridge and N. Sammells (eds) (1998) Writing the Environment, London:
Zed Books. Important anthology containing essays on children’s
|
|
20.9 Page 199 |
▲back to top |
186 further reading
literature, wildlife programming and Oscar Wilde as well as canonical
literature.
D. Quammen (1996) The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of
Extinctions, London: Pimlico. Excellent example of popular scientific
writing that explains one of our most pressing ecological problems.
K. Soper (1998) What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell. An uniquely accessible
and insightful discussion of ecophilosophy and politics.
L.H. Westling (1996) The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender,
and American Fiction, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. A
persuasive ecofeminist reading of canonical American literature.
A. Wilson (1992) The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from
Disney to the Exxon Valdez, Oxford: Blackwell. A witty and combative
contribution to green cultural studies.
|
|
20.10 Page 200 |
▲back to top |
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbey, E. (1992) Desert Solitaire: a Season in the Wilderness, London: Robin Clark. First
published in 1968.
Aberley, D. (1999) ‘Interpreting bioregionalism: a story from many voices’, in
M.V. McGinnis (ed.) Bioregionalism, London: Routledge.
Adamson, J. (2001) American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism:
the Middle Place Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Allaby, M. (1990) Guide to Gaia, London: Optima.
Allen, P.G. (1996) ‘The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective’, in C. Glotfelty
and H. Fromm (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology,
London: University of Georgia Press.
Alpers, P (1996) What is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Armbruster, K. (1998) ‘Creating the world we must save: the paradox of television
nature documentaries’, in R. Kerridge and N. Sammells (eds) Writing the
Environment, London: Zed Books.
—— (2001) ‘Can a book protect a valley?: Rick Bass and the dilemma of
environmental advocacy’, in O.A. Weltzein (ed.) The Literary Art and Activism
of Rick Bass, Salt Lake City,UT: University of Utah Press.
Attfield, R. (1983) ‘Western traditions and environmental ethics’, in R. Elliott and
A. Gare (eds) Environmental Philosophy, Milton Keynes: Open University
Press.
Atwood, M. (1991) Wilderness Tips, London: Virago.
—— (1992) Surfacing, London: Virago.
Austin, M. (1996) The Land of Little Rain, New York: Dover. First published in 1903.
Baarschers, W.H. (1996) Eco-facts and Eco-fiction, London: Routledge.
Baker, S. (1993) Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Barrell, J. and Bull, J. (1982) The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, London:
Penguin.
Barry, P. (2002) Beginning Theory: an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bass, R. (1998) Fiber, London: University of Georgia Press.
Bate, J. (1991) Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition,
London: Routledge.
—— (2000) The Song of the Earth, London: Picador.
Baudrillard, J. (2001) Selected Writings (2nd edn), ed. M. Poster, Cambridge: Polity.
Beck, U. (1999) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity.
Beckerman, W. (1995) Small Is Stupid: Blowing the Whistle on the Greens, London:
Duckworth.
Bennett, M. (2001) ‘Jeremiad, elegy and the Yaak: Rick Bass and the aesthetics of
|
|
21 Pages 201-210 |
▲back to top |
|
|
21.1 Page 201 |
▲back to top |
188 bibliography
anger and grief’, in O.A. Weltzein (ed.) The Literary Art and Activism of Rick
Bass, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.
Bennett, M. and Teague, D.W. (eds) (1999) The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and
Urban Environments, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Berger, J. (1979) Pig Earth, London: Bloomsbury.
—— (1980) ‘Why look at animals?’, in About Looking, London: Penguin.
Bergon, F. (2000) ‘“Sensitive to the verge of the horizon”: the environmentalism of
John Burroughs’, in C.Z. Walker (ed.) Sharp Eyes: John Burroughs and American
Nature Writing, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Berry, W. (1980) A Part, San Francisco: North Point Press.
—— (1990) What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press.
Biehl, J. (1991) Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, Montreal: Black Rose
Books.
Biehl, J. and Staudenmeier, P. (1995) Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience,
Edinburgh: AK Press.
Biggs, S. (1998) ‘The biodiversity convention and global sustainable development’, in
R. Kiely and P. Marfleet (eds) Globalisation and the Third World, London:
Routledge.
Botkin, D. (1992) Discordant Harmonies: a New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brain, T. (1998) ‘Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?’, in R. Kerridge and
N. Sammells (eds) Writing the Environment, London: Zed Books.
Bramwell, A. (1965) Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green’ Party, Bourne
End, Bucks.: Kensal Press.
—— (1989) Ecology in the Twentieth Century: a History, London: Yale University Press.
Brennan, A. (1995) ‘Ecological theory and value in nature’, in R. Elliot (ed.)
Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brewer, R. (1994) The Science of Ecology (2nd edn.) London: Saunders College.
Branch, M.P. (1999) ‘Cosmology in the Casino: Simulacra of Nature in the
Interiorized Wilderness’, in M. Bennett and D.W. Teague (eds) The Nature of
Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona
Press.
Brooks, P. (1980) Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to
Rachel Carson Have Shaped America, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Buell, L. (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the
Formation of American Culture, London: Princeton University Press.
—— (2001) Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in
the U.S. and Beyond, London: Belknap Press.
Bunce, M. (1994) The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape, London:
Routledge.
Burke, E. (1990) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Callenbach, E. (1998) Ecology: a Pocket Guide, London: University of California Press.
Callicott, J.B. (1983) ‘Traditional American Indian and traditional Western European
|
|
21.2 Page 202 |
▲back to top |
bibliography 189
attitudes towards nature: an overview’, in R. Elliot and A. Gare (eds)
Environmental Philosophy, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
—— (1995) ‘Animal liberation: a triangular affair’, in R. Elliot (ed.) Environmental
Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, S. (1998) ‘Magpie’, in R. Kerridge and N. Sammells (eds) (1998) Writing
the Environment, London: Zed Books.
Carson, R. (1999) Silent Spring, London: Penguin. First published in 1962.
Cather, W. (2000) Oh Pioneers! London: Virago.
Clare, J. (1986) John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. M. Williams and R. Williams,
London: Methuen.
Clark, J. (1990) ‘What is social ecology?’, in J. Clark (ed.) Renewing the Earth: the
Promise of Social Ecology, London: Green Print.
Clark, S.R.L. (1998) ‘Pantheism’, in D. Cooper and J. Palmer (eds) Spirit of the
Environment: Religion, Value and Environmental Concern, London: Routledge.
Clements, C.D. (1995) ‘Stasis: the unnatural value’, in R. Elliot (ed.) Environmental
Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coates, P. (1998) Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Cambridge: Polity.
Cooper, D. and Palmer, J. (eds) (1992) The Environment in Question: Ethics and Global
Issues, London: Routledge.
Coupe, L. (ed.) (2000) The Green Studies Reader: from Romanticism to Ecocriticism,
London: Routledge.
Cronon, W. (1996) ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, Getting back to the wrong
nature’, in W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in
Nature, London: Norton.
Crosby, A.W. (1995) Ecological Imperialism: the Biological Expansion of Europe,
900–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cuomo, C.J. (1994) ‘Ecofeminism, deep ecology and human population’, in
K. Warren (ed.) Ecological Feminism, London: Routledge.
Daly, M. (1979) Gyn/Ecology, London: Women’s Press.
Davion, V. (1994) ‘Is ecofeminism feminist?’, in K. Warren (ed.) Ecological Feminism,
London: Routledge.
Day, A. (1996) Romanticism, London: Routledge.
DeLillo, D. (1986) White Noise, London: Picador.
Descartes, R. (1986) ‘A Discourse on Method’, ‘Meditations on the First Philosophy’, and
‘Principles of Philosophy’, London: Dent. ‘Discourse on method’ first published
in 1637.
Dick, P.K. (1997) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Voyager. First
published in 1968.
Doubiago, S. (1989) ‘Mama Coyote talks to the boys’, in J. Plant (ed.) Healing the
Wounds: the Promise of Ecofeminism, London: Green Print.
Eagleton, T. (1996) Literary Theory: an Introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ehrlich, P. (1972) The Population Bomb, London: Pan/Ballantine.
Ehrlich, P. and Ehrlich, A. (1998) Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-
Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future, Washington, DC: Island.
|
|
21.3 Page 203 |
▲back to top |
190 bibliography
Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elliot, R. and Gare, A. (eds) (1983) Environmental Philosophy, Milton Keynes: Open
University Press.
Erdrich, L. (1994a) Love Medicine (2nd edn), London: Flamingo. First published in
1984.
—— (1994b) Tracks, London: Flamingo. First published in 1988.
Ferry, L. (1995) The New Ecological Order, trans. C. Volk, London: University of
Chicago Press. First published in 1992.
Fitter, C. (1996) Poetry, Space, Landscape: Towards a New Theory, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Foltz, B. (1995) Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the
Metaphysics of Nature, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Fudge, E. (2000) Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English
Culture, London: Macmillan.
Fuller, B. (1969) ‘Spaceship Earth: An Operating Manual’, from
<http://www.bfi.org/operating_manual.htm> Accessed 6 December 2003.
Gaard, G. (1998) ‘Hiking without a map: reflections on teaching ecofeminist literary
criticism’, in G. Gaard and P.D. Murphy (eds), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism:
Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press.
Gaard, G. and Murphy, P.D. (eds) (1998), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory,
Interpretation, Pedagogy, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Garrard, G. (1996) ‘Radical pastoral?’, Studies in Romanticism 35(3): 451–65.
—— (1998) ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the problem of dwelling’, in Kerridge, R. and
Sammells, N. (eds) Writing the Environment, London: Zed Books.
—— (2000) ‘Wordsworth and Thoreau: two versions of pastoral’, in R.J. Schneider
(ed.) Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, Iowa
City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
Giblett, R. (1996) Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Gifford, T. (1999) Pastoral, London: Routledge.
Glotfelty, C. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds), The
Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, London: University of
Georgia Press.
Glotfelty, C. and Fromm, H. (eds) (1996) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in
Literary Ecology, London: University of Georgia Press.
Gore, A. (1992) Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose, London:
Earthscan.
Gray, C.H. (1995) The Cyborg Handbook, London: Routledge.
Griffin, S. (1978) Woman and Nature: the Roaring Inside Her, London: Women’s Press.
Hannigan, J.A. (1995) Environmental Sociology: a Social Constructionist Perspective,
London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, London:
Free Association.
|
|
21.4 Page 204 |
▲back to top |
bibliography 191
Harris, R. (2000) ‘Other-words in Silent Spring’, in C. Waddell (ed.), And No Birds
Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Carbondale and
Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Harrison, R.P. (1992) Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, London: University of
Chicago Press.
Harvey, G. (1997) The Killing of the Countryside, London: Vintage.
Hayles, N.K. (1996) ‘Simulated natures and natural simulations’, in W. Cronon
(ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, London:
Norton.
Hayward, T. (1995) Ecological Thought: an Introduction, London: Polity.
Heidegger, M. (1993) Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, London: Routledge.
Hochman, J. (1998) Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory,
Moscow: University of Idaho Press.
Hughes, J.D. (1996a) Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and
Romans, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
—— (1996b) North American Indian Ecology, El Paso, TX: Texas Western Press.
Ingram, D. (2000) Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, Exeter:
University of Exeter Press.
Janik, D.I. (1995) ‘Environmental consciousness in modern literature: four repre-
sentative examples’, in G. Sessions (ed.) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First
Century: Readings on the Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism,
London: Shambhala.
Jeffers, R. (1987) Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet.
Kay, J. (1998) ‘Concepts of nature in the Hebrew Bible’, in R.G. Botzler and
S.J. Armstrong (eds), Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence,
Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
Kerridge, R. (1998) ‘Small rooms and the ecosystem: environmentalism and DeLillo’s
White Noise’, in Kerridge, R. and Sammells, N. (eds) Writing the Environment,
London: Zed Books.
—— (1999) ‘BSE stories’, Key Words: a Journal of Cultural Materialism 2: 111–21.
—— (2000) ‘Ecothrillers: environmental cliffhangers’, in L. Coupe (ed.) The Green
Studies Reader: from Romanticism to Ecocriticism, London: Routledge.
—— (2002) ‘Narratives of resignation: environmentalism in recent fiction’, in
J. Parham (ed.) The Environmental Tradition in English Literature, Aldershot,
Hants.: Ashgate.
Kerridge, R. and Sammells, N. (eds) (1998) Writing the Environment, London: Zed
Books.
Kheel, M. (1989) ‘From healing herbs to deadly drugs: western medicine’s war
against the natural world’, in J. Plant (ed.) Healing the Wounds: the Promise of
Ecofeminism, London: Green Print.
Killingsworth, M.J. and Palmer, J.S. (1996) ‘Millennial ecology: the apocalyptic
narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming’, in C.G. Herndl and
S.C. Brown (eds), Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary
America, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
|
|
21.5 Page 205 |
▲back to top |
192 bibliography
—— (1998) ‘Ecopolitics and the literature of the borderlands: the frontiers of
environmental justice in Latina and Native American writing’, in R. Kerridge
and N. Sammells (eds) Writing the environment, London: Zed Books.
—— (2000) ‘Silent Spring and science fiction: an essay in the history and rhetoric
of narrative’, in C. Waddell (ed.), And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press.
King, T. (ed.) (1990) All My Relations: an Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native
Fiction, London: University of Oklahoma Press.
King, Y. (1989) ‘The ecology of feminism and the feminism of ecology’ in J. Plant
(ed.) Healing the Wounds: the Promise of Ecofeminism, London: Green
Print.
Kolodny, A. (1975) The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as History and Experience in American
Life and Letters, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Krech III, S. (1999) The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, London: Norton.
Kroeber, K. (1994) Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of
Mind, New York: Columbia University Press.
LaChappelle, D. (1996) D.H. Lawrence: Future Primitive, Denton, TX: University of
North Texas Press.
Lawrence, D.H. (1988) The Rainbow, London: Penguin. First published in 1915.
—— (1989) Women in Love, London: Penguin. First published in 1920.
Leahy, M.P.T. (1994) Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective, London:
Routledge.
Lee, M.F. (1997) ‘Environmental apocalypse: the millennial ideology of “Earth first!”’,
in T. Robbins and S.J. Palmer (eds) Millennium, Messiahs and Mayhem:
Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements London: Routledge.
Legler, G. (2000) ‘“I am a transparent eyeball”: the politics of vision in American
nature writing’, in J. Tallmadge and H. Harrington (eds) Reading Under the
Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah
Press.
Leigh, J. (2000) The Hunter, London: Faber and Faber.
Leopold, A. (1968) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Levinson, M. (1986) Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, M.W. (1992) Green Delusions: an Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism, London: Duke University Press.
Littlejohn, B. and Pearce, J. (1973) Marked by the Wild: an Anthology of Literature
Shaped by the Canadian Wilderness, Toronto: McLelland and Stewart.
Lovelock, J. (1982) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
First published in 1979.
Lukes, T.M. (1997) Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy and Culture,
London: University of Minneapolis Press.
Lutts, R.H. (2000) ‘Chemical fallout: Silent Spring, radioactive fallout and the
|
|
21.6 Page 206 |
▲back to top |
bibliography 193
environmental movement’, in C. Waddell (ed.), And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical
Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
McGinnis, M.V. (ed.) (1999) Bioregionalism, London: Routledge.
McKibben, B. (1990) The End of Nature, London: Penguin.
—— (1992) The Age of Missing Information, London: Penguin.
—— (2000) ‘The call of the not so wild’, in C.Z. Walker (ed.) Sharp Eyes: John
Burroughs and American Nature Writing, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.
Malamud, R. (1998) Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity, London:
Macmillan.
Malthus, T.R. (1970) An Essay on the Principle of Population, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Marx, L. (1964) The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America, London: Oxford University Press.
Masson, J. and McCarthy, S. (1996) When Elephants Weep: the Emotional Lives of
Animals, London: Vintage.
Merchant, C. (1990) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution, San Francisco: Harper and Row. Originally published in 1980.
Midgley, M. (1983) Animals and Why They Matter: a Journey Around the Species Barrier,
Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin.
Muir, J. (1992) The Eight Wilderness-Discovery Books, London: Diadem Books.
Murphy, P.D. (1995) Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques, Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Myers, N. and Simon, J. (1994) Scarcity or Abundance: a Debate on the Environment,
London: Norton.
Nelson, B. (2000) The Wild and the Domestic: Animal Representation, Ecocriticism,
and Western American Literature, Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada
Press.
Nietzsche, F.W. (1974) The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufman, New York: Vintage.
—— (1982) The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. W. Kaufman, Harmondsworth,
Middx.: Penguin Viking.
North, R.D. (1995) Life on a Modern Planet: a Manifesto for Progress, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Norwood, V. (1996) ‘Heroines of nature: four women respond to the American
landscape’, in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader:
Landmarks in Literary Ecology, London: University of Georgia Press.
Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness: from Prehistory to the Age of Ecology,
London: Yale University Press.
O’Leary, S.D. (1994) Arguing the Apocalypse: a Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Padget, M. (2001) ‘Native American Fiction’, in H. Grice, C. Hepworth et al. (eds)
Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, Manchester University Press.
Passmore, J. (1974) Man’s Responsibility for Nature, London: Duckworth.
|
|
21.7 Page 207 |
▲back to top |
194 bibliography
Payne, D. (1996) Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental
Politics, London: University Press of New England.
Pepper, D. (1993) Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, London:
Routledge.
Plato (1920) ‘Critias’, in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. II, trans. B. Jowett, New York:
Random House.
Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge.
—— (2001) Environmental Culture, London: Routledge.
Pollan, M. (2002) Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, London: Bloomsbury.
Ponting, C. (1992) A Green History of the World, London: Penguin.
Quammen, D. (1996) The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of
Extinctions, London: Pimplico.
Rackham, O. (1994) The Illustrated History of the Countryside, London: Phoenix.
Rawles, K. (1996) ‘Ethical Implications of the Gaia Thesis’, in P. Bunyard (ed.) Gaia in
Action: Science of the Living Earth, Edinburgh: Floris.
Rigby, K. (2002) ‘Ecocriticism’, in J. Wolfreys (ed.) Introducing Criticism at the 21st
Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Robinson, D.M. (1999) ‘Wilderness and the agrarian principle: Gary Snyder, Wendell
Berry, and the ethical definition of the “wild”’, Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment 6(1): 15–28.
Ross, A. (1994) The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society, London:
Verso.
Sale, K. (1985) Dwellers in the Land: the Bioregional Vision, San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books.
Schama, S. (1995) Landscape and Memory, London: HarperCollins.
Scheese, D. (1996) ‘Desert Solitaire: Counter-friction to the Machine in the Garden’, in
C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology, London: University of Georgia Press.
Schiller, F.W. (1985) ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’, trans. J.A. Elias, in
H.B. Nisbet (ed.) German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann,
Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Schneider, R.J. (ed.) (2000) Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental
Writing, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
Schneider, S.H. and Boston, P.J. (eds) (1993) Scientists on Gaia, London: MIT
Press.
[Chief] Seathl (1994) The Great Chief Sends Word: Chief Seathl’s Testament, Coalville,
Leics.: Saint Bernard Press.
Sessions, G. (ed.) (1995) Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century: Readings on the
Philosophy and Practice of the New Environmentalism, London: Shambhala.
Shapiro, M.J. (1993) ‘“Manning” the frontiers: the politics of (human) nature in Blade
Runner’, in J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka (eds) In the Nature of Things:
Language, Politics and the Environment, London: University of Minnesota
Press.
|
|
21.8 Page 208 |
▲back to top |
bibliography 195
Shelley, P. (1977) Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. D.H. Reiman and S.B. Powers,
London: Norton.
Shiva, V. (1989) ‘Development, ecology and women’, in J. Plant (ed.), Healing the
Wounds: the Promise of Ecofeminism, London: Green Print.
—— (1998) Biopiracy: the Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Totnes, Devon: Green
Books.
Silko, L.M. (1986) Ceremony, London: Penguin. First published in 1977.
Singer, P. (1983) Animal Liberation: Towards an End to Man’s Inhumanity to Animals,
Wellingborough, Northants.: Thorsons. First published in 1975.
Slater, C. (1996) ‘Amazonia as Edenic Narrative’, in W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon
Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, London: Norton.
Slovic, S. (1992) Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing, Salt Lake City, UT:
University of Utah Press.
—— (1996) ‘Epistemology and politics in American nature writing: embedded
rhetoric and Discrete Rhetoric’, in C.G. Herndl and S.C. Brown (eds), Green
Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Smit, T. (2001) Eden, London: Transworld.
Snyder, G. (1999) The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry and Translations 1952–1998,
Washington, DC: Counterpoint.
Sober, E. (1995) ‘Philosophical problems for environmentalists’, in R. Elliot (ed.)
Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soper, K. (1998) What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell.
Spretnak, C. (1989) ‘Towards an ecofeminist spirituality’, in J. Plant (ed.) Healing the
Wounds: the Promise of Ecofeminism, London: Green Print.
Sweeting, A. and Crochunis, T.C. (2001) ‘Performing the wild: rethinking wilderness
and theater spaces’, in K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace (eds) Beyond Nature
Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, London: University Press of
Virginia.
Theocritus (1978) The Poems of Theocritus, trans. A. Rist, Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press.
Thomas, K. (1984) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England
1500–1800, Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin.
Thomashow, M. (1999) ‘Toward a cosmopolitan bioregionalism’, in M.V. McGinnis
(ed.) Bioregionalism, London: Routledge.
Thompson, D. (1997) The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium,
London: Minerva.
Thoreau, H.D. (1983) The Maine Woods, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
First published in 1864.
—— (1992) Walden, London: Dent. First published in 1854.
—— (2003) ‘Walking’ from <http://eserver.org/thoreau/walking.html> Accessed
25 July 2003. First published in 1862.
Trafzer, C.E. (1993) Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short Stories of the Contemporary Native
American Experience, London: Anchor.
|
|
21.9 Page 209 |
▲back to top |
196 bibliography
Virgil (1984) The Eclogues, trans. G. Lee, London: Penguin.
—— (2002) The Georgics from
<http://www.tonykline.free-online.co.uk/Virgilhome.htm> Accessed 25 July
2003.
Warren, K. (1990) ‘The power and the promise of ecological feminism’,
Environmental Ethics 12(2): 124–46.
Warren, K. (ed.) (1994) Ecological Feminism, London: Routledge.
Welch, J. (1986) Fools Crow, London: Penguin.
Westling, L.H. (1996) The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and
American Fiction, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
White, L., Jr. (1996) ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’, in C. Glotfelty and
H. Fromm (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology,
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Wheeler, M. (ed.) (1995) Ruskin and Environment: the Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth
Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Williams, J. (1993) Wordsworth: Contemporary Critical Essays, London: Macmillan.
Williams, R. (1989) ‘Socialism and ecology’, in Resources of Hope, London: Verso.
—— (1993) The Country and the City, London: Hogarth. First published in 1973.
Willis, R. (1974) Man and Beast, London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon.
Wilson, A. (1992) The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the
Exxon Valdez, Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, J. (1998) The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America London: Picador.
Wollstonecraft, M. and Godwin, W. (1987) ‘A Short Residence in Sweden’ and ‘Memoirs
of the Author of “The Rights of Woman”’, London: Penguin .
Wordsworth, W. (1977) A Complete Guide to the Lakes . . . , ed. E. de Selincourt,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (1979) The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and
S. Gill, London: W.W. Norton.
—— (1969) Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson and E. De Selincourt, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Yearley, S. (1996) Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization: Reinventing the Globe,
London: Sage.
Zimmerman, M.E. (1990) Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology,
Politics and Art, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
—— (1993) ‘Rethinking the Heidegger–Deep Ecology Relationship’, Environmental
Ethics 15 (Fall): 195–224.
|
|
21.10 Page 210 |
▲back to top |
INDEX
Abbey, Edward 72, 76;
Desert Solitaire 74–5; The
Monkey-Wrench Gang 75
Aberley, Doug 119
Adams, Ansel 69
Adamson, Joni 131; American Indian
Literature, Environmental Justice
and Ecocriticism 128–9
agriculture see farming
AIDS 104
Allaby, Michael Guide to Gaia
173–4
Allen, Paula Gunn 132
American Indians see Native
Americans
animal rights 22, 136–8;
environmentalism and 139–40
animals 15, 25, 136–59; domestic
77, 140, 144–5, 147–50; feral
150, 159; as tropes 140; wild see
wildlife
animism 121, 131–5
anthropocentrism 22–3, 25–6, 34,
44, 46, 68, 88, 92, 96, 100, 107,
109, 121, 176–7, 179–82
anthropomorphism 90, 116, 137–8,
141, 152, 154
apocalypse 2, 15, 63, 85–107, 108,
128–9, 132, 146, 172, 176, 182;
critiques of 100, 104–7;
environmentalism and 93–107;
nihilism and 93, 102–3; rhetoric
of 5, 85, 89, 93, 95, 105–7
Armbruster, Karla 81, 176; Beyond
Nature Writing 177; ‘Creating the
world we must save’ 153–5
ASLE (Association for the Study of
Literature and the Environment)
4, 175
Attenborough, David 154
Atwood, Margaret: ‘Death by
Landscape’ 79; Surfacing 78
Augustine of Hippo 87–9
Austin, Mary 72, 150; Land of Little
Rain 75–7, 81
authenticity, poetics of 45, 71–2,
129, 134–5, 168–9, 179
Baarschers, W.H 11, 13
Bacon, Francis 61; The
Advancement of Learning 8
Baker, Steve 140; Picturing the Beast
141
balance of nature see harmony
Barrell, John 43
Bass, Rick: Fiber 80–1
Bate, Jonathan 55; Romantic Ecology
42; The Song of the Earth 43,
46–8, 112–13, 160–1, 176–7
Baudrillard, Jean: ‘Simulacra and
Simulations’ 169–72
Beck, Ulrich 11, 13, 172
Bennett, Michael 55; The Nature of
Cities 177
Bentham, Jeremy 136, 138
Berger, John 150; Pig Earth 115–18;
‘Why Look at Animals?’ 139–41
Berry, Wendell 113–15, 116, 177; ‘For
|
|
22 Pages 211-220 |
▲back to top |
|
|
22.1 Page 211 |
▲back to top |
198 index
the Hog-Killing’ 114; ‘The Work
of Local Culture’ 115
Bible 87, 92, 109, 175; ‘Genesis’ 2,
37–8, 91, 108–9; ‘Revelation’ 2,
87; see also Judaeo-Christianity
Biggs, Suzanne 158–9
biocentrism see ecocentrism
biodiversity 28, 43, 57, 158–9,
164–5, 182
bioregionalism 30, 118–20
Biosphere 2 179–81
biotechnology 146–7, 157–9, 164–5
Blade Runner 143, 145, 147
Blue Planet, The 153–5
Bookchin, Murray 28
Botkin, Daniel 73, 178; Discordant
Harmonies 134
Bramwell, Anna 90, 112
Branch, Michael 81, 170
Brennan, Andrew 73
Brewer, Richard 57, 174
Brooks, Gwendolyn 115, 177
Brooks, Paul: Speaking for Nature
67
BSE (‘mad cow disease’) 148–9
Buell, Lawrence 10, 12, 48, 55, 76,
93, 95, 100, 114–15, 129; The
Environmental Imagination 52–3;
Writing for an Endangered World
177
Bunce, Michael 55–6
Burke, Edmund: Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful 63–4
Burnet, Thomas: Sacred Theory of
the Earth 63
Burroughs, John 67
Callenbach, Ernest 174
Callicott, J. Baird 121
Campbell, SueEllen 75
Canada, wilderness in 78–9
Carew, Thomas: ‘To Saxham’ 38–9
Carson, Rachel 19; Silent Spring
1–2, 5–7, 81, 93, 94–6
Cather, Willa: Oh Pioneers! 54
Ceremony (Silko) 127–30, 132
Cicero 56
Clare, John 44–8; ‘Emmonsails
Heath in Winter’ 45; ‘The
Lament of Swordy Well’ 46;
‘Lamentation of Round-Oak
Waters’ 46
Clark, Stephen 109
Clements, Colleen 57
Clements, Frederick 56–8
Coates, Peter 13, 57
Cobbett, William 110
Cochunis, Thomas 79–80
constructionism 9–10, 24, 167–8;
mutual 10
cornucopians 16–18, 28, 97, 99,
161, 163
Cronon, William 69–71, 73, 83, 177
Crosby, Alfred 123
cyborg 15, 138, 144–8, 159, 172
Daisyworld 175
Daly, Mary: Gyn/Ecology 24
Dances With Wolves 121
Darré, Richard Walter 112
deep ecology see ecology
Deep Ecology for the 21st Century
(Sessions) 21, 26
deforestation 21, 36, 106
DeLillo, Don: White Noise 13, 170–1
demography see population 5,
16–17
Descartes, René 25, 61–2,
|
|
22.2 Page 212 |
▲back to top |
index 199
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep? 143–5
Disneyland 170
disnification 141–2
Doubiago, Sharon 24
Douglass, Frederick 55
dualism 21, 25–6, 29, 31, 38, 88,
146, 182
Eagleton, Terry 7
Earth 15, 31, 61, 90, 160–82; image
of 160–62; see also Gaia
Earth First! 20, 75, 103–4
ecocentrism 21–2, 28, 46, 68, 72,
74, 90, 95, 100–3, 109, 121
ecocriticism 14, 32, 36, 43, 44, 52–3,
55, 59, 76, 118, 148, 150, 159, 167,
168, 175–9; American 4, 48–9,
71, 77–8; cultural 4, 55, 161–2,
177; definitions of 3–5, 72; and
postmodern ecology 15, 178–9;
and postmodernism 13, 169–72
ecofeminism 3, 23–7, 53, 61–3, 76,
103, 132, 172, 174–7; critiques of
24, 26–7; radical 24, 27, 174, 177
ecological imperialism 123
Ecological Indian see Native
American
ecology 10, 14, 26, 36, 42–3, 48,
105, 117, 125, 132, 139, 154–8,
165–6; deep 20–3, 26, 27, 28, 47,
55, 61, 63, 68, 71, 81, 84, 89, 91,
96, 103–4, 120, 146, 172, 174,
176, 179; and ecocriticism 5;
pastoral 33, 34, 56–8, 178;
postmodern 14, 15, 23, 58, 73,
134, 172, 178–9; social 3, 27–30,
55, 97, 103–4, 118, 128, 162, 177
eco-Marxism 27–30
ecosystems 43, 54, 57, 155–6
Eden 12, 38, 61, 63, 91, 134
Eden Project 181–2
Ehrlich, Anne: Betrayal of Science
and Reason 99–100, 107
Ehrlich, Paul 17, 19; Betrayal of
Science and Reason 99–100, 107;
The Population Bomb 93, 96,
98–100, 105; The Population
Explosion 98
End of Nature, The (McKibben) 70,
106
environmental justice 3, 26, 29, 30,
128–9, 177, 182
environmental racism see
environmental justice
environmental surveillance 11,
165–6
environmental toxicology 10–12
environmentalism 16–17, 18–20, 21,
22, 28, 33, 36, 43, 47, 75, 95–6,
107, 124–5, 139, 153, 158, 163–6,
176
Epic of Gilgamesh, The 36, 61
Erdrich, Louise 129, 132; Love
Medicine 130; Tracks 130–1
extinction 123, 155–8, 164
expropriation of the senses 11, 13
farming 39, 49, 54, 60, 106, 108–10,
112–18, 148; factory 116, 137;
organic 19, 90, 112
feminism 9, 49, 53, 65, 146, 176
Fitter, Chris 35
Flipper 151
Foreman, Dave 22, 104
forests 31, 36, 60, 62–3, 79, 80, 123;
theory of succession in 52, 134
Fudge, Erica: Perceiving Animals
142–3
Fuller, R. Buckminster 161
|
|
22.3 Page 213 |
▲back to top |
200 index
Gaard, Greta 132; Ecofeminist
Literary Criticism 27
Gaia hypothesis 102, 162, 172–5,
178
Gardiner, Rolf 90
genetically engineered organisms
159
georgic 15, 108–20, 182; critiques of
115; modern 113–20
Giblett, Rod: Postmodern Wetlands
43
Gifford, Terry 33–4, 38, 39
global warming 18, 70, 89, 106–7,
169, 173
globalisation 15, 158, 162–8, 178
Glotfelty, Cheryl: The Ecocriticism
Reader 3
Godwin, William 93–4
Golding, William 172
Gore, Al 98, 99; Earth in the
Balance 89, 93
Graeco-Roman culture, tropes
deriving from 34–7, 56, 60,
109–10, 175
grand narrative, ecology as 13
Greenpeace 20, 105–6, 164, 172
Group of Seven 78–9
Hayles, Katherine 169
Heaney, Seamus 43
Heidegger, Martin 30–2, 47,
62–3, 110–13, 146, 176; ‘On
the Origin of the Work of Art’
111
Hemingway, Ernest 53–4
Hochman, Jhan 147–8
Hughes, J. Donald: North American
Indian Ecology 132–3
Industrial Revolution 39
Ingram, David 121, 151, 153
intrinsic value 18, 21–2, 176
Irish famine 96–7
Janik, Del Ivan 89
Jaws 153
Jeffers, Robinson 82–3, 100–3, 177;
‘The Inquisitors’ 101–3;
‘November Surf’ 101; ‘The
Purse-Seine’ 101
Jefferson, Thomas 49, 110, 115
jeremiad 81, 99, 148
Judaeo-Christianity, tropes deriving
from 2, 15, 37–8, 60–1, 85–9,
91–2, 108–9, 113–14, 129, 175–6
Haeckel, Ernst 89, 91
Hannigan, John 105, 160, 164, 167
Haraway, Donna 176, 177; ‘Cyborg
Manifesto’ 145–7
harmony, myth of 1, 34, 56–8, 113,
120, 133–4, 175, 178 see also
ecology, postmodern
Harris, Randy 95
Harrison, Robert Pogue: Forests 47,
177
Harvey, Graham: The Killing of the
Countryside 44
Kay, Jeanne 109
Keep America Beautiful, Inc. 120
Kerridge, Richard 148–9, 157,
171, 177; Writing the
Environment 4
Killingsworth, Jimmie 95, 99, 128
King, Thomas 126–7
King, Ynestra 26
Kolodny, Annette: The Lay of the
Land 51, 53
Krech, Shepard, III 120–1, 133
Kroeber, Karl 65
|
|
22.4 Page 214 |
▲back to top |
index 201
LaChapelle, Dolores: Future
Primitive 92
land ethic 72–4, 115
Land of Little Rain (Austin) 75–7, 81
landscape, gendered 51, 53–4, 64–5,
75–7, 132
Lawrence, D.H. 26, 89–93, 98,
100–3; The Rainbow 90–2;
Women in Love 93, 96
Lee, M.F. 103–4
Leigh, Julia: The Hunter 157–8
Leopold, Aldo: A Sand County
Almanac 72–4
Levinson, Marjorie: Wordsworth’s
Great Period Poems 43
Lewis, Martin 133; Green Delusions
19
liberationist criticism 139–49,
150–1, 159; see also animal rights
Lovelock, James: Gaia 102, 172–5
Luke, Timothy 71, 112, 165–6, 177,
180
McCarthy, Susan 138
McKibben, Bill: The Age of Missing
Information 168–9; The End of
Nature 70, 106
Malamud, Randy: Reading Zoos
150–1
Malthus, Thomas 97; Essay on the
Principle of Population 93–4
Manes, Christopher 22, 104
Marx, Karl 28
Marx, Leo: The Machine in the
Garden 36–7, 48–51
Marxism 29, 30, 37, 42, 176; see also
eco-Marxism
Masson, Jeffrey 138
Merchant, Carolyn 146; The Death
of Nature 8, 26, 62
Midgley, Mary: Animals and Why
They Matter 137
Milton, John: Paradise Lost 38
Montaigne, Michel de 125
Montreal Protocol 166–7
Muir, John 26, 67–9, 72, 76–7; My
First Summer in the Sierra 67
Murphy, Patrick 174–5, 176;
Ecofeminist Literary Criticism 27
Murry, John Middleton 44
Myers, Norman 18; Scarcity or
Abundance? 155
Naess, Arne 21–2
Native Americans 23, 55, 70, 75, 77,
82, 85, 120–35, 176; as
environmentalists 120–2, 124
nature writing 15, 52–3, 59, 72–8,
80–1, 113, 135
Nazism 32, 85, 111–13, 176
Nelson, Barney 150; The Wild and
the Domestic 76–7
neo-Malthusianism 96–100, 103–5
Newton, Isaac 61
Nietzsche, Friedrich 89–90, 100–3;
The Gay Science 90
North, Richard: Life on a Modern
Planet 20, 105–6
Norwood, Vera 76
Oelschlaeger, Max 61, 67–8, 82,
100
O’Leary, Stephen 86
ozone layer 166–9
Padgett, Martin 129
Palaeolithic culture 53, 60–1
Palmer, Jacqueline 95, 99, 128
pantheism 67–8, 71, 100
Passmore, John 5, 88
|
|
22.5 Page 215 |
▲back to top |
202 index
pastoral 1–2, 12, 15, 33–58, 90, 94,
108, 119, 131, 135, 140, 146, 148,
151, 161–2, 175, 179, 182;
American 34, 48–56; classical
34–9; critiques of 34, 40–4, 48,
51; kitsch 40–1, 48; Romantic 34,
39–48
Payne, Daniel 67
Pepper, David 29
pesticides 2, 5, 94–5
Plato: Critias 36
Plumwood, Val 24–7, 62, 174, 177
Pollan, Michael 134
pollution 2, 6–7, 17, 19, 59, 70,
94–5, 119, 120, 146; as trope 8,
12–13
population 5, 16–17, 18–19, 21–2,
93–4, 96–9, 104–5, 121, 133, 163
Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich) 93,
96, 98–100, 105
postmodernism 13–14, 169–72, 175
primitivism, myth of 108, 124–5,
130, 135; see also Native
Americans
Quammen, David: The Song of the
Dodo 155–7
Rawles, Kate 174
responsibility, poetics of 71–2, 129,
134–5, 179
rhetoric 6–9, 10, 14, 56–7, 72, 81,
85–6, 89, 98–100, 140, 142–3,
157
Riley, Patricia: ‘Adventures of an
Indian Princess’ 126
Rio Earth Summit 158
risk 11–13, 148–9, 172, 177
Robinson, David 82
Romanticism 34, 39–48, 64–5
Roosevelt, Theodore 67
Ross, Andrew 12, 135, 146–7, 161,
177
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 125
Ruskin, John 55
Sale, Kirkpatrick 96–7; Dwellers in
the Land 118–19
Sales, Roger 40–2
Schama, Simon 4, 63–4
Scheese, Don 74
Schiller, Friedrich 44–5
Schwarzenegger, Arnold 147
science 8, 10, 23, 24–6, 61–3, 71,
91–2, 99–100, 113, 132, 146,
166–8, 174
Seattle, Chief 124
Sessions, George: Deep Ecology for
the 21st Century 21
Shapiro, Michael 144
Shelley, Percy 4; ‘Mont Blanc’ 65
Shiva, Vandana 158; Biopiracy
164–5
Sierra Club 19, 67, 69, 77, 103
Silence of the Lambs 147–8
Silent Spring (Carson) 1–2, 5–7, 33,
81, 93, 94–6
Silko, Lesley Marmon: Ceremony
127–30, 132; ‘The Return of the
Buffalo’ 129
Simon, Julian 17–18, 99; Scarcity or
Abundance? 155
simulation 168–72, 175, 179–82
Singer, Peter 139, 141, 143; Animal
Liberation 136
Slovic, Scott 81
Smit, Tim: Eden 181–2
Snyder, Gary 20–1, 61, 78, 81–4;
‘Song of the Taste’ 83; ‘Word
Basket Woman’ 82–3
|
|
22.6 Page 216 |
▲back to top |
Soper, Kate 111, 143; What is
Nature? 167–8
Spretnak, Charlene 24
Stevens, Wallace 160
sublime 43, 49, 63–9, 77, 149
Sweeting, Adam 79–80
Teague, D.W.: The Nature of Cities
177
Theocritus 38; Idylls 34–5
Thomas, Keith 39–40, 63
Thomasow, Mitchell 119–20
Thomson, Thom 78–9
Thoreau, Henry David 26, 48, 53,
55, 71, 72, 74, 76; Maine Woods
66–7; Walden 49–51, 52, 66,
110
toxic discourse 12
tropes, ecocritical 7–8, 14–15, 86,
108, 125, 140
Van Gogh: ‘A Pair of Shoes’ 111
Virgil: Eclogues 36–7; Georgics
109–10
Walden (Thoreau) 49–51, 52, 66,
110
Wallace, Kathleen 177
Warren, Karen 27
Watt, James 88
Welch, James: Fools Crow 121–2
West, American 54, 60, 66
Westling, Louise 61, 131, 176; The
Green Breast of the New World
53–4
White, Lynn, Jr. 38, 88, 108–9
White Noise (DeLillo) 13, 170–1
index 203
White Wolf 152
wilderness 15, 49, 59–84, 108, 119,
146, 162, 175–6; critiques of
68–72, 75, 77; New World
66–84; Old World 60–6; as
trope 9, 79, 140
wildlife 6, 123, 150; documentaries
139, 151–5
Williams, Raymond 42, 46–8; The
Country and the City 37–40
Williams, Terry Tempest 78
Wilson, Alexander 55, 151–2
Wilson, James: The Earth Shall
Weep 122–4
Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Short
Residence in Sweden 65
Wordsworth, Dorothy 65
Wordsworth, William 4, 43, 44,
47, 48, 52; ‘Lines written a few
miles above Tintern Abbey’ 43,
65; ‘Michael’ 40–3; ‘Poems on
the Naming of Places’ 42; The
Prelude 42; ‘To — on her first
Ascent to the Summit of
Helvellyn’ 64
World Bank 163–4
world risk society 12
Worldwatch Institute 165–6
WTO (World Trade Organisation)
164–5
Yearley, Stephen 160, 162
Yosemite National Park 67–9, 70,
77
Zoos 150–1
Zoroastrianism 38, 85, 88, 89–90