Shifting ground: Metanarratives, epistemology, and the stories of nature

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 19-37

  Raglon, Rebecca ^a   Scholtmeijer, Marian ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0008163895     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics199618139     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. x.
2. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), p. 22.
3. Max Oelschlaeger, The Wilderness Condition (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992), pp. 271-72.
4. For a discussion of the relationship between women, nature, and language, see Maureen Devine, Women and Nature: Literary Reconceptualizations (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992).
5. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2.
6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiii.
7. Ibid., p. xxiv.
8. Jim Cheney, "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117-34.
9. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 352.
10. This term is used by the Canadian poet Erin Moure to describe her efforts to make "women's speaking possible." To create a slippage, even for a moment, is according to Moure, "to decentre the 'thing,' unmask the relation." Erin Moure, Furious (Toronto: Anansi, 1988), p. 98.
11. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 242-43. Comments on Thoreau are in Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 150-01 and Robert Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 50.
12. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 242-43. Comments on Thoreau are in Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 150-01 and Robert Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 50.
13. Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 242-43. Comments on Thoreau are in Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 150-01 and Robert Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 50.
14. Augusta Fink, 1-Mary (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1983). See also Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), pp. 81-82.
15. Augusta Fink, 1-Mary (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1983). See also Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), pp. 81-82.
16. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 31, and Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986).
17. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 31, and Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986).
18. Nature writing has most often been defined as a "partnership" between science and literature. The first academic definition is found in Philip Marshall Hicks, The Development of the Natural History Essay in American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1924), and it is one that has been followed in almost all recent work on the genre. Exceptions include the Canadian "animal story" (controversial because they were stories), and feminist collections such as Lorraine Anderson's Sisters of the Earth (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), which includes stories and poetry as well as nonfiction selections.
19. Nature writing has most often been defined as a "partnership" between science and literature. The first academic definition is found in Philip Marshall Hicks, The Development of the Natural History Essay in American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1924), and it is one that has been followed in almost all recent work on the genre. Exceptions include the Canadian "animal story" (controversial because they were stories), and feminist collections such as Lorraine Anderson's Sisters of the Earth (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), which includes stories and poetry as well as nonfiction selections.
20. It is a story which culminates in a God's-eye view of the natural world - a viewpoint illustrated perhaps most spectacularly in the NASA photo of Earth. Ironically, the well-known photo is frequently invoked as a symbol of greater environmental sensitivity, showing so graphically the fragility, interconnectedness and limitations of the earth. For a discussion of some of the impoverishment inherent in the image, see Yaakov Jerome Garb's article, "Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings on Contemporary Earth Imagery," in Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, ed., Reweaving the World (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), pp. 264-78.
21. Elliott A. Norse, Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1990), p. 104.
22. Barry Lopez, "The Salmon," River Notes (New York: Avon Books, 1979), p. 53.
23. Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 206.
24. Henry David Thoreau, Journal XIII, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 156 (18 February 1860).
25. Nicholas O'Connell, "An Interview with Barry Lopez," Brick 35 (Spring 1989): 29.
26. Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 84.
27. Lopez, "The Salmon," p. 54.
28. Rebecca Raglon, "Literature and Environmental Thought: Re-Establishing Connections With the World," Alternatives 17 (Spring 1991): 28-33.
29. Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1980), exemplifies this point well. Merchant takes seriously views of nature that the historically dominant perspective has dismissed as nonsense. Nature became the passive domain that we know today only with a shift in human interpretation. At the critical historical moment in this shift, conceptions of the Earth as an organism competed with the emerging tendency to reduce nature to dead, atomized elements. Thus, in 1558, for example, Giambattista della Porta could assert that "the world is a living creature" (p. 104), and in 1591, Tommaso Campanella could observe that the fact that "the sun and the earth feel is undeniable" (p. 113). Although we may nod in agreement at these assertions, it is very difficult for modern people truly to see the Earth as della Porta and Campanella were seeing it. Had vitalist conceptions of nature triumphed, we would indeed be living in quite a different world from the one we think we know.
30. Donna Haraway's Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989), is an intensive and extensive illustration of how powerful the concept of narrative can be when postmodernists use it as a tool to undermine the authority of scientific activity and scientific "discovery."
31. Stephanie Hoppe, "What the Cat Brought In," in Theresa Corrigan and Stephanie Hoppe, eds., With a Fly's Eye, Whale's Wit, and Woman's Heart: Animals and Women (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1989), pp. 14-20.
32. Italo Calvino, "Meiosis," in Robert Scholes and Rosemary Sullivan, eds., Elements of Fiction, rev. Canadian ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 601-07.
33. David McFadden, "Hiroko Writes a Story," in George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon, eds., Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992), pp. 165-78.
34. A word of caution is necessary at this point. The stories we are using to exemplify the breakdown of the observer/observed relationship could be discounted as merely humorous. No doubt, the final effect of these stories on most readers is a puzzled smile. Freeplay, as we know, is a keynote in the deconstructionist wing of postmodernism. These stories appear to play with the subject of nature. One might argue, of course, that one of the problems with authoritative assertions about nature is their deadly seriousness. It is a common mistake, nonetheless, to presume that humor does nothing ultimately.
35. Voices of dissent do exist. An unusual and unusually daring critic of the talking animal is Diedre Dwen Pitts. In her article "Discerning the Animal of a Thousand Faces," in Children's Literature, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), Pitts demands from authors of children's literature much greater care in the matter of talking animals than they are demonstrating. Uprooted from his or her own world, the "talking animal is a pathetic mechanism" (p. 173). Only with due attention to the animal's natural dignity and natural environment can authors tentatively have them speak. Pitts suggests that the talking animal reflects both ambivalence toward real animals and indifference to their animality. One way or another, the talking animal in literature is the consummate sign of vast troubles in our attitudes toward nature.
36. Hoppe, "What the Cat Brought In," p. 14.
37. Ibid., p. 16.
38. Ibid., p. 19.
39. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 274.
40. Calvino, "Meiosis," p. 602.
41. Ibid., p. 603.
42. Ibid., pp. 603-04.
43. Ibid., p. 607.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Brian Luke makes this argument in "Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation," Between the Species 8 (Spring 1992): 105. He puts the case, contra the premise behind the "justice" position in animal rights, that aggression towards animals is the social construction, while caring is, in effect, natural.
47. McFadden, "Hiroko Writes a Story," p. 172.
48. Ibid., p. 171.
49. Ibid., p. 175.
50. Ibid., p. 176.
51. Ibid., p. 177.
52. Ibid., p. 178.
53. Ibid., p. 170.
54. Ibid., p. 178.
55. Ibid., pp. 165-66.
56. Ibid., p. 169.
57. Ibid., p. 178.
58. Carl D. Esbjornson, "On Rethinking Resistance," Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 287.
59. Esbjornson, "On Rethinking Resistance," p. 288.
60. Diana Kappel-Smith, Wintering (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 81.
61. Susan Lorsch, Where Nature Ends (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1983), p. 21.
62. Lorsch, Where Nature Ends, p. 13.
63. See, for example, Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber, 1958).
64. Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus, p. 248. Hassan's ideas about indeterminancies is derived from literary theory and appeals to paradox, ambiguity, irony and open-endedness within cultural construction.