Embodying ecological citizenship: Rethinking the politics of grassroots globalization in the United States

Alternatives

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 439-466

  Reid, Herbert ^b   Taylor, Betsy ^a,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY   (United States)

^b Department of Political Science ^*  (United States)

^c Appalachian Center   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23044521873     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540002500402     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Cf. Christopher Sellers, "Body, Place, and the State: The Makings of an 'Environmentalist' Imaginary in the Post-World War II U.S.," Radical History Review 74 (1999): 31-64.
2. Ramachandra Guha and J. Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmenialism: Essays North and South (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), p. 91.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952-1960, John O'Neill, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), p. 64.
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 259, 274.
5. John O'Neill, Making Sense Together (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), pp. 37, 80, 37.
6. Alphonso Lingis, introduction to Merleau-Ponty, note 4, p. liv.
7. Merleau-Ponty, note 4, p. 122.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 160-161.
9. Edith M. Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, intro. Margaret Mead (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 89.
10. Edith M. Cobb, "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood," Daedalus (summer 1959), 537-548;
11. reprinted in Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, eds., The Subversive Science: Essays toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 122-132.
12. See also Herbert G. Reid, "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change," Dialectical Anthropology 2 (1977), 107-130, which reads Cobb's work in connection with the phenomenological studies of Merleau-Ponty and Erwin Straus.
13. Cobb, note 9, p. 19.
14. Cobb, note 9.
15. Mead's introduction to Cobb, note 9, p. 8.
16. John O'Neill, Perception, Expression, History: the Social Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 72, 82.
17. Substantial relevance for this argument will be found in the "Statement of the International Peoples' Tribunal on Human Rights and the Environment: Sustainable Development in the Context of Globalization," Alternatives, no. 23 (1998): 109-146;
18. see esp. 121-122, "The Right to Environment."
19. Reid, note 10, p. 126.
20. David Abram, "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth," Environmental Ethics 10, no. 2 (1988): 101-120;
21. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1996).
22. Abram, "Voice," note 16, p. 119.
23. Merleau-Ponty, note 3, p. 29.
24. Abram, Spell, note 16, p. 272.
25. Adrienne Rich, Your Native Land, Your Life (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 100.
26. Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 128.
27. Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), p. 119.
28. Abram, Spell, note 16, p. 65.
29. Monika Langer, "Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology," in Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, eds., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 115-129.
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, note 3, pp. 39-40.
31. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, note 3, pp. 39-45.
32. Reid, note 10.
33. Cf. Herbert G. Reid, "The Resurgence of the Market Machine-God and the Obsolescence of Liberal Democracy: On Metaphysical Rejections of the Public Realm and their This-Worldly Complicities," unpublished MS, November 1994.
34. Cf. discussion, esp. quotes from Nelson's The Idea of Usury, in Herbert G. Reid, "American Social Science in the Politics of Time and the Crisis of Technocorporate Society," Politics and Society 3 (winter 1973), 201-243.
35. Merleau-Ponty, note 8, p. 106.
36. Cf. pp. 342-343, in Jim Cheney, "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," in Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, eds., Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997), pp. 328-349.
37. Herbert G. Reid, "Democratic Theory and the Public Sphere Project: Rethinking Knowledge, Authority, and Identity," unpublished paper, 1995.
38. Cf. Herbert G. Reid, "Global Adjustments, Throwaway Regions, Appalachian Studies: Resituating The Kentucky Cycle on the Postmodern Frontier," Journal of Appalachian Studies 2, no. 2 (1996), 235-262. The Appalachian Mountains run north/south in the eastern United States. Rich in timber, coal, and other minerals, since the late nineteenth century the area has been dominated by extractive industries that have made it the most severely underdeveloped region in United States. Often described as an "internal colony," political democracy has been hampered by a bifurcated class structure, high inequality in land ownership, political corruption, and oppression. Like other "colonized" peoples, Appalachians have been symbolically constructed as Others (violent, premodern, "close to nature," genetically inferior, too fecund, and so on) in the national imaginary. These stereotyped images have particular power within the context of North American racism because Appalachians are, inaccurately, viewed as homogeneously white. This symbolic construction of Appalachian identity emerges from a complex dialectic with national identity over different historical epochs of the corporate US state (cf., Reid, ibid.). However, there are important, and underresearched, rural, working-class resistance movements, many of them based on environmental-justice issues.
39. Cf. Stephen L. Fisher, ed., Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993).
40. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 203.
41. Sellers, note 1: 31-64. Cf., also, Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island, 1993).
42. Cf. chap. 4 and p. 262 in C. A. Bowers, The Culture of Denial: Why the Environmental Movement Needs a Strategy for Reforming Universities and Public Schools (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997).
43. Cf. Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993);
44. Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1992).
45. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1958).
46. As points of entry into the large literature on these subjects, see Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 109-142;
47. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano, eds., Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996);
48. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano, eds., Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
49. While still too rare, there are some recent attempts to broaden the range of questions we ask in order to theorize 'place': James Duncan and David Ley, eds., Place/Culture/Representation (London: Routledge, 1993);
50. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1996);
51. Steve Pile and Michael Keith, eds., Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge, 1997).
52. Betsy [Elizabeth M.] Taylor, "The Taxidermy of Bioluminescence: Tracking Neighboring Practices in Appalachian Coal-mining Communities," Anthropological Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1992): 117-127;
53. Betsy Taylor, "The Global Timber Industry and Local Environmental Activism in Western North Carolina," Appalachian Studies Association annual meetings, Boone, North Carolina, 1998;
54. Herbert G. Reid, "American Liberalism, Authority, and the Corporate State: A Critical Interpretation," Annual Review of Political Science 3 (1990).
55. We include in reproduction both the natality that gives birth and the mortality that breaks down forms to enable renewed production and reproduction. A good example of this is soil, which produces nutrients out of the destructive action of microbes upon dead and dying creatures. It is not surprising that soil, which so powerfully embodies chiasm, is a key image for Merleau-Ponty.
56. Reid, note 28.
57. Cf. Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon, 1996).
58. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).
59. Betsy Taylor, "You Got the Gemein and I Got the Schaft: Gender, Class, and Domestic Desire in West Virginia Coal Mining Communities," unpublished MS.
60. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991).
61. In this context, cf. also her notion of 'infantile citizenship,' in Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997).
62. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).
63. No one has worked on these questions more consistently than the novelist/poet/essayist Wendell Berry: Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977);
64. Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990);
65. Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
66. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India (Delhi: Penguin, 1995).
67. Vandana Shiva, Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts over Natural Resources in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1991).
68. For discussion of these class, ethnic, gender, and ideological shifts in North American environmentalism, see Jim Schwab, Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue-Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994).
69. Galack is a local term for the plant galax, which is naturally wild in the Appalachian markets and for which there is a lucrative market among florists who use it for decoration. It is one of many herbs (such as ginseng) and plants that rural Appalachian subsistence farmers have gathered over several centuries. This can be one of their main sources of monetary income. For sensitive ethnographic depiction of the intertwining of these productive activities with the cultural reproduction of a sense of place in a southern West Virginia coal mining region, see Mary Hufford, "American Ginseng and the Idea of the Commons," Folklife Center News 19, nos. 1-2 (1997): 3-18. Recently, the illegal growing of marijuana has augmented this informal economy in many poorer areas.
70. Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992).
71. Taylor, note 41. See also Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an"Other" America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).
72. Taylor, note 41.
73. Such as the Project for the Civic and Environmental Commons, being initiated by the authors at the Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky; see the project website: http:\\www.uky.edu\rgs\appalcenter\ research.