A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature
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A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature
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Overview
A surprising and enlightening investigation of how modern society is making nature sacred once again
For more than two centuries, Western cultures, as they became ever more industrialized, increasingly regarded the natural world as little more than a collection of useful raw resources. The folklore of powerful forest spirits and mountain demons was displaced by the practicalities of logging and strip-mining; the traditional rituals of hunting ceremonies gave way to the indiscriminate butchering of animals for meat markets. In the famous lament of Max Weber, our surroundings became "disenchanted," with nature's magic swept away by secularization and rationalization.
But now, as acclaimed sociologist James William Gibson reveals in this insightful study, the culture of enchantment is making an astonishing comeback. From Greenpeace eco-warriors to evangelical Christians preaching "creation care" and geneticists who speak of human-animal kinship, Gibson finds a remarkably broad yearning for a spiritual reconnection to nature. As we grapple with increasingly dire environmental disasters, he points to this cultural shift as the last utopian dream—the final hope for protecting the world that all of us must live in.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429994866 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2009 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 367 KB |
About the Author
James William Gibson is the author of Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America and The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and the winner of multiple awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Gibson is a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He lives in Los Angeles.
James William Gibson is the author of Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America and The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and winner of multiple awards, including a Guggenheim, Gibson is a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach. He lives in Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Modernity and Its Discontents
The achievements of industrial societies have been the subject of endless celebration, but there have always been those who saw the darker side of progress. The generations of discontented social critics, nature writers, conservationists, landscape photographers, Native American activists, and counterculture leaders who decried the destruction of lands, animals, and indigenous peoples form the intellectual tradition grounding the new culture of enchantment.
Even the earliest proponents of industrial society were not blind to its destructive capacity. Marx and Engels, who lauded the potential for unprecedented social change released by industrialization, also realized that the subjection of nature had a price. The best of the premodern world, including its beauty, was being devastated by the industrial revolution and the market, and, in the pair's famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto (1848), "all that is holy is profaned." In the 1840s, when Engels visited England, his observations in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) included long passages detailing fouled air and water. The Irk River running through Manchester, for example, was "in dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools ... from the depths of which bubbles of miasmic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream."
While Marx and Engels clearly saw the physical damages wrought by industrialism, Max Weber better understood its spiritual costs. Weber pointed to Protestantism's definition of God — a transcendent being who does not dwell in the natural world or its creatures and is concerned only with humans — as the motive force behind the "practical rational conduct" necessary for sustained capitalist development. Earlier religions, Weber notes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920), had erected "spiritual obstacles" involving "magical and religious forces and the ethical ideas of duty based upon them," which created "serious inner resistance" to society's utilization of nature purely for its own practical purposes. Although Weber did not elaborate, it's not difficult to infer the different consequences of the two theological visions. No one would cut down a grove of trees to build houses, for example, if forest spirits were believed to inhabit the woods. Conversely, in the absence of such spirituality, cutting is a rational act if it produces a profit.
Weber saw himself as a man of science, but these developments disturbed him greatly. He repeatedly bemoaned "the fate of our time, with its characteristic rationalization, intellectualization, and above all else, the disenchantment of the world." The conclusion of The Protestant Ethic reads like an indictment:
No one knows ... whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized purification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said [quoting Goethe], "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
In North America, the clash of the two visions was vividly expressed in the treatment of the natural world as the frontier moved west. Whereas the old Native American cultural norms generated "serious inner resistance" to the wanton killing of wildlife, Christianity contained no such prohibitions, and colonizing Europeans embarked on a vast slaughter and transformation of the landscape. Before contact, some thirty to one hundred million buffalo had ranged from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. Then, in 1800, Anglo-American traders reached the Great Plains. Buffalo kills escalated throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and accelerated radically after the Civil War. Hunters killed buffalo for meat to supply workers constructing the new transcontinental railroads, to ship hides and tongues to national and international markets, and to deprive Plains Indians of their principal food source. By 1878 no herds remained on the southern plains of Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. Within the next five years, the northern herds of the Dakotas and surrounding regions were gone as well. By 1887 no more than a few dozen buffalo remained, protected by assorted ranchers and Indian tribes, living in tiny herds scattered across the West.
As the buffalo disappeared, the wolves of the Great Plains and Rockies found a new food source — the cattle herds arriving from Texas. Former buffalo hunters turned their attention to the wolves and, from 1865 to 1895, killed between one and two million, eliminating the animals entirely in most states and reducing the population to near-extinction in others. Cattle ranching in turn led to the death of the tall-grass prairie, because the cows grazed far more intensely than their bison predecessors. America's tens of millions of beavers, which had thrived in virtually all waterways, were relentlessly hunted, their pelts turned into hats and fur coats; by the late nineteenth century, most were gone. Without beaver dams and the wetlands that grew around them, American waterways increasingly became turbid and filled with silt. The moving frontier line also meant deforestation on a grand scale as first settlers and then business and industry sought lumber. No region was spared: New England, Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Rockies, and the West Coast all lost tens of millions of acres of forests.
Even ocean life fell prey to the conquest. On the Pacific coast, Russian and American fleets killed over two hundred thousand sea otters. By 1900 they were nearly extinct; only a tiny remnant population of three hundred to four hundred animals survived, hidden in the Big Sur region along California's central coast. Millions of whales — right, humpback, fin, gray, Bryde's, bowhead, sei, blue, and sperm whale species — died from harpoons in the nineteenth century. Some 1.5 million died in the South Pacific alone.
BY THE LATE 1840S, a culture of protest to the killing and ecological devastation arose in New England. Writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau challenged both the Protestant concept of a God indifferent or even hostile to nature's creatures and the nation's dominant frontier-capitalist mentality. Emerson revered the mysteries and beauty of nature, even in the most ordinary forms: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear." For Emerson, nature offered continual revelations of a unified divine realm, variously named the Universal Soul, Reason, Absolute Spirit, or God. Even the natural rhythms of day and night served as pathways to the absolute: "Not the sun or summer alone, but every hour and change yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight."
For Thoreau, on the other hand, animals and places had value in their own right, each with its own spirit and mystery. "Can he who has discovered the true use of whale-bone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?" he asks in an 1864 essay. Rejecting the contemporary description of animals as soulless automata, he looked instead to naturalists of older generations, for whom animals were sensuous, sentient beings. He approvingly quotes a 1607 essay called "The History of Four-footed Beasts," in which certain antelopes are said to live near the river Euphrates and "delight much to drink of the cold water thereof." In contrast, Thoreau laments, the creatures depicted by modern naturalists "do not delight in anything, and their water is neither hot nor cold. ... Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. Yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are as it were phenomena of dead matter." (Emerson's eulogy for Thoreau celebrated his intimacy with animals: "Snakes coiled round his legs; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters.")
Among the contemporaries who shared Thoreau's sensibilities, Herman Melville stands out. Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick (1851), points to the majesty, beauty, even divinity of whales. When the sperm whales navigate the globe, it's as if they were "guided by some infallible instinct — say rather, secret intelligence from the Deity. ... No ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvelous precision." Captain Ahab, by contrast, personifies the human will to dominate nature, and his growing derangement points to flaws in the entire Western mentality. He describes to Starbuck, his first mate, "the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey — more a demon than a man! — aye, aye! What a forty years' fool — fool — fool — old fool, has old Ahab been!"
Thoreau and Melville were joined by Frederick Law Olmsted, their editor and colleague. The designer of Central and Prospect parks in New York City, Olmsted also served as the de facto head of the federal government's Yosemite Valley commission, which in 1864 established Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove as a thirty-nine-square-mile reserve for "public use, resort, and recreation ... inalienable for all time." While not called a national park at the time, this was the beginning of the National Park System, and marks an early recognition of the threat that industrial depredation posed to the natural world.
Still, the influence of these writers and wilderness advocates was limited. Neither Thoreau nor Melville were widely read at the time. And when Congress moved to establish a national park at Yellowstone in 1871, supporters stressed that the land was unfit for agriculture rather than that it was a wilderness worthy of preservation: Saving it, they emphasized, would do "no harm to the material interests of the people." Even those who promoted the splendor of natural landscapes often acted out of financial self-interest. Financier Jay Gould, having invested a fortune in the Union Pacific, Kansas Pacific, and Denver Pacific railroads, publicized Yellowstone and the West by hiring landscape photographer William Henry Jackson to create images that would attract tourists. As Jackson later explained his work for Gould, "Most of all, it was a matter of money."
Similarly, New York's Adirondack Forest Preserve (initially 313 square miles), protected in the state constitution by an amendment that included the famous Forever Wild clause, was created in 1885 to address threats to New York City's water supply and Hudson River trade from excessive logging in the Adirondack forest watershed. Certainly the Adirondack region had many advocates who saw it as a majestic example of nature's intricate processes and a spiritual presence warranting protection — Verplanck Colvin, the Adirondacks' first major surveyor, claimed that in the forest "a grand and beautiful solemnity and peace makes its way into the soul, for human strife and discord seem here to have passed away forever"— but these were not as influential as the practical and economic concerns.
Still, by the 1890s, the political and spiritual heirs of Emerson, Melville, and Thoreau began to exert greater pressure on nationalpolitics. John Muir, one of the founders of the Sierra Club, drafted legislation expanding Yosemite to nearly 1,200 square miles in 1900, and lobbied successfully to make it an official national park. A perceptive scientist, Muir was the first to propose (accurately) that Yosemite Valley had been formed by glaciers scraping away rock and earth. Equally important, he made repeated efforts to sound the alarm about destruction of the West. In an extraordinary series of essays for the Atlantic Monthly, he assessed the damage: The magnificent five-hundred-mile-long bed of golden and purple flowers of California's Central Valley had been "ploughed and pastured out of existence," the "once divinely beautiful" ground in his beloved Sierras, "the noblest forests of the world," was now "desolate and repulsive, like a face ravaged by disease." This disease would spread across the whole Pacific Coast and throughout all the Rocky Mountain forests and valleys, he warned, "unless awakening public opinion comes forward to stop it."
Muir reminded his readers of how much had already been lost. Calaveras Grove, inside what would later become part of Sequoia National Park in the eastern Sierras, once had trees three thousand to four thousand years old and over twenty-four feet in diameter. But settlers cut down the sequoias and danced on the stumps. At times Muir's writings reveal his admiration of the kind of premodern sensibility that would find a spiritual presence in each forest, valley, mountain, and desert: "So charming a fall and pool in the heart of so glorious a forest good pagans would have consecrated to some lovely nymph." In other instances, he seems more transcendentalist, seeing each natural wonder as a manifestation of a universal God. As he reverently describes Yosemite: "The walls are made up of rocks, mountains in size, partly separated from each other by side canyons, and they are so sheer in front, and so completely and harmoniously arranged on a level floor, that the Valley, comprehensively seen, looks like an immense hall or temple lighted from above. But no temple made with hands can compare to Yosemite." In every case, Muir clearly considered the land as sacred, and he used the language of religion as a rhetorical tool to influence public opinion. Early in the twentieth century, Muir fought to save Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed and drowned to provide drinking water for San Francisco. "These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar," he raged. "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated in the heart of man." Muir lost this battle, the dam was built, and Hetch Hetchy Valley disappeared under water. But the memory of Hetch Hetchy became a rallying cry for future struggles, and now, nearly a century later, a new movement proposes to tear down the dam and restore the valley.
Muir's writings exerted their influence in another way as well, setting up some fundamental rhetorical conventions that would inform generations of literary nature writers. First, he showed that the very act of writing could lead to a radical change in how something was perceived: Evoking the sanctity of a place prompted others to see it as sacred, too. Some, affected by the poetic evocation of nature's spiritual presence, might experience immediate conversion, but even skeptics were exposed to a powerful suggestion that nature might be more than just an inert resource for human use.
Second, Muir popularized a kind of hybrid discourse, alternating lyrical descriptions with scientific references to geology and ecology. Thus, he reveres the giant sequoia trees of California both in their own right and for their ecological contributions. At twilight, their "rosy, glowing countenances seemed to be hushed and thoughtful, as if waiting in conscious religious dependence upon the sun"; once the sun set, "the trees seemed to cease their worship and breathe free." Yet in the same essay, writing of the trees' proximity to streams, he notes that "it is a mistake to suppose that the water is the cause of the groves being there. On the contrary, the groves are the cause of the waterbeing there. The roots of this immense tree fill the ground, forming a sponge which hoards the bounty of the clouds and sends it forth in clear perennial streams instead of allowing it to rush headlong in short-lived destructive floods." Muir's break with the accepted conventions separating science and poetry buttressed the idea of a nature that was neither inert nor dead, but on the contrary alive and aweinspiring — in a word, enchanted.
Finally, Muir always included in his writings the personal element that would become vital to the contemporary culture of enchantment. His extensive, intimate experiences of the places he wrote about gave his writing special power and intensity. He climbed the mountain crests; he drank from the creeks; he smelled the flowers in Hetch Hetchy Valley; he personally saw the wrecked land and the tree stumps after timber harvests. In contrast to capitalism's treatment of land as an impersonal commodity and scientists' use of dry abstractions to describe and analyze nature, Muir conveyed to his readers a profound encounter with the landscape — whether aesthetic, spiritual, or moral — that was compelling, even life-changing.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Call of the Wild,
Part I • FORMS OF ENCHANTMENT,
1. Modernity and Its Discontents,
2. Animals Who Speak to Us,
3. Holy Lands,
4. Space Exploration, Gaia, and the Greening of Religion,
5. Eco-Warriors and Blood Sacrifice,
Part II • TROUBLES IN PARADISE,
6. Loving It to Death,
7. Imitation Wildness and the Sacred Casino,
8. The Right-Wing War on the Land,
Part III • HOPE RENEWED,
9. Fighting Back,
10. The Journey Ahead,
Notes,
Index,