Green
Voices: Some Aspects Of Ecological Criticism
By Dr. Murali Sivaramakrishnan
31 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In
the late seventies, when the dispute over the Silent Valley in Kerala
was rampant and the great debate over the whole philosophy of Nature
Conservation was in its incipient stages, a senior friend of mine who
later was to become a naturalist of considerable renown, accosted me
one day and opined: "you are more of an aesthete than a naturalist!"
His dismissive tone was on account of the significance that I had advocated
for the idea of beauty and value in nature. Nature conservation, I had
then argued, began with the love and devotion to nature and the natural.
However, the seventies in Kerala, were quite unsuitable times for the
aesthete and idealist! And by then, the Sastra Sahitya Parishad-- the
advocates for peoples' science movement-- who radicalized the idea of
science and technology, and who were development-oriented and forward-looking,
had taken over the entire struggle towards the popularisation of the
idea of conservation and preservation. Ecology had become a household
term and the idea of conservation of biodiversity was indisputably foregrounded
as an integrated part of the agenda of development studies. Equating
development with the progressive adaptation of science and technology
was as always held to be logical and unquestionable.
Of course, the arguments
for and against conservation have far from subsided. Strangely enough,
even now there are many who believe that the entire idea of nature conservation
is only suited for the developed countries, while the poor and needy
in our part of the world cannot afford such a measure! Economically
such proceedings are not quite feasible at all. Ecology we need to remember
was a comparatively recent science and it has been necessitated by the
inadvertent march of human (read Western) civilization! Because we overexploit
our natural resources and remorselessly indulge in species annihilation,
lethally poison our rivers and seas over and above damming and polluting
them, smoke out holes in our atmosphere, and engage in a hundred different
ways of self-destruction, we need to sit up and take stock before things
go out of our hands. Now, if only we had listened to our poets and artists!
If only we had heeded our now over-interpreted spiritual texts and good
old religious seers! It is not as if everything about the past and those
days of yore is to seen as conservation-oriented. And it is not to generalise
that all religious texts are wisdom texts too. But then there had been
one too many voices of dissent and disapproval raised against the mad
march of development in the past. And the point is that they had perhaps
resorted to the heart rather than the head. And that is where it all
leads us to. West or East, ecological wisdom had always been there,
but then it was buried under the rubble of destructive and exploitative
philosophies. Further it was for the most an affair of the heart rather
than the head as such. Feeling, of course would later spill into thought
and action.
The argument that my scientist-friend
disapproved of was that nature conservation was largely a matter of
the heart than the head. I had cited the green poets and pointed out
that the ultimate historical foundations of nature preservation are
aesthetic (which I much later came to realize was the basis of the environmental
ethics as formulated by the deep ecologists). We start by loving nature
and the natural, and begin to care for what we love and cherish. The
deep blue sky, the wide expanse of the green earth, the songs and flutter
of the birds and butterflies, the gambolling animals—all these
begin to crystallize in our hearts a deep fondness of indistinguishable
delight, a sense of nature. This crystallization is not without its
cultural and historical contexts. Nevertheless it is what binds us the
great wide world. The hard data of the like that today a significant
portion of the 15000 plant species and 75000 animal species found in
India are threatened by the pressure of human activity on land and forests,
and so many hectares of forest land are ransacked per the hour in the
rain forests of the world, are only supplementary and they could add
to our agony. The fragility and the resilience of earth is first borne
into our hearts through the wonder and amazement that our hearts accord.
Perhaps this is the experience of the intangible behind the tangible
that the spiritual masters have spoken of. This would bring us to the
brink of metaphysics and religion. Perhaps, this is the right place
to begin.
Religious thought, the world
over, dovetails with that of the nature lover, because religion in its
beginnings and ends has a bearing on nature. Almost all religions, sociologists
would agree, have their roots in the worship of nature. The adoration
of trees, birds and animals, the worship of sacred groves, and the attribution
of sacredness to all life forms are true to the spirit of ancient religions.
It may be that the reasons for their being so sacred might be slightly
different from the ecological angle that we are seeking for, but however,
in spirit, they come quite close to that. Of course, we are saddled
with the virtues and hindrances of hindsight and therefore can see in
history the reverence attributed to all life forms in the sacred texts
of almost all religions. The finer aspects of differences may be a matter
of significance only for the scholar: while most "pagan" religions
identified the immutable with the divine, the Hebraic, especially the
Christian religion, maintained the natural superiority of the human
being over all other life forms, and insisted on his (His?) superior
ability to break the immutability of natural laws. As many perspective
scholars have noted it might be this underlying patriarchal power that
laid the foundations for classical science and its strains are still
visible despite the claims to universality and understanding of contemporary
science. However, pre-scientific societies cherished a celebratory attitude
to nature.
In the march of Western history
of ideas, the Enlightenment is often looked upon as the age of reason.
Whatever else this might have entailed, the most significant aspect
is that this age gave rise to a belief in scientism—a dangerous
attitude indeed—a deep faith in the order of scientific thinking.
Human emotion, feeling, and the entire "irrational" sphere
of mankind were delegated a secondary insignificant position in the
understanding of life. The intellect superseded the heart and analytical
thought sought precedence over the intuitive. Values came to be reinterpreted,
religion was relegated to superstition, and science got itself the supreme
role as the interpreter of truth. In our own times even to speak of
one's beliefs is to rake up the ghost of pre-renaissance nescience!
How could one speak of being moved by nature and the natural forms?
Poetry and imagination are things of the past. These are days of rationality
and intelligence. Religion breeds only superstition and nonsense; it
works as opium! This is not to demean rationality and intelligence per
se but only to challenge their claims to being the only valid means
of approaching the truth. While this being so, truth, in the logic of
the postmodern, is multi-dimensional and multifaceted. Let us reorient
ourselves to this fact that is not a fact! If fiction differentiates
itself by not being fact let us create the faction of the present! In
the search for alter/native truths we need to heed and understand the
other logic that may not resemble the logic we are used to. If the post-enlightenment
logic declaims the validity of religion and metaphysics, then we need
to reorient ourselves with regard to these two as well.
To believe Theodore Adorno,
it is barbaric to write poetry after Auswitz . And to believe Michael
Foucault and Edward Said, it is impossible to think of any social situation
without relating it to the politics of power and oppression. And of
course after the great movements in Feminist thinking it is virtually
impossible to understand any situation without relating it to the ideas
of gender and politics. Likewise race, class, ideology—these concepts
have all altered our ways of understanding the present. In such a situation
how could we relegate the idea of nature? What we understand by nature
most certainly has a bearing on what we make of ourselves. And our understanding
needs necessarily be holistic and not discriminative. The efforts of
environmental historians and environmental geographers have enabled
us to understand the profound implications of the natural environment
and our ways of responding to it.
Thus in our understanding
of the world we live in we need to reorient ourselves with regard to
the values and our ways of response. It is my strong contention that
aesthetics belongs to the order of values of which ecological value
too forms a significant part. In fact the value which we attribute to
the environment cannot be seen distinct from our general aesthetico-ethical
frame of reference. The value which we attribute to the environment
is holistic and complete and not peripheral or derivative . Aesthetic
value cannot be and should not be dismissed as subjective (in a Cartesian
sense) when considering the value of environment and issues pertaining
to conservation and preservation. The ecological activism that globally
politicized these issues has come to be known as the Green Movement.
There is a green politics and even a green speak! And over the last
fifteen years a whole aesthetics of the green has also emerged under
the name of ecological criticism or eco criticism. In the great welter
of socio-political theorizing that had held sway over the last half
of the twentieth century the concerns of the human individual and nature
were virtually submerged. After the death of the author the individual
artist/poet ceased to have any space to speak afterwards, and after
the closure of the text history ceased to exist at all. If one were
to take the pains of going over the warp and woof of socio-political
theorizing carefully, one can perceive the struggles of the author and
the text in the light of meaning production. When we reinstate class,
race and gender along with the voice of nature we regain the fuller
meaning of human's being. When Thoreau wrote, "I went to the woods
because I wished to live deliberately…" and when Aldo Leopold
spoke of the land ethic, they were giving voice to an aesthetics of
commitment and engagement.
DeepEcology
What came to be called Deep
Ecology stemmed primarily from the work of the Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess. According to Naess, "the aim of supporters of the deep
ecology movement is not a slight reform of our present society, but
a substantial reorientation of our whole civilization." Hence it
is an ecosophy. It concentrates on the human relationship with the natural
world and supplies a substantial reorientation to a world run astray.
Let me provide the major points of this ecosophy as it is developed
by the practitioners of deep ecology:
A rejection of anthropocentrism.
All life on earth has an intrinsic value irrespective of the human angle.
Richness and biodiversity
are valuable in themselves and humans have no right to reduce this diversity.
An identification with all
life
Caring for the other life
forms is part of individual self realization.
A critique of instrumental
rationality (emphasis should be not on quantity and efficiency but quality)
Personal development of a
total world view. Individual thinking and action are of utmost significance
and later the collective and the social.
As can be seen the concept
of deep ecology is akin to the spiritual. What is aimed at is life enhancing
qualitative values very much similar to spiritual enlightenment or artistic
fulfillment. After all, life becomes meaningful only when we start to
live fully and selflessly.
In our present day-to-day
life of hard reality at every point we are habituated to turn to the
physical sciences for concurrence and approval for only they can account
convincingly for our corporeal existence. Similarly, in spite of their
theoretical differences the so-called social sciences get their sanction
only because they meekly follow the methodology of the non-human mathematical
sciences. And yet many perceptive minds have pointed out time and again
that our thinking and perception have been determined by the technological
environment rather than the natural. There is apparently little of nature
that is left in us. Technology has taken over. This has become an automatic
universe for us. Our constructions of our environment and our lives
have become so removed from the organic unity of the poetic and the
spiritual and so how could we sense and see the elemental harmony that
is so apparent to the poet when he writes:
My beloved is the mountains
The solitary wooded valleys,
Strange islands…silent music
(St John of the Cross)
or
iyam prithvi sarvesam bhutanam
madhu, asyai prithvyai sarvani bhutani madhu
this earth is like honey
for all creatures and all the creatures are like honey for this earth,
Brhadarnyaka V brahmana1.
This brings us to the immediate contexts of ecological criticism or
ecocriticism. Literature and art have always shown deep affinities with
nature, however, the academic critical pursuit of this interdisciplinary
field of enquiry has developed fairly recently. It has come to be known
as ecological criticism, or ecocriticism in short. Among the many factors
that led to this recognition of environmental art and literature—distinctions
have also been drawn between nature writing and environmental writing,
etc—are the growing public awareness of profound ecological crisis
consequent to many conservation and Green movements the world over,
as well as the historical development of contemporary social and critical
theory. It is in this context that the work and critical practice of
most ecocritics who endeavour to direct public attention to the ecological
values embedded in literary texts become contemporary and relevant.
Scott Slovic (2004) has drawn attention to the fact that despite traditional
interactions between humans and the land that figure prominently in
the literatures of the world, literary scholars and other specialists
in the arts and humanities (the visual and performing arts, history,
philosophy and related disciplines) have almost solely concentrated
their studies on human experience and expression, seldom considering
the ramifications of human behaviour for the planet and the impact of
nature on human experience. Ecocriticism is an attempt to organize and
understand the human and non-human interactions and interrelationships.
Ecocrticism is further an attempt to reintegrate the human and the non
human, to retrace the lost links between humanity and the world out
there. Too much of scientism has effected the human separation from
nature and hastened in a clear demarcation between the head and the
heart. What is thus so crystal clear to the nature-aesthete—the
intimate links between those primal human emotions, the need and desire
for sympathy and compassion and the principles of nature conservation—has
become too indistinct to the woolly-minded scientist and material philosophers.
Ecocriticism focuses on these and much more.
In his recent book, Farther
Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature, Patrick Murphy points
out that the rapidly increasing number of published aesthetic texts
concerned with nature, environmental issues, ecology, place, regionalism,
and inhabitation has gained sufficient critical mass to generate an
entire field of ecologically influenced literary studies—ecocriticism.
Perhaps this could be looked upon as being more of a movement than a
method. The emergence of ecocriticism has been compared to that of the
feminist movement by one of its pioneers in the U.S., Cheryl Glotfelty
(1996), in its practice of rediscovering early writers, rereading the
classics from a 'green' perspective and the attempts to conceptualize
the subject in a theoretical way. Ecocriticism thus has as much links
with the feminist movement and thinking as with the development of theory
per se. It runs deep roots in culture and history. Like New Criticism
necessitated by the European Modernist movement ecocriticism has multiple
roots.
Primarily ecocriticism could
be seen as a product of the rising environmental concerns—this
is not to reduce this movement to being but an offshoot of something
else, but, on the other hand it would reveal its global significance
and relevance. Then of course, there is this deep-felt post-deconstructivist
crisis in the human science academia, a sense of being deprived of direction
and momentum. Ecocriticism reintegrates the text and the world, history
and narrative, meaning and value. While it poses challenges to any universal
value system, it attempts to reinstate the living experience of reality
and multidimensionality of experience. Ecocriticism calls for a paradigm
shift from the human-centric to the bio-centric, which transcends the
mutually exclusive categories of centre and periphery. As Robert Kern
puts it:
…ecocriticism…
depends upon our willingness as readers to marginalize, if not completely
overlook, precisely those aspects and meanings of texts that are traditionally
privileged or valorized …. What ecocriticism calls for, then,
is a fundamental shift from one context of reading to another—more
specifically, a movement from the human to the environmental….from
the exclusively human to the biocentric or ecocentric…a humanism
informed by an awareness of the more than-human.
Robert Kern, Ecocriticism—What
is it Good For? ISLE,7.1.Winter 2000, 9-32
Finer distinctions have to
be drawn between literature and writing: while the literary kind includes
the imaginative and fictional, writing of a broader nature goes beyond
the fictional into non-fictional narrative. Further distinctions have
already been drawn between nature writing and writing for nature. While
nature writing could be either natural history information or personal
responses to nature, writing for nature would be something more self-reflexive
and self-aware, philosophically as well as scientifically--like philosophical
interpretations of nature and the human-nonhuman integration. Environmental
texts tend to interrogate the human/nature divide and focus on the human
accountability to the environment.
Much has happened in the
wake of the controversial essay by Lynn White that drew attention to
the interrelationship of nature, science, technology and Christianity.
The patriarchal Christian world-view, according to White has been instrumental
in fostering a utility-oriented and exploitative view of nature, while
science and technology have become its handmaidens. Ecofeminism has
been another major intellectual challenge to this patriarchal world-view.
Many feminist intellectuals the world over have drawn attention to wide
spread environmental domination and damage as another effect of androcentricism.
These are some significant
aspects of Ecocritical studies:
1.environment and ecology—basic
awareness of nature
2.writing about nature and
nature writing—poetry, fictional/non fictional narratives
3.rereading history—European
Romanticism , Colonialism,
4. Women and nature—ecofeminism
5.reclaiming the past—tracing
roots of environmental writing and awareness Especially in non-anglo-American
situation—traces of environmental culture
6. religion and society and
nature
7. environmental philosophy
8. environment, geography
andlandscape studies
9. landscape,culture and
memory—mythical and spiritual connections to non-human world
What is to be done?
Michael Branch, another American
critic writes quite prophetically of the future of ecocriticism:
The recent acceleration of
scholarly activity in the areas of environmental ethics, environmental
history, ecofeminism, and ecotheology provides a clear indication that
environmental consciousness is increasingly being reflected in both
academic discourse and the institutional structures which underwrite
that discourse. Environmental scholarship has finally infiltrated the
discipline of literary studies, where it variously appears under the
rubric of nature writing, environmental literature, nature/culture theory,
place studies, ecofeminism, and a number of other subdisciplines which
may be constellated around the term ecocriticism. The green writing
is now on the wall—or, more precisely, the palimpsest—of
literary studies, and today's burgeoning ecocritical scholarship will
be tomorrow's curricular reform.
Ecocriticism could also be
seen as a method. If we could reorient our critical and conceptual tools
we can rediscover our intimate ties with nature, and towards that end
ecocriticism is also a methodolgy. What is now called for is a shift
in our perceptions. Nature is not that something out there that excludes
the perceiver, the feeler and the thinker. Nature is not peripheral
but holistic and complete. Ecophilosophy encourages us to perceive change
at every point of time and it would orientate us towards a rediscovery
of our long lost ecological wisdom. When we attempt to retrace the h
istorical roots of ecocriticism and ecological wisdom in our spiritual
texts, we are not regressing to fundamentalist values, but only reconnecting
with our indigenous roots meaningfully. What is now called for is an
intensive study of our tribal and folk culture and simultaneously an
extensive study of environmental movements in other parts of the world
– because both the global and the local are of equal significance
for us. After all, we have only one earth and we all share the skies
and water and air. And ecocriticism shows us how to go about it. We
need to recognise the urgency of evoking our ecological wisdom. Our
constructions of our environment and our lives have become so removed
from the organic unity of the poetic and the spiritual and so how could
we sense and see the elemental harmony that is so apparent to the poet…?
The Upanishadic wisdom of delight in dispossession is there for us to
reclaim. It is not through domination and assertion of right and possession
that we relish the universe but by an aesthetic distancing. Further,
the values that ecocriticism hastens to establish are far from that
of the colonial as well as consumer-oriented capitalist culture. At
every point ecocritical theories have challenged domination, power and
authority. Thus the voices of the minorities, the underprivileged, the
subaltern and marginalized would be heard distinctly. Introducing ecocriticism
into our hard-core curriculum would thus mean a rereading of our intellectual
and cultural inheritance. Perhaps we could reintegrate our value systems
and regain our sense of balance and harmony. Not through a strategy
of homogenisation and universalisation but through a recognition of
difference and an understanding of the many. Passion and compassion
are at the core of ecocriticism.
Dr. Murali Sivaramakrishnan
Department of English
Pondicherry University
Pondicherry India 605 014
email: [email protected]
[email protected]
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