Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Louise Westling, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1103-4.

EVER SINCE David Ehrenfield's The Arrogance of Humanism twenty years ago, the realization has been growing that a paradigm shift is needed in the so-called developed world. That shift has been under way for some time, I believe, beginning with quantum physics in science and the closely associated modernist formal innovations and skepticism that have dominated twentieth-century cultural activity in the West. Yet in the popular mind--indeed in the assumptions that motivate most activities in the industrialized countries of the globe--the radical ideas of indeterminacy, contingency, and the interrelatedness of beings and phenomena have not yet been absorbed. Ecocriticism and environmental philosophy are beginning to articulate the worldview that is required as much by the new physics as by ecological sciences and the increasing evidence of global environmental problems. Such a worldview must be nondualistic, embodied, and relational. It must define human consciousness and action within an enormously complex, interdependent community of life on earth.

The need for change must be defined against the basic notions of human superiority we inherited from Renaissance humanism. Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man articulated a confident vision of human possibility transcending "the fermenting dung heap of the inferior world." According to Pico, we can withdraw from the body into "the inner chambers of the mind" and become "neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed with human flesh" (trans. Robert Caponigri [Regnery/Gateway, 1956] 10-11).  Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian mechanics of the Enlightenment era grew out of such notions, but the mechanistic model of the universe was thoroughly debunked in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, even though dominant rhetorics fail to move away from it.

An ecological humanism would restore appropriate humility, absorbing the lessons of quantum physics and emphasizing cooperative participation within the community of planetary life. From studies of our primate relatives, by Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey as well as many others, we have learned that most of the traits we claimed as demonstrative of human superiority--toolmaking, language, reasoning and innovative adaptation, cooperative social structures--are shared with animals still considered savage beasts in popular parlance. Birds also use tools, wolves have complex social arrangements much like our own, and even viruses and plants communicate and actively shape their environments and destinies. I spoke recently with a microbiologist who witnessed a geranium turning off a gene that had been introduced into it to prevent it from blossoming. Human beings are not the unique agents among living creatures on earth.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty articulated a philosophy in The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, remarkably congruent with quantum physics, regarding the interrelation of space and time, the situatedness of our knowing, our participatory relation with the things we perceive, and the indeterminacy of our apprehension of the world in which we are embedded. Given such an understanding, we should develop a sacramental awareness of the world, perhaps through the concept of an "ecological sublime" that accepts "confirmation of its astonishment" (Visible and the Invisible [Northwestern UP, 1993] 102) instead of seeking or presuming control. Such a vision would be congruent with other contemporary scientific enterprises, such as James Lovelock's geophysiology (formerly called the Gaia hypothesis) and the biologist Lynn Margulis's work on symbiosis as the process underlying major evolutionary novelty (Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution [New York: Basic, 1998]).

An ecological humanism would reorient the evaluation of literature and other cultural forms. The new fields of environmental literature and ecocriticism are already exploring the possibilities of such reevaluation, and they provide immensely fruitful results that intersect with feminist theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and indeed basic readings of every kind of literary text. My own work has been focused on twentieth-century American literature and the ways ecocriticism revises the American pastoral tradition, but ecocriticism offers useful approaches to texts as disparate as Shakespeare's King Lear, Winter's Tale, and Tempest; Spenser's Faerie Queene; Romantic poetry of the sublime; postcolonial works like Achebe's Things Fall Apart; Native American and African American fiction and poetry; and works from many other cultural traditions, such as Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North. If, as I believe, the human place in the living community of the planet is at issue, ecocriticism is a crucial approach for literary study in the next century.

LOUISE WESTLING
University of Oregon