Evolutionary Biology's Challenge to the Pastoral Imagination
By Louise Westling
INTRODUCTION
The pastoral imagination that shapes most literature about the natural world might seem very far from practical matters of public policy and law. Why should anyone care about descriptions of city people escaping to green meadows, forests, or even wilderness areas to simplify their lives and refresh themselves for awhile? The answer, as Lawrence Buell tells us, is that “pastoralism is a species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without.” Its tropes pervade popular media and advertisements, and influence the ways environmental policy is made. Green places are considered timeless reservoirs of pure Nature, which are essentially other than human. Most environmental amelioration efforts of governments and private agencies alike are based on the idea of human technologies “fixing” problems. If an oil refinery or shopping mall is set to be built on a wetland area, replacement wetlands can be built elsewhere. Or if dams block salmon runs, ingenious fish ladders will reroute the fish. Genetic engineering can solve agricultural toxicity problems by introducing genes from animals or other plants into food crops to remove the need for pesticides. The fate of New Orleans shows that humans are just as affected by wetland destruction as birds and fish. Pacific Northwest salmon runs are dying because fish ladders do not work. The jury is still out on genetically modified organism foods and their effects on ecosystems as well as mammalian bodies, but some studies already suggest that they will be harmful to the diversity of insect and bacterial life on agricultural lands and eventually to us. The idea of nature as separate pastoral space needs to be exploded if environmental law and policy are to address real problems. Humans must be seen as integral parts of the whole biosphere, who share in its fate.
Placing Darwin in Arcadia explodes the static concept of the pastoral and exposes the dynamic evolutionary history of the natural world, grounded in what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called brute or wild being. The classic pastoral setting established by Theocritus in the third century BC and peopled by shepherds, was “a conventional, closed landscape . . . where water peacefully flows, [and] the foliage of the trees rustles, . . . .” Idyllic modulation between the contemporary and the mythic in such places allows imaginative escape from cities to natural tranquility and simplicity. Since the Renaissance this conventional space of nature has been expanded to include forests and gardens, as we see in familiar works like Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. After Kant and the Romantic Sublime, the pastoral impulse opened out to include much wilder scenes as European and American writers began to extol craggy mountains, tempestuous seascapes, and eventually the idea of wilderness. But always nature has been assumed to be a separate sphere that humans visit for temporary respite. “At the root of pastoral,” explains Greg Garrard, “is the idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies.” Seen in evolutionary terms, however, pastoral space cannot be understood as separate from ordinary human settings. Instead it must include all of the earth, with homo sapiens only one among myriads of interrelated and interdependent species of living creatures. According to biologist E. O. Wilson:
For more than 99 percent of human history people have lived in hunter-gatherer bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms. During this period of deep history, and still farther back, into paleohominid times, they depended on an exact learned knowledge of crucial aspects of natural history. That much is true even of chimpanzees today, who use primitive tools and have a practical knowledge of plants and animals. As language and culture expanded, humans also used living organisms of diverse kinds as a principal source of metaphor and myth. In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated world. It would be therefore quite extraordinary to find that all learning rules related to that world have been erased in a few thousand years, even in the tiny minority of peoples who have existed for more than one or two generations in wholly urban environments.
Most ancient literatures express a sense of this immersion in the natural world in kinship with other organisms, as Buell remarks. In almost every culture the earliest writings are concerned with the creation of plants and animals, and the oral traditions that preceded ancient literature and still linger in some parts of the globe posit kinship, shape-shifting, and dialogue between humans and the other creatures around them. It is likely that the highly conventional and artificial genre of pastoral poetry owes its origins to folk traditions of this sort. Indeed, my colleague, Glen Love, suggests that the pastoral has far more ancient roots when he asserts that evolutionary perspectives help to explain why most human cultures are deeply attracted to green places of repose and natural abundance. I would like to consider Darwinian perspectives on the pastoral in what I hope is a complementary way to Love's work, by focusing particular attention upon what Merleau-Ponty called “man-animality intertwining” within the flesh of the natural world. That is, I wish to raise the question of the status of humans in relation to other living creatures, to suggest that our lives are intertwined with theirs, and any question of justice or operation of law must reflect that understanding.
Taking Darwin seriously means rejecting an idealized notion of Arcadia as a separate “nature” which we humans can visit as we might a theme park. Instead we must see the natural world as an essentially wild co-evolving tangle of beings and forms that covers the planet and includes the human species. “Our bodies are wild,” says poet Gary Snyder. “The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting--all universal responses of this mammal body.” Merleau-Ponty puts it more abstractly: “This environment of brute existence and essence is not something mysterious: we never quit it, we have no other environment.”
Such assertions take us back to the perspectives Charles Darwin expressed in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He insisted that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” He painstakingly itemized the structural homologies between humans and other mammals, as well as pointing out parallels in fetal development. And he credited other animals with cultural behaviors, reasoning abilities, and abilities to communicate in complex ways. A return to this kind of thinking has been gathering momentum recently in ethology, primatology, and other animal studies, cultural studies, and critical theory.
I hope it is obvious, however, that these debts to Darwin's thought are far from what Steven Rose calls “ultra-Darwinism,” a sort of Hobbesian vision of ruthless struggle for reproductive success and adaptation at the level of the “selfish gene” that renders organisms mere robots. Such thinking oversimplifies Darwin's concept of evolution, and much evolutionary biology of the past century has added further nuances and complications to the picture of how living creatures developed in new forms over the millions of years of planetary life. One of the most powerful challenges to the caricature of survival of the fittest through relentless competition is Lynn Margulis's theory of symbiogenesis, which once seemed heretical but “has now become the conventional wisdom of the textbooks,” according to Rose. Margulis's theory suggests that “symbiosis, beginning as an uneasy alliance of distinct life-forms, may underlie the origin of major evolutionary novelty.” Explanations of punctuated equilibrium, the fact that many evolutionary events seemed to happen in sudden leaps rather than gradual adaptive development, and the phenomenon of genetic drift also indicate other forces at work than mere competition for survival.
In cultural studies, increasing attention is focused on the question of human/animal relationships, viewed from the perspectives of many disciplines. Cary Wolfe's Zoontologies and Animal Rites bring together a representative sample of recent interdisciplinary work on the question of the animal. Ironically, as species extinction intensifies around the globe, we turn to recognize the ways in which humans have always been dancing in a communal embrace with millions of others, many of them in our bodies.
Individual bodies turn out themselves to be far from discrete entities but rather cavorting alliances of creatures in intricately choreographed patterns. As human animals we live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria. Six hundred species in our mouths neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies. Four hundred species colonize our intestines; without them we could not digest and absorb the food we eat. Tiny creatures live all over our bodies, eating dead skin and performing many other kinds of housekeeping functions, as for example the microscopic lobster-like insects that infest our eyelashes and continually clean away the lubricants that would otherwise glue our eyes shut. As we move and breathe, we actively exchange nutrients and waste, energy and even atoms, with the air and things around us and the millions of creatures within us. Each person is a bipedal, mobile, and self-conscious community of living agents sharing an inner sea bound by the semipermeable extended surface organ of skin and given firm shape by bones. Armies of friendly microbes swim through our inner seas, scouting for and devouring invaders, cleaning the pipes, carrying freight. The “human” DNA that shapes and marks each of our unique selves is far less a proportion of the DNA in our body mass than that of our microbe friends. Even within our individual cells, the mitochondria that make our energy have their own, different DNA than that in our “human” chromosomes.
Conscious thought--the much-vaunted mind that has dominated philosophical tradition for two and a half thousand years--is only a tiny winking of self-reflective light in this symbiotic community of our body. Only a small part of that self-consciousness is focused in the deliberate kind of attention we call “reason” or “logic.” The individual human agent is not the queen of her fate or the master navigator of his life's course. As philosopher Alfonso Lingis puts it, our bodies are like “coral reefs . . . continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood, and biles. Movements do not get launched by an agent against masses of inertia; we move in an environment of air currents, rustling trees, and animate bodies.”
As Margulis explains in Symbiotic Planet,
[We are] a kind of baroque edifice, . . . rebuilt every two decades or so by fused and mutating symbiotic bacteria. Our bodies are built from protoctist sex cells that clone themselves by mitosis. Symbiotic interaction is the stuff of life on a crowded planet. Our symbiogenetic composite core is far older than the recent innovation we call the individual human. Our strong sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species superiority, is a delusion of grandeur.
As I mentioned previously, traditional peoples used to understand the submersion of humans within the pullulating swamp of planetary life, though they would have described that understanding in rather different terms than ours. Oral traditions from all over the world tell stories of humans conversing with other animals as relatives, being aided by them or tricked by them, and always remaining closely associated in a shared world even though each may experience it in quite different ways. The development of agriculture and urban civilizations eroded that sense through a long, gradual process, but the earliest literatures are haunted by fears of what happens when humans try to set themselves outside or above these wider kinships. Some of the earliest literary works document the uneasy sense of human/animal intertwining during the Bronze Age when agriculture and cities were well-established, and we might briefly reexamine one of the most familiar of these, Euripides' Bakkhai, written about 407 BC.
The pastoral imagination that shapes most literature about the natural world might seem very far from practical matters of public policy and law. Why should anyone care about descriptions of city people escaping to green meadows, forests, or even wilderness areas to simplify their lives and refresh themselves for awhile? The answer, as Lawrence Buell tells us, is that “pastoralism is a species of cultural equipment that western thought has for more than two millennia been unable to do without.” Its tropes pervade popular media and advertisements, and influence the ways environmental policy is made. Green places are considered timeless reservoirs of pure Nature, which are essentially other than human. Most environmental amelioration efforts of governments and private agencies alike are based on the idea of human technologies “fixing” problems. If an oil refinery or shopping mall is set to be built on a wetland area, replacement wetlands can be built elsewhere. Or if dams block salmon runs, ingenious fish ladders will reroute the fish. Genetic engineering can solve agricultural toxicity problems by introducing genes from animals or other plants into food crops to remove the need for pesticides. The fate of New Orleans shows that humans are just as affected by wetland destruction as birds and fish. Pacific Northwest salmon runs are dying because fish ladders do not work. The jury is still out on genetically modified organism foods and their effects on ecosystems as well as mammalian bodies, but some studies already suggest that they will be harmful to the diversity of insect and bacterial life on agricultural lands and eventually to us. The idea of nature as separate pastoral space needs to be exploded if environmental law and policy are to address real problems. Humans must be seen as integral parts of the whole biosphere, who share in its fate.
Placing Darwin in Arcadia explodes the static concept of the pastoral and exposes the dynamic evolutionary history of the natural world, grounded in what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called brute or wild being. The classic pastoral setting established by Theocritus in the third century BC and peopled by shepherds, was “a conventional, closed landscape . . . where water peacefully flows, [and] the foliage of the trees rustles, . . . .” Idyllic modulation between the contemporary and the mythic in such places allows imaginative escape from cities to natural tranquility and simplicity. Since the Renaissance this conventional space of nature has been expanded to include forests and gardens, as we see in familiar works like Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It. After Kant and the Romantic Sublime, the pastoral impulse opened out to include much wilder scenes as European and American writers began to extol craggy mountains, tempestuous seascapes, and eventually the idea of wilderness. But always nature has been assumed to be a separate sphere that humans visit for temporary respite. “At the root of pastoral,” explains Greg Garrard, “is the idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies.” Seen in evolutionary terms, however, pastoral space cannot be understood as separate from ordinary human settings. Instead it must include all of the earth, with homo sapiens only one among myriads of interrelated and interdependent species of living creatures. According to biologist E. O. Wilson:
For more than 99 percent of human history people have lived in hunter-gatherer bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms. During this period of deep history, and still farther back, into paleohominid times, they depended on an exact learned knowledge of crucial aspects of natural history. That much is true even of chimpanzees today, who use primitive tools and have a practical knowledge of plants and animals. As language and culture expanded, humans also used living organisms of diverse kinds as a principal source of metaphor and myth. In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated world. It would be therefore quite extraordinary to find that all learning rules related to that world have been erased in a few thousand years, even in the tiny minority of peoples who have existed for more than one or two generations in wholly urban environments.
Most ancient literatures express a sense of this immersion in the natural world in kinship with other organisms, as Buell remarks. In almost every culture the earliest writings are concerned with the creation of plants and animals, and the oral traditions that preceded ancient literature and still linger in some parts of the globe posit kinship, shape-shifting, and dialogue between humans and the other creatures around them. It is likely that the highly conventional and artificial genre of pastoral poetry owes its origins to folk traditions of this sort. Indeed, my colleague, Glen Love, suggests that the pastoral has far more ancient roots when he asserts that evolutionary perspectives help to explain why most human cultures are deeply attracted to green places of repose and natural abundance. I would like to consider Darwinian perspectives on the pastoral in what I hope is a complementary way to Love's work, by focusing particular attention upon what Merleau-Ponty called “man-animality intertwining” within the flesh of the natural world. That is, I wish to raise the question of the status of humans in relation to other living creatures, to suggest that our lives are intertwined with theirs, and any question of justice or operation of law must reflect that understanding.
Taking Darwin seriously means rejecting an idealized notion of Arcadia as a separate “nature” which we humans can visit as we might a theme park. Instead we must see the natural world as an essentially wild co-evolving tangle of beings and forms that covers the planet and includes the human species. “Our bodies are wild,” says poet Gary Snyder. “The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting--all universal responses of this mammal body.” Merleau-Ponty puts it more abstractly: “This environment of brute existence and essence is not something mysterious: we never quit it, we have no other environment.”
Such assertions take us back to the perspectives Charles Darwin expressed in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He insisted that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” He painstakingly itemized the structural homologies between humans and other mammals, as well as pointing out parallels in fetal development. And he credited other animals with cultural behaviors, reasoning abilities, and abilities to communicate in complex ways. A return to this kind of thinking has been gathering momentum recently in ethology, primatology, and other animal studies, cultural studies, and critical theory.
I hope it is obvious, however, that these debts to Darwin's thought are far from what Steven Rose calls “ultra-Darwinism,” a sort of Hobbesian vision of ruthless struggle for reproductive success and adaptation at the level of the “selfish gene” that renders organisms mere robots. Such thinking oversimplifies Darwin's concept of evolution, and much evolutionary biology of the past century has added further nuances and complications to the picture of how living creatures developed in new forms over the millions of years of planetary life. One of the most powerful challenges to the caricature of survival of the fittest through relentless competition is Lynn Margulis's theory of symbiogenesis, which once seemed heretical but “has now become the conventional wisdom of the textbooks,” according to Rose. Margulis's theory suggests that “symbiosis, beginning as an uneasy alliance of distinct life-forms, may underlie the origin of major evolutionary novelty.” Explanations of punctuated equilibrium, the fact that many evolutionary events seemed to happen in sudden leaps rather than gradual adaptive development, and the phenomenon of genetic drift also indicate other forces at work than mere competition for survival.
In cultural studies, increasing attention is focused on the question of human/animal relationships, viewed from the perspectives of many disciplines. Cary Wolfe's Zoontologies and Animal Rites bring together a representative sample of recent interdisciplinary work on the question of the animal. Ironically, as species extinction intensifies around the globe, we turn to recognize the ways in which humans have always been dancing in a communal embrace with millions of others, many of them in our bodies.
Individual bodies turn out themselves to be far from discrete entities but rather cavorting alliances of creatures in intricately choreographed patterns. As human animals we live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria. Six hundred species in our mouths neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies. Four hundred species colonize our intestines; without them we could not digest and absorb the food we eat. Tiny creatures live all over our bodies, eating dead skin and performing many other kinds of housekeeping functions, as for example the microscopic lobster-like insects that infest our eyelashes and continually clean away the lubricants that would otherwise glue our eyes shut. As we move and breathe, we actively exchange nutrients and waste, energy and even atoms, with the air and things around us and the millions of creatures within us. Each person is a bipedal, mobile, and self-conscious community of living agents sharing an inner sea bound by the semipermeable extended surface organ of skin and given firm shape by bones. Armies of friendly microbes swim through our inner seas, scouting for and devouring invaders, cleaning the pipes, carrying freight. The “human” DNA that shapes and marks each of our unique selves is far less a proportion of the DNA in our body mass than that of our microbe friends. Even within our individual cells, the mitochondria that make our energy have their own, different DNA than that in our “human” chromosomes.
Conscious thought--the much-vaunted mind that has dominated philosophical tradition for two and a half thousand years--is only a tiny winking of self-reflective light in this symbiotic community of our body. Only a small part of that self-consciousness is focused in the deliberate kind of attention we call “reason” or “logic.” The individual human agent is not the queen of her fate or the master navigator of his life's course. As philosopher Alfonso Lingis puts it, our bodies are like “coral reefs . . . continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood, and biles. Movements do not get launched by an agent against masses of inertia; we move in an environment of air currents, rustling trees, and animate bodies.”
As Margulis explains in Symbiotic Planet,
[We are] a kind of baroque edifice, . . . rebuilt every two decades or so by fused and mutating symbiotic bacteria. Our bodies are built from protoctist sex cells that clone themselves by mitosis. Symbiotic interaction is the stuff of life on a crowded planet. Our symbiogenetic composite core is far older than the recent innovation we call the individual human. Our strong sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species superiority, is a delusion of grandeur.
As I mentioned previously, traditional peoples used to understand the submersion of humans within the pullulating swamp of planetary life, though they would have described that understanding in rather different terms than ours. Oral traditions from all over the world tell stories of humans conversing with other animals as relatives, being aided by them or tricked by them, and always remaining closely associated in a shared world even though each may experience it in quite different ways. The development of agriculture and urban civilizations eroded that sense through a long, gradual process, but the earliest literatures are haunted by fears of what happens when humans try to set themselves outside or above these wider kinships. Some of the earliest literary works document the uneasy sense of human/animal intertwining during the Bronze Age when agriculture and cities were well-established, and we might briefly reexamine one of the most familiar of these, Euripides' Bakkhai, written about 407 BC.
