Response to Stephen Cushman and Louise Westling
By Lawrence Buell
These remarks were first framed as a response to Stephen Cushman's Speaking of Alaska and Louise Westling's Darwin in Arcadia. Unfortunately, illness prevented me from delivering my response in person. Having gathered that a fair amount of skepticism was expressed at the conference as to whether humanists have anything substantive to say to their colleagues in environmental law, I have revised my original remarks somewhat in order to include a response to this point.
The disparity of topics and emphases between Speaking of Alaska and Darwin in Arcadia might alone make someone in the field of environmental law wonder if I speak the same language as everyone else, and if the environmental humanists have their act together. On first reading, Cushman and Westling seem to have precious little in common, except for a principled objection to the inherent factitiousness and practical stumbling blocks entailed in hypostasizing “nature” as a distinct, constant, unchanging space apart from human presence and/or interests. Even this shared contention they treat in sharply discrepant ways.
To begin with, they define the “space apart fallacy” quite differently, although not diametrically so. For Westling, “pastoral” thinking is the culprit, whereas for Cushman the culprit is the mistaken assumption that Alaskan wilderness has always been seen simply as wilderness in the manner of modern preservationism, as rightfully a primordial sacred space. Her starting point is the conceptual structure, and his is the historical record. So far the arguments are congruent. Not so their specific sites of critique, however. They concern themselves with quite different kinds of specious boundary-drawing--Cushman with the error of conceiving the nonhuman world (Alaska specifically) as monolithically apart, and Westling with the opposite error of conceiving the human body as a monolithic space apart. As such, they represent two very distinct, albeit characteristic, kinds of projects within what might be called the “second wave” of the burgeoning ecocriticism movement in literature studies.
Yet some broadly shared countermovements begin to bring the two papers back together. The most significant of these, and the ones on which I shall concentrate here, are their respective normative critiques of anthropocentric arrogance. For Cushman, this means arguing that “nature”--however un-pristine and modified by human motives and agency it may be relative to our fondest green illusions--is not to be regarded as simply ours for the taking. Cushman chastises the excesses of Gale Norton-ish utilitarianism, though he also shrewdly makes Norton testify against herself in the process. For Westling, anthropocentrism is false consciousness, pure and simple. Biocentric consciousness is necessary for human as well as planetary survival. Significantly, Westling avoids altogether the tendency to celebrate body-machine hybridization that one finds, for example, in the work of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.
Cushman takes his line of argument further than Westling would likely accept. He concurs with environmental historian Richard White's charge that the American arch-romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson looks from a modern ecocentric standpoint alarmingly mainstream in his proclamations of the rightful dominance of man over nature. But Cushman also sets great store by the other “uses” of nature that Emerson ranks “higher” than “commodity” (the lowest on Emerson's scale of nature's uses), particularly “beauty” and “language,” which come much closer to reinstating respect for nature on something like its own terms. These post- or neo-romantic frames of vision and value, as Cushman rightly notes, have proven importantly influential grounds on which the case for preservation of what's left of the Alaskan wilderness has been argued for more than a century. Westling is clearly--and given her frame of analysis, understandably--unwilling to cut slack for Emerson's old-fashioned rhetoric of natural holism. But her strong defense of the intractable symbiosis of the human and the natural leads her to a post-Darwinian equivalent: a vision of biotic community as a normative value crucial to ecosystemic and ultimately planetary health.
The presence of these countermovements within each paper suggests that whatever the epistemological or empirical truth of the matter, categories like “pastoral” and “primordial nature” are not likely to lose force anytime soon. They are two-edged swords, admittedly subject to abuse, hyperbole, and self-delusion. But if Rachel Carson, for example, had not transfused Silent Spring's scientific arguments against abuse of chemical pesticides with futuristic dystopian narrative and poignant lyrical portrayal of actual devastation of the “natural” world, her book would not have received the swift and ready hearing it did and become the text that contributed more than any other piece of writing in the 1960s to radicalizing the environmental movement.
My own critique of these two papers is accordingly that each might have reflected more explicitly upon the salutary paradox embedded in its main line of analysis. As these papers both in their own ways testify, but do not directly argue, we go too far in a “right” direction if we take the position that the vision (or myth?) of an integral realm of nature should simply be scrapped. It is historically correct that romanticizations of “nature” as a sacred space apart are not eternal verities but modernisms, historically identifiable effects of realization at a certain stage in the processes of urbanization and industrial revolution that “nature,” for all practical purposes, had become a space apart--in the daily lives of an increasing number of human beings. It is true as well that pastoral and wilderness idealizations have also all too often been deployed in the interest of the privileged few to create sanctuaries to marginalize or exclude the unprivileged many. Yet if environmentally concerned citizens simply let go of the dream of preserving unspoiled or, more precisely, relatively unspoiled places, or if we defend that dream simply on such utilitarian grounds as appeal to the potential benefits to human health of yet-unknown species being extinguished every hour, we engage in a kind of unilateral disarmament against resource-extractivist utilitarianism that risks suicide for the environmental movement. The dream, not of a nature unspoiled but of salubrious coexistence between the human and nonhuman in the assurance that it is in human as well as the larger biotic interest to resist anthropocentrism of a narrowly self-interested kind, is sure to maintain a certain evocative power in the public arena regardless of administrative regime changes; and future generations will rightly hold us responsible for abandoning it. The greatest virtue of these two papers, to my mind, is that at heart they seem resolved not so much to scrap it on account of its anachronisms, but to update and retrieve it in a more critically responsible form.
At this point, I may seem to have strayed away from the question of why scholars of environmental law should listen to this (or any other) demonstration of “critical responsibility” by environmental humanists. Of course the same question should be put with equal cogency in reverse: Do environmental humanists really need the resources of environmental legal scholarship in order to do their business? From a purely intra-disciplinary perspective, the answer in both cases is no: each camp has its own precedent models, methods, and protocols. But that is a silly way of viewing things: a formula for myopia, hermeticism, and impotence all around. Besides, my commentary has not really strayed from the question. It points to at least one widely shared aspect of humanistic inquiry from which nonhumanists can profit: its way of living with paradox, in this case a critique of environmental mythography that at the same time maintains and sustains the ongoing cultural power of such.
True, just as no environmental humanist would or should presumably want to spend more than a limited amount of time poring through environmental articles in legal journals, the same holds in reverse. Yet environmental humanists have a number of potentially valuable perspectives to offer legal scholars patient enough to try to separate the originally insightful from the routinistically pedantic. These include sociohistorical accounts of how a given initiative succeeded or failed; ethnographic accounts of how environmental ethics of one sort or another do or do not match particular cultural milieux; work in religions of how humans, under certain conditions of tribal and/or value solidarity, might generate “green” theologies that put environmental interests ahead of human interests; outside-the-box thought experiments by philosophers concerned with such issues as extension of moral consideration and/or rights to nonhumans or future generations; and--within literature studies per se--informed self-consciousness as to the workings of persuasive rhetoric, of metaphor, of imaging, of genre (e.g. narrative, confession)--all of which affect, sometimes profoundly, the actual conduct and success of legal initiatives, if not also the formal structure of law itself.
How do you turn a “swamp” into a “wetland” ?--to name one of the more heartening success stories in the history of late-twentieth century advocacy, albeit now in danger of rollback. Law and conservation biology have been indispensable, but neither could have realized the results that have been achieved without a massive shift in dominant cultural values, such that places formerly thought repellent and unsightly came to seem precious and even beautiful. Visual and literary aesthetics are crucial to this story, though not of course the whole story.
My last answer to the question of why scholars in environmental law need environmental humanists, including literary critics, is not scholarly but pedagogical. In the quarter century that I have taught environmental literature to undergraduates, I have noticed that for the sizeable contingent of my former students who proceed to careers in the environmental field, one of the most attractive options has been the law. This to me has been immensely gratifying. Obviously I cannot claim for most to have been the deciding influence.But it makes me suspect that a goodly number of environmental legal professionals, both outside the academy and within, have been at some point in their lives, and very likely continue to be, reinforced in their attraction to the specialty of environmental law by an ethical and aesthetic zest that can only be called humanistic. If so, I am doubly glad.
The disparity of topics and emphases between Speaking of Alaska and Darwin in Arcadia might alone make someone in the field of environmental law wonder if I speak the same language as everyone else, and if the environmental humanists have their act together. On first reading, Cushman and Westling seem to have precious little in common, except for a principled objection to the inherent factitiousness and practical stumbling blocks entailed in hypostasizing “nature” as a distinct, constant, unchanging space apart from human presence and/or interests. Even this shared contention they treat in sharply discrepant ways.
To begin with, they define the “space apart fallacy” quite differently, although not diametrically so. For Westling, “pastoral” thinking is the culprit, whereas for Cushman the culprit is the mistaken assumption that Alaskan wilderness has always been seen simply as wilderness in the manner of modern preservationism, as rightfully a primordial sacred space. Her starting point is the conceptual structure, and his is the historical record. So far the arguments are congruent. Not so their specific sites of critique, however. They concern themselves with quite different kinds of specious boundary-drawing--Cushman with the error of conceiving the nonhuman world (Alaska specifically) as monolithically apart, and Westling with the opposite error of conceiving the human body as a monolithic space apart. As such, they represent two very distinct, albeit characteristic, kinds of projects within what might be called the “second wave” of the burgeoning ecocriticism movement in literature studies.
Yet some broadly shared countermovements begin to bring the two papers back together. The most significant of these, and the ones on which I shall concentrate here, are their respective normative critiques of anthropocentric arrogance. For Cushman, this means arguing that “nature”--however un-pristine and modified by human motives and agency it may be relative to our fondest green illusions--is not to be regarded as simply ours for the taking. Cushman chastises the excesses of Gale Norton-ish utilitarianism, though he also shrewdly makes Norton testify against herself in the process. For Westling, anthropocentrism is false consciousness, pure and simple. Biocentric consciousness is necessary for human as well as planetary survival. Significantly, Westling avoids altogether the tendency to celebrate body-machine hybridization that one finds, for example, in the work of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.
Cushman takes his line of argument further than Westling would likely accept. He concurs with environmental historian Richard White's charge that the American arch-romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson looks from a modern ecocentric standpoint alarmingly mainstream in his proclamations of the rightful dominance of man over nature. But Cushman also sets great store by the other “uses” of nature that Emerson ranks “higher” than “commodity” (the lowest on Emerson's scale of nature's uses), particularly “beauty” and “language,” which come much closer to reinstating respect for nature on something like its own terms. These post- or neo-romantic frames of vision and value, as Cushman rightly notes, have proven importantly influential grounds on which the case for preservation of what's left of the Alaskan wilderness has been argued for more than a century. Westling is clearly--and given her frame of analysis, understandably--unwilling to cut slack for Emerson's old-fashioned rhetoric of natural holism. But her strong defense of the intractable symbiosis of the human and the natural leads her to a post-Darwinian equivalent: a vision of biotic community as a normative value crucial to ecosystemic and ultimately planetary health.
The presence of these countermovements within each paper suggests that whatever the epistemological or empirical truth of the matter, categories like “pastoral” and “primordial nature” are not likely to lose force anytime soon. They are two-edged swords, admittedly subject to abuse, hyperbole, and self-delusion. But if Rachel Carson, for example, had not transfused Silent Spring's scientific arguments against abuse of chemical pesticides with futuristic dystopian narrative and poignant lyrical portrayal of actual devastation of the “natural” world, her book would not have received the swift and ready hearing it did and become the text that contributed more than any other piece of writing in the 1960s to radicalizing the environmental movement.
My own critique of these two papers is accordingly that each might have reflected more explicitly upon the salutary paradox embedded in its main line of analysis. As these papers both in their own ways testify, but do not directly argue, we go too far in a “right” direction if we take the position that the vision (or myth?) of an integral realm of nature should simply be scrapped. It is historically correct that romanticizations of “nature” as a sacred space apart are not eternal verities but modernisms, historically identifiable effects of realization at a certain stage in the processes of urbanization and industrial revolution that “nature,” for all practical purposes, had become a space apart--in the daily lives of an increasing number of human beings. It is true as well that pastoral and wilderness idealizations have also all too often been deployed in the interest of the privileged few to create sanctuaries to marginalize or exclude the unprivileged many. Yet if environmentally concerned citizens simply let go of the dream of preserving unspoiled or, more precisely, relatively unspoiled places, or if we defend that dream simply on such utilitarian grounds as appeal to the potential benefits to human health of yet-unknown species being extinguished every hour, we engage in a kind of unilateral disarmament against resource-extractivist utilitarianism that risks suicide for the environmental movement. The dream, not of a nature unspoiled but of salubrious coexistence between the human and nonhuman in the assurance that it is in human as well as the larger biotic interest to resist anthropocentrism of a narrowly self-interested kind, is sure to maintain a certain evocative power in the public arena regardless of administrative regime changes; and future generations will rightly hold us responsible for abandoning it. The greatest virtue of these two papers, to my mind, is that at heart they seem resolved not so much to scrap it on account of its anachronisms, but to update and retrieve it in a more critically responsible form.
At this point, I may seem to have strayed away from the question of why scholars of environmental law should listen to this (or any other) demonstration of “critical responsibility” by environmental humanists. Of course the same question should be put with equal cogency in reverse: Do environmental humanists really need the resources of environmental legal scholarship in order to do their business? From a purely intra-disciplinary perspective, the answer in both cases is no: each camp has its own precedent models, methods, and protocols. But that is a silly way of viewing things: a formula for myopia, hermeticism, and impotence all around. Besides, my commentary has not really strayed from the question. It points to at least one widely shared aspect of humanistic inquiry from which nonhumanists can profit: its way of living with paradox, in this case a critique of environmental mythography that at the same time maintains and sustains the ongoing cultural power of such.
True, just as no environmental humanist would or should presumably want to spend more than a limited amount of time poring through environmental articles in legal journals, the same holds in reverse. Yet environmental humanists have a number of potentially valuable perspectives to offer legal scholars patient enough to try to separate the originally insightful from the routinistically pedantic. These include sociohistorical accounts of how a given initiative succeeded or failed; ethnographic accounts of how environmental ethics of one sort or another do or do not match particular cultural milieux; work in religions of how humans, under certain conditions of tribal and/or value solidarity, might generate “green” theologies that put environmental interests ahead of human interests; outside-the-box thought experiments by philosophers concerned with such issues as extension of moral consideration and/or rights to nonhumans or future generations; and--within literature studies per se--informed self-consciousness as to the workings of persuasive rhetoric, of metaphor, of imaging, of genre (e.g. narrative, confession)--all of which affect, sometimes profoundly, the actual conduct and success of legal initiatives, if not also the formal structure of law itself.
How do you turn a “swamp” into a “wetland” ?--to name one of the more heartening success stories in the history of late-twentieth century advocacy, albeit now in danger of rollback. Law and conservation biology have been indispensable, but neither could have realized the results that have been achieved without a massive shift in dominant cultural values, such that places formerly thought repellent and unsightly came to seem precious and even beautiful. Visual and literary aesthetics are crucial to this story, though not of course the whole story.
My last answer to the question of why scholars in environmental law need environmental humanists, including literary critics, is not scholarly but pedagogical. In the quarter century that I have taught environmental literature to undergraduates, I have noticed that for the sizeable contingent of my former students who proceed to careers in the environmental field, one of the most attractive options has been the law. This to me has been immensely gratifying. Obviously I cannot claim for most to have been the deciding influence.But it makes me suspect that a goodly number of environmental legal professionals, both outside the academy and within, have been at some point in their lives, and very likely continue to be, reinforced in their attraction to the specialty of environmental law by an ethical and aesthetic zest that can only be called humanistic. If so, I am doubly glad.
