Searching for the Wild: the Changing Post-War Conceptions of Environmentalism and Gender
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SEARCHING FOR THE WILD: THE CHANGING POST-WAR CONCEPTIONS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND GENDER Scott Obernesser A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of The requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2010 Committee: Jolie A. Sheffer, Advisor Lawrence Coates © 2006 Enter your First and Last Name All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Jolie A Sheffer, Advisor Throughout the course of contemporary environmentalism, activists have found voice within practices of civil disobedience. Similarly, movements to reassess traditional constructions of gender have been entrenched in disobedient practices in hopes of upsetting dominant discourse. Through disobedience, distinct ties have been drawn between shifting gender ideologies and treatment of the environment. This work looks to examine two 1990’s manifestations of disobedience in terms of environmentalism and gender: Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild (1996) and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). Through inspection of the text’s two main characters, Chris McCandless and Tyler Durden, we are able to examine links inherent in environmental and gender activism and thereby prompt reassessment of gender and environmental praxis. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER I. American Crisis .............................................................................................. 14 Environment + Disobedience = Crisis ....................................................................... 14 Masculinity + Disobedience = Crisis ......................................................................... 30 CHAPTER II. Masculinity, Gender, and Environment ........................................................ 40 Into The Wild ............................................................................................................ 36 Fight Club…… .......................................................................................................... 47 CHAPTER III. Conclusion ................................................................................................... 69 REFERENCES/WORKS CITED .......................................................................................... 82 1 Introduction Society, you're a crazy breed. I hope you're not lonely, without me. Society, crazy indeed... I hope you're not lonely, without me. -Eddie Vedder, Into The Wild Soundtrack Monkeywrenching, a term coined in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, is the practice of “sabotage in the name of the environment,” also known as ecotage and even ecoterrorism. Civil disobedience has always been controversial, whether the noncompliance is violent or non-violent. The use of civil disobedience by various post- war social activist movements, most significantly the Environmentalist and Feminist movements, constructs links between ecology and gender and growing needs throughout the 20th century to reassess conceptions of environment and gender. Though both the environmental and gender movements have extensive histories, it is clear that both have been entrenched within a history of disobedience. In one of the first issues of the EarthFirst! Journal, Dave Foreman speculated about the use of protest, even violent protest, in environmentalism: “I am entirely pragmatic about violence/non-violence. We should use whichever we feel comfortable with and whichever is most appropriate to a particular situation… There are many paths one can take to defend our Earth Mother” (Foreman 2). EarthFirst! developed in response to stagnation in the environmental movement almost simultaneously alongside civilly disobedient groups working towards gender and sexual equality. Acknowledging disobedience as a part of evolving discourses in environmentalism and gender is an important step in recognizing the inherent connections between environment and gender. 2 A century before EarthFirst!, American conservation was firmly connected to disobedience. Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the most prominent example of the historical bond between American ecology and disobedience, proclaiming both the importance of nature and wilderness to the human spirit, while also claiming the need for that spirit to be autonomous and revolutionary. Other figures such as John Muir stand out as central to conservation and developments in American environmentalism; though Muir’s disobedience was nothing like EarthFirst!’s, he did move against modes of westward expansion that relegated the environment to a position of domination. As modes of environmentalism progressed, so did activist reactions to environmental impact: there are hundreds of men and women who have utilized civil disobedience in hopes of changing environmental discourse, including members of Green Anarchy, Earthfirst!, or the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). As campaigners perceive acts against the environment to have progressively larger impact, reactions against environmental hazards must progress as well. While many contemporary protest groups can be admittedly extreme, they are nonetheless still adhering to a tradition of disobedience. By examining understudied connections between environmentalism, gender, and methods of disobedience, it is clear that wildness entails the liberation of gender and environmental discourses from dominant constructs that limit and restrict historical perceptions. Contemporary conceptions of the wild go beyond mere landscapes. Rather, wildness now evokes images of environmentalism, which are clearly fixed upon nature and conservation, but also connect to masculinity, feminism, and gender. Surrounded by the trappings of post-war America, the wild became particularly important during the 1990’s due to converging ideological crises in gender and environmentalism. It can 3 debated whether aspirations to respond to growing crises arose out of either inauthenticity spurred by mass-consumption in the 1980’s or a climactic realization of humanity’s incredible (and often negative) impact upon the environment, displayed by destructive phenomena such as global warming and climate change. Realistically, the desire to react against contemporary ecological practices became publicly volatile because of both previously noted comprehensions: in response to an ecologically destructive decade (the 1980’s) that reversed trends to limit human impact on nature, many Americans during the 1990’s realized their impact on the environment to be individually much larger and more destructive than they had previously imagined. Further, newly developing gender discourses revealed major problems in perceptions of gender, particularly perceptions of masculinity. Dominant cultural constructions of gender limit gender discourse in much the same way that environmental discourse is limited: relegating certain othered individuals to reside in restricted, defined circumstances creates a set of distinct problems. Throughout this work I consider disobedient environmentalists to be othered because they are largely ignored by dominant culture and searching for voice, just as persons traditionally thought of as othered are searching for voice. Though this term is usually reserved for works using psychoanalytic, feminist, or race theories, I feel the search for voice is applicable to other groups as well, contemporary environmentalism being one of those groups (further, movements in gender, which this work is addressing, regularly use the term as well). While environmentalists may not have an extensive history, they have been limited by culture for most of their active years. As with masculinity, consigning men to fulfill historical visions of masculinity rather than allowing progression and change creates major conflicts with social movements such as 4 feminism and environmentalism. The 1990’s mark a moment when responses to both environmental and gender crises draw deeper connections between both environmentalism and feminism. In April, 1992, Christopher McCandless, a Romantic and idealistic young nature enthusiast, sent a short postcard to Wayne Westerberg, a friend and former employer. The postcard is both a greeting and a declaration, a medium for McCandless to announce his great adventure, a stupid yet courageous attempt to reclaim notions of masculinity while allowing himself to be a part of nature, rather than the oppressor of nature. The last two sentences of this short message are touching and prophetic: “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again, I want you to know you are a great man. I now walk into the wild” (Krakauer 69). By August that same year, McCandless was dead. McCandless marks the growing crises in both conservation and masculinity by showing the link between men and nature. His life argues that a man needs adventure, and that adventure must come in the wild, because it is within the wild that we see clear connections between conceptions of gender and nature. Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild displays the imbalance between social ecological practices and cultural conceptions of gender. For that reason, Into The Wild will be one of my major texts for the entirety of this work. Again, the “wild” McCandless writes of is more than just mountainsides and uninterrupted vistas. Modern conceptions of the wild go beyond mere borders; they evoke visions of modern masculinity, gendered relationships to landscapes, disobedience and revolution, and chaos vs. order, primitivism vs. civilization.