UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Endangered Borders:

Environmental Activism in Three Works of Canadian Creative Non-Fiction

by

Kathryn Willms

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JANUARY, 2008

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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission.

In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these.

While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada ABSTRACT

In this thesis, I examine discourses of activism and environmentalism in three works of

Canadian autobiographical creative non-fiction, Ric Careless's To Save the Wild Earth:

Field Notes from the Environmental Frontline, Alexandra Morton's Listening to Whales:

What the Orcas Have Taught Us, and Sid Marty's Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook. Language and texts play an integral role in determining our relationship with the natural world and each other. Using these texts as guides, I explore the danger of the nature/culture binary and suggest that narrations of the natural environment are inextricably linked to social processes and the exercise of power. I argue that only through a new definition and creation of community can environmental activism avoid perpetuating the very economic, political and cultural discourses that contribute to environmental destruction and truly achieve its goal of "saving the earth."

111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I would like to acknowledge the inspiration, support and patience of my

supervisor, Dr. Pamela Banting. I would like to thank my committee members - Dr.

Tom Wayman and Dr. George Colpitts - for their hard work and spirited engagement with my ideas. I would also like to thank the Department of English at the University of

Calgary for its continuing support. I would like to acknowledge SSHRC for its much-

appreciated assistance. I presented portions of this thesis at various conferences and the

feedback was invaluable to this process. I would like to thank Free Exchange, the

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the Popular Culture

Association/American Culture Association, and the Literary Eclectic for giving me the opportunity to present my research. I would like to thank Kara, Oliver and Charlotte for looking after us so often; your generosity is amazing and so appreciated. I would like to acknowledge the amazing ongoing support and sensitivity of my wonderful family throughout this process. Mom, Dad, Dave, Liz, Mike, Rebecca, and Gabrielle, you are now allowed to ask how it is going.

IV DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this thesis to two of my favourite people:

My brilliant aunt and namesake, Dr. Kathryn Skau (or "AK" if you prefer). I have no words for how much your love and encouragement have meant over the years.

And

Chris Sinclair, the love of my life and the reason this is finished today.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Approval Page ii

Abstract iii

Acknowledgments iv

Dedication v

Table of Contents vi

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE 11

Notes from the Environmental Bottom Line: Valuations of Nature in Ric Careless's To Save the Wild Earth: Field Notes from the

Environmental Frontline

CHAPTER TWO 36

Surface Tensions: An Activist Vision in Alexandra Morton's

Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us

CHAPTER THREE 64

Blowing Down the Fences: Activism in Sid Marty's

Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook

CONCLUSION 94

Works Cited 104

vi 1

Introduction

Each of the environmental texts studied in this thesis - Ric Careless's To Save the

Wild Earth: Field Notes From the Environmental Frontline, Alexandra Morton's

Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us and Sid Marty's Leaning on the

Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook-is, in part, an activist manifesto. As such, the elusive and eliding term "activism" is of critical importance to this thesis. The word activism has too often gone unquestioned and undefined in the environmental movement.

Within the movement's larger narratives, belief systems and communities, its meaning is continually constructed and legitimized by the context in which it is employed. At present, environmentalism is often viewed as a discourse that exists in opposition to the dominant locations of power in Western society, particularly in opposition to the excesses of capitalist and consumerist culture. In this construction, environmentalism is narrated as a marginalized discourse, which must, in the face of powerful opponents, focus on protecting its political victories rather than theorizing or questioning its underlying ideologies (an admittedly unappealing process given the eagerness of its opponents to exploit any self-consciousness or perceived weakness). As environmental discourse enters mainstream consciousness, it can no longer (if it ever could) be defined as a marginalized discourse.

The legitimization and popularity of the movement both confirms the successes of some of environmentalism's discourses and ideologies and demands a serious self- critique in order to keep environmentalism healthy and relevant within rapidly changing political and environmental climates. In his essay "American Literary Environmentalism as Domestic Orientalism," David Mazel argues that environmentalism is "not solely a 2 resistance to power but also an exercise of it" (143). Environmental writers and critics who still wish to prevent serious critical engagement with their underlying assumptions and ideologies increasingly attempt to cut off such inquires with hyperbolic claims of imminent environmental catastrophe. While the possibility of such a catastrophe surely exists, Glen A. Love in 'Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism" demonstrates the dangers of this strategy in his analysis of Leo Marx's engagement with

American nature writing: "unfortunately, he continues to underestimate its significance, seeing it only as another in a set of competing political ideologies. Marx does not consider whether the very real loomings of ecological catastrophe preclude pastoral's classification as just another value system" (234). Love refuses to engage with the obviously political nature of environmental writing and invokes the threat of catastrophe in an attempt to stifle criticism that might challenge his and other's ethical stances. In

Love's configuration, other value systems are less significant than environmentalism.

Not only does this ignore the fact that millions of people around the world are more immediately threatened through systems of racism and colonialism (and it is these systems that are creating environmental destruction in many poor countries through oil and gas exploration and development, genetic engineering of crops, and out-sourced manufacturing), it falsely insinuates that nature writing and environmentalism are involved in moral issues, rather than political ones. I agree with Mazel that the job of the ecocritic should be to ask questions of the environmental and ecocritical movements, questions that speak to their "deeper politics": "What has counted as the environment, and what may count? Who marks off the conceptual boundaries, and under whose authority,

1 See Garret Keizer's distinction between "moral" and "political" issues on page 97. 3 and for what reasons? Have those boundaries and that authority been contested, and if so, by whom? With what success, by virtue of what strategies of resistance?" (143).

Because environmentalism acts on behalf of a natural world with no (human) voice or neutral translator to evaluate or challenge the work of its human interlocutors, the movement itself must constantly survey the ideology in which it is lodged (in a productive way, unlike the survey that might be conducted by its detractors) and conduct a close examination of its terms and the actions it supports. Edward Abbey's seductively simple assertion that "We need no more words on the matter. What we need now are heroes. And heroines. About a million of them. One brave deed is worth a thousand books" (152) is a strong rhetorical statement, tapping into grandiose Western notions of bravery and heroism, but it is also naive and misguided. Traditionally, the hero is a character of tragedy, a man who performs great deeds in the face of adversity, "the triumphant image of what man can be" (Meeker 157). However, Joseph W. Meeker argues in "The Comic Mode" that "prerequisite to tragedy is the belief that the universe cares about the lives of human beings.... Corollary to this is the assumption that man is essentially superior to animal, vegetable, and mineral nature and is destined to exercise mastery over all natural processes, including his own body" (167). Abbey accesses this tradition - more egocentric than eco-centric - to recruit environmental agitators and activists. This is a perfect example of the way that discourse and activism are interlocked in negotiations of power and the creation of meaning. Through his discourse, Abbey limits his definition of who performs - or what constitutes - "heroic" action, and grants nature little autonomy, sanctioning the actions of human "heroes" to speak for nature and act in its best interests. By erecting the false binary of text and action, Abbey does not 4 acknowledge that an interrogation of the way meaning is constructed in environmental discourse is vital to its success (although his employment of text to deliver this message suggests some consciousness of the role discourse plays in creating action). A just activism cannot occur, even with the best of intentions, if it - accidentally or self­ consciously - perpetuates the economic, political and cultural discourses that contribute to environmental destruction.

Ric Careless, Alexandra Morton and Sid Marty are involved in markedly different activist projects. Careless locates his activism in his work as an independent environmental activist and as a government official dedicated to preserving large tracts of

British Columbia as park land. Alexandra Morton's activism is focused on disseminating information related to the destruction of whale habitats off the coast of Vancouver Island.

She has also challenged the environmentally destructive practice of fish farming, encouraging stricter regulations and safer operations. Sid Marty continues to be involved in various conservation groups and initiatives including the Canadian Parks and

Wilderness Society (a branch of the Sierra Club); his book Men for the Mountains was cited by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society as one of the fifty books most influential in Canadian conservation. Each text charts the author's personal history, the roots of their environmental philosophies, their accomplishments (and failures) as activists, and their interpretation of their work in relation to their communities, the environmental movement, and Western capitalist society. These issues are particularly relevant given the burgeoning popular interest in environmental thought in North

America today. The average North American is now aware of some global problems

(climate change and the diminished habitats of many animal species) which demand 5

coherent strategies for effective political action. Not surprisingly, given the rich history of activism these authors share, their texts all reflect a cognizance that activism is, in part,

about creating meaning and value in your own life as well as in your environment. There

are any number of texts employing countless environmental ideologies and representations of activism that might have been included in this thesis. Careless, Morton

and Marty, however, are particularly useful here because each articulates a distinct model

of environmental activism. The tension between their radically different philosophies

and the similarity of their ultimate goals resonates in the environmental movement as a

whole. In this thesis, I will demonstrate that narrations of the natural environment are

inextricably linked to social processes, the exercise of power and the performance of

cultural identity.

The link between the ways that different cultures and nations narrate nature and the differing manners in which they interact with it has been well-documented by the

ecocritical movement which has taken as its mandate the study of the intersections of

literature and the environment. Drawing from science, philosophy, religion and history,

ecocriticism has interrogated the ways metaphors, binaries and ideologies construct our views of nature and have contributed to environmental destruction. Metaphors, binaries

and ideologies create patterns of thought that sanction a systematic way of relating to the

environment, and it is only through a shift in this communal mindset that long-lasting and

effective change can occur. In The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature

Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Lawrence Buell famously asserts that

"Although the creative and critical arts may seem remote from the arenas of scientific investigation and public policy, clearly they are exercising, however unconsciously, an 6 influence upon the emerging culture of environmental concern" (3). In Conserving

Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement, Daniel

Philippon documents the vital role nature writers have played throughout American history in creating and organizing such well-known environmental groups as the Sierra

Club, the Wilderness Society and Earth First! The ecocritical movement illuminated the constructed nature of the term "nature" itself. In American Literary Environmentalism,

David Mazel articulates the idea that "the environment is itself a. myth, a 'grand fable,' a complex fiction, a widely shared, occasionally contested, and literally ubiquitous narrative" and "a discursive construction, something whose 'reality' derives from the ways we write, speak, and think about it" (xii).

At the same time, a number of ecocritics have (ironically) expressed some trepidation about the importance of texts and have failed to recognize their central role in determining how we see the world. Because the ecocritical movement was created to address a lack of engagement with nature and landscape in dominant modes of thought, many proponents are understandably wary of taking the focus off the natural world. The belief that there is something inherently valuable about the natural world often lingers at the heart of this anxiety, and the desire to differentiate between "text" and "world" betrays a reluctance to let go of the over-utilized binary between nature and culture. The emphasis in this thesis on the construction and representation of "nature" should not, however, be seen as a denial of the existence of the literal natural world which is undergoing a series of changes due to human actions. A just and successful activism demands a passionate theorizing of the textual world we inhabit and a closer look at the 7 production of environmental works and their interaction with the natural world. The popular distinction between theory and practice is yet another false binary.

Further to Buell's model of affecting the cultural "unconscious" by disseminating

knowledge in the public, political realm, environmental texts must make essential

contributions to the creation of a just activism that works to challenge the often harmful

activities practiced and perpetuated by dominant corporatist ideologies. In Solving

History, Raymond Rogers argues that: "To focus on issues such as the social

constructions of nature or biocentric conceptions of human identity without recognizing

that these areas of study are connected to, and indeed, created by relations in capitalism is

to deflect analysis away from the deep historicity of environmental problems and to valorize categories which are part of the problem" (4). An awareness of the manner in

which environmental activism is situated in and affected by the dominant structures of power is an essential first step in a process that, if taken seriously, will serve to increase

the long-term efficacy of activism under any large-scale economic model.

Autobiographical creative non-fiction is a genre that allows these writers to represent

their personal histories while simultaneously crafting a literary work that is self-

conscious of writerly concerns like authority, voice and metaphor to effectively present a personal environmental philosophy. In this manner they interrogate their activism as well

as the genre out of which they are writing.

In To Save the Wild Earth, Ric Careless describes nine environmental campaigns

that he organized in British Columbia. These include the Nitinat Triangle and Schoen

Valley of Vancouver Island, the Purcell mountains and Middle White Valley of the

Rockies, and, most famously, the Tatshenshini river that runs through Alaska, the Yukon 8

and northern British Columbia. Each chapter recalls a visit to the endangered wilderness

area, a description of his activist approach to its preservation as a park, and a report on the outcome of his campaign. To achieve his activist goals, he negotiates with the

government and natural resource companies of British Columbia, devising new methods

for multi-agency collaboration and control of conservation areas. Careless employs two

sets of discourses that complement and justify each other throughout To Save the Wild

Earth. His romanticized, religious descriptions of wilderness which provide the impetus

and reward for his activism are set against the pragmatic, political discourse of resource

conservation which allows him to accomplish his goals. Echoing the spatial representations of the parks he helped to name, define and preserve as an activist, the virtual borders in his written work - the atomized nature and formulaic format of each

chapter - reinforce his activist methodology that adopts a strong, singular focus to protect natural spaces from being irretrievably destroyed.

In Listening to Whales, Alexandra Morton describes how a life-long fascination with science led her to study marine biology - and in particular, the language of whales - in the waters off Vancouver Island. While she includes details of her childhood, her

experiences at Marineland in California, and the period she spent studying with John C.

Lilly, the famous and controversial dolphin researcher, Listening To Whales focuses on the twenty-five years she has spent in British Columbia studying orca echolocation. She

chronicles the personal triumphs and tragedies of a life devoted to the study and protection of orca whales. Her personal experiences, combined with her scientific

observations of a degraded aquatic ecosystem, push her from science into activist work.

Her activist message focuses on empathy, an interspecies female community and the 9 mother-child bond as she attempts to create an ethical activism that will help to define a new relationship with whales and the natural world. Near the end of her text, she moves her focus from her personal narrative to reach out to other people who share her ideological opposition to fish farms and the environmental pollution caused by natural resource industries. The descriptions of her life and the format of her text begin to mirror descriptions of ecosystems, where diverse ideas, lives and species co-exist, and where productive connections create a more hopeful future for all its members.

In his work of creative non-fiction, Leaning on the Wind, Sid Marty's aesthetic universe is built upon an ethic of inclusivity. He employs a multitude of stories and voices and imposes minimal constrictions on form or content as he shapes his representations of the natural world. The construction of text mirrors his inclusive philosophy as he recounts and preserves a plethora of personal and historical narratives.

In this way, he self-consciously connects the preservation of land with the preservation of the narratives that create a sense of community that imbues the land with value. Near the beginning of his text, Marty launches into an almost straightforward history of the local

Blackfoot tribes and their early interactions with the white (Canadian and American) settlers. The invocation of traditional history is both enriched and challenged by his inclusion of personalized literary flourishes: "take a look at our great Canadian myth in the rosy light cascading westward on to Massacre Butte" (47). Leaning on the Wind goes on to include drastically different narratives of his own family history augmented with passionate descriptions of the local geography. Accounts of Marty's personal experiences as a warden patrolling the national parks in Banff, Yoho and Jasper are followed by ruminations on the role of the clown at bullfights and forays into the society of cowboy 10 poets. Marty's use of autobiography allows him to explore some of the more contentious, problematic considerations and consequences of the environmental crisis with humour,

sensitivity and compassion. By engaging critically with the role of writing in Western

capitalist society and in environmentalist discourse, he explores its limitations while proving the importance of its role in questioning and changing the way we think and the way we act towards nature.

All three texts perform and perpetuate the political and activist vision of the

author; however, each of these visions pertains to more than just the immediate

environmental crisis and the potential solutions they propose. These texts are about

constructing meaning and deciding how best to live in the world - considerations that are

always ostensibly about the creation and definition of community, not the heroic actions

of the atomized individual. Some of the activist visions in these texts are more successful than others at developing an effective strategy that might make us more responsible for not only the earth and the animals, but each other. In Voices in the Wilderness: American

Nature Writing and Environmental Politics, Daniel Payne argues that environmental texts need to "effectively combine esthetic, ecological, economic, and ethical rationales into a persuasive polemic for political change" (2). This thesis adopts this ideal and explores the intricacies and difficulties that these three writers face in their intersections with it by

examining the limits and potentials of their environmental discourses and visions of

community. 11

Chapter One:

Notes from the Environmental Bottom Line: Valuations of Nature in Ric Careless's

To Save the Wild Earth: Field Notes from the Environmental Frontline

For over twenty-five years, Ric Careless has campaigned to preserve wilderness threatened by destructive logging and mining projects through the creation of a system of national and provincial parks. His campaigns have helped to preserve five and a half million acres of British Columbia parkland, and he is recognized throughout the United

States and Canada as an important environmentalist. To Save the Wild Earth: Field

Notes from the Environmental Frontline is his account of nine of the environmental campaigns he led over the course of his career. Careless's successful activist career is built on a personal environmental philosophy which is constructed around an almost religious belief in the value of wilderness. This unparalleled activist record demands a serious interrogation of his methodologies and activist strategy. Careless deploys two dominant discourses in To Save the Wild Earth to make his case for wilderness conservation: one describes the aesthetic and moral nature of wilderness and the other centers on the pragmatic methodologies of the business world. This chapter will trace the functions of each of these discourses separately and then examine how they interact to form Careless's activist philosophy.

The designation of certain lands as national parks has been an important part of the environmental movement since its conception. Parks are one way to protect large tracts of land from industrial development. Often the only sites left where endangered species can be found, they act as safety nets for biodiversity. More significantly, perhaps, 12 they excite the imagination of an increasingly urbanized North American population as they represent an opportunity to experience and develop a certain privileged relationship with the natural world. In North America, parks have played a significant role in the

creation of national identity. Roderick Nash argues that wilderness is "an essential part of the American identity" (727), figuring "prominently in the national ego" (728), and thus America was the first country to institute the widespread creation of large-scale wilderness parks. Careless augments these arguments with the claim that the wilderness of national parks is a source of personal spirituality and redemption, a belief that, in

concert with the obvious ecological and cultural benefits, makes the creation of parks his most important activist goal.

In To Save the Wild Earth, Careless articulates what he sees as the environmental movement's fundamental task: the creation of value in the public perception of nature.

He situates himself, metaphorically and discursively, as the prophet figure who translates these values for others to inspire them to change the way they relate to nature. He employs a combination of established metaphors related to the natural world with the authority of the dominant religious, economic, nationalist, and historical systems of North

America to legitimize his value system. Working within the Western patriarchal, capitalist system, he establishes a compelling voice for the environment and creates a highly successful form of activism. Despite his obvious successes, his stance raises some serious questions about activist ideology and methodology. The singularity of his environmental solution (the creation of park land), which relies on established metaphors of wilderness, and his "pragmatic" approach to preservation all work to reinforce the power dynamics that have created the environmental destruction he seeks to remedy 13 through the preservation of wild spaces. While Careless argues that, at this point of crisis, preserving land should take precedence over ideological discussions or an overhaul of defective economic and political systems, the methodologies he employs to instill the value of nature in people's minds and advocate for the creation of parks demonstrate the impossibility of separating action from ideology or discourse.

To Save the Wild Earth is a compelling addition to the tradition of environmental literature that has long focused on discourses related to "value" and the search for language that might alter (and add value to) the public perception of the environment. In

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson mounted a successful activist campaign to ban DDT by marrying extensive scientific evidence with a compelling futuristic narrative. In his famous treatise The Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold asserts that environmental destruction is a direct result of the way we treat land as a commodity and separate ourselves from its natural communities and processes. He proposes that a change in the way we assess value is necessary to heal our relationship with the Earth:

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love,

respect and admiration for the land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of

course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in

the philosophical sense so that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the

integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends

otherwise. (261)

Linking the use of a particular value system with an ethical and moral stance, Leopold touches upon one of the central debates within contemporary environmental philosophy: whether the value system responsible for environmental degradation can be used to 14 remedy it or whether a new value system must be implemented to change the way society views the environment. Subsequent debates expand on Leopold's work to question whether environmental conservation is best served by eschewing a single value system for a proliferation and mingling of heterogeneous value systems and discourses. Alasdair

Maclntyre argues that Western society fails to resolve environmental problems because of the quantity and diversity of agendas, values, motives, and epistemologies which prevent environmental groups from being able to communicate effectively with each other and potential supporters (qtd. in Killingsworth 4). In Reading Under the Sign of

Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, John Tallmadge counters that environmentalism must escape the limitations of a single, intractable moral stance and instead acknowledge that "our places as individuals in related communities, families, or other kinship systems are never simple, straightforward assignments" (258). Eeva K. Berglund takes

Tallmadge's argument one step further, suggesting that environmentalism not only has a responsibility to include all discursive groups but it must situate its movement within the context of other political and social struggles: "Environmental activism that discredits other political issues as secondary is indeed a kind of environmental fundamentalism"

(16). David Harvey sums up the problem in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of

Difference: "Heterogeneity embraces difference and allows for a wide swath of important and politically viable languages to articulate ecological values (scientific, poetic, mythic, moral and ethical, economistic and instrumental, emotive and affective) but it curtails any of these languages' ability to carry political weight" (172). The success of Careless's discourse is partially due to its singular focus but this same focus compromises the ethical and revolutionary power of his activism. 15

In his introduction entitled "Birthright: An Introduction to Wilderness," Careless

establishes his activist voice with an aesthetic definition of wilderness:

Wilderness. It is a place, a tradition, a remembering, and a future. It is an ancient

forest homeland, a living refuge for wildlife, a sanctuary for endangered species

and biodiversity. Wilderness is the very archive of life. The essence of purity, it

serves as a guarantor of fresh water, clean air, and health. Vast and free, the

wilderness provides a wild place to play, a space for solitude. It offers a chance

for renewal in Nature, reconnection with the land, reunion with the spirit.

Most important, wilderness is for wilderness's sake. Precious beyond measure,

finite, rare, and disappearing too fast, it is all that is left in our world that is

unmarcaged. It is where the soul of the planet resides. (1)

It is immediately apparent that Careless's concept of wilderness is heavily imbued with religious (as well as nationalist) metaphors. He highlights wilderness as a source of positive experiences and spiritual truths ("it serves," "it provides," "it offers"), and he

employs multiple metaphors to connect it with Christian discourse ("purity," "spirit,"

"soul," etc.). The incantatory effect of these repetitions suggest the rhythms of a prayer.

The repetition in "renewal," "reconnection" and "reunion" emphasizes the sense of loss that results from our disconnection from the natural world, and it recalls the Christian

conception of the fall from the Garden of Eden and the coming of a Day of Judgment.

Careless uses Christian language and iconography to conflate wilderness and God. He refers to wilderness as "the Garden of Eden" (234), "a modern-day ark" (114) and "a living church of antiquity" (26), and he capitalizes the word "Nature" to signify its

sacredness. Like a deity, Careless's "wilderness" imparts important lessons, inspiration 16 and wisdom. Nature gives "love" to humanity (7), and it is "the path we will follow to rediscover the Garden of Eden" (234). In this activist's conception, wilderness is a source of religious values and environmentalism becomes a spiritual quest.

Thomas R. Dunlop in Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest cites a long and intimate relationship between conceptions of wilderness and religion in

America. He identifies the impetus for the creation of American national parks as an understanding of wilderness as a sacred site that reveals spiritual truths, as well as "a nostalgia for the pioneers and their virtues that accompanied the rise of industrial, urban

America" (70). William Cronon famously problematized this worship of the purity of wilderness in his essay "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong

Nature" by arguing that wilderness is a construction of civilization (69) and that the idealization of wilderness may "teach us to be dismissive and even contemptuous of [...] humble places and experiences. Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others" (79). He argues for a closer engagement with the natural spaces that constitute home and the everyday. Cronon has been subsequently challenged by such renowned environmental critics as Gary Snyder,

Samuel P. Hays, Dave Foreman, and Don Waller for the personal nature of his critique and, they argue, his misunderstanding of science, politics and the conservation movement

(Dunlop 87-89). This debate over the definition and value of wilderness demonstrates the power of this metaphor of nature in North American society.

Although wilderness has autonomy in Careless's vision, acting as the source of all power and knowledge, it requires a prophet figure to represent it and interpret its messages for society. Like Moses summiting Mount Sinai to receive the Ten 17

Commandments, Careless makes ritual treks to the peaks of the wilderness he seeks to save and descends with the knowledge needed to carry out the appropriate environmental campaign. In fact, each chapter begins with Careless hiking in the wilderness and communing with the natural world. It is only after he has seen the wilderness that he can value it and commit to its preservation. Once he has received this visual message and spiritual motivation, Careless returns to civilization to initiate and organize a political campaign that often requires extensive boardroom meetings, months in the library or the office, and days traveling in the car drumming up community support. When he completes a campaign, Careless ritualistically returns to the wilderness, humbled by its immense presence, to receive its blessings. He attempts to legitimize his right to speak on nature's behalf with this ritualistic movement between wilderness and civilization.

The natural habitats that Careless describes as wilderness share a set of aesthetic attributes that strengthen his argument for their preservation. These wilderness landscapes are home to grand vistas, mountain ranges, large mammals, and crystal clear rivers. In his representations, there is no mention of dirt (not even soil), adverse weather or insects. Careless's characterization of nature attaches its value to an aesthetic that privileges remote, mostly inaccessible landscapes. His descriptions are written like postcards of Canadian national parks. For example, he describes his fly-over of the

Schoen Valley in idealized terms: "We crossed a long, deep lake edged by fir trees. An untouched beach defined the far end, while above the grand, snow-crested peak of Mount

Schoen looked on.... Below, a chain of golden meadows came into view. A small stream wandered through them and into Nisnac Lake, a shimmering jewel" (37).

Careless emphasizes the "drama" (37) of this landscape, comparing it to the neighbouring 18

Tsitika Valley which he sees as far less spectacular. Tsitika Valley generates no extensive aesthetic description. Instead, he emphasizes the old growth forests and the estuary of the Tsitika Valley which he understands as instrumentally important to the ecosystem in the area, in particular as drainage for the Schoen Valley. Interestingly, he leaves little doubt that he finds the Schoen Valley - aesthetically, a "glimmering jewel" - the more valuable "wilderness" and it is the area for which he most strenuously campaigns. At the end of the campaign, the Tsitika Valley - more important ecologically but less beautiful - is not fully preserved. For Careless, land must be beautiful and depopulated to incite a religious pledge to save wilderness. The religious aspects of this belief system are symbolized in the concluding scene of the chapter when he swims naked in the "fresh rainforest water" (45) of the fully-protected Schoen Valley. His wilderness baptism takes place in the beautiful and inspirational valley, not in the land which acts as a drainage basin, produces soil or houses important bacteria.

Alison Byerly in "The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the

National Park System" speaks of the power (and explores the dangers) of this aesthetic creation of value. Although she criticizes the way it appeals to the mythology of wilderness rather than the natural processes the environment undergoes, she recognizes its extensive use by nearly all environmental activist groups. She explains the durability of the aesthetic valuing of nature:

The idea of wilderness refers to the absence of humanity, yet 'wilderness' has no

meaning outside the context of the civilization that defines it. This paradox

requires that we experience the wilderness without changing its status as 19

wilderness. This can only be done by constructing an aesthetic image of the

wilderness that allows us to avoid confronting its reality. (54)

For Careless, the aesthetic representation of wilderness leads him to idealize "natural" spaces as pure, pristine and untouched. The fact that this kind of aesthetic value often corresponds with portions of land that are not particularly resource-rich helps to explain the high success rates of his environmental campaigns. One of the strategies he employs to encourage preservation by the government and big business is to demonstrate to industry officials how little in the way of profit and resources they are giving up through preservation. Each of the landscapes that he seeks to preserve consists of the same features: snowcapped mountains, crystal lakes and grizzly bears. These high alpine, largely barren landscapes are excellent for mountain climbers but less vital for ecosystem health. By encouraging resource companies to do research in the areas he is trying to preserve and then to mark out on maps the extent of their interests, he argues most conflicts between different industries and wilderness activists can be resolved. Resource companies are more interested in preserving power (through control over large tracts of land) than in the limited resources available in these landscapes, as Careless observes:

"territory is power in bureaucracy" (138). This allows him to successfully introduce a new style of wilderness management in British Columbia. His creation of the IMU

(integrated management unit) land-use status places a cooperative of resource agencies

(Parks, Mining, Forests) in charge of preserving and managing wilderness areas. This allows the resource industries to retain some level of control over these areas and encourages them to police each other's activities. 20

In the chapter "Babine River: The Economics of Preservation," Careless refigures the value of wilderness to convince the logging industry to cease destructive practices in the area: "In effect, we would determine the dollar-and-employment values of leaving the corridor's forests intact.... We felt sure the preservation values would prove so great and convincing that they would make our case in a manner than no forester, bridge engineer, bureaucrat, or politician could deny" (160). Indeed, this campaign moves quickly towards resolution as the government is more comfortable being approached "from a commercial, rather than conservation, standpoint" (162). As a prime fishing location, the Babine River's conservation project was an easy sell to both the government and the logging industry. Because the Babine River has another direct economic use and the potential to produce profit, Careless is able to convince government and industry operatives that it has value. Admitting that "certainly numbers made quite a difference" (162), Careless's arguments for the preservation of the river are not informed by his underlying belief in "wilderness for wilderness's sake," but are instead rooted in alternative business strategies that refigure the river's instrumental value.

In Careless' view, the most effective and efficient way to preserve natural spaces is to lobby government officials and negotiate with the resource industries to reach an agreement that results in the greatest preservation of natural space in the shortest amount of time: "If things go well, more can be achieved in a few key minutes face-to-face with the person who will make the actual decision than months, even years, of protesting or media coverage can accomplish" (20). This philosophy makes it vital that the person lobbying can communicate effectively with people in power: "It isn't just knowing what you need to say, but how to get your message heard and accepted and your agenda acted 21 upon" (21). To be successful at preserving wilderness within this system, he must represent nature in a way that it has value to the people who have the economic and political power to conserve it. He expounds upon this system during his campaign to preserve the mountainous terrain of the Purcell Wilderness: "So it was clear to me that if

Art's wish for a Purcell park was to happen, a select group of senior bureaucrats and key

Cabinet ministers living 550 miles away in Victoria would have to be sold on the concept" (57). Ironically, it is not Art Twomey who is able to speak on behalf of the wilderness in which he lives. Careless must advocate on behalf of this landscape to a room full of elites 550 miles away.

Careless acknowledges that his campaigns did not always include grassroots activism or democratic support:

Each wilderness campaign is different. For some areas, like Nitinat or Clayoquot,

high-profile "flagship" campaigning based on extensive public support is the best

means to achieve success. For less-contentious or less-known areas like the

Schoen Valley, "finesse" campaigning focused on convincing key politicians is

the best way to go ... To win wilderness requires a winning strategy. (85)

Careless is untroubled that he conducts some of his campaigns outside the public arena, facing off against powerful people (Careless refers only to men in his descriptions) in the boardroom, government office and press conference. He defends his participation in this undemocratic, elitist backroom politicking with the claim that, because his activism is motivated directly by the wilderness itself, his actions are beyond reproach. Free to adopt the language of his political and ideological opponents to realize his environmental goals, he uses business speak to convert wilderness into "wilderness values" (41) and describes 22 each campaign in terms of achieving goals, peaking intensity and victory (25). While he uses metaphors of war, rape and pillage to condemn the activities of the natural resource industry, he photographs the wilderness with the intent of making it a more consumable fetishized spatial commodity. Using economics to validate conservation works best for the sort of nature that already has value in capitalist society: big, beautiful wilderness with remote fishing lodges and tourist possibilities. Careless effectively utilizes this discourse and his access to the government and representatives of big business to preserve these sorts of wilderness areas. In doing so, he does not acknowledge his use of the consumerist, capitalist ideologies that have so destructively and narrowly defined what is valuable.

Careless establishes this ethical basis for his activist methodology with an all-or- nothing binary: "There is a priceless virginal quality to wilderness: either it remains intact or it is irreversibly lost. There can be no in between. Defile it with roads, cut down trees and, regardless of the logging technology used, the wilderness vanishes" (61). This rigid binary employs the age-old link between the female body and endangered landscapes to support the idea that any means are justified in the effort to preserve the virginity of wilderness. Careless's activist priorities are not, however, so rigidly defined. The original all-or-nothing binary allows him to defend an activism that works within the existing structures of power and, as such, is beset by questionable deals and compromises. He does not attempt to overthrow the destructive systems that have led to this environmental degradation - a process he believes would take a long time to produce the necessary results and therefore would prove devastating to the Earth and environmentalism's success: 23

... humanity has come to live in an age when economics has supplanted religion

... Therefore, if it is necessary in these fear-ridden, debt-laden, nature-bashing

last days of the second millennium for conservationists to speak in the tongues of

economics, then so be it. To live by the rules of our present reality we must use

the fiscal tools appropriate to save the essential for eternity. So, even if dollars

are but a poor substitute, a fool's creation for Creation itself, still we, too, must

use them in our measuring. (163)

Situating himself in the "last days of the second millennium" - a phrase imbued with apocalyptic undertones - Careless juxtaposes the ephemerality and insignificance of "our present reality" with the importance of preserving "the essential for eternity" to emphasize the high stakes of his cause. He agrees to use the discourses of international capital that have been so damaging to the environment in a desperate bid to save it.

Careless vilifies economic valuations but suggests that, since they are ubiquitous, activists should employ them as a useful tool. While there may be a resistant quality to this argument, it ultimately serves to reinforce the multivalent power of capital and fails to challenge its prominence in our value system.

Although Careless acknowledges the role economic valuations and political machinations play in his activist successes, he tries to diminish their importance by giving wilderness credit for its own preservation. This rhetorical practice is evident in the two "conversion narratives" in To Save the Wild Earth, the "Height of the Rockies" and the "Chilcotin Mountains" campaigns. In these narratives, he describes how the natural resource and government representatives come to appreciate, and even adopt, his religious valuation of nature, converted, he claims, by the natural world itself. The 24

"Height of the Rockies" chapter provides a useful model. Careless connects this landscape with his spiritual conception of nature: "the power of that place changed me...

Because there in that Rocky Mountain cathedral I touched the Tao of the wild" (129).

After days of heated debate about the borders of the newly designated conservation area between the Forest Service and local environmentalists, District Forester John Little stands up and gives a speech "about sitting under old-growth trees and watching the stars, how the sense of living in Nature was essential to being a Canadian" (140). In Careless's telling, the change in language leads to the conversion of everyone in the room: "And then a most amazing thing happened. As John Little spoke, a peacefulness permeated the room, and with it, this group of longtime adversaries - the logging executives, the enviros, and the bureaucrats - were transformed. They changed right before my eyes and became ... people" (141). Careless attributes this conversion moment (not just a conversion of mindset, but of values) to natural forces: "For what had started as a power negotiation over wilderness had, in the end, been influenced by the Power of wilderness itself (147). This movement from economic value to natural value suggests that the environmental side won this debate, even though this is one of the few examples in the text where Careless's team clearly had to compromise significantly to reach an agreement. He suggests that a portion of the landscape itself endorsed his compromise:

"As ideas were traded around the table, I mused at how this could ever be accomplished.

And then a voice drifted into my mind. It whispered, 'The Middle White Valley is old enough to take care of itself" (141). Here, in the middle of the boardroom, "Nature" speaks directly to the "prophet" (Careless), ostensibly offering a piece of land "old enough to take care of itself' for sacrifice. Identifying the speaker as "the land itself 25 allows Careless to avoid admitting to his part in sacrificing the Middle White Valley

(147). This rhetorical move, like the conversion narrative, again suggests that "Nature" supports his work and quite literally intervenes to aid it. He credits nature - "the Power of wilderness itself — with uniting this diverse group when, in fact, these men are brought together by John Little's appeal to their shared privilege and their extensive experiences in national parks.

The whispered voice of the wilderness allows Careless to avoid the arduous task of consistently questioning his ideological positions and the influence they have on his activism. As Kevin Deluca points out in his article "Trains in the Wilderness: The

Corporate Roots of Environmentalism": "the sublime feeling produced by wilderness is not an innate, universal feeling but a culturally conditioned response" (7). In fact, the idea of wilderness "is indigenous to a particular cultural formation (white, upper-class, and urban)" (8). DeLuca argues that the idea of pristine wilderness hinders the environmentalist cause by preventing environmentalists from "forming coalitions with civil rights groups and unions to effectively challenge industrial practices that degrade the earth" (8). It does not, however, prevent Careless from forming coalitions with elite political and economic power brokers as his description of his time as a bureaucrat illustrates:

It was an apprenticeship into the dynamics of power that gave me contacts I

would utilize over the next two decades. Looking back on the experience, I have

come to believe that if more environmentalists had the chance to spend a couple

of years at the upper levels of government, the success rate of their subsequent

campaigning would increase dramatically. (60) It is difficult not to question whether, if environmentalists were allowed into the upper levels of government, the necessity for subsequent campaigning might not be significantly diminished. It is equally hard to accept Careless's position that there are some mysterious motivations for the machinations of these elites that are impossible to understand from the outside. It is striking that he refuses to question the implications of the "success" of his campaigns. Careless gains access to a world of corporate and governmental cronyism where only a privileged few are allowed into its upper levels to effect change. His worship of supposedly "sublime" spaces that are visually stunning, remote and accessed by very few people seems commensurate with his respect for the elite.

One of Careless's central slogans "Wilderness for wilderness's sake" is a declaration of intrinsic value that suggests that the very definition of wilderness accounts for our responsibility to intervene on its behalf. As David Harvey notes, the attempt to assign intrinsic value to nature contains a number of dangerous assumptions: "no matter how ruthless, pristine, and rigorously 'objective' our method of enquiry may be, the framework of interpretation is given in the metaphor rather than in the evidence" (Harvey

163). To describe values as necessarily inherent and natural in nature, one must always rely on an anthropocentric view and assume a neutral speaker/mediator. This annuls the intrinsic nature of these values and forces the speaker to defend the basis of the "truths" he or she puts forth. Harvey suggests that the only way we can access intrinsic or non- instrumental values is through "intuition, mysticism, contemplation, religious revelation, metaphysics, and personal introspection" (158), epistemologies that are based largely on subjective experience. Furthermore, the description of certain values and metaphors as "natural" allows for the possible application of other less-desirable totalizing metaphors.

While civilization only recognizes instrumental value, Careless's unmanaged wilderness embodies privileged intrinsic values like freedom, autonomy, independence, and democracy. Ironically, in the course of environmental campaigns, Careless undermines these sacred tenets of wilderness in his attempts to save it.

The chapter titled "Birthright: An Introduction to Wilderness" includes Careless's first encounter with wilderness in Ontario's Algonquin Park. It reveals how deeply

Canadian nationalistic discourses are embedded in his discourse of the intrinsic value of nature:

Paddle dipping into clear water, loons calling plaintively, wind riffling the waves

along, I reconnected with my national heritage: "O Canada, my home and native

land." As the coureurs de bois of the fur trade had journeyed these waters 200

years prior, as Native peoples had known this place down through the ages, as the

land had ever endured wondrously wild, now I, too, was here. For the first time I

sensed the eternal, the infinite, the spirit of the original Earth. (3)

Incorporating Canadian emblems and anthems, Careless connects Canadian national heritage with a universal "natural" heritage. He suggests that the natural world, "the original Earth," gives strength and power to the national identity of Canada. He places himself in a history of fur traders and native peoples, accessing a mythology created by

European colonizers that suggests the land was "pure" and "wild" before the creation of

Canada. He naturalizes and depoliticizes his position by linking his activities with the historical fur traders and native peoples. This link between Canadian national identity and "the original Earth" undermines his attempt to deny that his conception of wilderness 28 exists in a narrowly defined political, colonial context. His definition of wilderness is as much an invention of colonial discourse and political elites as a reflection of animals and landscape.

To Save the Wild Earth reinforces these colonial implications with its use of the motif of frontier. Although Careless recognizes that the frontier mentality can be blamed for "the belief that the land was superabundant and limitless" (59), he endorses this spatial metaphor throughout the text, claiming that certain land must be saved or "there would be no frontier remaining" (80). The frontier narrative that To Save the Wild Earth endorses at the expense of other legitimate stories and mythologies finds its origins in the romantic imaginary world of Careless's own childhood. Careless tells the reader that he was raised in Ontario and that his construction of British Columbia as a frontier is based on his father's bedtime stories . British Columbia becomes an imaginary geography that is filled with "places where no one had gone, places to be discovered that no one knew, places that were wild beyond imagination" (2). This nostalgic remembrance of a bedtime story seems innocuous enough. However the myopic and relativist nature of what defines a frontier is troubling, because these binary spatial constructions seem to define

Careless's activities as an activist. His defense of his childhood vision is especially disturbing: "Nowadays, I suppose, many aboriginal Canadians would dispute the accuracy of this story but, as a young child, imagine my wonder, my excitement" (3).

There are a number of competing discourses in this sentence that require some attention.

His nostalgic tone suggests a fondness for a time when this mythology would not be

"disputed" by aboriginal peoples contesting these sorts of frontier narratives. His

2 The fact that Careless's father is J.M.S. Careless, the renowned Canadian historian who is responsible for the "metropolitan" theory that opposes frontierism, makes the accuracy of this "memory," which corresponds directly with Ric Careless's ideological beliefs, suspect. 29 qualifier, "I suppose," is arrogant and dismissive, and, while he states that aboriginal people "would dispute the accuracy," he does not explicitly admit that they would be correct. Although it may seem benign, Careless also manages to homogenize a large number of societies of indigenous peoples. This colonizing gaze has disturbing implications given his part in the creation of parks which are spaces that bind wilderness within the borders of a map. He exploits Canadian mythology to authenticate his maps, perpetuating a natural heritage which has serious political, nationalistic and colonial implications. Although he sees the failure of North American society to respect and protect the environment as a holdover from European society's propensity for being

"restless and always on the move, exploring, colonizing and exploiting new worlds"

(224), he perpetuates this system by glorifying the frontier and painting nature as wild, pristine and virginal.

His fictionalized account of native life in the Nitinat Triangle portrays native cultures and their mythologies of nature in opposition to the wave of destruction that accompanied European colonization. Careless tells this story from the viewpoint of a tree

(the Hobitan cedar) - a rhetorical flourish that helps to diminish any connection he has to the colonizers. His revised history blames European influence for endangering the long history of this tree. He romanticizes, idealizes and dehumanizes indigenous peoples by making them wise, peaceful, innocent caricatures of themselves: "For generations beyond number the Tsilhquot'in lived here in harmony with the land, the animals, and the fish, never taking more than they needed, grateful for what they were given, loving Great

Spirit, and leaving health for the future" (203). His theory that indigenous tribes lived more responsibly with the land because they stayed in a single place their whole lives (225) is a simplification of a far more complex history that groups together an entire country of racially, culturally and socially different communities into a single, homogenous entity. It is also untrue. While Careless subsumes a vast and diverse set of societies under the single title of "Native peoples," he simultaneously creates a group he calls "colonizers," defines them as "Other," and assigns them responsibility for current environmental destruction. It is a strategy that ignores the fact that, given modern technology and population growth, the ecological footprint of the modern world is significantly greater than the relatively small group of Europeans who originally colonized North America. Blaming current ecological disasters on these colonizers allows Careless to avoid naming those most responsible for ongoing environmental degradation. Presumably unwilling to assign blame to the people in power who grant him access and with whom he negotiates, he employs passive language, constructing sentences without subjects to avoid a discussion of exactly who is behind the damaging line of action:

... logging activity around the town had accelerated dramatically. The valleys

leading into the Rockies and Purcells were hit hard by clearcutting. North of

town, 100 miles of Columbia River Valley bottomland were in the process of

being drowned behind the new 800-foot-high Mica Dam. (51)

He does not acknowledge the role economic negotiations play in creating this environmental destruction. Careless ignores the extremely wealthy minority that profits most from this degradation and provides no discussion of the way governments support this behavior with public funds through subsidies, tax breaks and land. The easy acceptance of the closed and undemocratic nature of the negotiations he describes is one of a few recurring ethical dilemmas that problematize Careless's activist program in To Save the Wild Earth. These negotiation are closely linked to his strategic decision to employ monetary valuations of natural space. He reinforces this practice by repeatedly using the vocabulary of precious gems to emphasize the rare and unique quality of wilderness. He refers to rivers as "liquid crystal" (157) and "luminous" (157), emphasizing "glinting" waters (158), lakes as "glistening jewels" (1), and everywhere, nature is bathed in "golden" and "silvered" light. In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey concurs with Careless's observation that money has the most power out of any social currency and is a comfortable tool for the people that have the most power in society. However, he argues that this is precisely why environmentalists should refuse to engage with nature on these terms. He recognizes that money's value is arbitrary, created by a market which only calculates the price of something after it has already been removed from its environment. As such, it relies on nature's destruction, ignores the way the environment can be "construed organically, ecosystemically or dialectically" (152), and locks us into a "Cartesian-Newtonian-Lockeian and, in some respects, 'anti-ecological' ontology of how the nature world is constituted" (152). This means that nature is separated into constituent parts, rather than evaluated in more holistic terms which emphasize the interaction and interdependence of all aspects of the natural world. Likewise, Harvey points out that this ideology assumes a certain figuration of space and time (as linear and progressive, concepts that do not apply to the natural world), and that money is not in fact a neutral instrument; it works in favour of those who already have power, and can work against those who do not (152). Harvey's 32 arguments apply to Careless who employs the values and language of the existing capitalist elite and attempts to save wildernesses that are valued for their potential as tourist attractions and icons of Canadian nationalism.

The final soliloquy in To Save the Wild Earth clearly articulates the impetus for

Careless's activist work:

For beyond all the other reasons used to justify preservation - the protection of

scenic splendors and the pioneer frontier, recreational experiences, wandering

space, solitude and freedom, the tourism economy, endangered wildlife and

biodiversity - the most important reason for saving the original Earth is that it will

guide us homeward. Wilderness shall be the path we will follow to rediscover the

Garden of Eden. (234)

Relying on Christian symbolism, Careless engages with the most basic questions related to the impetus for the environmental movement. Constructing wilderness as a metaphysical "home" shifts attention away from the practical concerns of activism and environmentalism and focuses, instead, on an alternative way to conceive of value and meaning. The notion that wilderness is a spiritual homeland suggests that Careless's activism is more a spiritual quest than a political struggle. In the chapter "Purcell

Wilderness: Back to the Land," Careless describes the death of his friend Art Twomey, "a modern-day mountain man" (47), as a return to the land: "... his dream lived on, enduring throughout the Purcell Mountains as Nature's first song, as life's essential dance, as wilderness ... today Art has gone back to the land forever" (71). Perhaps this encourages people to think beyond the immediate gratification that accompanies unlimited consumption and figure themselves as part of a larger narrative of nature and 33 creation. This belief system, with its Christianity-influenced appeal to eternal life and the promise of a return to "home," undermines the value of our current earthbound existence.

David Foreman writes that preserving wilderness is an "ethical and moral matter, a religious mandate" (qtd. in Dunlap 10) and Sigurd Olson argues that "the intangible values of wilderness are what really matter.... Wilderness will play its greatest role, offering this age a familiar base for exploration of the soul and the universe itself (qtd. in

Dunlap 3). This idea of spirituality in wilderness has an important cultural currency in

North American society, and Careless employs it to great success in his activist career.

However, in David Harvey's words, "ecological arguments are never socially neutral any more than socio-political arguments are ecologically neutral" (182). Careless spends his text speaking to the problem of socio-economic arguments that dismiss the importance of wilderness. However, his lack of engagement with the socio-political context of his own ecological stance calls into question the efficacy of his activism in solving environmental problems. This, too, should be a goal of the environmental movement.

Careless believes that the "power" and "purity" of wilderness can be preserved indefinitely within park space. He constructs parks metaphorically, as islands and sanctuaries, and emphasizes connections to the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark. While these metaphors uphold the value of national parks as privileged and special, they ignore the political and social contexts that create these parks in the first place. On several occasions Careless expresses surprise that development has reached the edges of the national parks for which he campaigned. He fails to see that by drawing boundaries around certain pieces of land, naming them and declaring them to be especially valuable, he actively diminishes the value of other lands and spaces which makes them more 34 expendable. Areas that are seemingly less suitable for designation as parkland, for example oceans, swamps and prairie, require an entirely different form of activism and preservation. In To Save the Wild Earth, parks are the end result of each narrative, their creation the ultimate achievement of Careless's activist goals. Although Careless mentions the controversial history of parks in "Schoen Valley: Graduate Studies in the

Wild," including their origin in colonial Africa as game reserves, he offers no discussion of the way that the concept of park is highly contested and political, and he provides no direction for the ensuing management of the spaces he works so hard to protect. Despite

Careless's earnest declarations, wilderness is not for wilderness's sake when it is preserved as a park, and any insistence on its virginity, its wildness or its timelessness ignores its political realities.

If saving the world is about human redemption in Careless's vision, the creation of parks (while an important step) has curiously anti-humanistic undertones. His vision of wilderness places more value on spaces not inhabited by humans. His rigid ideological stance allows him to ignore the human populations of the world that are degraded and subjugated under the systems he exploits to preserve these "pristine" spaces. Careless's belief that any methodology is validated by the successful completion of his objectives has serious implications for the rest of humanity and for the way environmentalism is viewed. It radically narrows the field of action on which environmentalism can participate, cuts off its ability to join with other groups to effect political change, and turns a blind eye to injustices that are directly linked to his activist methodologies. As

Rogers argues, "An activist agenda which does not take on the increasing privatization of political power in the economic sphere severely circumscribes its realm of activity, and 35 does not address the processes of domination and appropriation in the private economic sphere which cause environmental problems" (3). Instead of bandaging the damage done to the earth, environmentalism should be challenging the mythologies that view nature as a commodity, a view that allows too many North Americans to ignore the impact of their existence on the rest of the global - human and natural - world. It is only through the proliferation of other narratives, other understandings and other voices that we can begin to dissect the roots of environmental degradation. To save Careless's "wild earth," we must challenge the way society constructs value. Then perhaps we can begin to dissolve the boundaries of the park and find a more inclusive vision of the human in nature. 36

Chapter Two:

Surface Tensions: Alexandra Morton's Activist Vision in

Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us

In her work of creative nonfiction, Listening to Whales: What the Orcas have

Taught Us, Alexandra Morton attempts to develop an activist voice rooted in her scientific work that will speak for the conservation of orca whales and their habitats.

Listening to Whales is an autobiographical account of how the American-born Morton made a home in British Columbia and the many personal, scientific and political experiences she has weathered in over twenty-five years of studying the aquaculture surrounding Vancouver Island.

Morton moves away from the visual economy in which science is heavily invested to challenge the binary of self/Other that it upholds as an absolute.

Alternatively, employing a methodology that focuses on listening, Morton transports scientific ideology to a new discursive borderland which holds the promise of the discovery of new places of knowledge, language and meaning. This borderland is the physical space of the ocean. Its dynamic, fluctuating surface acts as a site for tensions and interactions between the human and the more-than-human, becoming a liminal landscape infused with possibility and danger. This essay will chart Morton's personal, scientific and activist journey along this membrane between human and whale, land and water, and self and Other. It will also explore her husband Robin's and the whale Eve's transgressions of these binary formulas. In this chapter, I argue that, in challenging the ideological framework science perpetuates, Morton seeks new methods to conceptualize 37 and value a little-known, little-understood mammal whose ecological fate is so intricately tied to our own. Listening to Whales is a call to listen in the spaces and to the voices that exist outside our cultural definitions and are silenced by the Western, patriarchal, capitalist system.

In order to contextualize Morton's activist vision, it is essential to understand the matrices of power and knowledge that scientific discourse has created. The discourses of science dominate the modern Western intellectual landscape. Science constructs ideological formulas that determine who and what is valuable. These practices have created a social and ideological framework that defines and mediates our interaction with the world, with other humans and with the animal 'Other'. Science's central myths of objectivity, political disinterest and reductionism impart it with absolute authority and, simultaneously, undermine systems of thought that rely on subjective evaluations

(Haraway, Primate Visions 13). Heavily invested in the claim that good science is able to maintain an impermeable barrier between the scientific "eye" and the "I" of personal identity, the scientific view assumes a single God-like angle of observation, as Vicki

Hearne puts it: "No One in Particular with a View from Nowhere" (229). In Primate

Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Donna Haraway postulates that science creates the myth of a world that must "be objectified as thing," and a nature that is "only the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible for disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist colonialism" (13). However, science's power to name, categorize and determine what constitutes the normative also limits its ability to act in revolutionary ways. In the face of a growing environmental crisis, science has, perhaps, lost access to the potentialities that 38 exist in the marginal and liminal spaces where definitions are indeterminate, and where ideology must be contested.

Morton and her scientific work exist at the periphery of the scientific establishment: she has no institutional affiliation and she holds a Bachelor of Science degree. She began her research on orca language in the late 1970s at Marineland in

California after a stint working for the famous and controversial dolphin researcher, Dr.

John C. Lilly. Although her political opponents have challenged her research on salmon farming based on her lack of scientific credentials, Morton is published in many peer- reviewed journals including the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences and respected as the leader of the movement for sustainable salmon aquaculture in the waters of British Columbia. She identifies herself as a self-funded scientist, working at various times in concert with England's Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, the Sierra

Club and Greenpeace. In 2005, she received the $20,000 Canadian Sablefish Association

Award for "Fisheries Research Pioneer." She was also awarded "The Conservationist of the Year" award by the B.C. Wildlife Federation in 2007 (B.C. Wildlife Federation).

Morton's independence as a researcher has allowed her to challenge the power of government and businesses who wish to escape scrutiny and to forge a new conception of the topics science can address and the way science is studied.

With her delineation of an aural economy in Listening to Whales, Morton challenges science's over-reliance on the visual and illuminates the patriarchal and capitalist system it creates. Morton sets up her aural economy in the first sentence of

Listening to Whales: "Some nights I hear whales in my dreams" (1). She describes the sound of whales as a "series of rippling harmonics so perfect it imparts a deep sense of 39 peace in me, like a shuddering sigh" (1). The allusions to music continue as she awakes and proceeds with her morning routine: "I trundle downstairs in stocking feet, put my ear to the hydrophone speaker, and hear Tsitika calling to her children" (1). In this scene,

Morton and the female whale carry out parallel routines that are grounded in the protective and nurturing aspects of motherhood. The descriptions of the "trundling" of stocking feet and the "shuddering sigh" rely on the aural to infuse this scene with a feeling of contentment and domesticity, while drawing the reader into connecting the woman's and whale's realms through a shared association with the aural and through the intimacy and embodiment of their sounds. The ability of the whale's song to pass through the realms of the unconscious and conscious worlds and through water and air speaks to the imaginary, ideological and literal power of aural transmission.

Although Morton recognizes the importance of both visual and aural engagements with the world, she is particularly invested in challenging the omnipotence and omniscience of the scientific eye ("I") or gaze with the alternative of the ear. This is particularly important as the dominance of the visual in scientific discourse has potentially lethal consequences for those that cannot be approached visually or whose appearance marks them as Other. The explication of the dominance of the visual has been discussed by several theorists. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud posits that humans, as they began to walk upright, moved from privileging smell to privileging sight

(51-52). Cary Wolfe suggests that with sight came the development of the aesthetic, a contemplative distance and sensibility from which to understand the rest of the world (2).

This resonates with the prominence of vision and visual figures in the symbolic universe of theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and even Donna Haraway. In 40 every case the visual is intimately tied to a specifically human subjectivity (Wolfe 3). As

Wolfe notes, it is a speciesism defined by marking difference visually that has led to the tacit agreement that "the full transcendence of the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we engage in what Derrida will call a non-criminal putting to death of other humans as well as marking them as animal" (6). Furthermore, this ability to use the definition of non-human to sanction, exploit and inflict violence on the Other accesses the pre-existing symbolic economy that links the "edible bodies of animals and the sexualized bodies of women within an overarching logic of domination", a system Derrida calls caraophallogocentrism (Wolfe 8). This sexualized economy emphasizes both the importance of the gaze in creating the non-human and silencing the Other, and Western science's complicity in this logic of domination through its reliance on mainly visual cues to classify, mark difference and designate Other.

Focusing on family, community and, in particular, motherhood in her scientific work, orca society and her own life, Morton tries to counteract this logic of domination by putting forth an alternative methodology of identity formation that refuses to rely on the presence and rejection of a non-human Other. Her movement from scientist to activist is accompanied by an annulment of this binary formula in favour of a more fragmented understanding of self and epistemology. Morton conceives of a society that is grounded in female relationships that span species and physical distance. This conception suggests that it is not the boundaries and differences between species that must be challenged to ameliorate the cultural conditions that have led us to environmental crisis, but rather the way we construct identity as individuals and as humans. Morton 41 attempts to move the binary of self and Other to a more general plane of difference. She articulates a desire to seek out parallels and establish relationships with the Other. By claiming that "human" does not need to be defined in opposition to animals, other humans or even technology, Morton highlights the dangerous cultural ideologies that have led to environmental destruction and asks her reader to consider other more productive and revolutionary conceptions of identity, community and value.

In order to create her revolutionary voice, Morton must first escape the bindings of the patriarchal system. As wilderness photographer and underwater filmmaker,

Morton's first husband, Robin Morton, embodies the technological eye and acts as the trespasser of both human and whale boundaries and differences. Although Robin is not defined as a scientist in the text, he accompanies Morton on most of her scientific explorations, attends scientific conferences, videotapes new killer whale behavior to add to the scientific record and demonstrates identification, classification and research skills.

Throughout Listening to Whales, Robin is linked to the visual, the technological, the commercial, and the scientific. As Morton constructs it: "Robin was the eyes, I was the ears" (125).

The first time Morton meets Robin he materializes from the ocean's surface after completing a dive to check his underwater camera equipment: "From the icy water emerged a tall man in an orange wet suit. Robin Morton walked up the beach, set down his camera, and peeled off his neoprene suit. For a moment he stood stark naked: tall, slender, with a killer whale tattooed on his right shoulder. I sneaked a peek; he caught me and gave me a big, broad smile and pulled on some sweatpants. I fell in love" (111).

In this scene, Morton employs entirely visual terms and indicators to describe Robin as a 42 being who moves between worlds, as much whale as man. With the killer whale on his shoulder, Robin bears the mark of the animal, but he is, in fact, what Donna Haraway in

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women calls a "cyborg," which she defines as "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (149) who appears "where the boundary of human and animal is transgressed" (152). In this moment of nakedness, Robin has the potential to return to the water or return to land; both human and whale are marked on his body. The orange wet suit becomes his killer whale form, the skin that allows him to withstand the icy water, but he can peel it off and emerge as human. Only the small mark on his shoulder alludes to his intimate, transgressive link to the Other. Morton recognizes that her desire to see this sort of nudity is taboo in multiple ways. Viewing the naked male body, she momentarily occupies the position of the dominating gaze, while the doubleness and potential perversity of this whale/man's body makes her a voyeur of a sexual curiosity.

Robin, in contrast, seems to welcome the look, which can be understood as evidence both of his full submersion in the visual economy, and his hybrid identity as simultaneously the viewing "eye" and the objectified animal that is captured in the visual economy.

Robin is the only figure in this book, besides the whales, whose body is displayed and described. By pulling on his sweatpants, he covers up the site of multiple signs, contradictions and negotiations, and moves back towards a human form. Morton's attraction to Robin lies not (or not only) in the disparate visual signifiers on Robin's body

- the whale contrasted with the naked male form. Rather, Morton is attracted to Robin's ability, as a trickster figure, to embody these two seemingly incongruous subjectivities 43 simultaneously. Alexandra Morton falls in love with a man who seems to have fused self and Other without violence or appropriation, becoming both man and whale.

In Morton's construction, Robin's confidence, which borders on arrogance, symbolizes the patriarchal dominance of the I/eye in scientific discourses. Taking to the water armed with a camera, Robin captures the whales on videotape and later sells the film to the nature tourism industry. Even if Morton does not acknowledge it, the language used to describe this undertaking focuses on the violent and colonizing aspects in the language of photography: cameras use magazines, are loaded up and take shots. In

Morton's contention that "[w]here others might reach for a gun, Robin always reached for his camera" (153), she differentiates the camera from the gun, but the idea that both technologies can be used to intimidate reinforces their power and their potential for violence. Morton's very linking of the two technologies draws a comparison of them. In this scene, the focus of Robin's eyes into a single lens (the camera) represents a concentration of the visual. His eventual choice to use a remote-controlled camera reduces the underwater body further - to just a single eye. This single "eye" recalls

Hearne's description of the scientific eye as coming from "No One in Particular with a

View from Nowhere" (229). It becomes an image representing the human arrogance that creates the conditions for speciesism and allows humanity to commodify its interactions with the whales. By participating in the market economy and selling images that contribute to the objectification of whale's bodies, Robin acts as the I/eye who can judge, quantify and deal in the naming of subjects and objects. His ability to record the static image and sell it as "whale" confirms his investment in a single vision, the solid "I" of human subjectivity. However, his dependence on the visual scientific economy has 44 interesting consequences for his own body. The technologizing of his body - the extension of his feet with flippers, his skin with a wetsuit, his eye with the camera - places him within the techno-capitalist system, and suggests that rather than understanding Robin as a kind of human/whale cyborg (as Morton does), he can be read as a human/machine cyborg. When Morton speaks of Robin "loading up," she connects camera and gun and implicates this visual tool with violence against the whales (153).

Indeed, these manifestations of I/eye on the part of Robin represent the larger ideological stances that threaten the whales. These include the investment in an exclusively visual representation of the animal, the anthropocentric construction of self and Other, human and whale, the desire for more invasive technologies, the reduction of epistemology to the single sense of vision, and the creation of a value system based on economic terms.

The respective technologies that Morton and her husband Robin employ are emblematic of their different relationships to the whales and their different ideological positions. Morton's primary technological tool is the hydrophone, which allows her access to the aural economy. Originally used by the military to locate submarines, the hydrophone is an underwater microphone that Morton adapts to find and identify orca tribes and individuals. It is the most important connecting thread between her and the whales, and she uses it both in the twelve-foot inflatable Zodiac boat and within her ocean-front home:

In the kelp bed floating outside my window, a hydrophone dangles down 15 feet

into the water of Cramer Passage. A black cable snakes through the kelp, up the

rocky beach, through the salal brush, around my kale garden, past the greenhouse

and chicken coop, and up through the floorboards into my house (1). 45

In this passage, the hydrophone morphs into an animal-like creature that passes between worlds; its technology is naturalized, domesticated and entirely demilitarized. The reader is able to visualize the black cable as an umbilical cord, connecting the female whale and female human through the parallel experience of motherhood. A key aspect of the cable consists of its ability to connect human and animal without significantly intruding on either's landscape. It is a transmitter, not a translator. Acting as an ear that can reach under the water, the hydrophone picks up not only the music of the whales but all the sounds of the ocean, thus contextualizing the whales' language and providing Morton with clues as to how the entire ecosystem functions. The description of the sounds of shrimp crackling as they come "alive with the lightening of the sky" (1), otters

"chirping", and dolphins twittering "like monkeys on helium" (2) complete Morton's auditory underwater sea-scape. Morton uses the hydrophone to 'see' what takes place beneath the surface, relying on sound for acquisition of knowledge. It also allows her to appreciate the extent to which human noise intrudes upon this landscape as the

"screaming" outboard motor imposes fear and insecurity on the more playful, social and domestic sounds of the ocean. The hydrophone is technology that can move into the aquatic landscape while preserving a relatively non-exploitative relationship with the scientific subject, the killer whale.

In contrast, Robin relies on the rebreather device which is a scuba technology that allows him to stay underwater for longer periods of time without creating bubbles. The rebreather functions by recycling the air that he breathes out and filtering out the carbon dioxide. This technology is vital to Robin's work as an underwater photographer because the whales rarely approach a scuba diver emitting a turbulent upsurge of air. Unlike the hydrophone which connects Morton and the whales, the rebreather disconnects Robin from his environment and thus reliance on it is dangerous. The rebreather does not attempt to connect animal and human. Eliminating the bubbles that scare the whales, it submerges the human "eye" into the whale's natural surroundings, disguising the marks and signs of Otherness. The fact that Robin received this rebreather from a documentary film shoot with Peter Benchley, the creator of the movie, Jaws, links it explicitly with the visual economy that commodifies and mythologizes ocean mammals - an economy that, in fact, uses mechanized simulations instead of real animals.

While Morton waits on the boat, Robin's rebreather device malfunctions. A clogged valve results in Robin breathing in carbon dioxide instead of oxygen and he drowns just as Eve, a matriarch orca, comes into view. Without bubbles to confirm his breathing, Morton is not alerted to the accident. She waits patiently at the surface for her husband to return, not wanting to wreck his perfect footage of the whales to check on him. With her son watching onboard, Morton ties herself to the boat and dives down to find him. She recovers his lifeless body.

Robin's accident, resulting in the death of the cyborg whale/man, re-establishes the border between animal and human worlds and undermines the notion that one can exist as both self and Other. This border-crossing is unsuccessful because of Robin's connection to the visual economy and the technology, ideology and subjectivity that accompany it. Robin is caught and killed for his attempt to transcend the boundaries of the natural world. In Morton's symbolic universe, the image of Robin, "arms stretched up" and "staring calmly at the sky" (211), suggests a longing for the surface. Robin's body appears to be reaching for the Other in an attempt to return to a balance on the 47 border of air and ocean, but his whale identity is revealed as a conceit. He cannot live underwater. When he dies, Morton feels "a crack open between two worlds" and a sense of "comings and goings" (212). As she does at the birth of her son, Morton associates the underwater world with the mysteries of the unconscious world, the void associated with birth and death that is so essential to the construction of (human) subjectivity.

The only other witness to Robin's death is the whale matriarch, Eve3. The difficulty of whale to human communication is highlighted at the moment of Robin's death as Morton does not immediately understand the implications of the strangeness of

Eve's behavior:

Eve dove toward Robin, then abruptly emerged from the water and charged back

toward me. Her movement struck me as strange, like a film played forward and

reversed. She shouldn't have resurfaced so soon. She shouldn't have needed that

second breath so soon after the first. I couldn't put my finger on her behavior.

(210)

Eve, whose name equates her with primordial woman, mother and transgressor, is explicitly linked to Morton in this scene. Morton places the guilt for Robin's death, which symbolically alludes to the inability to save the I/eye, on both females - human and whale: "I knew my anger was irrational. But there were two beings in this world who could have saved Robin: Eve and myself. And I was mad at both" (216). In this formulation, the guilt is linked to a doubting of the I/eye's absolute power. Alexandra

Morton and Eve, as objects of the gaze, are endangered (and engendered) by it.

However, in this scene, the objectifying scientific lens is blinded and whale and woman

3 Although Eve's name lends itself compellingly to a literary analysis of this scene, the whale was one of many given a popular name by Mike Bigg and the local residents before Morton arrived (82). gaze at the dead body of the underwater photographer. Morton's inability to translate

Eve's strange behavior suggests the fallibility of her own scientific gaze, while Eve's superior knowledge of the situation and her apparent demonstration of alarm for the endangered human place her in a complex subject position imparted with agency. At the moment of Robin's death, the relationship between Morton and Eve gains a new complexity that cannot exist in the presence of the scientific gaze.

Ultimately Morton realizes that she and Eve are not responsible for Robin's death, and articulates the main cause of Robin's death as his submersion in the visual economy:

"Robin had a habit of holding his breath when he rolled film. It steadied the shot. With his body already starving for oxygen, he saw Eve, stopped his breath, and blacked out.

He fainted and then drowned. The whale didn't kill Robin. The sight of her did" (213).

By articulating this distinction, Morton demonstrates the disconnect between the so- called power of the I/eye and the ultimately more powerful natural boundaries and rules that govern both humans and whales. In Morton's construction, the dangerous commodification of the natural world undermines Robin's attempt to exist in the underwater world. This is illustrated by Morton's comment that she does not check on

Robin early enough because he has given her explicit directions not to destroy the shot.

Robin's technology, his ability to see underwater and his power to exchange images of the Other to generate financial reward neither saves him from premature death nor keeps his subjectivity intact. His drowning illustrates the danger in human constructions that separate the human from the natural, self from Other. When Morton's son, Jarrett, asks

"if Daddy's dead, how are they going to fix him?" (214), Robin's cyborg identity is revealed to be both absolute - his own son uses the vocabulary of the machine - and ultimately, a lie. Robin cannot be fixed because the death that results from the malfunction of his technology marks him clearly as animal/human, and thus mortal.

Juxtaposed with Robin's death scene, Eve's death is another moment of border- crossing which calls into question our ability to see and understand the Other. Eve's movement onto land, like Robin's crossing into water, results in death. Like Robin's death, Eve's death marks a moment when Morton's sense of self is challenged and must be re-solidified using binary identity formulas. Setting this scene, Morton describes a tremendous storm that cuts off power and floods roads as they rush to dissect Eve: "It felt as if the gods were enraged at our transgression" (241). Because Morton believes this whale is sacred, the desire to gain scientific knowledge from viewing her dead body becomes sacrilege to Morton. With the whale carcass lying before her, Morton portrays

Eve's body as "whole and vulnerable" (240). In the ocean, the whale's body is seen in parts, as a fin, a tail or an eye. Earlier in the text, Morton acknowledges the difficulty of differentiating dorsal fins from "sailboats, kayakers, tree roots, deadheads" (83). Her basic rule for orca sighting, that "if you have time to pull out the binoculars and get a good look, it's not an orca" (83), demonstrates a paradoxical dilemma: to see an orca, you must not see it. The bodily markers that allow whales to be visually identified and differentiated become a site of confusion for the scientific gaze. However, Eve's body transgresses the border between ocean and land making her "whole" and objectified - on display and dissected for scientific knowledge. The human desire to construct a unified

"self is evident in all human undertakings. Morton's distress at seeing the beached Eve suggests that part of Eve's power lay with the fractured nature of her body that resisted the objectifying gaze. Scientific practitioners often construct the Other as unified and 50 whole in order to name, judge and dissect it. These activities, in turn, allow scientists to acquire "knowledge" about the Other and, by fitting the being that is Othered into the dominant systems of value, assume power over it.

Lying whole on the concrete ramp in Telegraph Cove and lit by a streetlight, Eve makes "an eerie, macabre sight" (242). However, when Morton moves closer the next day and "touched the gentle curve of her face" (242), Eve is re-imagined as a gigantic mother figure: her "great ribs arched protectively over her soft inner organs," her face is

"the oil-filled acoustic lens ... arched outward in a pregnant curve, her skull actually curved inwards, cradling a globe of fatty tissue" and her voice is "ample" and "great"

(242-3). Everything in this description suggests the contours of Eve's body as globe-like.

She seems to contain a plethora of undersea life within her ("fifty-nine individual fish from thirteen different species" (242)), is the source of significant scientific knowledge

("Eve rewrote the science on orca diet" (242)) and is the pinnacle of evolutionary perfection. In Morton's description, Eve is the embodiment of Mother Earth: huge, protecting, pregnant and ever-giving. If Robin's body is diminished with death by being made cold, stiff and frozen, Eve's is made bigger. However, with this expansion comes

"the sickening stench of decaying whale carcass" (243). Kristeva's theory of abjection states that "the body's inside ... shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside" and that "urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking 'its own and clean self" (53). Put in textual context, Kristeva's theory explains Morton's ambivalence reading the dead whale's body. 51

Eve's death occurs after a series of incidents that cause Morton to question her commitment to - and the parameters of- her scientific practice. Her mentor, Mike

Biggs, has just passed away, and she is enmeshed in arguments among politicians and scientists about a proposal to sell a family of killer whales into captivity. This debate requires her to politicize her relationships with the whales. Furthermore, she has recently experienced some inexplicable and potentially miraculous behavior by a family of orcas that causes her to question both the soundness of her mind and the soundness of her science. Immediately after Morton publicly and emotionally lobbies for the protection of a certain killer whale family, the family aggressively corrals her Zodiac, blocking any movement, and then demonstrates a behavior that Morton declares (while lobbying on their behalf) she has never seen before. That is, the orcas travel up and down Cramer

Pass three times, as if reiterating a point and communicating a message. In the midst of these unsettling events, Morton is involved in the dissection of Eve's body - which reduces the female to body and then to the object of scientific scrutiny. Morton's sense of a stable subjectivity returns as she practices more traditional scientific methodologies - dissection and classification. As embodied by the display of Eve's skeleton at the Sidney

Museum, the border between inside and outside of the animal body is entirely annulled as

Morton's own sense of inside and outside, self and Other, returns. Morton comes to the conclusion that the difference between whales and humans is that "humans use their bodies to change their environment. Whales change their bodies to change their environment" (243). She then moves to a discussion of the stench of Eve's decaying body, re-establishing the borders between whale and human and re-asserting herself as the subject who studies, and the human who mythologizes and dissects the Other. Eve's 52 stench is a silent protest against this sort of invasion, preventing any of the participants from "Disney-fying" a wild animal (56). The odor marks the transgression that leaves the whale's motionless body not whole at all. In this section, Morton demonstrates an ambivalence to her work as scientist. She studies wild whales because she feels less guilty "knowing they could get away from me" (82), and yet the advancement of her scientific knowledge requires the whales' removal from their natural environment and, ultimately, their death. The image of the gigantic Earth Mother dead on the pavement allows Morton to re-establish the borders between human and whale, but it completely counters her desire to create a new revolutionary space where alternative forms of subjectivity might be seen within scientific practice. Earlier on, she acknowledges the limits to her ability to know orcas: "to the whales my world was where they discarded spent air ... I wondered if there was any hope of following a whale's train of thought as it dove into a world completely alien to my senses" (91). However, here Morton returns to the well-worn historical narrative of scientific investigation which requires the object to be dead and dissected: "Although we never determined exactly what had killed the great matriarch, by allowing us to find her body, Eve had educated my species in death as much as she had in life" (243).

These two examples of failed border crossings - Robin's and Eve's - act as an important backdrop, foil and contextualization for Morton's journey along the edge of land and sea in search of a borderland where more productive cultural and identity construction work can be done in order to reorient the boundaries of human and animal, woman and whale, and self and Other. This borderland is linked implicitly with Morton's own individual search for identity. Morton describes the feeling of being around killer 53 whales as a mixture of "instinctive fear mingled with magnetic attraction" (77). The language Morton employs here surrounds discourses of the Other which focus on attraction, repulsion and the exotic. This discourse is associated with constructions of subjectivity which rely upon an Other which must be repulsed and contained. However, in the scene where she and her first boyfriend, Jeff, are lost in the fog, Morton's description of the whales suggests a move away from these reductionist discourses. After a day of following the whales out to sea, a fog closes in on the Zodiac. While three of the four possible directions will lead them back to land, the fourth will take them out to sea.

As night closes in, Morton begins to panic. In the fog, the distinction between air and water dissipates - both elements surround them on every side - and Morton is consumed by fear. At once, the whales return and surround the boat, "their fins spread like a hand of cards" (113). They swim slowly at the surface guiding the boat back home:

"Confidence washed the fear clean out of me.... Instinctively I knew what to do. We would stay with the whales ... I trusted them with our lives" (113-4). Here, the words

'instinctive' and 'fear' recur, but this time, the whales dispel fear and are instinctively trusted. The fog works to eradicate the power of the I/eye, which initially creates panic and fear in the human observer. However, the whales, having temporarily escaped the bounds of the observing "eye," restore a sense of certainty and confidence with their own unique ability to "see" and direct. The reference to playing cards suggests a possible connection of whales with fortune and luck, but in fact, the whales can be understood as, metaphorically, showing their hand, opening up to another level of communication and revealing their unique intuitive powers. Morton's absolute trust is preceded by the blinding of the scientific "eye" and articulates a return of the connection between human and whale. In a fogged-in world where the distinction between above and below water is hazy, the hierarchical structures that define this relationship in human terms are inverted.

Whales and humans meet and intervene on each other's behalf. If synchronicity in whale behavior is the cornerstone of understanding the whales' language and familial bonds, as

Morton argues, then this traveling together seems like a moment of profound communication, a matching of rhythms and a gesture of goodwill by both humans and whales. Viewed in contrast to Eve's and Robin's border crossing, this scene presents

Morton's conception of a common borderland where language, science and intelligence are open to multiple formulas and definitions.

The three scenes discussed thus far represent a matrix of relationships between humans and animals. These differing relationships interrogate constructions of self and

Other, while problematizing visual and aural methodologies in scientific research.

Having effectively questioned existing visions, Morton moves on to present her own, alternative vision. This vision serves as the focus of her activism and places all the setbacks to self that she experiences in the context of her final and definitive activist identity and voice. As I illustrated in my Introduction, activism easily slips any attempt to pin it down to a particular methodology, strategy or definition. Even so, I would contend that Morton does activist work in her conceptualization of personal identity and scientific practice. The remainder of this chapter will explore this activist vision - its tenets, its implications and its pitfalls - in an attempt to offer up another area of ideological work that must be undertaken to change the system that has created environmental destruction. 55

Morton's activist vision in Listening to Whales is grounded in the connection between women and whales, and the idea of a community that spans the borders of species and negates the dominance of the I/eye. Using the motifs of synchronicity and motherhood, Morton establishes a series of echoes between the female whale and female human's worlds. She creates a mirror image of her family in the Zodiac and the orca families beneath the surface, she equates the experience of losing her husband to the loss orcas suffer when family members are captured and shipped to aquariums, and she recognizes family to be the most important, even vital, bond in orca society:

"Unknowingly, I had observed the founding principle of orca society - the familial bond.

Nothing, not even life itself, rates higher for these mammals" (50). One of the most important examples of Morton's symbolic order centers around Corky, the Sealand orca who loses her babies. Morton identifies with Corky, offering the deepest sympathy for the mother whale who cannot get her baby to nurse: "Nursing my plump baby while watching Corky suffer the slow starvation of her own threw me into a tailspin" (139).

Corky cannot save her children because she lacks a community of other female whales to guide the baby to her mammaries. Morton empathizes: "Now I knew what it would feel like if someone took my baby from me while I was trying to save him" (141). Morton's portrayal of Corky's struggle to become a mother provides the most powerful argument against whale captivity in the text.

Morton's empathy contains revolutionary possibilities. In Primate Visions,

Haraway presents empathy as the essential dark twin of objectivity in the mythology of western science: "each constructs the other in the history of modern western science, just as nature-culture and woman-man are mutually constructed in a logic of appropriation 56 and progress" (293). As "both part of a code in a narrative and a culturally specific way to construct what counts as experience" empathy creates subjects, and obscures the simple reduction of the object of empathy to Other (Haraway 317). Morton is constantly looking for a means to employ western science in a manner that refuses to reduce the object of study to a marginalized Other and, as Haraway suggests, empathy is promising in this regard. Although Morton's use of empathy applies human feelings to whales, it nevertheless makes headway where traditional science cannot by taking steps towards granting rights and subjectivity to another species. Throughout Listening to Whales,

Morton uses empathy as an alternative epistemology to the scientific way of knowing and judging. For example, when witnessing what she believes to be grief and healing processes among orcas, Morton acknowledges her own skepticism and lack of evidence but insists that "My heart knew the answer" (50). Later, in the midst of her activist work,

Morton is accused of losing scientific objectivity (and her sanity) in her passionate defense of the whales. When other scientists allege that "no pictures" equal "no proof

(237), Morton responds: "When proof comes it'll be too late. When everything around us is destroyed, we'll be left with nothing but proof (282). Morton challenges the importance of visual evidence, suggesting that reliance on the visual simply reinforces the dominant scientific, patriarchal practices that are, in part, responsible for the existing crisis. What cannot be captured on film, that which is heard, felt, intuited and even observed over a long period of time is, for Morton, the only way to legitimately acquire knowledge and construct meaning. Establishing connections with the subject of study using these alternative methodologies is also the only way to save the orcas: "A wondrous thing happens when an animal moves from population status to individual 57 standing: it can no longer be mistreated with impunity" (148). However, while empathy is an important foil to the objective stance science professes to hold, it only functions in

Listening to Whales in tandem with scientific discourse which continues to carry ideological and epistemological freight.

Morton uses a combination of empathy and objective discourse to make her arguments for the protection of the orcas. After she and Jeff are rescued from the fog by the whales, Morton is forced to confront the limits of knowledge that her science will recognize. She begins by constructing a list, a series of facts that she separates out in point form. These facts add up to "profound evidence of something beyond our ability to scientifically quantify" (115). However, she refuses to come to a scientific conclusion from this series of facts, choosing instead to ask questions: "Had Jeff and I just been rescued? Was that possible?" (115). This thread runs throughout Morton's scientific career: as a child, she comes to realize that "the inability to explain is no reason to forget, modify, or deny the extraordinary information that sometimes comes through our ordinary senses" (12). For Morton, truth arrives through all the senses and does not always fit easily into the framework of scientific mythology. She stresses the importance of an "open mind" and suggests that science needs to get back to its roots of asking questions and believing in the possibility of something entirely new and undocumented.

The borderland nature of listening, touching, and intuiting allows for the possibility that science can slip its pre-determining, limiting assumptions. Although Morton acknowledges the importance of gathering extensive evidence and setting parameters to define practices and the reliability of results, she challenges science's traditional mythologies and methodologies, in particular, its deliberate dissociation from social and 58 political action. In the beginning of Listening to Whales, she says that "anyone who studies a wild animal faces the challenge of, in effect, making a case for its life on earth.

I pray that mine is strong enough" (5). For her, science, to be effective, must abandon the mythology that suggests it is apolitical, objective and reductionist.

Morton's "case" for the whales extends outward, becoming a "case" for all ocean animals, and in particular, wild salmon who feed the whales and act as the life-blood of the West Coast ecosystem. Morton's case also extends to humans, as she argues that the scientific "eye" be turned inwards towards a recognition of the effects of our actions on the ocean, our own bodies and our existence as a species. In this final section of the text, she depicts humans using the vocabulary and the physical/behavioral cues scientists use to describe animals, rendering human politics as a battle for hierarchical dominance in the animal world, and the people she is fighting with as "corporate animals" (297) with

"cancer-like" (298) tendencies. Animals bear the marks of this cancer: whales are killed in oil spills and the bodies of farmed salmon are completely corrupted (302). Morton suggests that the result of this human corruption is infertility and lack of reproduction in the animal world. Whales in the aquarium cannot successfully produce offspring. Wild salmon fry are killed by the thousands by fertilizers, fish farms and logging. The matriarchs that are the center of orca society are killed by oil spills and other environmental changes. Eve's dead body rotting on the pavement is a powerful symbol of a world where motherhood has become desecrated and destroyed. With the loss of these matriarchs in orca society, the familial bond is in extreme danger and without it, the chance of an individual orca surviving in the wild is slight. In the final section, Morton moves away from her individual search for identity and into a larger vision of a 59 community based in female relationships and centered around the ability to listen to many voices, a vision that has both powerful potentialities and fundamental problems.

The power of Morton's activist vision lies in her argument for a return to a full sensorium in scientific work, for understanding all humans and animals in a community as potential environmentalists, and in her challenge to the binary of self and Other. In particular, her emphasis on family creates an economy where "we" carries the power instead of "I/eye". Here, Morton recognizes community as central to the formation of the

"I," and, instead of focusing on how that subjectivity is maintained in the face of the

Other, she breaks down the barriers that we erect in order to keep the I static, stable and whole. Morton creates a world of parallel subjectivities, each existing and living on either side of a border that allows for a surface of interaction, a gateway to communication through a variety of senses and media, but not an annihilation of difference. Instead of fearing the idea of a fractured, multiple subjectivity, Morton sees it as the possibility of an identity that does not require an Other. Just as orcas swim together in pods, organizing from the matriarch outwards, while moving as a concerted whole, Morton envisions her small west coast community as an ecosystem, where every person, animal and house has a story that relies on and relates to its environment. She develops a network of "Keeners" to call in whale sightings that include school children, fishermen, loggers, and homesteaders. She becomes part of a collective of women activists that include lawyers, Greenpeace representatives, municipal council members, commercial fishers, and tribal chiefs, all invested in "defending the earth, each ... also trying to keep together a home as women do everywhere" (286). She is adopted by a series of international organizations who help fund her work and she uses the internet to 60 connect with scientists around the world. By valuing diversity over uniformity in every aspect of her life and activist work, Morton embarks on an environmental mission whose ultimate goal is to change the way we construct value. In this conception, the terms science, nature, technology, animal, and human are not judged morally or absolutely.

Morton grounds these terms in a relationship with the natural world and suggests that it is a matter of repeatedly returning to the borderlands with a full sensorium to wake us up to the danger of our value-based binaries.

The mingling of the voices of three orca clans in the dusk at the conclusion of her text encapsulates the potential of Morton's activist vision. However, the idealism specific to this text is problematic. Although Listening to Whales boldly investigates emotional territory and interrogates truths associated with loss, identity and a relationship with another species, it does not fully explore its own politics. Morton chooses to study a large mammal that has cognitive abilities that are easily recognized by human scientists: the ability to create language, form communities and experience loss, grief and mother- child bonds. Morton never grants the same complexities to other animals in this text, not even dolphins. The privileging of the orca whale as an equal to humans threatens to subsume other species into the category of non-human others who carry less intrinsic value. Although she acknowledges the difficulties in knowing what to look for in whale language, she nevertheless ignores the broader implications of her politics of listening and the constraints on what she can hear. If orcas use telepathy as Morton comes close to suggesting several times, then she is forced to work with a miniscule, even negligible, sample of orca language - that which can be heard by humans. Furthermore, communication is not happening in both directions in these encounters; Morton needs the 61 possibility of orcas reading her mind to believe that they can speak back to her.

Otherwise, she is merely eavesdropping and then creating a narrative out of her interpretations. The desire for reciprocation is also problematic. Although Morton wants to believe that, having created an identity based in community, she can speak on the orcas' behalf within human society, she does not fully acknowledge that this is a non­ symmetrical relationship. Whales are inevitably Othered in this conception. As Zygmunt

Bauman suggests in Postmodern Ethics, any relationship between humans and animals is unequal, because the Other is "indeed without power since they cannot repay what's been done to them (nor for that matter reward our deeds), and vulnerable since they cannot prevent us from doing whatever we think is worth doing" (219-20). In Listening to

Whales, the orcas cannot judge, speak to or change the course of action Morton employs on their behalf.

Another limitation related to Morton's activist vision surrounds her attempts to translate it into a larger impetus for change. Although she attacks the construction of the

"I" or personal subjectivity, she does not critically examine her construction of community in this text, which creates problems for the efficacy of her activism and narrows her activist vision. She views the large cities in this text as places of captivity and immobility. It is only when Morton establishes herself in a tiny, remote village that she can create the sort of community that lends itself to a sense of self that is grounded in the natural world. There is little examination of how the very existence of this community is reliant on the larger economic centers and commercial trade. In fact, many of her readers are the very whale-watching tourists about whom Morton expresses extreme concern. It is not clear how people who live in the city can contribute to this 62 fight or live the lifestyle that Morton describes. Morton expresses doubt about the economic value that whale-watching imparts to killer whales but does not engage at any greater level with the complex implications of this viewpoint. She does not tell her reader if whales are to be looked at, protected, left alone, imagined, mythologized, valued for their similarities, or valued for their otherworldliness. The single passage that addresses the question of what humans can do to fight the power of corporations which threaten our livelihood and survival on earth is the most problematic of the book: "I believe the power that will stop that insatiable corporate drive is known as love. Fueled by an unassailable source of energy, love has a mysteriously incorruptible capacity to prevail" (298). Here, Morton relies on a motif associated with purity, strength, idealism, hope, and compassion, but gestures further to an absolute truth that defies definition.

This abstraction is meant to embody the life force of community and the power community can wield, but instead it creates something impossible to emulate or fully understand. Activism is not created through an abstract and global force called love. It is the construction of meaning, identity and history in human lives, as Morton herself demonstrates throughout. Even if this love is connected to motherhood, Morton universalizes the mother-child bond. The ubiquitous conceit that activism is undertaken for the sake of the next generation or "our children's children" plays into a sense of martyrdom and self-sacrifice which is otherwise not present in this text. Morton creates a narrative that follows a life passion and a quest for identity and home. The diminishment of all the complexities in this text to a single narrative of "love" is disappointing.

Far more productive is the answer Morton provides at the end of her text: "Are we human enough to extend the rights of humanity to another sentient species? Are we 63 ready to end the silence? I am" (308). In this moment, Morton actualizes a self that is political and powerful. This is where her search leads, not to "love," but to an "I" that can withstand the existence of other subjectivities, the threat of governmental officials, personal loss, and can appreciate whales as "one of the wonders of the world" (309). As

Haraway predicts in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, it is through one's relationships with animals and machines that one can learn how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos (173). It is through a giving up of traditional notions of what constitutes human that one can move into the borderlands and begin to unravel the logic of domination that threatens global health and humanity's own existence. 64

Chapter Three:

Blowing Down the Fences: Activism in Sid Marty's

Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook

In his work of creative nonfiction, Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the

Great Chinook, Sid Marty tells a myriad of stories and histories of southern Alberta. He narrates his personal history in the land, exploring the path of his American ancestors in the region and the journey of his immediate family onto their "ranchette" in Aspen

Valley, the montane region nestled on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains, a thirty minute drive northwest of Pincher Creek. He recounts his experiences as a park warden in Banff, Yoho and Jasper National Parks, and the journey and hardships that have accompanied his career as a writer. And throughout, he returns to the chinook wind and the mythical and physical landscape it inhabits to articulate his unique environmental philosophy that sees time, history and land as fluid, polymorphic forms and community as a "natural" right and a revolutionary tool.

In Leaning on the Wind, Marty constructs a vision of nature that refuses any reliance on borders, binaries or hierarchies. This vision represents, in Marty's opinion, activism's powerful potential: the ability to articulate a new understanding of the natural world that might provide the basis for a just community. Unlike Careless who draws borders around privileged landscapes and appeals to private interests to achieve his pragmatic and limited activist goals or Morton whose activism implicitly honours existing borders by focusing on transgression and exploration of the borderland between humans and whales, Marty rejects hierarchical and divisive constructs. He questions the 65 individualistic act of writing in terms of its activist and political value. Self-consciously challenging his own authority as a writer, Marty interrogates the West's dependence on difference and Other-ing to create value and the disastrous consequences this thinking has had on the natural world. Both a public and private act, writing is always in danger of constructing the same limiting structures he seeks to criticize. Marty deconstructs the often problematic rhetorical ploys that are used to construct 'nature' and 'activism.' This challenges the power of language and its integral role in determining how we understand the environment, but it also suggests that, by laying bare the often hidden ideological constructs (and problems with authorship), the writer can create the space for a more hopeful re-engagement with the natural world and the creation of a subversive, inclusive activism. Having interrogated existing power structures and the binaries they have created - between human and animal, human and landscape, animate and inanimate matter, past and present, and public and private land - he articulates a vision of a just community, making this the most potentially revolutionary text examined in this thesis.

This chapter explores Marty's conception of a natural community, in particular in his description of the Wheelhouse, and examines two scenes from the text - the protest on

Prairie Bluff and his experiences at the sweat lodge - to interrogate his activism which is grounded in the idea of public property and true democracy.

In his essay "Marty and Zieroth: Two Writers from Elsewhere," Tom Wayman calls attention to the lack of critical engagement with Marty's work in the Canadian literary scene. He argues that this talented writer has been overlooked due to his interest in nature as an autonomous force, instead of as a backdrop or a mirror of human psychological states: "his story is important, but these detailed descriptions of what the 66 plants, animals, and landscape are doing or look like continually emphasize that human beings are only one component in the natural order" (47). Ironically, when seen through the critical lens of the ecocritical movement, Marty suffers from exactly the opposite problem. His interest in human communities alongside and as a part of communities of other living and non-living entities results in Marty being doubly marginalized.

Since Aldo Leopold articulated his vision of a natural community in A Sand

County Almanac (1949), the term community has resonated in environmental literature.

Leopold believes that the human species must refigure its part in the natural community, moving from "conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it" (240).

He defines community as inter-species and inclusive, but although he speaks of humans' relationship with nature, he does not describe more than one or two humans in nature at a time. This trend has continued through to nature writing today. Overwhelmingly, in environmental literature, the only human communities mentioned living in concert with nature are "native" populations. In her essay "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo

Imagination", Leslie Marmon Silko describes Pueblo culture as engrained in the natural community of the desert: "families belonged to clans, and it was by clan that the human being joined with the animal and plant world" (273). In The Ecocritical Reader:

Landmarks in Literary Ecology, a compilation of the most influential and canonical ecocritical essays, there is virtually no discussion of anything other than an individualized relationship with nature. Most of these authors subscribe to the idea that environmental destruction would cease if all humans could have this sort of personal and positive experience with nature. The lack of human culture in the "natural communities" these authors describe - each of which is comprised of individual humans in a vast and varied natural world - perpetuates the divide between nature and culture. As Frederick Turner writes in "Cultivating the American Garden":

The ideological opposition of culture and nature - with no mediating term - has

had real consequences. More often than need be, Americans confronted with a

natural landscape have either exploited it or designated it a wilderness area. The

polluter and the ecology freak are two faces of the same coin; they both

perpetuate a theory about nature that allows no alternative to raping it or tying it

up in a plastic bag to protect it from contamination. (45)

Both the "polluter" and the "ecology freak" prize their individual interactions with nature and understand nature as something outside civilization that must be controlled and contained. Marty's blurring of the distinction between nature and culture and his emphasis on human communities, rather than individual experiences in nature, prevent him from perpetuating these dominant and dangerous ideologies of the environmental movement.

These dominant ideologies are evident in familiar environmental tropes which emphasize the distinction between the (naturalized) local resident and the (intrusive) tourist, a ubiquitous construction which depends on the practices of naturalizing and privileging certain relationships in the natural world. As Neil Evernden expounds in his essay "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy": "The tourist can grasp only the superficialities of a landscape, whereas a resident reacts to what has occurred.

He sees a landscape not only as a collection of physical forms, but as evidence of what has occurred there ... The resident is, in short, a part of the place..." (99). The resident that Evernden refers to here is granted an authority based on his/her assumed intimate, 68 personal relationship with their local landscape, a relationship that designates this person a part of the natural community. The tourist who desires a relationship with the landscape (who is not trying to rape or preserve it, but to experience it) and who often interacts with this landscape as part of a large group of other tourists is degraded and labeled ignorant for his or her lack of a personal relationship. In Leaning on the Wind and Switchbacks (in which Marty focuses more closely on his career as a park warden),

Marty challenges these discourses by understanding human communities - whether they be tourists in the national parks where he was a warden, his family on their homestead, or the residents of the south west corner of Alberta - as a part of the natural community.

His descriptions of the natural world are mediated by his relationships with other creatures and other humans, and he relishes the intersections of these communities. He uses humour to celebrate the miscommunications between, for example, bears and humans, and he perpetuates (and creates) the local mythologies that describe connections between the cultures of animals and humans. He breaks down concepts of ownership that prevent the construction of inclusive communities consisting of humans and other living creatures. And, by opening up the concept of community in a way that traditionally environmental literature has not, he offers a new approach to addressing and dealing with environmental issues.

In the first two chapters of Leaning on the Wind, "An Arrowhead" and "How the

Ocean Got Up in the Sky," Marty uses fluid spatial poetics to attack borders and challenge the idea of land as property. This is an important first step in his attempt to theorize a new understanding of the environment and our relationship to it. His discussion of bordered landscapes begins with a description of working as a warden in 69

Yoho, Jasper and Banff National Parks. Once designated as a park, land comes under the

"protection" of political power but is open to the economic and political negotiations that

Marty despises. For Marty, the government's mandate to keep park space "unimpaired" creates another paradoxical, irrational and ultimately destructive relationship towards change in the landscape. The desire to see the park remain unchanged and stagnant echoes the Western world's desire for eternal youth and its hubristic denial of death. The document that ostensibly declares the importance of the land and dedicates it to the public also ties its value to a number of decidedly un-natural considerations. The construction of highways and hotels exponentially increases (through access and in political and economic terms) and severely decreases (in terms of keeping it unimpaired and preserving its mythology, history and ecological viability) the park's value. Having effectively cut the park off from the rest of the natural world, the authors of park policy attempt to remove this increasingly imperiled landscape from the temporal world.

Removing this landscape from the natural processes of time, change and evolution in the name of preservation condemns it to a slow decay. As the visitors' experience of the park becomes increasingly mediated, Marty suggests that there is no natural or productive view of change in this bordered and politically-constituted space.

The park's borders are policed by wardens who work on behalf of the government to restrict individuals' ability to enter the park and police the activities of those who are admitted. Marty is clearly ambivalent towards his role as warden. Tasked with policing this landscape to ensure it is sufficiently "wild," his occupation is a symbol of the unnatural binary constructs that have destructive consequences for the natural world. His 70 description of the death of the bear Four-Toes illustrates the perilous practice of fencing in wilderness in order to protect it:

I don't see Four-Toes, the seven-hundred-pound grizzly bear that my partner and I

trapped at Stoney Warden cabin on the Cascade River, nor hear the metallic crash

when Four-Toes hits the barred gate of the culvert trap, trying to get at us. I don't

see how he looks dead quite as often now; sometimes I forget why he was not

allowed to live, in the one place left where grizzly bears are supposed to be

protected. "The parks are hereby dedicated to the people of Canada, to be left,

unimpaired, for future generations." It was an ideal we lived by, when we could.

A bit of it died with each passing year, as the railway twinners, highway twinners

and real estate developers pursued their politically approved destruction of the

Bow Valley. A bit of that idealism died week by week with every game animal

crushed under the wheels of progress in Banff National Car Park. A bit of it died

in me, every day. (5)

The borders - the grizzly cage, the park boundaries, "Banff National Car Park" (as he calls it) - result in destruction. For Marty, the death of Four-Toes, the grizzly bear, metaphorically represents the death of wilderness - which in turn is closely linked to the end of his own idealism which, within the bordered space of the park, "died in me, every day." Unlike the dramatic death of the bear, the wilderness (along with Marty's idealism) is slowly strangled and closed off within the boundaries of a park, unable to remain wild and in danger of being destroyed by its inability to evolve and change.

Marty provides a contrasting image of human interaction with the natural world in his description of the Wheelhouse, a shack he and his family built near their home. I read 71 the Wheelhouse as a metaphor of cohabitation and cooperation between Marty and the animals that reside on his land and as an attempt by the writer to re-imagine the borders between species' spaces. In this windy landscape, his descriptions of the natural world are imbued with a sense of permeability, movement and indeterminacy:

I call it the Wheelhouse; there is an old iron wheel bolted to the wall by the

entrance. It's a relic from an old horse-drawn hay rake I found half-buried in the

willows along our north fence. Give this good Earth a chance, and it will bury all

our improvements - amen. I think of it now as a ship's wheel, bolted permanently

on a course that steers this shanty into the prevailing southwest wind.... Its lares

and penates keep changing. Right now they are the golden eagles that fly low

over its roof, the little brown bats that summer under its board-and-batten siding,

the antique white mare, Candy, who likes to scratch her buttocks on its corners,

and the chinook, which likes to grab the Wheelhouse in its paws occasionally and

shake it like a Christmas present, to see what might rattle out and run for cover.

(7)

The normal notion of a building whose walls demarcate human from animal space (with the exception of those animals domesticated and differentiated as pets) and civilization from nature is replaced by the Wheelhouse, a space open to the elements. The transient nature of its residents - human, animal and the more intangible forces of the natural world - suggest the autonomous right of all these beings and things to inhabit this space without the claim to ownership. The name-sake wheel, displaced from its origins as a part of harvesting equipment forged by men in order to produce food and profit, is, instead, enveloped by the landscape and undergoing a natural decomposition. Like the architects of public policy, Marty employs a romantic notion of the interminability of the natural world. However, in his notion, nature will only survive and flourish if it is left alone: "Give this good Earth a chance, and it will bury all our improvements - amen" (7).

The decaying wheel's proximity to the fence - the only border in this landscape - suggests the impermanence of that boundary marker. The wheel acts as a compass, a reminder of where we have been and where we are going, and its movement through the landscape (physical, temporal and metaphoric) demonstrates how fluidly all things and beings transition, metamorphose and take on new meanings and identities. In spite of his ambivalence towards the sodbusters of his ancestry, the multiple purposes and connectedness of the wheel with the natural world in this scene allow Marty to remove any stigma from this object related to its previous incarnations (14). The constant evolution of all things in nature is set in direct contrast to the stagnation that takes place within the borders of a park.

Marty, determined to use his writing to challenge ingrained notions of permanent boundaries, emphasizes the nautical connotations of the wheelhouse and the wheel-as- compass to connect and confuse the difference between the prairie and the ocean. He describes the landscape before him as "the prairie oceanic" (7), its grasses "a dun- coloured surf breaking through the trees to lap against the rimrock and the clouds" (8).

This connection attacks the pervasive belief that land, and especially the prairies, is somehow static, permanent and unchanging as contrasted with the turbulent waters of the ocean. Situating this landscape in the geological terms of the ice ages allows Marty to employ a broad and fluid conception of time that demonstrates the absurdity of humanity's desire to a "fix" certain privileged spaces and "protect" them from change. 73

Imagining the extinct lakebed beneath the grasses and buttercups, Marty notes that "in the middle of winter, when the chinook begins to blow, I have watched in disbelief as the snow turns to melt-water, the clock turns backwards, and an eerie version of Lake

Livingstone returns, for a few days, to lap at the edge of our garden" (24). The past exists in the land, and change is both irresistible and necessary for survival. The importance of his vision of impermanence and fluidity is that it embraces continual change. One example of this flexible history of landscape is the "bizarre rock sandwiches" which occur when older limestone gets pushed over layers of younger limestone by geo-seismic forces to form what Marty calls "reversed chronologies" (20). The tangled chronology of the limestone acts as a metaphor reminding the reader that history resurfaces repeatedly, that there is no logical "progression" or geological truth to be found among the layers, only the gentle to-and-fro or cataclysmic sweep of change: "The strangerstone tells us that the only constant is change. Nothing is fixed or permanent, not even what is written in stone" (25). The twisted history of the rock sandwiches prevents Marty's geological conception of time and history (based literally on the layers of deposits beneath the earth's surface) from falling prey to the same authoritative, linear history that is written on the horizontal landscape.

Marty's relationship to the Wheelhouse is complicated by his role as owner.

Before attempting to deconstruct borders and dismantle the economic/political construct of land as property, he must first address his desire to own this property and retain it throughout the generations in the family name. In order to define ownership, individuals erect boundaries and Marty expresses satisfaction in knowing that his sons "say this will be Marty land forever" (10). At the same time he acknowledges the history of indigenous 74 peoples in this landscape and notes that even those with the longest roots and the most legitimate claim to the land were unable to retain rights to it in the face of European

(white) settlers. Marty is self-conscious about the illusory and perhaps offensive nature of his claim to the land: "ambition does not rule the drylands. The sun and the wind rule the drylands" (13). He gives credence to his claim by demonstrating the impossibility of anchoring land to a piece of property: " 'Time,' sang the wind. 'Mine,' it sang. It was my neighbour's land that was in motion just then, and the Wheelhouse was inside its hourglass, a world of whirling topsoil" (14). The hourglass image again emphasizes the landscape's existence within the temporal world and recalls Marty's rejection of the attempts to "maintain" and "protect" bordered and isolated parklands by preventing change. He both contextualizes the brevity of the human reign - his own and that of the human race on earth - and illustrates its fundamentally illusory nature by employing imperialist and materialist language in a description of the expanse of time the wind has ruled this landscape ('Mine,' it sang). His enthusiastic portrayal of the Wheelhouse being slowly buried by the sand of the hourglass as the wind reclaims its territory suggests his acceptance of the futility of his own claim to the land. This calls into question the definition of land itself and the imposition of property rights that logically follow the establishment of such a definition. The natural world is constantly moving independent of any political or economic restrictions, and "Marty land," a self-conscious and self- mocking title, is clearly identified as an ideological construct that has little power or influence over the land.

Marty continues his attack on linear notions of time and the hidden ideologies they manifest by describing the history of the land in a vertical framework, as a series of

4I address Marty's relationship to indigenous history and ritual later in this chapter. 75 layers. This rhetorical strategy provides a sharp contrast to the dominant constructions of map-making that describe land as flat, horizontal packages (and, viewed from above, display the distinctive patchwork quilt pattern forged by various economic negotiations of homesteading that have become iconic of the Canadian prairies). Marty replaces the omnipotent view with an intense focus on the layers that are unseen from this privileged, elevated vantage point. Layers which, unaltered by mankind, more accurately portray the linkages between time, earth and its inhabitants: "Without the animate, there would be much less inanimate mass. Life piled on life makes mountains higher where new life forms find a niche. The mountain goat walks on a sea floor raised into the clouds" (19).

Marty's descriptions recall Laurence Ricou's distinction in Vertical Man, Horizontal

World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction between the vertical man who is

"waking, consciousness, health" and the horizontal earth who is "sleeping, unconscious, debilitation" (xii). Marty describes the land in terms of the geological changes it has undergone and blurs existing binary definitions that separate mountains and sea floors, representing them instead as landforms in the complementary terms of their creation. In a constant state of transformation, the landscape resists its incarnation as property and refuses descriptions that rely on borders.

Marty's description of the transformation of animate matter into inanimate matter blurs the borders between life and death:

The mute stone is warm in my hand; hard clay held by living clay. I hold what I

know to be certain, what one day this body will become, and when I put it down,

minute traces of my body (a few old epidermal cells, a little perspiration) stay on

the rock, as if this mortal clay of mine were making overtures already to its own 76

death. And so, in this minute at least, I imagine a fixed position where some mote

of myself will abide eternally in this beloved landscape. (22)

The stone and his hand are created out of the same material at different stages of its journey through the landscape. This connection challenges the Western world's investment in emphasizing difference and constructing borders between the body and the landscape. Instead of propagating the idea that humans are more valuable because of a long-articulated separation from other natural creatures, Marty suggests that the most valuable of human experiences constitute a recognition of the convergence between body and landscape. No matter what policy reform is argued or environmental group advocated, the writer is best positioned to focus attention on the bigger picture: the destructive use of binaries, borders and hierarchies that foster the political, cultural and social conditions that lead to the neglect of this relationship.

The role of writer comes under greater scrutiny as Marty explores the tension between the personal and political in environmental activism in the chapter, "Headlights at the Grizzly Den." Marty describes a protest put on by the Alberta Wilderness

Association (AWA) to stop the advancement of a Shell Oil logging road up Prairie Bluff.

Defining his role as that of a writer and journalist, Marty accompanies his friend Mike

Judd (the lone protester) as he confronts the Shell workers. Standing on the side of the bluff in pre-morning light, Marty and Judd use their bodies to block the bulldozers from continuing up the mountain. The operations of class, economics, environmentalism, capitalism, and justice are laid bare on the side of the mountain as Marty attempts to understand the complexities of his own activism and forge a relationship between writing and land. One of Marty's central positions in Leaning on the Wind is that all land is intrinsically public land. It has multiple users, inhabitants, a plethora of purposes, and a history that is larger than any one individual, group, system, or species. More specifically, his belief is that natural resources - land for recreation, oil and gas, wilderness, and animals - belong to the people of Canada and they have a right to determine how they are managed and who (if anybody) is able to profit from their exploitation. Marty argues that individual Canadians do not have a voice in the current political climate, pointing out that, while eighty percent of Albertans strongly support preservation, the government elected to represent them sells (often, in fact, gives away) the rights to public land to private companies and investors. He questions government's right to the land, its ability to protect it, and interrogates the motivations and actions of the courts in resolving disputes between companies and protesters. Marty expresses discomfort with resisting the law. However, the actions and beliefs of Alberta's pro- business, capitalist government who displays a neo-conservative interest in the protection of private property rights (and almost religious belief in the virtues of ownership of property) creates a situation where people and nature are deprived of their political voice.

In recognition of its fragility, biodiversity and aesthetic value, Prairie Bluff has been designated a Prime Protection Zone by the Department of Energy and Natural

Resources. In the case of Prairie Bluff, two pieces of legislation that promise to correct this power imbalance, the Prime Protection Zone and the Environmental Impact

Assessments, are not honored by the government or Shell. In what Marty calls a

"legalized assault" (321) on the land, this same government grants drilling permits to

Shell in the protected zone. Marty notes that conservationists only challenged two out of four and a half thousand drilling permits in this time period and both challenges were 78 initiated because they were related to land designated as a Prime Protection Zone. He defends the "brave" principle behind the original protective legislation: "the very idea that something should be allowed to exist that wasn't generating money" (330). In spite of

Marty's endorsement of the philosophical underpinnings of this legislation, he acknowledges its inability to bind the government, in any real way, to protect this land from development. Like the park legislation he has come to despise, this process draws borders around a few select landscapes which are asked to bear the burden of the health of the ecosystem. It becomes a focus for conservationists who are intent on protecting these successful instances of preservation and utopic principles that are easy to support and defend. Unfortunately this legislation seems to embody the effective machinations of hegemony that deny real change and provide an extremely powerful opportunity for wealthy oil companies to control the discourses and drain the resources of the environmental movement simply by repeatedly attempting to drill in these areas. This forces conservationists to spend time and money defending their successes (rather than creating new ones).5 Prime Protection Zones act as a tool to pacify environmentalists and the voting public, declaring intention instead of taking action that would protect and preserve the land.

Because the legislation that might give the land and its inhabitants a voice is ineffectual and serves the government and big business's motives, Marty, as a writer, feels strongly that part of his task is to provide an alternative voice. Clearly uncomfortable with this "borderline" position, he contradictorily insists that he not be mistaken for a protester and repeatedly confesses discomfort with the role of writer and

5 In To Save the Wild Earth, Ric Careless comments on the pervasiveness of this tactic employed by oil companies to distract and wear down environmental opposition. 79 the power that accompanies the authorized and authorizing voice. Marty employs a complex rhetorical strategy that links language and land. In Marty's construction, language and land exist in the public sphere, each has multiple users, each is an environment in which we live, and each can be exploited for their respective power and resources. As a writer interested in conserving the land, Marty struggles with the diverse potentials of the written word, recognizing both its entrenchment in the structures of power that seek to harm the land and its potentially revolutionary and emancipatory power. Marty's tortuous decision to define himself as writer is accompanied by an anxiety that recalls his difficulty acting as a warden, the fear that his participation is a tacit endorsement of a destructive power structure. In order for language to be a useful tool for the expression of his ideological beliefs, he must, at every turn, recognize and address its power and set it in contrast to the land's voicelessness and its resulting vulnerability to being colonized by the language of power and economic value. For

Marty, the limits of our language will define the limits of the natural world.

Written documents are extremely problematic in Leaning on the Wind. Marty's ambivalence towards the written word is interesting in relation to his insistence on being identified as a writer during the Prairie Bluff protest. In a quote that emphasizes these contradictory emotions, Marty notes the fickleness and danger of putting a pen to paper:

"It's always amazed me how much damage can be done to entire mountain ranges just with a few words scribbled by a ballpoint pen" (326). Ironically it is the absence of a letter - a signed permission by the Chief Forest Ranger, Art Evans - that provides the legal basis for Judd's case against Shell. This letter becomes a symbol of authority and power. Its absence is the weapon wielded by the protesters and it is the absence of 80 language that might save the environment. However, it quickly becomes clear that the letter is inconsequential - the power wielded by the legal and governmental authorities is absolute. The Shell workers write a letter of their own granting themselves the authority to move forward even without the signature of the Forest Ranger, and the legal system supports Shell's claim to the land. Marty confronts the reader with the letter itself.

Stripped of the legitimizing ceremonies of the political and judicial world, it is revealed as a blunt instrument of power, completing the disenfranchisement of the protesters and the landscape. Judd's desperate and impassioned verbal pleas yield no results: "It's greed!

That's all it is. After all the bullshit, it just gets down to one thing: just greed!" (330).

Judd captures the central injustice of the moment, reducing all the players - the company workers, the absent owners tucked safely away in Calgary high rises, the provincial and national governments, and the entire capitalist "democratic" system - to duplicitous money-hungry exploiters. In a kind of Foucauldian power dynamic, Judd is defeated by a letter with no author or authorization, manufactured directly by the machinations of power. His simplistic and almost primal howl, an example of language rooted in the body and ripped from the soul, is powerless and inarticulate in the face of the hastily scribbled note.

Writing is a borderline act - a bridge between public and private worlds, concerns and responsibilities. Marty positions writing as a job requiring sacrifice, hard work, political maneuvering, and the overcoming of adversity. His insistence that he is "here as a journalist" (325) distances him from the emotional and political stance Judd takes as a volunteer protester, as someone not profiting economically from the events that take place on Prairie Bluff. Within the protest scene, Marty positions himself sympathetically 81 with the workers. Like them, he works for the money to feed his family and his work exists in the public, economic, social sphere. One could even argue that he profits from environmental destruction, one of the subjects of the books he writes and sells. On the other hand, he has no boss, he does not need to obey orders, he can certainly write and live by his ideals, and his work also exists in and takes direct inspiration from the very private sphere of his life and family. In the protest scene at Prairie Bluff, there is a clear separation between Marty and Judd and the workers. His activism exists in his written account of the incident, complete with his theory on government interference, the role of volunteerism, and the necessity for environmental policing. He creates an artificial border between his activist self and his writer self who is present on the road that day.

The current journalistic trend whereby journalists claim "neutrality" is an absurd but effective rhetorical device that allows a writer to grant her/himself authority. In the face of this trend, it is hard to criticize Marty for attempting to challenge their overwhelmingly conservative, corporate "neutrality" with his own. At the same time, there is nothing coy, detached or theoretical about these descriptions; Marty explicitly attacks the system and its shareholders in a way that Careless and Morton refuse to do. His description of Judd's breakdown is heart-wrenching, an empathetic attempt to convey the depth of the injustice and his friend's helplessness. Marty understands his position of writer in these activist terms as well: "If there is anything that words can do to breast the force of this fresh assault on the land, then let me ready my arsenal now.... If the land has a voice, the

Boomers have not heard it yet. If, in these pages, I can sometimes hit the notes that echo and harmonize with that sustaining voice, I will be satisfied "(15). Marty's activist goal - to provide a voice that speaks on behalf of the natural world - necessarily relies on 82 language to challenge the silences and absences in political and cultural debate and draw attention to the borders society constructs between nature and culture.

However, the power of language is harnessed for both sides of the environmental debate. As Marty writes the protest scene with an eye to its political and cultural complexities, it is the written word, in the form of the infamous letter, that determines the destruction of Prairie Bluff. The developers, along with the provincial government, use the written word to undo the history of the land and prey on ignorance to engender support for their exploitative practices. Marty describes the developers' practice of re­ naming; they change the name, Three Rivers Dam, to Oldman River Dam in order to downplay the fact that the dam blocked three major waterways. Ever anxious about the capacity of language to cause and sanction environmental destruction, Marty attempts to correct this imbalance. Where the corporate elite seeks to write over landscapes to diminish their value, Marty responds by presenting a proliferation of names and stories, a tactic he also employs when describing various natural phenomena, multiplying names and providing alternative histories of each landscape. For example, the Rocky Mountains were the "Shining Mountains" to the fur traders and "The Backbone of the Earth" to the

Blackfoot (18). After describing the meteorological and geological origins of the chinook wind, Marty also provides the North Peigan name, 'aisiksop'u or oily wind, and describes its meaning and origin. This dismantling and reconstructing multiple histories of the land is powerful activist work, a response to narrow colonial and economic narratives.

In the chapter "The Year of Knives," Marty provides his personal parallel to

Judd's breakdown on the side of Prairie Bluff. The connection between language and 83 land is vital in Marty's own "breakdown" scene where, for a time, he fails to navigate the divide between his theoretical concept of writing and its real, practical value. Marty's breakdown is brought about by the hospitalization of his son Paul and the severe financial stress that accompanies his illness. At the depth of his misery, Marty writes: "Who was that young fool back then who would put his family's security at risk on behalf of a principle, on behalf of what he saw then as his integrity! . . . Yes, yes. But you wanted more than that; you wanted your work to matter. You wanted to protect the national parks; you wanted to save the earth" (190-191). In a provocative contrast to Careless,

Marty decries his idealistic naivety, vanity and self-obsession that led to his desire to save the earth. He shifts the importance from the earth to his family. This move highlights the personal investment necessary to "save" the earth and the hardships that accompany a decision to refuse participation in the economic systems responsible for the exploitation of the natural world. He uses his own life to comment on the class differentiation that exists, for instance, between workers and protestors in the Prairie Bluff standoff, a disparity that can act as an impediment to any kind of large-scale, unified action on environmental issues involving both groups. Many volunteers are privileged people with the time and money to protest (although Marty and Judd may not fit into this category).

When they expect the workers they confront to do their part, they inflict their greater social power and moral superiority on people overwhelmed by other concerns. When his son gets sick, Marty becomes all too aware of the oppressive power of our economic system.

Marty regains his composure by returning to the natural world. He grabs onto an old bullpine and, humbled by the power of nature, realizes he was wrong and that "it is 84 the earth that will save you" (191). Marty's version of salvation does initially resemble

Careless's spiritual quest to access the earth's moral and spiritual teachings; however, the contrasts between the two versions of activism become apparent quickly. Instead of moving into the comfortable environs of the halls and backrooms of the political elite,

Marty decides to hunt for an elk that will feed his family through the winter. As Wayman points out in his essay on Marty in A Country Not Considered: "an active relation to the wilderness, to the natural world, is often paired or merged with the family. ... In order to be at home on this planet, the writers imply, we need to understand its natural processes"

(73). The land will provide what his writing cannot, and he, in turn, will protect the land with his writing. The elk comes to represent nature's contribution to Marty's writing and the source of his inspiration, his family. Because hunting is only possible outside the confines of parks or protection systems, Marty's pursuit of the elk reinforces his writing philosophy which focuses on dismantling borders and challenging the worship of private property. It also requires a deep knowledge and respect of the animal and the area.

Marty acknowledges all these aspects with a detailed discussion of the physical attributes, multiple names, historical accounts and evasive habits of elk. He also argues that all animals should have the right to hunt including human animals, cheekily calling it a belief in "animal rights" (194). Marty's writing and activism will help preserve a wilderness where wild animals can flourish; in return, Marty and his family are sustained by the presence and access to this wildlife. During the long and strenuous hunt that follows, Marty emphasizes this point, pitting his own survival against that of the elk's.

His eventual success not only feeds his family for the winter but functions metaphorically to confirm and re-establish the value of his writing and philosophy. 85

The idea that nature is best served by the dismantling of borders is illustrated metaphorically by the chinook wind's - and in turn, nature's - complete disrespect for the human desire to border and protect the land they live on as private property. When the chinook wind dismantles a neighbour's No Trespassing sign and flings it onto Marty's land, he interprets it as a symbol of the perverse and seductive power of private property which ultimately destroys community and local arrangements. This is the final tenet of his environmental philosophy: that a sense of community, an interest in one's own locality - the land, the people, the history, the future - is the only way to challenge global power structures and to re-imagine our relationship with the land. In his words: "I fear the day when we are all confined within the borders of mere property, when our interests become narrower and narrower and we have less and less of a common purpose, less and less responsibility to the land, and to each other; the day we start locking our doors"

(334). Marty reiterates this point using the example of conservative Albertan ranchers and farmers who suffer from insularity and a dislike of dissenting opinions at the peril of their own livelihood:

What defeats them is their own stubborn individualism, their dislike of not

having total control, without regulation or caveat, over their property.... Soon

they must decide either to stand together, maintain a common front as a

community and protect the agricultural zoning, or to fall, one by one, until the

names of the founders disappear from the M.D. map. (336)

Marty seems sympathetic to their motivations, recognizing their intimate relationship to the land and an established reciprocal relationship with their neighbours. However, their stubborn dedication to unfettered ownership is extremely harmful. Blind distrust of 86 government intervention and resistance to making a political stand that might require communal access to "owned" land will ultimately result in its loss to developers. This self-defeating ideological straitjacket echoes Marty's own conversion narrative. He too wished to resist overt political action even when present at the environmental protest at

Prairie Bluff. He instinctively wants to slow down the rate of change, not contribute to it.

However, maintaining the status quo with the idea that one can slow down the movement of time proves a dangerous fantasy, one that Marty believes serves the dangerous dealings of the provincial government and developers. There is a rich history of radical conservatism in Canadian history. For example, our overwhelmingly popular (and successful) universal health care system did not, despite any corporatist attempts at revisionist history, originate in the minds and actions of leftist radicals. Small prairie farming communities facing eradication at the hands of larger capitalist interests realized that this radical action was precisely what was necessary to protect a conservative, communal way of life (Houston and Boan).

Marty ends his book with an anecdote that centres on the dissolution of borders, in this case between individuals, communities and nature. Marty's description of his experience in the sweat lodge of the Piikani people in the hopes of reaching some sort of

"friendship and understanding between our races" (341) contains his clearest articulation of the potentially revolutionary notions of community. As the heat of the sweat lodge intensifies, Marty describes his revelatory moment:

For long moments, I fought off a wave of panic, of claustrophobia, an impulse to

bolt out through the flap into the daylight and the cool air of May. I closed my

mouth against the heat and steam, and my ears were ringing, my eyes bulging. 87

But the voice of the singers swelled on. Pressed shoulder to shoulder with the

men, I felt the life force of the people surging through me again. [...] The power

of the tribe lifted me with the song. I let my sense of my own boundaries drift,

drift until I no longer felt alien and separate. (343)

In the communal space of the sweat lodge, Marty is initially reluctant to remove the borders he uses to define his personal and historical identity - these borders remained un- breached in his earlier enthusiastic description of the space of the Wheelhouse. Marty is now convinced that, in order to execute a fundamental paradigm shift in human attitudes towards the environment, a change in human personal interaction is necessary. Divisions between communities and individuals and the accompanying isolationism and estrangement has lead to an increasing powerlessness (as in Marty's description of the atomized Alberta ranchers and farmers unable to work together) which erodes democratic ideals. This atomized individualism and resulting inability to unite only reinforces the already dominant power of the current elite and is as much a factor in environmental destruction as our dependence on oil and gas. Marty identifies the crux of the problem as a denial of community: "We are too obsessed with individuality here, and it undercuts our ability to safeguard the community of plants, animals and people that sustains us all"

(352).

Marty's description of his participation in an ancient Piikani ceremony does contain some problematic elements of cultural appropriation. He employs a system of racial stereotyping that threatens to undo his inclusive vision of community. He attempts to emphasize his "powerless" position by noting that he is placed in one of the hottest spots during the ritual; the "sly chuckling" of the Piikani people around him confirm his 88 suspicions. Sympathizing with the native men about the destructive force of white colonization in Canada, he adopts a self-deprecating ironic tone that both highlights his identity as a white man and attempts to separate himself from other white men. By describing himself as "pigmentally challenged Napikwan, a member of the tribe of white

Seizers" (339), Marty marks himself as a white man who can see himself from the position of the Other. This is Marty's way of granting himself an authority to speak on behalf of and about the Piikani people. At the end of the sweat, he confesses to a disappointed Crazy Bear that he could not see the spirits floating around the room during the chant, that he had not earned the right to see them. Marty's honesty about the limits of what he could see, hear and translate, is, in some way, very positive; it keeps him from colonizing the scene. At the same time, Marty exhibits none of the angst he displayed in the Prairie Bluff showdown related to the potential abuses of power to which he, as author, is always susceptible.

This absence creates questions about Marty's motivations in joining the sweat lodge. In How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers in Canada, Helen Hoy explores some of the dangers non-Native writers encounter when describing Native traditions. She notes that there is a "propensity of non-Natives to employ notions of tradition and cultural difference to explain everything Indian" (5), and a desire to evoke specificities of a cultural scene and group to make, in the words of Stuart Hall, "a kind of difference that doesn't make a difference of any kind" (qtd. in Hoy 5). By suggesting that

"difference functions asymmetrically" (5), Hoy provides a model that we can use to explain how Marty's racial difference in this scene is not equivalent to the racial difference the Piikani people experience in their everyday lives. Marty is not a 89 marginalized figure, even in a situation where he is not versed in the cultural language, and his desire to reach some sort of equal communication and building of community with the Piikani people always exists within a complex system of power inequities. The sweat lodge scene contains some vibrant images of the potentials of a shared community not based on race, class or history, but by attempting to annul the difference between himself and a systematically oppressed group, he remains in a position of privilege. It seems unlikely that the same coming-together would be possible if a Piikani person joined a non-aboriginal cultural rite. This powerful vision of community remains limited and lacks revolutionary possibilities because it tries to write over without acknowledging the framework of power relations that underlies Marty's contemporary relationship with the Piikani and the white man's historic and cultural relationship with various native groups in Canada. Like the fences around parkland Marty despises, before removing the borders between the Piikani and himself and recognizing humanity's radical sameness, these same borders and hierarchical constructs must be acknowledged.

Throughout Leaning on the Wind, Marty attempts to transcend these limitations by understanding writing as activism, as a way to create community and address environmental change. Marty identifies the problem in the chapter "The Train That

Flew":

It is very much in the interests of the developmentalists and their political

accomplices to keep young minds buttoned to the stunner, and to discourage, via

their cuts to the school curriculum, the proliferation of knowledge about local

history, local culture, local ecosystems. The ignorant, rootless and uninformed

are meat for the multinational grinder. (238) 90

Marty's solution is to create an archive of stories and local knowledge. He describes his job as "remembering" (304) and specifically links the value of this sort of history-making and conservation with the creation and preservation of community:

I realize why some stories do not translate well. The stories arise out of the

common experience of a community, and without the community to supply the

context in which the stories occur - what the writer calls explication - the stories

lose their dramatic or comedic force. As in the case of Blackfoot legends, without

the cultural context, they sound like simplistic yarns or like fairy tales to our ears.

(236)

Stories may be culturally specific but Marty argues that the same grains and strands of narrative run through all stories and these similarities can be the basis for forging a relationship between different communities: "What is surprising is how interrelated the stories are, how they so often seem to be variations on a few protean, seminal tales"

(230). Drawing on humour and common experiences, stories subsume difference in the moment of their telling. Stories are all written in a common language for Marty; they are extra-linguistic. This makes them potentially revolutionary. Using story as a natural archive of human experiences in and with the land is, for Marty, a way to "refuse to forget what was lost, and refusing, decline to stamp a mindless approval on what has replaced it" (305). For Christopher Cokinos, too, "histories, like species, can go extinct"

(8), and Ulrich Beck argues that "only if nature is brought into people's everyday images, into the stories they tell, can its beauty and its suffering be seen and focused on" (1, qtd. in Buell's Writing for an Endangered World). 91

In spite of Marty's persistence in challenging dominant borders and binaries, he continues to rely on the binary between city and country, rural and urban. He never expands the idea that all people live in a relationship with nature to include those in urban centres. Marty's lack of critique of this border between city and country is an unfortunate oversight and limits his discussion of locality and community. By focusing solely on rural and park landscapes, Marty perpetuates a hierarchical and dangerous binary, the very problem his environmental philosophy seeks to combat. However, in a paradoxical fashion, this weakness upholds the strength of his argument, even if it highlights one of his personal blind spots. It draws attention to the danger of all binaries. If he challenged and dismantled the borders between country and city by seeing storied histories of humans in all environments and the same potential for a positive community in urban centres, Marty would begin to articulate a vision of true democracy and set up a philosophical position from which revolutionary change could occur. Even this single binary inhibits the potential of Marty's activism.

Sid Marty's collection of diverse stories and histories, Leaning on the Wind, articulates and demonstrates his philosophy that the preservation of stories and histories is a vital part of the conservation of the earth. It reads like an archive - a history of experiences and epistemologies. Its autobiographical content further works to define the connection between the activism in Marty's life and the activism that is the book itself.

Ultimately, writing becomes Marty's primary activist medium, and the relation of story and history, his most important tool to effect change. In a way that Morton and Careless allude to but never explicitly acknowledge, Marty demonstrates that the text that describes one's activist journey succeeds most powerfully if it enacts the writer's activist 92 philosophy. In "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," Jim

Cheney argues that ethics is essentially narrative in form. He understands stories as binding "self and geography ... together in a narrative which locates us in the moral space of defining relations" and notes that this space is always "at the same time the space we live in physically" (10). In this formulation, community is inclusive of the land, animals, plants, and humans, and the stories we tell about this community allow us to take responsibility for the role we play within it. Marty's injunction that "our way must be to war with words, to war without violence" (353) emphasizes the role writing and literature play in shaping cultural and societal values. In Lawrence Buell's words:

Although the creative and critical arts may seem remote from the arenas of

scientific inquiry and public policy, clearly they are exercising, however

unconsciously, an influence upon the emerging culture of environmental concern,

just as they have played a part in shaping as well as merely expressing every other

aspect of human culture. (1-2)

In the twenty-first century, this is still a contentious position. Careless may write a book about environmental activism but in it, he preaches the importance of political action and ethical compromise because there is not enough time for other methodologies. Morton might agree that it is more important to write letters to important government officials in the Fisheries Department and contact powerful international environmental organizations than it is to write a book about those experiences. And yet both choose to recount their campaigns in a cohesive, written form that emphasizes narrative and revelatory experiences. Marty self-consciously struggles with the importance of his writing to any political cause. At times he seems to agree with Edward Abbey that "we need no more 93 words on the matter. What we need now are heroes. And heroines. About a million of them. One brave deed is worth a thousand books" (152). And yet, his text demonstrates the fallacy of Abbey's construction of the difference between a book and the world.

Marty attacks the prevalence of borders and the reliance on difference in Western society because it leads to these sorts of false dichotomies. Texts and reality are the same thing; the physical entities in nature and the mythical/cultural meaning we confer on them cannot be separated. Any attempt to do so is merely another ideological construction. So the act of redefining those mythical/cultural constructions while observing, and being part of, the physical changes in nature is not only vital for mounting a challenge to capitalist hegemony but also an important activist act - in Marty's terms, an act that is more effectual than standing on the side of a mountain in protest. The narratives of wilderness that place nature outside of human culture, the narratives of colonialism, economy, individuality, and political freedom, are powerful components of the on-going environmental crisis. Marty's challenge to these narratives and his creation of a new archive of stories that seek a boundary-less space where a just community is built on a strong relationship with local surroundings, is an essential step in re-conceptualizing the foundations and systems of Western North American society in order to stem the tide of environmental destruction. 94

Conclusion We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. -Aldo Leopold

It may seem somewhat paradoxical that, in a thesis that endorses the removal of ideological and political borders and rejects atomized individualism in favour of a more communal approach to environmental activism, each of the narratives discussed here is autobiographical. However, while Ric Careless, Alexandra Morton and Sid Marty write about personal experience, each is engaged in a complex negotiation between their individual subjectivity and their hopes for a community where their personal activism has a deeper meaning. Each text focuses, in part, on three important negotiations in the creation of such a community - the establishment of a balance between local and global concerns, an interrogation of the value of "sameness" and "difference" within communities, and an examination of the methods of policing the actions of individuals and corporations within a community. These issues resonate in the broader environmental movement which is in a constant battle to balance these dialectics.

Popular and pervasive narratives that present the environmentalist as an "outsider,"

"hippie" or "hiker" who achieves an authentic relationship with nature only when he or she is alone in it (Tallmadge 31) serve to ostracize large sectors of society, uphold the cult of the individual, and limit the effectiveness of environmental activism. Each of the authors discussed in this thesis either explicitly or implicitly struggles to articulate their activism in a manner that addresses this historical penchant for individualistic heroic narratives. The most promising ideas and ideals in these texts are born of the author's ability to constantly survey the ideology in which he or she is lodged. The question is no 95 longer whether or not an emphasis on community is necessary; it is, rather, what should this community look like to best combat the underlying ideological framework that perpetuates environmental destruction.

Individualistic heroic narratives are, in part, responsible for the propensity of environmentalists to argue that it is the duty of human beings to "save the earth."

Ironically, if the true goal of the environmental movement is to protect other living things from human harm, our self-destructive environmental behavior, even when taking into account the danger it poses to some other species, represents an extremely effective solution. The effect of our disappearance on other species would be negligible (a far cry from the catastrophic consequences of the disappearance of coral reef or plankton). The real hope of the environmental movement, then, might more accurately be viewed as a desire to "save" humanity from itself, and, as Careless, Morton and Marty understand, this process requires a serious engagement with language. The ways in which we write about nature and narrate our experiences within it provide keys to understanding how we have arrived at our current environmental crisis and how we might effectively deal with it in the future. As Deluca notes: "If places are not found but constructed through political struggle, then place construction is fundamentally a rhetorical process and it is as rhetoric, not history, that the myths of wilderness and environmentalism must be judged"

(6). Ecocriticism has focused on the integral role metaphors play in determining and perpetuating our understanding of nature. Barbara Novak declares that the metaphors we use to describe the environment result in "a powerful self-image, a moral and social energy that could be translated into action" (qtd. in Philippon 6). In "Caring for

Creation," Max Oelschlaeger argues that "useful metaphors are likely more important 96 than any other linguistic matter in a time of ecological crisis" (qtd. in Philippon 22). The writers I engage with in this thesis have more in common than their desire to change the environmentally-destructive practices of North American society. They all live in

Western Canada and are conscious of an overlapping set of environmental problems.

They also share a socio-political climate as white North Americans of approximately the same age. In spite of these similarities, they articulate three very different visions of activism.

The different metaphors employed by Careless, Morton and Marty dramatize their differing environmental philosophies. Careless uses the metaphor of wilderness, which is closely tied to his transcendent, almost religious view of an untouched and pristine nature. His descriptions present wilderness as a privileged space - a remote and transcendent location that exists outside the messy realms of politics, culture and social problems - where a unique, sacred connection with nature can be forged. His activist strategies centre on defining and then protecting wilderness spaces as parks. Morton's vision is rooted in matriarchal metaphors as she employs the mother-child bond to establish her connection with the killer whales off Vancouver Island and to articulate her vision of a just community. Morton, whose activism focuses on this matriarchal connection, is much more concerned with community than Careless. At the same time her environmental philosophy privileges a certain kind of difference, dependent as it is on the empathy resulting from shared female experience. Sid Marty infuses his text with a proliferation of metaphors. The Wheelhouse, Yoho and Banff National Parks and the

Sweat Lodge could all be read as metaphors for Marty's relationship with nature, a relationship which focuses on inclusive and communal spaces. Marty's employment of a multitude of contrasting metaphors makes an essential contribution to his vision of an exceptionally diverse yet inclusive community.

Marty understands that an inclusive environmental community is as essential to human survival as a diverse ecological community and that an attempt at "saving humanity" - at least, at times - corresponds with what is best for the survival of other species. If the goal of environmentalism is the survival of humanity, then battling the injustices related to class, ethnicity and nationalism that the Western world inflicts upon disadvantaged countries must become a significant part of its mandate.

Environmentalism has too often failed to acknowledge the broader systemic manifestations of the current structure of power that causes environmental destruction even though it often uses the discourse of moral responsibility to call people to action. In his article "Climate, Class, and Claptrap," Garret Keizer articulates the dangers of too narrow an environmental focus: "Global warming, we are told, will have its most devastating effects on the world's disadvantaged. Therefore, we need not care so particularly about the world's disadvantaged; we need only care about global warming - as mediated, of course, by those who stand to make a bundle off it" (9). Keizer argues that the emphasis on morality in environmental discourse marginalizes equally important issues:

To quote Mr. Gore, global climate change is "not a political issue; it's a moral

issue," glad tidings of great joy to souls weary of such crassly political issues as

universal health care, reproductive freedom, the rights of workers, the treatment

of captives, the plight of women and men shoveled daily off our sidewalks like so 98

much offal, and who can now devote their energies to transcendently moral issues

like the daytime highs in Chattanooga. (9)

Saving the earth requires more than a new relationship with "nature." It demands a re­ thinking of the way we conceptualize a human global community.

The tension between local and global issues, an essential component in each of these texts, is a key area of tension in the environmental movement itself. Careless,

Morton and Marty take a bioregional focus in their texts and this thesis interrogates the implications of this local investment. For environmentalism, the relationship between local acts and global political change is particularly vital because the damage one individual, corporation or country inflicts on the environment affects the rest of the world. Clearly global dialogue and concerted action is essential to combat environmental problems in an effective manner. On one hand, the focus on local spaces allows for a powerful personal narrative which can inspire and convert others. In "Postmodern

Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," Jim Cheney argues that stories are the essence of ethics because they bind "self and geography ... together in a narrative which locates us in the moral space of defining relations" (126, 129). This focus emphasizes the role of community and reciprocity to bring about responsible decision making. By offering a multitude of stories, Marty demonstrates a more nuanced examination of environmental ethics than Careless does in his single, repetitious narrative. John Tallmadge, in Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in

Ecocriticism, suggests that by fixing a certain time, place and problem in sight, these narratives can adopt a healthier view of change, focusing on its everyday nature rather than its potentially cataclysmic results (10). The personal nature of these narratives has 99 the power to create an authenticity of voice (through shared experiences and locality) that results in a personal investment of the reader. Of course this focus on the representations of localized spaces through personal experiences is politically and culturally charged.

The microcosms these writers represent have implications for global politics. The fact that none of these authors delve into global concerns like global warming or indigenous rights to the land is a provocative stylistic and philosophical decision. Terry Eagleton in

After Theory articulates the dilemma for activists in North American society: "At just the point that we have begun to think small, history has begun to act big. 'Act locally, think globally' has become a familiar leftist slogan; but we live in a world where the political right acts globally and the postmodern left thinks locally" (72). The desire to fixate only on the local may have disastrous consequences when the forces which cause the most major environmental destruction - the oil companies, the governments of the industrial world, the corporations - act on a global scale. Although these bioregional narratives are adequate vehicles for the expression of an environmental philosophy which should theoretically apply to the global situation, they often fail to access a space where local and global concerns and initiatives might meet. I believe it is useful to devote a portion of this conclusion to an attempt to situate these texts in a global political context by examining their strengths and limitations, as well as their absences and ideologies, in relation to the current state of environmentalism, the environmental crisis and global politics.

The moment we begin to campaign for an environmental activism that contains both local and global foci, we confront the essential question of whether to base such a complex and contested heterogeneous community on the foundations of sameness or 100 difference. On one hand, environmentalism takes its cues from nature itself, which depends upon its diversity, polyphony and difference for survival. The ability to embrace difference as part of a never-ending evolutionary project is just as important for an activist movement which would otherwise risk becoming irrelevant or dated in the flux of the changing world. Environmentalists have long defined themselves against irresponsible and ignorant people as well as corporations and governments who, in an arrogant recklessness, damage the earth. This can create a very committed group of people with a strong personal investment in the environmental cause. It can also, however, result in some environmentalists becoming closed minded, normalizing their constructions of the world to the point where their ideology makes it impossible to recognize differing, yet equally legitimate takes on the way the world is changing.

In Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, Carl Herndl argues that a polyphony of environmental discourses "makes it difficult to understand and resolve environmental disputes" (4). He also suggests that there is a danger of "moral paralysis" when so many issues need to be considered that it results in the "paradox of having to save everything and thereby nothing" (256). The solution, he proposes, is a

"self-sustaining model based on individuation" which would allow for a moral response and intervention based on each individual situation. I would follow this idea to its natural conclusion and suggest that the first step is the creation of a moral community where such an evaluation of individual circumstances is possible. This moral community must recognize and celebrate difference but refuse to worship it in a manner that might prevent a recognition of a radical "sameness" that allows for a concerted and global response to 101 the environmental crisis. There must be a common set of facts, a common strategy and a sense of a common community to effect world-wide change.

The three authors examined in this thesis achieve this goal of re-conceptualizing a global community to varying degrees. Careless tries to connect human beings and inspire them to fight for preservation through appeals to a common spiritual belief in nature.

However, this assumption of a shared experience with nature - or a common understanding of what constitutes nature - is elitist, racist and classist. His activist methodology that relies on backroom dealings and economic valuations of nature reinforces existing power structures and falls prey to the same limiting constructs that

Keizer speaks of- making environmentalism a question of morality at the expense of all other political issues. Careless's global community consists of a small sector of Western society and an assumption that the values of these people are shared by the world.

Morton comes closer to imagining an inclusive and revolutionary community. The matriarchal communities of the orcas she studies inspire her to rethink traditional societal roles. She comes to see herself as part of a matrix of female relationships that include whales, scientists, mothers, and activists. This "community" is powerful, autonomous, and functions in the margins of capitalist, patriarchal society, but it is ultimately founded on difference. By upholding the binaries of male/female and human/animal, Morton's conception of community remains limited. Marty is the only one of these authors to attempt to remove all borders in his activist vision, and this, I believe, makes him the author of the most successful activist text studied in this thesis. He challenges the ideology that land must be property; he blurs chronology in his descriptions of history, geology and in the format of his own text; and he engages with the social and political realities that foster mis-use of the environment. Most importantly, he understands the potential revolutionary power of an inclusive community. Instead of being mired in discourses of difference and the Other, Marty celebrates every kind of conversation, interaction and connection between living beings as he obliterates borders in search of community everywhere.

Careless, Morton and Marty all engage with the role of the individual; they write individualistic narratives that involve the performance of or the search for stable and whole subjectivities. However, none of these authors focuses on what has come to be understood as the individual's role in environmental change - recycling or controlling energy consumption or buying more environmentally-friendly products. Instead, these writers remind us of issues outside of our normal experiences and other ways to live and understand the changes in the world. These activist messages act as a tableau of the strategies used to further the goals of environmentalism, but they also allow for an evaluation of more than just a specific activist methodology; they point to the larger issues environmentalism faces, highlighting - often in spite of themselves - the rhetorical and theoretical ploys that construct the ideas of "nature" and "activism." The illusions that corporations cannot be stopped, that government can no longer effect positive and productive change, that individuals will live forever if they keep themselves healthy and fit contribute to the environmental crisis and stonewall the possibility of demanding change. Given the resistance of governments and businesses to cease practices that produce profit, it is up to the individual to demand accountability - of themselves and their representatives. In this regard, the three texts examined in this thesis herald an important societal moment, a moment when the contested space of the environment may 103 push humanity to recognize the importance of an inclusive and flexible community in ensuring the survival of many of Earth's species - including the human race. Works Cited

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