WALKING, WORKING, and TINKERING: PERCEPTION and PRACTICE in ENVIRONMENTALISM Jake Greear a Dissertation Submitted to the Johns H
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WALKING, WORKING, AND TINKERING: PERCEPTION AND PRACTICE IN ENVIRONMENTALISM Jake Greear A dissertation submitted to The Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October, 2013 © 2013 Jake Greear All Rights Reserved Abstract: “Walking, Working, and Tinkering: Perception and Practice in Environmentalism” examines the venerated status of certain practices in the history of American environmentalism, particularly wilderness walking, traditional farming, and the scientific fieldwork of naturalists. These practices, which, following Foucault, I call “environmental techniques of the self,” are held up as ways of enacting, restoring, or cultivating a rightful relationship to the natural world. Specifically, I examine Henry David Thoreau on walking, Wendell Berry on work, Martin Heidegger on “dwelling,” and Aldo Leopold on ecological fieldwork. Through critical engagements with these authors I show how environmental techniques of the self tend to enact ecological subjectivities with reference to various figurations of perceptual truth, and how in this way they perform “nature” as a normative and critical concept. However, I suggest that traditional ecocritical practices are ill suited to a world that no longer seems holistically natural. Seeking an alternative modality of ecological practice I explore an under- acknowledged affinity between environmental philosophy and the practice of tinkering. Dissertation Defense Committee: Professor Jane Bennett, Professor William E. Connolly, Professor Jennifer Culbert, Professor Anne Eakin Moss, Professor Douglas Mao ii Table of Contents Chapter One: The Politics of Naturalism and Environmental Techniques of the Self .................. 1 Chapter Two: Thoreau’s Peripatetic Asceticism: Walking, Wilderness, and Truth ..................... 28 Chapter Three: Perception and Practice in the Agrarian Environmentalism of Wendell Berry and Martin Heidegger ........................................................................................................................ 78 Chapter Four: Tinkering, Science, and Ecological Ethics ........................................................ 140 iii For invaluable help with the long process of completing this dissertation I would like to thank my parents and the many friends who helped me along the way. Thanks especially to Daniela Ginsburg, Mary Otterbein, and Noora Lori for generous help in the crucial final stages. Thanks also to Tim Luke and Frank Kalinowski for inspiring me and encouraging me to write. For graciously agreeing to serve on my dissertation committee and for making the final part of the process memorable and extremely rewarding, I thank Jennifer Culbert, Bill Connolly, Douglas Mao, Anne Eakin-Moss, and most especially Jane Bennett, my advisor, my first reader, a great critic, and a dear friend who went above and beyond to help me. iv Chapter One The Politics of Naturalism and Environmental Techniques of the Self “Humans are losing touch with nature. We are on the threshold between a real world and a virtual world...” -- Michael Samways, conservation biologist Arguments over the viability of the concepts of “nature,” “wilderness,” or even “reality,” often seem to be operating wholly in the cognitive realm: the realm of ideas, discourses, images, tropes, and ideals. Thus genealogies of ecological consciousness tend to focus on how different ideas and ideals interact with one another, or with artistic and literary renderings of an idealized state or situation. However, the premise of this dissertation is that concentrating only on ideals and imagery and their direct renderings makes it too easy to miss the cultural and intellectual breadth and the historical depth of environmental thought. Hannah Arendt’s warning is appropriate here: “Tempting as it may be for the sake of sheer consistency...it would be a delusion and a grave injustice to 1 the problems of the modern age if one looked upon them merely from the viewpoint of the development of ideas” (1958, 333). It is necessary, in other words, to periodically revisit how ideas, in their effects and in their historical dynamics, are inextricably linked with practices, and with modes of experience that involve and include various technological artifacts and material circumstances and events. While concepts are embedded in discursive structures, and can even be firmly stabilized within binaries such as “nature/politics,” such discursive structures are also embedded in what Wittgenstein called “forms of life,” which include embodied practices and projects carried on in a material environment. Words and concepts refer to the material world of practice, but it is also within the ongoing practical projects of living that concepts originate. If nature is a concept demanding critical attention, it should be attended to not only as a discursive construction, but also simultaneously as an embodied performance, or rather a set of various embodied performances. The practice or performance of “nature” in this sense is attested to by the numerous ecocritics and nature writers who advocate, theorize, and celebrate various concrete “techniques” for restoring one-ness with nature and becoming harmonized with or at home in “the environment.” Through the careful imbrication of thought and practice, these testimonies imply, one can actually become or work toward becoming un-alienated from physical nature. Such practices, I will argue, are a primary site of affect-generation for Western environmental consciousness. They are also one of the principal ways in which the nature-alienation problematic is manifested in contemporary ecocriticism and in the critical and 2 philosophical traditions on which environmentalism draws. To illuminate the sense of this preliminary claim, it will be helpful to take a brief pre-amble into the terrain of American environmental politics. In 1995, an environmental organization called “Forest Guardians” sued the U.S. Forest Service to stop commercial logging operations in the Carson National Forest in Northern New Mexico. The Forest Guardians were bearing witness to what they saw as grave and continuing threats to endangered species and old growth forests. They cited a history of cozy relationships between the Forest Service and logging corporations, which they perceived as a travesty of the ideal of environmental stewardship. The lawsuit was an attempt to implement a hard-line “zero cut on public lands” vision, which the Forest Guardians shared with other environmental groups including, most prominently, the Sierra Club. They saw themselves, in short, as the inheritors of a venerated minority tradition that values nature for its own sake--the sole defenders of not just trees and owls but the land itself as an unaltered wilderness. They were well funded and the lawsuit met with some success.1 The problem was, the National Forests in Northern New Mexico have a particular history. Federal land holdings there are contested by local Hispano communities as having been unjustly expropriated from community land grants guaranteed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican-American War. The treaty promised to honor prior Spanish and Mexican land grants, which had given a large amount of land to 1 In telling this story I depend largely on Jake Kosek’s excellent book on the controversy, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (2006). 3 the communities who had historically farmed this region using a stream diversion irrigation system that functioned as a common pool resource. Hispanos of Northern New Mexico claim Spanish, Anglo, and Native American descent, but cultural memory here recalls a history of ties to the land that predate European colonization. Today, while descendants of the recipient communities no longer have legal title to most of the originally granted lands, a complex history of contention and negotiation has led to continued if restricted economic uses of the forest lands by local communities. The lawsuit brought against the Forest Service led to a temporary stoppage of all timber extraction--not just clear-cutting by Duke Timber Corporation, but also commercial logging by smaller local Hispano timber companies, and even firewood cutting, on which many families in this area depend. The controversy that ensued--which is chronicled in Jake Kosek’s excellent book Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (2006)--quickly began to look less like brave “defenders of the earth” against the capitalist state, and more like white, urban, outsider environmentalists against the native Hispano communities. For most of the locals, environmentalists were simply the latest group of outsiders trying to separate Hispanos from their lands. Anthony Devargas, owner of a local timber company and long-time Hispano rights activist, became the front man for the local “green backlash.” By his telling, the community had fought the U.S. government, the Forest Service, big logging corporations, housing developers, and now they were fighting these elitist urban greens. But if the environmentalists were simply the latest group, they 4 became a particularly hated opponent. Leaders of the Forest Guardians were even hung in effigy. Others had tried to exploit and expropriate, but these environmentalists had the singular arrogance to suggest that they were the true protectors of the forest, that they were the ones with a direct line to the real interests of nature,