On Saturday, February 28, 2004, at 03:01 PM, Jim Tantillo wrote:
Gus wrote:
Jim - you are picking out one part of Crichton's piece - that the
environmental and conservation movements have been urban based
historically - and ignoring all the rest. As a matter of fact, I have
published on exactly that issue, and have no disagreement with
the facts, though my interpretation of their meaning
differs from Cronon's, and from Crichton's.
But Crichton also says in the passage you take me to task over - and
Cronon does not - that the "romantic" view is held by people with "no
actual experience" of nature - this view Crichton equates with
environmentalism - and implies (I see no other way of reading the
passage) that romantics/environmentalists are against killing animals
or uprooting plants. Where does Cronon say this? Please point it
out. If you can't then your example falls flat. Utterly.
Well, for one thing: I interpret Cronon's book, Nature's
Metropolis to be very nearly a *book-length* argument to this
effect. In many ways, the Prologue ("Cloud Over Chicago") and the
Epilogue ("Where We Were Driving") state and restate the point you
make here about the "romantic" views that people hold--and I take
Cronon's book-length treatment of nature as commodity to be a sermon
about how divorced most (naive) city
people/readers/environmentalists/deep ecologists are from "actual
experience" with nature--meaning nature as the raw stuff of value. It
is where value comes from.
OK - you've got a book I've bought but haven't yet read.
I'll take your word on what follows.
Cronon writes for example that the radical rural-urban split
in modern society embodies "one underlying assumption which is itself
deeply problematic." This he identifies as the assumption "that city
and country are separate and opposing worlds." In other words, naive
city folk (as he even describes himself at an earlier age) find it
easy to romanticize nature as playground, while they have difficulty
understanding and comprending nature more fully as the raw stuff of
value--economic or otherwise.
I agree with the play/work distinction. Even when I had a
garden I could survive its failure in a way that a farmer could not
survive the failure of his crops. Nor did I have a family dependent
on a good harvest for survival or - in later years - solvency. I
think this is a weakness of some forms of
environmental thought. I have thought so for a long time.
He writes:
"Such beliefs are deeply embedded in Western thought. We
learned our city-country dichotomy from the nineteenth century
Romantics, who learned it in turn from pastoral poets stretching back
to Virgil" (17).
". . . [D]ecrying the 'unnaturalness' of city life in a place like
Chicago was merely one more way of doing what my own environmental
ethic told me to oppose: isolating human life from the ecosystems that
sustain it. Putting the city outside nature meant sending humanity
into the same exile. And yet this is what I and many other modern
environmentalists have unconsciously often done, following the lessons
we learned from nineteenth-century romantic writers like Wordsworth,
Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. . . " (8).
Both Cronon and those who see the city as unnatural are correct (or
can be, depending on what they mean, anyway). They are focused on
different dimensions of what it means to be natural.
Cronon says, if I get his point, that we are necessarily completely
embedded within the natural world, whether we are in the city or out
of it. Humanity is not exiled from nature and it is harmful to
cultivate the sense that it is. I agree.
Also - natural processes adapt almost entirely on the basis of genetic
change across generations. Human ones almost entirely on the basis of
changes in ideas and understanding within generations. Therefore the
rate of human change is far more rapid than the rate of natural
adaptation except for life forms that tend to be opportunistic,
extremely fecund, and reproduce very rapidly. think bacteria,
viruses, rats, dandelions, and so on. they do just fine with us.
This is a very real, very important, and very legitimate, distinction
between human society and nature.
Third, there seems to be a very real difference in our psychological
states depending on our exposure to nature. the latest edition of
Orion mentions scientific research indicating much more rapid rates of
recovery in hospitals where patients had a window view of greenery
compared to having a window view of a wall, or no window at all.
there seems to be a widely acknowledged psychological benefit from
leaving a place of many buildings and people and entering into a place
where nature is less obviously or strongly shaped and molded by human
impact. Not 100% untouched, of course, but largely left to its own
devices, It would make lots of sense that the psychological strains
of urban life and the benefits of going into nature from it would be
noticed by urbanites, not country dwellers.
There is also the difference between being in a place that is
dominated overwhelmingly by human creations, and a place that is not.
This leads to all manner of different things, from the spiritual to
the psychological to the aesthetic to the shamanic. So I'll llet it
stop there.
This is just off the top of my head, and the examples are not trivial.
I think the point is clear. Whether we are or are not in nature is
pretty much dependent on the context we focus on.
I get my knickers in a knot when context A is used to dispute the
legitimacy of context B, or vice versa.
Jim again: Now, it would be difficult to summarize Cronon's entire
book, proving to your satisfaction that it is indeed a book-length
elaboration of the thesis that "the 'romantic' view is held by people
with 'no actual experience of nature," but this thesis is in fact what
I believe the book to be saying (among other things). Intelligent
people of goodwill on this list--and they are ALL intelligent people
of goodwill in my humble opinion--can read Nature's
Metropolis and determine this for themselves. But Cronon
provides additional clues in his Prologue.
It's a damn BIG book, which is why I haven't yet. But you
have succeeded in moving it much higher up on my list. So many books,
so little time... SIGH.
He writes:
"The urban-rural, human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the
deeper unity beneath our own divided perceptions. If we concentrate
our attention solely upon the city, seeing in it the ultimate symbol
of 'man's' conquest of 'nature,' we miss the extent to which the
city's inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman world as
they do on each other. We lose sight of the men and women whose many
lives and relationships--in city or country, in factory or field, in
workshop or countinghouse--cannot express themselves in so simple an
image as singular man conquering singular nature. By forgetting these
people and their history, we also wall ourselves off from the broader
ecosystems which contain our urban homes. Deep ecology to the
contrary, we cannot solve this dilemma by seeking permanent escape
from the city in a 'wild' nature untouched by human hands, for such an
escape requires us to build the same artificial mental wall between
nature and un-nature" (18).
Interesting passage - in part because of the kinds of unity
he does not seem to be aware of. Partly he seems to be complaining
that environmentally concerned people don't pay enough attention to
the powerless in our own society. Sometimes true, sometimes not. The
anti-WTO demonstrations, whether you liked them or didn't like them,
certainly focused on both. And no - I don't want to get into that
issue other than the point that the myopia Cronon describes did not
seem evident there. Whether it was well informed is another matter
that is very complex.
I also sure don't read Arne Naess as advocating we depart from cities
and live in the country as hunter gatherers or what have you. A man
who endorses the usefulness of snowmobiles for Inuit people does not
easily fit Cronon's caricature.
So I give this passage maybe a "B" maybe a "B-"
Again - the stumbling point about
"the 'romantic' view is held by people with 'no actual
experience of nature,"
Jim that is simply false. How do you define experience? Is
the only experience of nature that you regard as real plowing a field?
Did Aldo Leopold have experience of nature? Was he a romantic? Was
he an environmentalist? It may also be as one of my points above
suggested , that like vitamins, we realize our need when we are
deprived of them. Otherwise we take them for granted.
So - if you want to continue this thread, answer please my question -
"Did Aldo Leopold have experience of nature?"
So I disagree with your assessment that Crichton and Cronon
are necessarily "apples and oranges"--again, and to make the point
more explicitly this time: I believe Crichton exhibits the influence
of Cronon's ideas. It would be an interesting thing to ask Crichton
about this.
It would. It would be even more interesting to discover
whether Crichton understood Cronon, if he did. I see no evidence of
it. There is next to nothing in his talk he couldn't have cribbed
trom a Techcentral site and a Ron Bailey book.
Now, to be sure, they differ a great deal as well, but I
think that is more in the respective *tone* each author adopts:
Crichton, delivering a 45 minute speech designed to be heard, intended
to be provocative, and crafted with the hope of keeping people in the
audience awake <. Cronon, on the other hand, the sober
historian making an extended 450 page book-length argument, with all
the bells, whistles, and scholarly apparatus that the written academic
genre implies.
So yes, Gus, Crichton and Cronon are in one sense, "apples and
oranges." But I do not believe that the *argument* each individual is
making is necessarily that far apart from the other's.
And I obviously do.
Enjoying the conversation,
Jim
Also enjoying it - but remember my question about Leopold.
Gus
0000,0000,0000Cronon, William. 1991.
_Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West_. New York:
W.W. Norton.
