Anniversary Forum

Consumption and the Angel of History

Douglas Cazaux Sackman

IN HIS "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin uses a Paul Klee painting, Angelus Novus, as his point of departure for thesis number nine. "This is how one pictures the angel of history," Benjamin writes. "His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."1	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-073671-D. A Japanese American family in July, 1942, at the Nyssa, Oregon, farm on which they lived and worked during World War II relocation. Environmental historians have considered the differing histories of men and women with regard to the environment, but we might also envision an environmental history of the family. As the family changed in form and meaning, how did its connections to nature shift as well? How have ideas about nature and the natural in turn directed social and cultural understandings of family? Family of Workers at Nyssa, Oregon, Farm
I am tempted to call Benjamin's cherubim the angel of environmental history. Have we not looked back, over history, toward paradise, longingly? Have we not looked at the seemingly senseless chain of events, put them in order, documented the debris they have left, and told our readers to look with new eyes on what we call progress? Have we not, ecologically oriented in our values and aspirations, wished to make whole what has been smashed—even though we know that we put the past back together in our narratives, not in the living, breathing world?	2
To be sure, one would have to say that this angel is a creature from out of our field's past. We no longer try to look back, to some paradise, and regard all anthropogenic alterations in the earth as evidence of destruction. Paradise was once imagined to lie on the earth's high point—its nipple; everything else was downhill from there. Our histories often implicitly looked up and back to Eden, and configured everything that had happened as declension. We have learned to no longer privilege paradise; we know there is no perfect nature out there, only a world constantly in flux, with or without human beings and the economic systems they have created. We try not to be nostalgic for some better, other place. Though we certainly seek to show the interconnections of people, plants, and animals, we do not pretend that we can holistically heal the past.	. . .