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Retrospective Review
Decaying Nature/Natural Beauty: How to Find Refuge Post-The Death of Nature?
By Vera Norwood
| WITHOUT CAROLYN MERCHANT's book I never would have appreciated and been called to participate in the twenty-year-plus recovery project of women's roles in environmental history. Before I read The Death of Nature I was interested in ideas of space and place and gender; after, I realized that my real passion for those issues sprang from fundamental questions about the intersections of nature and culture. I was not an environmental historian until I read Carolyn's book; I have identified myself as such ever since. |
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This review led me back to my teaching copy of The Death of Nature to see what, over the years, I have chosen to read with my classes. As Don Worster notes, the early modern period is not one that many environmental historians or our students have been grounded in—so that makes this a difficult book to teach. I spend a great deal of time trying to help students "live" in the, to them, "ancient history" Carolyn writes about. I discovered in my teaching text all sorts of notes to myself to make slides of the visual materials Carolyn alludes to—as we all know, one or two such illustrative sources can help students "see" the history they are reading. A favorite is the female "Soul of the World"—students really engage the project of drawing their own sense of an organic nature off this image. The book is also filled with "one liners" that can lead to energized conversations in class. For example in a section on science and the witch, Carolyn alludes to the ways that sixteenth-century feminists flipped ideas about feminine nature and disorder: "In women the tempering of heat by humidity made them more deliberate in their decisions and less given to outbursts of violent anger. This also made them more superior to men in their capacity for understanding" (p. 143). If I am teaching the graduate seminar in Environmental Theory and Practice and I want to make sure that the students "get" that gender matters—I assign The Death of Nature. Were I teaching The Death of Nature this semester I might place the section on science and the witch up against the current controversy over women's innate ability to do math instigated by Harvard's president and the consequent "he said/she said" debates at play in both academic and popular circles. |
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The book accomplishes some other "heavy lifting" as well. There is the Epilogue—which might be seen as the prolegomena to the rest of Carolyn's career. Here we have a call to action in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. Carolyn places the wages of the forces of modernism that resulted in a vision of nature as inert and subject to human intention up against recent ecological understandings of a natural world in which every thing is hitched to everything else. Appearing just after the Three Mile Island event in 1979, the last two paragraphs of the book offer both a caution and a call: "the sick earth, 'yea dead, yea putrefied,' can probably in the long run be restored to health only by a reversal of mainstream values and a revolution in economic priorities. In this sense, the world must once again be turned upside down" (p. 295). Not only is nature dead—but its decaying carcass threatens any human future we can imagine. Merchant's call in 1980 was to radically change the way we live in nature and in society, and this has been a consistent refrain in Carolyn's writings for the ensuing twenty-five years. |
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This notion of a toxic landscape requiring rejuvenation by critical social revolutions continues to invigorate recent scholars who rely on her historical work, take it in new directions, but come back to her passionate call for social change. For example, Miguel Lopez relies on Merchant's work as a jumping off point for an analysis of dystopian images of globalization in recent Mexican and Chicano narratives. These narratives echo Merchant's critiques of twentieth century modernism and, he argues, assert that the "cure for the plagues of the (present and) future ... entails embracing more holistic values characterized by a greater respect for the environment, indigenous communities, and individuals of both genders." His work will add to a growing body of literature famously described lately by Larry Buell as "toxic discourse"—the developing sentiment that indeed the world now suffers under a universal pall of pollution unrelieved by lingering edenic refuges, that there is a bright line between our current putrefying environment and a "healthy" nature existing only as a potential future.1 |
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Key to this new generation of literature is a fundamental commitment to gender analysis and a sense that women continue to have different experiences of bonding with the natural world—even when it threatens their very survival. Buell notes, for example, a tide of narratives (including Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge and Sandra Steingraber's Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment ) "emphasizing the female body as a primary site, indicator, and victim of environmental toxification."2 Such literature probes what it means that women and nature now constitute a decaying world and further justifies the radical call to a new social order as the only hope for the future. |
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The call to action is indeed one of the most important responsibilities of an environmental historian and what I have been arguing is Carolyn's leading voice in such activism. What troubles me at the moment is the perhaps too literal and enthusiastic embrace of Carolyn's powerful evocation of an image of the death of nature—particularly the sense reported by Buell and others that we live in an unrelieved toxic landscape in which any hint of beauty is seen as a misguided return to lost edens and pastoral refuges. My concern derives from an essay I was asked to write for a collection on Rachel Carson's legacy. I did not think I had much to say—since Steingraber in Living Downstream has pretty much encapsulated it: Carson alerted us to the dangers of chemicals in our environment and gave us the tools through citizen education and engagement to prevent and reverse their impacts on future generations. But then I went back to Carson's own sense of what she had accomplished in completing Silent Spring. She did not mention the threat of chemicals to human health (including her own breast cancer), but emphasized her effort to remind humanity of the debt we owe to the beauties of nature: "last night the thoughts of ... all the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness, that now I had done what I could—I had been able to complete it."3 I was struck by the story of a woman able to locate enduring value in a toxic landscape. Carson knew full well that her call to action was predicated on an image of the death of nature. The powerful lines from Keats—"the sedge is withered on the lake, and no birds sing"—that she chose to open the book signal her intent. But we also do well to remember that in her own daily life this was not the nature she experienced. Rather, the world in which she lived commingled the beauties of bird flight and spring bloom with the horrors of thinning shells from which no chicks hatched and the blight of herbicide burned roadsides. Silent Spring grabs attention with the image of dead nature—but its point is that this is a potential trajectory, not an accomplished event—and it relies very much on Carson's lived experience of the continuing beauties of the world to issue its call to action. |
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Likewise for Steingraber—who writes of her own exposure to cancer-inducing, chemically drenched, agricultural and industrial landscapes—but for whom beauty maintains in pioneer graveyards filled with remnant native wildflowers competing with equally treasured invasive imports—both of which she is able to bring with her to an urban apartment and sit on a shelf alongside scientific studies of the polluted landscapes in which they grow and she continues to live. |
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What I am suggesting is that we might do a bit more to complicate the bright line between the contemporary death of nature and a future in which the organic world is revived, and between women as victims of that death and a future in which health is returned, by considering how women negotiate beauty in a world which, thus far, threatens, but has not destroyed either. This is important work because such negotiation feeds activism. I will conclude with an example that links Carson and Steingraber. The most poignant legacy Carson willed to Steingraber is a place: the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in southern Maine. Surrounded by developed land—burgeoning urban/suburban sprawl as Maine becomes more and more a bedroom community of Boston—the refuge draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Seeking more understanding of Rachel Carson the person, Steingraber (who was battling bladder cancer) reports making a trek to the salt marsh refuge with a friend also diagnosed with cancer. The two women follow the trail through the marsh, moving back and forth between conversations about their illness and responses to the place. Steingraber gradually comes to appreciate the subtle beauties of the salt marsh in November. Particularly entranced by the "luminous oak groves" that seem to trick the season, their walk culminates at one of the salt pannes with their specialized, salt-tolerant stands of sea-blight and glasswort—"Life thriving among bitterness."4 These women find solace and deeper meaning in a natural world that at once takes them outside themselves and resonates with their difficult personal histories. Without the trail through the salt marsh sedge, how would Sandra and her friend have found a common landscape in which to ground their efforts to cope with the toxic world they now find located in their bodies as well as their homes? The aesthetic appeal of sea-blight for cancer victims on a winter day references a human figure who understands a fundamental ecological truth. The survival of person and plant are inextricably linked. This is a place that, through its complicated beauty, offers a reason for action in the world today—not because nature is only dead and rotting but because it also and at once is not. |
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Vera Norwood is professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
NOTES
1. Miguel Lopez, "Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Dystopian Images of Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Literature," unpublished manuscript, 45. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30–31.
2. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 290.
3. Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman, Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, ed. Martha Freeman (Boston; Beacon Press, 1995), 394.
4. Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 20.
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