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Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy pp 209–227Cite as

The Hero, the Wolf, and the Hybrid: Overcoming the Overcoming of Uncultured Landscapes

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Abstract

In this chapter, Nathan Kowalsky reconnects the wolf as a symbol for the wild, with some of the themes that were developed earlier in this volume. Kowalsky criticizes the idea that cultural landscapes such as the rural landscapes of Europe are hybrids that step outside the binary thinking of humanity vs. nature, and thus offer grounds for a more cosmopolitan and cross-culturally relevant environmental ethic. To the contrary, he argues, the equation of cultural with agricultural landscapes reinforces the very dichotomy it proposes to dissolve. Kowalsky uses Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” to show that putatively cultural landscapes are defined by domestication of animals and opposition to undomesticated landscapes as inappropriate for human involvement. The bucolic peace of rural Europe where “humanity” and “nature” appear to co-operate in mutually beneficial harmony is, in fact, a result of the successful domination of the wild other in both extirpating the wolf and relegating wildlands to largely aristocratic estates. Kowalsky argues that domesticated rural or urban landscapes do not exhaust the meaning of human culture, and that recognizing hunting as a landscape culture forces post-dichotomous thinking to be more critical: some landscape cultures may be less dominating and/or more natural than others.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Callicott’s second point follows McKibben (1988); cf. Callicott 2002, 301.

  2. 2.

    Drenthen notes here that his understanding of wilderness is developed in earlier writings (Drenthen 1999, 2005, 2007), but its implications for landscape hermeneutics and the illegibility of wild places (spaces?) were drawn out in more detail in an earlier version of this paper presented at the Sixth Annual Joint Environmental Philosophy Meeting, Allenspark, Colorado, USA, 17 June 2009.

  3. 3.

    “Savage” is an etymological derivative of silvaticus, or forest-dweller.

  4. 4.

    In English, a boor is not clever but a “rustic ill-mannered fellow”, a pejorative term derived from the more neutral Dutch word boer, for “farmer” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. “boor”).

  5. 5.

    Technically ducks and most songbirds are omnivores, but because – like seeds and nuts – insects shed no blood, Prokofiev’s neat categorizations and contrasts present both birds as trophically benign in contradistinction to carnivores.

  6. 6.

    Prokofieff (1961). This book does not have page numbers, but I understand its English text to be a close translation of the Russian original.

  7. 7.

    “Of course, one could argue that the idea of these places somehow represent the not-yet-symbolised is itself another symbolised meaning, but whether that paradox will prove to be a killing objection is yet an open question” (Drenthen 2009a, 303).

  8. 8.

    Diamond (1997, 168) also notes that only fourteen of the world’s 148 “big terrestrial herbivorous mammals” are suitable for domestication.

  9. 9.

    And so, according to Adorno and Horkheimer (1997), Enlightenment seeks to overcome domination by dominating it, and thus never escaping (what it thinks is) the barbarity of nature.

  10. 10.

    Paraphrasing Dr. Samuel Johnson. See also, Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2007, 37) for more on the comparison between the effects of foraging and farming on the landscape.

  11. 11.

    This is not to say that some forms of gardening or agriculture are less out of step with the original recalcitrance of the land than are other forms of gardening or agriculture. Cf. Glenn Deliège’s contribution to this volume.

  12. 12.

    “[N]ot only does the wild serve no discernible advantage for the farmer and for agrarian societies in general, but it seems to actively hinder and undermine … the domestic human order” (Kover 2008, 240; cf. Shepard 1982, 23, 28, 35).

  13. 13.

    I owe this turn of phrase to T.R. Kover, who in turn derived it from Paul Shepard’s treatment of “the ethic of the barnyard.” See Kover (2012); Shepard (1999b, 60–61); and Shepard (1967, 190–205). To our knowledge, Shepard did not articulate his ethic of the barnyard as a metaphysic per se.

  14. 14.

    E.g., Varner (1995); Cowen (2003); Nussbaum and Faralli (2007); Raterman (2008); as opposed to Callicott (1980); Hettinger (1994); Kover (2010).

  15. 15.

    Shepard (1993, 289–290) also notes that these treaty relationships were always understood metaphorically, but that animal domestication collapsed the distinction between literal and figurative. I would suggest this as another reason why Social Darwinism can only arise within an agricultural context.

  16. 16.

    I offer one caveat here: there is a form of hunting which intentionally pursues “dangerous game”, such as grizzly bears, lions or Cape buffalo. Theodore Vitali (2010, 24) notes that “[i]n this model, the hunted animal is perceived as a threat to the hunter and thus the hunter-hunted relationship is viewed as mortal combat in which there is parity of danger: for one or the other, the outcome will be final.”

  17. 17.

    T.R. Kover, e-mail message to author, 6 December 2011.

  18. 18.

    ARK, “Death as Part of Nature,” http://www.arknature.eu/ark-en/nature-development/natural-processes/predation-and-death (accessed May 4, 2011).

  19. 19.

    “We see it as our duty in the debate to put the interests of the animals first: are these measures really benefiting the animals? Wild animals are really best off when there is least interference by humans. It is always the hunters who are asking for supplementary feed to be provided to prevent an agonizing demise” (Esther Ouwehand, Member of the Dutch Parliament, Party for Animal Rights). “It really is an ideal situation in the Oostvaardersplassen. Animals dying just happens to be a fact of life. Unfortunately, huntsmen have a really powerful lobby aimed at doing away with this natural system” (Pauline de Jong, Secretary of the Fauna Protection Society; cf. Kleis 2010).

  20. 20.

    I would like to thank Steven Vogel, Martin Drenthen, Thom Heyd, Allen Habib, Jozef Keulartz, Glenn Deliège and T.R. Kover for helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Joseph’s College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Nathan Kowalsky

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  1. Nathan Kowalsky
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Correspondence to Nathan Kowalsky .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Science, Innovation & Soci, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Martin Drenthen

  2. Institute for Science, Innovation & Soci, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Jozef Keulartz

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Kowalsky, N. (2014). The Hero, the Wolf, and the Hybrid: Overcoming the Overcoming of Uncultured Landscapes. In: Drenthen, M., Keulartz, J. (eds) Old World and New World Perspectives in Environmental Philosophy. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07683-6_13

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