Abstract
In his justly famous essay “Walking,” published after his death in 1862, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau penned these words at a time when Americans were enacting their vision of “manifest destiny,” displacing the indigenous peoples from the western half of the continent and hacking down its ancient forests to make way for orchards, cattle pastures, and industrial progress. A century later, Thoreau’s remark became a clarion call for the modern American environmental movement in its effort to preserve our remaining “pristine” forests and natural areas. “Wildness” had become, in the minds of many, equivalent to “wilderness,” defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
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- 1.
For the confusion of “wildness” with “wilderness” in Thoreau’s quote and an inspired effort to turn this confusion toward the preservation of wilder wilderness, see Jack Turner, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, ed. by George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1995), 331–338.
- 2.
See, e.g., George Sessions, “Ecocentrism, Wilderness, and Global Ecosystem Protection,” in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, 356–375.
- 3.
Classic criticisms of the wilderness ideal include Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989); and J. Baird Callicott, “A Critique of and an Alternative to the Wilderness Idea,” in Environmental Ethics, ed. by Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston, III (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 437–443.
- 4.
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. by William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 83.
- 5.
Cronon admits in the “Introduction” to Uncommon Ground that a secondary agenda of the book is to “demonstrate the practical relevance for practical problem solving of humanities disciplines that are rarely even consulted by policymakers and activists who devote themselves to environmental protection” (Cronon, 27).
- 6.
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962; reprinted by Routledge Classics, 2002). Hereafter cited as PP, with French preceding English pagination.
- 7.
Jakob von Uexküll offers the classic statement of this difference of animal Umwelten, for instance in Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956); “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. by Claire Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957).
- 8.
For instance, David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), especially Chapter 2; Monika Langer, “Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. by Galen Johnson and Michael Smith, 115–129 (Evanston: Northwestern, 1990); Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien, 2nd. edn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), especially Chapter 2; Don E. Marietta, Jr., “Back to Earth with Reflection and Ecology,” in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, 121–135 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
- 9.
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §15.
- 10.
Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), esp. 14; Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 31–32; Emmanual Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 51–60; and Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 130–142.
- 11.
Compare a similar example from the chapter on space: “I never live wholly in varieties of human space, but am always ultimately rooted in a natural and non-human space. As I walk across the Place de la Concorde, and think of myself as totally caught up in the city of Paris, I can rest my eyes on one stone of the Tuileries wall, the Square disappears and there is then nothing but this stone entirely without history; I can, furthermore, allow my gaze to be absorbed by this yellowing, gritty surface, and then there is no longer even a stone there, but merely the play of light upon an indefinite substance” (PP 339/342).
- 12.
See, e.g., PP 417 ff. /423 ff., and Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the contradictory nature of the perceived world in “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. by James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964), 18–19.
- 13.
Gary Snyder, “The Etiquette of Freedom,” in The Wilderness Condition, ed. by Max Oelschlaeger (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992), 30.
- 14.
This would be close to what Neil Evernden calls “nature as miracle” in “Nature in Industrial Society,” reprinted in Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence, 3rd edn., ed. by Susan Armstrong and Richard Botzler (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004), 191–200.
- 15.
“Nature, says Lucien Herr in a comment upon Hegel, ‘is there from the first day.’ It presents itself always as already there before us, and yet as new before our gaze. Reflexive thought is disoriented by this implication of the immemorial in the present, the appeal from the past to the most recent present” (Merleau-Ponty, “The Concept of Nature, I,” in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays [Evanston: Northwestern, 1988], 133).
- 16.
Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 225; Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964), 178. Hereafter cited as S, with French preceding English pagination.
- 17.
David Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 160.
- 18.
The distinction between these two different senses of “nature” was perhaps first made explicit by John Stuart Mill in the essay “Nature.” See The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. by Max Lerner (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 365–370.
For a very useful contemporary discussion of the various connotations of “nature” and their relation to environmental theory, see Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. Chapter 1.
- 19.
Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 21. Mary Midgley explores the parallel ambivalence of our relationship with animals and its psychological motivations in The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2003), 135–141.
- 20.
This undercuts the dichotomy between “biocentrism” and “anthropocentrism” that continues to shape much of the dichotomy in environmental circles, although I do not develop this point here.
- 21.
Wood, The Step Back, 6.
- 22.
The position that I am describing should not be interpreted as opposed to scientific investigation of nature, although it may suggest that we understand the practice of science differently, perhaps along lines similar to Donna Haraway’s suggestion that the world be understand as agent or “coding trickster” rather than as an object. See Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 197–201.
- 23.
David Wood, Thinking after Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 58.
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Toadvine, T. (2010). Ecophenomenology and the Resistance of Nature. In: Nenon, T., Blosser, P. (eds) Advancing Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_20
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