"The Social Creation of Nature" by Neil Evernden

I read Evernden's The Natural Alien 2nd ed. (1993) in a Nature and Society class and really enjoyed it, so when I saw another book by Evernden which appeared to be appropriate to this class I had to pick it up. I thought that the book could at least help us to define what exactly this thing "nature" is that we are talking about. However, I found the book to be helpful much beyond that.

It took me a long time to read this book - not because I didn't enjoy it (I did) but because Evernden's argument is so complex and covers so many areas of thought (even if he says he tried to limit it). I often found I had to put it down and go think about something else for awhile before I could come back to it. I actually found that a lot of what Evernden argues in this book is something which I already thought (or perhaps felt) but that I could not clearly articulate, or explain my reasons for thinking. He draws from several fields of thought, many authors, and goes back as far as the Renaissance period (and even considers some things before that) to make his argument.

He starts out - in the preface by suggesting that despite all the advances in environmental science and in "environmentalism" little has really changed. The dangers and problems that Rachel Carson and others talked about are still just as real and pressing.
One cannot avoid the sense that however much our environmental awareness has increased and our intentions to "save the earth" improved, at root nothing has changed. And if we genuinely care, we must surely ask why. . . . [I]f as many suspect, we continually propose the same solution under different names, there seems to be little gained by hearing it yet again. Indeed there is good reason not to do so, given its apparent ineffectiveness and the suspicion that it may itself be the determinant of our futile efforts. In other words perhaps the solution is determining the question: perhaps we inadvertently define our environmental problem as that to which the application of ever more technology is the only solution (pp. ix-x)

What is nature?
Evernden says that "nature" started off as a Greek concept meaning everything but that somehow this concept started to be refined or "demoted". So that certain things became outside of nature - True reality beyond appearances (Platonic), unchangeable things such as math and gods (Aristotelian), and finally God (Christian). Only once this separation occurred could concepts such as natural and unnatural occur.

Eventually we arrived at a dual idea of nature 1. Nature as "material given, nature as everything-but-us"(p. 23) and 2. Nature as norm or absolute. Evernden suggests "...the understanding of nature as the realm of external stuff, which is studied by science, lends an aura of objectivity to the understanding of nature as norm." (p. 23)

In the Renaissance the idea of nature changed dramatically to become "explicitly devoid of human participation . . .All that belongs in a system of Nature is "necessity," the expression of the obligatory relationships that can be described through mathematics." (p.51)


Nature and Knowledge
By removing meaning from nature and reserving it strictly to humans the very idea of what constitutes knowledge has changed. This idea which Evernden attributes primarily to Galileo is
...the view of knowledge we have all come to accept as truth, even though neither we nor its official practitioners, whom we call scientists, are likely to have given much thought to its fundamental assumption of separation. Yet all cooperate in the attempt to explain life in terms of nonlife.
If the living creatures were removed, contamination would cease and the "real" Nature would stand revealed. It is a staggering undertaking, the effective expulsion of all human, or indeed all living, properties from the system that is Nature. (p. 52)

This transformations served to change how we look at the world:
The very possibility of literal objects – what we would today simply call “objects” – was unthinkable until this transformation, for objects had never been “merely” objects until this time. Before there could be a literal object, all metaphoric or figurative content had to be dismissed. …[This] sets the stage for the increasing attention to, and trust in, the literal surfaces of the natural world. (pp. 70-71)

This idea of Nature and knowledge is defended by charges of anthropomorphism.
Whereas before the Renaissance it had been considered essential that some form of empathy be employed to acquire knowledge of nature, it is now essential that empathy not be employed. And whereas it had been believed that knowledge is to be acquired through nature and the meanings discernable therein, it is now believed that knowledge of Nature results from applying human reason to discern the necessary form of Nature. This discernable form is not posited as a mere “model”: on the contrary, it is taken to be the true shape of nature, freed from distracting detail and perceptual distortion. (pp. 57-58)

Evernden suggests that Art was the means through which such a huge change in the understanding of nature, and of knowledge, was transmitted so quickly to an entire culture. I talked about this in an earlier post.

The problem with all this is that:
We are fully aware, and are constantly reminded, of the benefits that accrue to those who posses practical knowledge. And we are assured that greater acquisition and application of such knowledge – that is, more pushing and pulling nature’s levers – will in due course alleviate the contemporary “environmental crisis.” But the fact that we constantly reassure ourselves of this may have less to do with tour faith in the assertion (though it is certainly that, too) than with the fact that our very choice of language precludes the consideration of other possibilities. One can scarcely hope to be taken seriously when using, for example, metaphoric language to prescribe a solution to this crisis – such language is merely subjective, as we all know, and utterly impractical. And indeed it is impractical in this sense, for practicality is virtually defined as “pushing and pulling,” which can be discussed comfortably only in descriptive language. (p. 84)

By removing meaning from nature, and relying only on objective scientific observation for the acquisition of knowledge we have created a situation where something can only be considered real knowledge if it can be seen by everyone; it is agreed upon by social consensus as true or real.
…[T]he consequence of this is a deliberate impoverishment of individual perception, because in order to maintain the social consensus, any deviant perception must be marginalized or eliminated. (p. 86)

“The Erosion of Dualism”
Dualism [Nature vs. Human] protected us from the realization of “materialistic monism,” the nihilistic of understanding the lifelessness of nature. We could, in time, come to regard other organic beings as “behaving matter,” for we ourselves seemed protected from such reduction through the great wall of dualism. (p.90)

However, we have now started to absorb humans into the category of nature again, through the very scientific study that began the reliance on this artificial dualism. That we can now study human behaviour, human anatomy etc. scientifically, and that science has shown humans to have evolved from nature situates human at least partially in the realm of material objects – or Nature.
That which is not clearly material, objective in the modern sense, must be an artifact of some sort, an “epiphenomenon.” But when that epiphenomenon is consciousness, over very means of access to the “real” world, the consequences of this assumption are troubling to say the least. (p.91)

…we have rigorously defended a dualism that permits us to think of ourselves as fundamentally unlike anything else on the planet, if not the universe, and to establish a concept of Nature through which to characterize all else. Yet we have also used that concept as the virtual definition of that which is knowable, and we have had no reason to shun it in the examination of ourselves. When we find ourselves about to be subsumed in our own concept, our own real of the “not us,” we have little ground for rejecting the results. The only way to get off our own dissecting table is to admit the fiction. That is, if we want to prevent the realm of humanity or history becoming a subcategory of Nature, we are going to have to admit to ourselves that Nature is in fact a subcategory of Humanity or history – that we are after all the authors of the system we call Nature. And moreover, that we are the authors of the dualism that facilitates the existence of humans and nature as qualitatively distinct entities. (pp. 93-94)


“The liberation of Nature”
In our everyday assumptions, nature is regarded either as the embodiment of natural laws or as “self” – but either way, it is ours. It cannot be encountered as other, because in a sense, it cannot be encountered at all: it is posited as something beyond the human world. The famous dualism conceals the fact that whether we opt for one “side” or the other, we still find ourselves and little more. The other, the genuinely ultrahuman being of nature, has become invisible, it has no place. (p. 121)
He suggests that occasionally people can encounter the truly ultrahuman, as a child or that “…occasionally an exceptional adult can still encounter an animal in all its ultrahumanity.” (p.121)

It is no accident that we find ourselves, in the end, considering the words of creators such as [Annie] Dillard who posses the means of evoking sustained images of otherness – and who are uniquely permitted by society to use the essential, metaphoric language. If, as I have suggested, it required the inspired vision of artists of the past to constitute the “things” which occupy the ordered domain of Nature, it will surely require a similar level of inspiration to reconstitute them. The so-called environmental crisis demands not the inventing of solutions, but the re-creation of the things themselves. (p. 123)

Evernden is unsure whether this re-creation is possible through all the social and cultural constructions we have created to maintain the dualism of humanity and nature. However, if it is possible it is through the work of creative artists who can change the way we see and think about the world around us.

William Blake

Once Neil Evernden had proven to me that by accepting the objective scientific world-view one also must accept that we don't exist (the human "mind" not being objectively scientifically provable) I decided it was time for a break . . .so I turned to my absolute favorite poet. Evernden had actually also mentioned Blake a little earlier in the chapter.

"...William Blake, who rejected the idea of passively achieving knowledge of the world without engagement of the imagination, which could reveal that which is more real, so to speak-that which transcends the limitation of sensation or reasoning, and which constitutes wisdom rather than mere knowledge." (Evernden, 1992; p. 81)

So I looked through some of my Blake collection to see if I could find some examples of this. So here are a couple pieces I found:

I come In Self-Annihilation

I come in self-annihilation and the grandeur of inspiration
To cast off rational demonstration by faith in the Saviour,
To cast off the rotten rags of memory by inspiration,
To cast off Bacon, Lock and Newton from Albion's covering,
To take of his filthy garments, and clothe him with imagination,
To cast aside from poetry all that is not inspiration,
That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersion of madness
Cast on the inspired by the tame high finisher of paltry blots
indefinite, or paltry rhymes, or paltry harmonies,
Who creeps into state government like a caterpillar to destroy -
To cast off the idiot questioner, who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
Silently plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publishes doubt, and calls it knowledge; whose science is despair,
Whose pretense to knowledge is envy, whose whole science is
To destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify ravenous envy
That rages round him like a wolf day and night without rest.
He smiles with condensension, he talks of benevolence and virtue
And those who act with benevolence and virtue they murder time on time!
These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers
Of Jesus, who deny the faith and mock at eternal life;
Who pretend to poetry that they may destroy imagination
By imitation of nature's images drawn from remembrance!
These are the sexual garments, the abomination of desolation
Hiding the human liniments as with an ark and curtains,
Which Jesus rent - and now shall wholly purge away with fire,
Till generation is swallowed up in regeneration . . .
(Milton, plate 41, 2-28; c. 1804 engraved c. 1808-10)

Trembling I sit

Trembling I sit day and night. My friends are astonished at me, Yet they forgive my wanderings. I rest not from my great task - To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes Of Man inwards into the worlds of thought; into Eternity Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination!
(Jerusalem, plate 5, 16-20; c. 1804-7, engraved c. 1818)

Erasmus Darwin

Here, high in air, unconscious of the storm,
Thy temple, Nature, rears it's mystic form;
From earth to heav'n, unwrought by mortal toil,
Towers the vast fabric on the desert soil;
(The Temple of Nature, 1803; Canto 1 lines 65-68)


The whirling Sun this ponderous planet hurl'd,
And gave the astonish'd void another world.
When from it's vaporous air, condensed by cold,
Descending torrents into oceans roll'd;
And fierce attraction with relentless force
Bent the reluctant wanderer to it's course.
(The Economy of Vegetation; 1792, Canto 2, lines 15-20)


Neil Evernden speaks of the power of art to change the way we look at the world; one artist he uses as an example of this was Leonardo Da Vinci. Another artist who I think could be pointed to as one who has had a profound influence on the way we view the world is Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather).
Though stylistically he must be counted among the poets of the earlier period, his visionary approach and his revolutionary and evolutionary ideas certainly move him closer to the Romantic moderns. . . . Darwin's poetic vision taps into the central themes arising in modernity and sets the stage for the Romantic poets and the post-Kantian philosophers that follow. (Page, 2005 p. 168)
Erasmus Darwin was firstly a scientist and secondly a poet. He was also a keen observer of nature and much of his poetry can be seen to describe complex scientific ideas (e.g. the piece from The Economy of Vegetation above). Page (2005) suggests that “[b]ecause of the way Darwin translated this new vision for a wider audience in his poems, it is no exaggeration to see him as the prophet for the scientific worldview that came to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” ( p. 147)

However the reason I am attracted to Darwin’s poetry is the mythological and magical imagery he uses in describing scientific phenomenon. Perhaps the same or similar artistic means can be used to reverse the trend that they helped to start; the trend towards the acceptance of a scientific worldview and the exclusion of all other possible views. He used those magical references to help his audience accept the scientific ones. Maybe we can use scientific references to help others accept magical ones! I don’t mean that we should try to bring back the belief in faeries and monsters, but that decreasing our insistence on objective, rational, scientific observation may allow us to see ourselves as subjective participants in nature.


Reference Cited:

Page, Michael. The Darwin Before Darwin: Erasmus Darwin, Visionary Science, and Romantic Poetry Papers on Language and Literature; Spring 2005; 41, 2.

Pop Surrealism: The rise of undeground art. Kristen Anderson ed.

I LOVE this book. I also love the possibilites it shows for subverting popular culture - using popular cultural images in strange and unusual ways. I think this is exactly what Neil Everenden is talking about when he discusses the power of art to change the way that people see the world.

I had seen this book a year or so ago in a Chapters, and liked it but didn't want to spend the money to buy it. However, as I have been thinking more and more about art in relation to this course I have repeatedly thought about the book - so I decided to get it and see if it was as relevant as I remembered it to be. I really think it is.

I hope that I can use the inspiration of this book for the style, and the inspiration of the theory I have been reading from some of the authors to compose my final project for this class. I am excited about the idea. I have some images in mind - I'm just worried about my ability to translate what I see in my head to paper. Wish me luck!

The transformative power of art

In my other class this summer I read a book by Wendy Donniger O’Flaherty called Other People’s Myths(1988). One thing that Donniger O’Flaherty says really ties into what I am thinking about currently in this course, and to what I am reading about in Neil Everenden’s Social Creation of Nature (1992). [I will write more about this book at another time]

Donniger O’Flaherty(1988) suggests that that “[n]ew myths move us into new worlds where we can begin to think thoughts that not only were impossible to think within our old familiar world of ideas but that we could not even realize that we had been unable to think in that world.”(p. 166).

Everenden(1992) – speaking of the change of the conception of nature during the Rennissance period – argues that “[t]he expulsion of human qualities from nature, although radical in the extreme, was justified through the assertion that only when the distorting effects of human projection are removed can we achieve an understanding of the “primary” or real properties of nature, properties that can be articulated through the perfect language of mathematics . . . and once the use of normal perception is banished, society becomes dependant on a secular priesthood for its knowledge of nature.”(p. 49) In other words a new myth about objective, scientific, rational understanding of ‘nature’ was created and thereby changed the way we think about nature and about how we can gain knowledge of nature.

However, Everenden’s(1992) argument does not end there. He goes on to address how it was possible that a new understanding, a new myth, about nature held by a few intellectuals could have so rapidly replaced older understandings of nature. “The answer, I suspect, is that no overt argument or logical demonstration was necessary, in the initial stages: it would suffice to show the world what nature is “really like.” As will become apparent, the means existed to just that through the medium of art.”(p. 58).

The conclusion I draw from this is that not only myth but other artistic mediums have the same transformative power to change the way we see the world. Everenden(1992) is addressing a negative example of the transformative power of art on social understanding of the world where Donniger O’Flaherty (1988) is looking at possible positive uses of this power. I suspect that this transformative power of art has been used – intentionally or not – throughout human history to change the way people view the world. The same power which allowed art to alter the way people saw nature in the Renaissance period could, therefore, be harnessed to again alter how we view the world.

Ecological Identity - by Mitchel Thomashow

I have not actually finished reading this book yet - but thought I would post a few thoughts/comments while I am reading . . .and add more later as necessary.

Overall the book is good, interesting reflections of an environmental educator on how to establish/understand ones own ecological identity. Some of the activities he describes that he does with his students sound interesting. However, I am not sure of how applicable most of it is to our question(s). He takes the existance of environmental problems as a given - and doesn't really explore the source of the problem - maybe b/c he doesn't feel that that is the subject he is addressing. I guess his most important contribution are his ideas on how to restore a connection to "nature" and to the broader "environment".

Property
One part that I really struggled with is his discussion of "property." By which it appears he means mainly land ownership - though he does discuss money as a consolidated form of property. Thomashow refers to property as both sacred and profane. It is the sacred part that I struggle with. I know that many people in our society feel the oposite - that property ownership is sacred, and would be unable to see it as profane. However, that just makes it worse for me. I am not saying that I don't understand how important property ownership can be to people in our society - and I can even admit to the desire to own things - even to own land. I just can't see that as sacred - more as a socially created need.

He mentions the "tradgedy of the commons" so maybe he is suggesting that property ownership is a method of protecting land (an idea I completly disagree with). Though he also admits that enclosure of the commons is the source of problems such as homelessness for people who do not own land.

What he talks about as sacred - I don't see as a function of land ownership per se rather I think that the sacred connection to land can be created by having a close relationship to a place - regardless of ownership. I can also see the idea of "home" and of having a personal private space to retreat to as being sacred - but again I don't see property ownership as a necessary prerequsite to the creation of "home." Here particularly I am forced to question - what about all the people who rent a living space, or people in various societies throughout human history who lived on shared "property"?

The good side
Despite this struggle I have with some of his ideas - or with understanding them I do think that this book has been helpful for me. It actually has a quite optomistic message. And, it has made me think a lot about alternatives. I found myself lying in bed - not reading, just thinking about alternative ways that goverment, power, land ownership - particularly community could be used to solve some of the problems we face. His discussion of community was interesting and thought provoking - in that it helped me to understand my own feelings arround community, and arround bioregionalism.

I will post more comments if I find more that I would like to discuss/am having trouble with.

"Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication " By John Livingston

“. . . The human animal of any society and at any time was and is the creature of how-to-do-it. That is the most fundamental characteristic of humanness.” Chapter 2 pg 14.

The human as a domesticated animal
“Human domestication is, nearly enough, a synonym for civilization. It is the quality of domesticatedness that has allowed us not only to be what we are but to accomplish what we have on Earth in the course of our relatively brief tenure as a species. . . . Among domesticated animals we are unique. All domesticated animals that are not human are our artifacts. . . We, on the other hand, are evolved domesticates, the products of our own biological and cultural history. . .”Chapter 2 pg 13-14.

Characteristics of domesticated animals:
1. dependence – on human owners, or in the case of the human domesticate on technology/how-to-do-it (usually derived from co-operative social structures) often to the point of the destruction of individual will/mind
2. individual bonds are to other individuals rather than to place (usually – exception is the dog)
3. reduction/eradication of the natural aversion to crowding
4. docility and tractability
5. most ancestors of domesticates were large, lived in open or montane habitats, and were non-selective feeders
6. decreased social interaction/communication within and between species
7. hoofed domesticates especially show high tolerance for discomfort (or can’t communicate it)
8. acceptance of homogeneity in its environment
9. fecundity (no breeding season, many offspring)
10. fast physical(size) and sexual maturation
11. social maturation is slow or absent (adults even look like young members of non-domesticated relatives)
12. decreased sensory acuity
13. may be great variability in appearance but behavioural variability is low

“. . . In theory at least, we all retain the capacity for wildness. In practice, we cling limpet-like to the ideology of dualism, we deny the virtue of wildness, and we deny its accessibility to us.” Ch 6 p. 118

“… although domesticates grow very rapidly, they never really grow up. That is exactly the way we want it. . . . Where the domesticate has been genetically manipulated into that parlous condition, however, we have not. We are the creatures of our ideological prosthesis – the surrogate for wild wholeness that allows us to believe in our separation from and supremacy over Nature. Though the animal’s plight is genetic and ours is ideological, the net result is strikingly similar. The development of the young domesticate is arrested by the nature of its physical being; the development of the young human is arrested by cultural conditioning.” Ch. 7 p. 120.


Children and Nature

“for the pre-adolescent the experience of technology is substituted for the experience of nature.” Ch 7, p. 134

“The arresting effects of experiential undernutrition [lack of exposure to nature] on the development of children in urban-industrial society are made worse by the additional influence of chronic malnutrition [exposure to harmful experiences of nature/technology]. . . . Where the experientially undernourished child may be seen as a casualty of neglect and deprivation, the experientially malnourished child may be seen as the model achievement of the process of domestic technological fabrication. Most of our society’s children suffer from both. It would seem that while the effects of undernutrition can often be ameliorated through proper doses of appropriate dietary supplements, the work of chronic malnutrition is much more difficult to correct. . . “Ch 7 p. 134


The myth of “zero-order humanism”

“As the domesticates of technology, we have developed traditions and modes of behaviour, and ideas, that best serve our master.” Ch 8 p. 138

“As we moved more deeply into conditioned servitude to reason, rationalization, and technique, the role of experience in our lives inexorably diminished, ultimately to be subordinated almost entirely to reason. Our hyperspecialization was deftly rationalized from unprecedented domesticated dependence into unprecedented species chauvinism.” Ch. 8 p. 139

“The sacrosanctity of the human program is immune to challenge. It is zero-order. Critics of “sustainable development,” for example, are expected to be silenced by the ultimate trump card.” A trump card carries its own moral authority and, like any other absolute, requires on explication or justification. On the basis of already existing evidence, the destiny of Earth as human monoculture is manifest.” Ch. 8 p. 142

“Zero-order humanism, like all ideologies, is vulnerable to both ethical and logical analysis because its final bulwark consists of nothing more than its trump card. Remove the justifying moral authority of any manifest truth, and you have very little left. Remove the mythological “imaginative insulation” that surrounds a human society, reveal the world outside the cultural stockade, and – presto! – good things can follow. If the human enterprise can be shown not to enjoy primacy over all other things – and certainly not necessarily – then there could be positive consequences for all concerned. Perhaps even for the laboratory victims.” Ch 8 p. 149

“…most of those who would work to improve the lot of non-human Nature in the world customarily contain their arguments within the ground-rules of conventional human-centered discourse. Why not couch our case for Nature protection in terms of human interest? . . . It is not even so much the inadequacy of such within-the-system tinkering that disturbs one (if you are working within the system, you are part of the problem); it is much more that silence on (and, indeed, avoidance of) the “root” issues may be taken as tacit endorsement of the zero-order imperative.” Ch 10, p. 186

“…as biological beings, we still have access to our own nature. That is a statement arising from an ideology different from the prevailing version. It is one that allows us first to understand and then to reject zero-order humanism together with all of its arrogant, cruel, and unnatural appendages. It allows us to seek a structure of ideas and beliefs that will be built not on future (abstract) desires and expectation, but on past (experienced) qualities of active bonding and participation.” Ch 10, p. 196