View source for Quest For A New Kinship With Nature

'''Book: A Reenchanted World: The Quest For A New Kinship With Nature by James William Gibson. Metropolitan Books, 2009'''


=Introduction=

James William Gibson:

"1, The culture of enchantment creates symbolic, totemic kinship ties with wild animals. It does not erases human-animal differences, but clearly links them in human-animal kinship ties.
 
2. Consecrating land--restoring enchantment or sacredness to lands and waters--is a collective act. Consecration changes the public meaning of places. It helps create commons.
 
3. Both the political/economic right and the fundamentalist right tried to destroy this culture and the enviro movement during the Bush administration. They failed. The evangelicals split. Using sacred in a broad sense of the term, most of Christianity and Judaism embraces some form of sacred earth theology--even if they don't stress it.
 
4. Ordinary people fight for animals and places. It's not a top-down movement."


=Motivation=

Bill Gibson:

"I spent roughly 15-17 years studying war and warriors, publishing The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (1986) and Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994). Both books received a fair amount of attention, especially Warrior Dreams after Timothy McVeigh's 1995 truck bomb attack in Oklahoma City.  But after considerable reflection I came to the conclusion that although it's important to analyze how wars are fought and the ways war cultures sustain warfare and masculinity, writers face a serious problem. War is hell, yes. But once a writer has taken readers to a particular hell, then what? The critique of hell doesn’t necessarily lead the way to something better. Hell is a place where all hope of change is abandoned.  

I concluded that I needed to understand desire and hope. And that led me to the land, the ocean, and to wild animals. By the mid-1990s it was clear that a profound cultural change—what I came to call reenchantment—was well underway, but in subtle, fragmented ways.  I thought that if I could connect these fragments then I could help increase people's desire to feel connected with land and creatures and increase hope that we can actually save the planet. 
  
Some of my own experiences as a scuba diver and as a hiker in the mountains and deserts of Southern California also helped change my direction. Once while diving off of Catalina Island I saw thousands of  anchovies suddenly swarm into a great silver pulsating ball that shimmered with the fishes' neon blue stripes. It was an exquisite experience. I was stunned; a door had opened. 

In time I learned that many other people have had similar experiences. When John Quigley sat in the oak tree, Old Glory, to protect it from Los Angeles developers, and the crane-man geared up for his ultra-light flight to lead Siberian cranes to a new winter refuge, and  Jacques Mayol and Richard Barry dove with dolphins, (not in captive theme parks, but in the open sea) they hoped that somehow they could breakthrough the numbness and deadness of contemporary culture .Their projects aimed at reaching people emotionally, at liberating them to the richness of life. Or look at the searchers for ghost species. They hope finding a near-extinct species or a species thought to be extinct will both trigger provisions of the Endangered Species Act, but more importantly, will generate hope within the broader society: We haven't killed them all; we can help bring them back.      

The ideas that the Earth is sacred in a broad sense of the term and should be protected and wild animals respected as our totemic kin are now circulating at multiple levels, from theological treatises to Hollywood animated movies and nature documentaries. Newspapers now routinely run obituaries for wild animals--beached whales, bears shot by police, deer impaled on a spiked suburban fence.  Funeral oratory articulates a culture’s fundamental values—our eulogies and public mourning for wild animals mean our sense of community has broadened.  When the same themes begin to permeate a culture across vastly different domains it’s a sign of profound change. Cultural change in turn makes political change possible."
(via email, January 2010)


=Excerpts=

James William Gibson:

"Desires for place and the animal Other

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, a new and striking kind of yearning was evident in the ways ordinary people felt and talked about nature. People were touched by stories of bears who befriended humans, enthralled by the fluid grace of whales, moved to the depths of their souls by majestic trees, newly alive to the sense of mystery, of a world larger than themselves. Some suburban residents came to feel deeply connected to the few remaining open spaces—slivers of forest, wetland, meadow—around them, dedicating years to trying to save them from development. Others restored degraded places such as polluted wetlands and rivers. People began speaking up for the dignity of ordinary domestic animals such as cows and pigs.

How are we to understand this upsurge of feeling? To some degree, it can be considered a product of contemporary environmentalism. But the spreading influence of the environmental movement only partially explains the last two decades’ fundamental change of consciousness. No political movement or platform can account for the intensity of feeling expressed by those who long to rediscover and embrace nature’s mystery and grandeur, who experience an attachment to animals and places so overwhelming that they feel morally compelled to protect them, and who look to nature for psychic regeneration and renewal. More than an ideology, this quest for connection indicates a fundamental rejection of the most basic premises of modern thought and society.

Those premises center on a view of nature as inert matter, void of spirit and consciousness. For an early scientist like René Descartes, writing in the first half of the 17TH century, animals were simply unfeeling machines, incapable of emotions or pain. As the accomplishments of science earned it increasing prestige, this utilitarian view of nature became the dominant mode, further reinforced by the success of industrial capitalism. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed in The Communist Manifesto, the modern world was built largely through “the subjection of Nature’s forces to man.”

This subjection was so complete it eclipsed humankind’s past and, with it, the traditional unity between humans and the rest of creation that is typical of premodern societies. Among Native American tribes, for example, animal species were, like other tribes, deemed “nations,” such as the buffalo nation or beaver nation.

The premodern cosmos possessed a kind of enchantment. Humans were never alone: The crane flying overhead, the ground beneath one’s feet, the great oak tree near the creek, the creek itself, could all be addressed as kin by those who knew the right words and rituals.

Modernity, as has been widely noted, drained the cosmos of that magic. In Max Weber’s formulation, the West’s elevation of “rational empirical knowledge” led to the “disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” Radical and utter isolation followed. Carl Jung, a contemporary of Weber, grasped that loneliness had tragic implications: “Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him.”

Yet, the idea of the human world as separate from the rest of nature never gained complete acceptance. A few mavericks and romantics have always seen such isolation as wrong in substance and unbearable in spirit. Over generations, they repeatedly fought back, launching waves of protest, both cultural and political.


'''A rapidly dying worl'''d

The current wave of spiritual interest in nature is not simply another outburst of romanticism. For one thing, it is fueled by a new sense of urgency.

In 2005, the United Nations released the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the result of a five-year study of the world’s environment involving some 1,360 scientists. In its executive summary, “Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-Being,” the report’s authors write, “Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. “

Global warming looms ominously, with the climate changing faster than anything seen since the end of the last ice age some 10,ooo years ago. The rapid rise in temperature is endangering countless animals. People converted more forests and prairies to cropland from 1950 to 1980 than in the century and a half between 1700 and 1850. The destruction of habitat leaves animals with nowhere to go. The report’s authors conclude: “Some 12 percent of birds, 25 percent of mammals, and at least 32 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction over the next century.”

The assessment reads like a funeral oratory.


'''A new covenant takes shape'''

Funerary rhetoric marks what is irretrievably gone, but it also reveals a people’s fundamental moral values—what the deceased meant to those still living, and what their hopes are for the future. In a growing public acknowledgment of kinship, laments for the deceased are now given on behalf of wild animals and places of all kinds. Such oratory serves as a reveille, a call to make amends for creatures’ wrongful deaths by acting to save those who are still left: Outlaw lead bullets, so the few remaining California condors won’t die from lead poisoning when they eat carcasses left by hunters. Urgently study the mysterious deaths of whales. Put the U.S. Navy’s testing of powerful sonar systems under stringent government regulation.

Increasingly, for every funeral story or call for action there is also a tale of resurrection and renewal. Searches for “ghost” species, for instance, are holy pilgrimages, mythic quests to bring back life from death’s grasp. If one near-extinct creature can be restored to a healthy population, then possibly others can, too.

When researchers announced in 2005 that they had videotaped an ivory-billed woodpecker in a forested Arkansas swamp, the first sighting since 1944, government agencies and the Nature Conservancy bought more forested river-bottom lands near the location of the sighting to increase the bird’s chances for survival.

The response to the sighting shows a new covenant between society and nature taking shape. As novelist and bird-watcher Jonathan Rosen commented, the return of the ivorybill offers hope: “It somehow suggests that we have found more than just a missing bird and that God, whom we invoked when we conquered the wilderness, is also present in our effort to get it back.”
(http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4907/the_politics_of_enchantment/)




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