Nature and Human Nature:
Contextualising Literature, Ecology, and Meaning
—Murali Sivaramakrishnan
Any critical engagement with fundamental concepts like Nature and Human Nature and the attempts to contextualise literature, ecology and meaning, in the present day, certainly is bound to lead one toward problematising the very ways of human living, thinking, and being, primarily because such a debate would necessarily involve the planet on which we live and our essential existence as human beings. It is common knowledge today that human beings have evolved to such a calamitous level so much so that we as a species pose severe threats to the entire non-human nature, and of course, to ourselves. Our contemporary culture grounded on science and technology (for the most, urban and urban-centred) has brought things to such a pass that we can play with all life-forms to our liking. Thus the meaning that the interface of literature and ecology would make available would be one of immediate consequence: literature and art are essentially human, and the knowledge they produce no less significant than science and technology. Further, any debate on this issue would call for an interface of the hard sciences and the human sciences—for the coming together of academics, intellectuals and hard-core activists, because, thinking and being, theory and praxis, need always and should, go together.
This whole project[1] was a sort of outcome of the long felt need for bringing together experts working in various disciplines equally committed and concerned with nature and human nature. The Humanities and Social Sciences in the academy have necessarily followed their own path and development, while the sciences—mathematical, physical, chemical, and biological– have traced out their own paths. Seldom do they appear to get together for a meaningful dialogue of human and non-human possibilities. And where else could they interact meaningfully but in the academic atmosphere of the university? This might sound at the outset in line with the well-known two cultures debate. Nevertheless the growth and development of Environmental Studies have brought the focus of attention on the intersection of these two diverse streams of human inquiry. The history of Environmental studies has been the history of the interface of these two cultures! Now, where do the literary and the aesthetic come in? Let me here briefly provide an account of this aspect of the intersection that might make this confluence less cumbersome as it looks from the outside, and more meaningful and relevant.
In the late seventies, when the dispute over the Silent Valley in Kerala was rampant and the great debate over the whole philosophy of Nature Conservation and preservation of biodiversity was in its incipient stages, a senior friend of mine who later was to become a naturalist of considerable national renown, accosted me one day and opined: “you are more of an aesthete than a naturalist!” His dismissive tone was on account of the significance that I had advocated for the idea of beauty and value in nature. Nature conservation, I had then argued, in our small collective of natural history enthusiasts—the Kerala Natural History Society– began with the love and devotion to nature and the natural. Much later I was happy to find solace in the views of kindred spirits the world over: the ultimate founts of nature conservation and preservation, one critic has argued, are linked to the aesthetic.[2] However, the seventies in Kerala, in south India, were quite unsuitable times for the aesthete and idealist! And by then, the Sastra Sahitya Parishad– the advocates for peoples’ science movement– who radicalized the idea of science and technology, and who were development-oriented and forward-looking, had taken over the entire struggle towards the popularization of the idea of conservation and preservation. Ecology had by then become almost a household term and the idea of conservation of biodiversity was indisputably fore-grounded as an integrated part of the agenda of Development Studies. Equating development with the progressive adaptation of science and technology was as always held to be logical and therefore unquestionable. And science in the popular eye dismissed any subjective responses as of little consequence.
Of course, the arguments for and against conservation have far from subsided. However, strangely enough, even now there are many who believe that the entire idea of nature conservation is only suited for the developed countries, while the poor and needy in our part of the world cannot afford such a measure! Economically such proceedings are not quite feasible at all. Ecology, we need to remember, is a comparatively recent science and it has been necessitated by the inadvertent march of human (read Western) civilization! Because we overexploit our natural resources and remorselessly indulge in species annihilation, lethally poison our rivers and seas over and above damming and polluting them, smoke out holes in our atmosphere, and engage in a hundred different ways of self-destruction, we need to sit up and take stock before things go out of our hands. Now, if only we had listened to our poets and artists! If only we had heeded our now over-interpreted spiritual texts and good old religious seers! If only we had recognized the ancient wisdom embodied in spiritual reasoning. It is not as if everything about the past and those days of yore is to seen as ecologically wise and conservation-oriented. And it is not to generalise that all religious texts are wisdom texts too. But then there had been one too many voices of dissent and disapproval raised in the past against the mad march of development at the cost of nature. And the point is that they had perhaps resorted to the heart rather than the head. And that is where it all leads us. West or East, North or South, ecological wisdom [or rather environmental wisdom, because ecological prior to its inception would be a misnomer!] had always been there, but then it was buried under the rubble of destructive and exploitative philosophies, overlaid by the march of much powerful dominating cultures and their discourses. Further, it was for the most an affair of the heart rather than the head as such. Feeling, of course, would later spill into thought and action. But there was no space for the heart in the dominant cultural discourses.[3]
The argument that my scientist-friend disapproved of was that, nature conservation, or the very idea of preservation, was primarily and largely a matter of the heart than the head. I had cited many green poets and environmental thinkers and pointed out that the ultimate historical foundations of nature preservation are aesthetic (which I much later came to realize was the basis of the environmental ethics as formulated by the deep ecologists, and even some eco-feminists). We start by loving nature and the natural, and begin to care for what we love and cherish. The deep blue sky, the wide expanse of the green earth, the slow unfolding of the meandering river, the songs and flutter of the birds and butterflies, the gamboling animals—all these begin to crystallize in our hearts a deep fondness of indistinguishable delight, a sense of nature. This crystallization is not without its cultural and historical contexts. Nevertheless it is what binds us the great wide world. The hard data of the like that today a significant portion of the 15000 plant species and 75000 animal species found in India are threatened by the pressure of human activity on land and forests, and so many hectares of forest land are ransacked per the hour in the rain forests of the world, are only supplementary and they could only later add to our agony. Fundamentally, the fragility and the resilience of the earth is first borne into our hearts through the wonder, amazement and empathetic identity that our hearts accord. Perhaps this is the experience of the intangible behind the tangible that the spiritual masters have spoken of. This would bring us to the brink of metaphysics and religion. Perhaps, this is the right place to begin.
Religious thought, the world over, in more ways than one, dovetails with that of the nature lover, because religion in its beginnings and ends has a bearing on nature. Almost all religions, sociologists would agree, have their roots in the worship of nature. The adoration of trees, birds and animals, the worship of sacred groves, and the attribution of sacredness to all life forms are true to the spirit of ancient religions (and even later religions during their inception). It may be that the reasons for their being so sacred might be slightly different from the ecological angle that we are seeking for, but however, in spirit, they come quite close to that. Of course, we are saddled with the virtues and hindrances of hindsight and therefore can see in history the reverence attributed to all life forms in the sacred texts of almost all religions. The finer aspects of differences may be a matter of significance only for the specialist-scholar: while most “pagan” religions identified the immutable with the divine, the Hebraic, especially the Christian religion, maintained the natural superiority of the human being over all other life forms, and insisted on his (His?) superior ability to break the immutability of natural laws. As many perspective scholars have noted it might be this underlying patriarchal power that laid the foundations for classical science and its strains are still visible despite the claims to universality and understanding of contemporary science. However, pre-scientific societies cherished a celebratory attitude to nature. (See Lyn White’s seminal paper)
In the march of Western history of ideas, the Enlightenment is often looked upon as the age of reason. Whatever else this might have entailed, the most significant aspect is that this age gave rise to a belief in scientism—a dangerous attitude indeed with disastrous consequences—a deep faith in the order of scientific thinking. Human emotion, feeling, and the entire “irrational” sphere of mankind were delegated a secondary insignificant position in the understanding of life. The intellect superseded the heart and analytical thought sought precedence over the intuitive. Values came to be challenged, reinterpreted, and recast (sometimes even obliterated); religion was relegated to being mere superstition, and science acquired the supreme role as the interpreter of truth. In our own times even to speak of one’s beliefs or faith is to rake up the ghost of pre-renaissance nescience! How could one even speak of being moved by nature and the natural forms? Poetry and imagination are things of the past. It would be like looking for truth in mere fancy! These are days of rationality and intelligence. Religion breeds only superstition and nonsense; it works as opium! My intention here is not to demean rationality and intelligence per se but only to challenge their claims to being the only valid means of approaching the truth. While this being so, truth, in the logic of the postmodern, is multi-dimensional and multifaceted. Let us reorient ourselves to this fact that is not a fact! If fiction differentiates itself by not being fact let us create the faction of the present! In the search for alter/native truths we need to heed and understand the other logic that may not resemble the logic we are used to. If the post-enlightenment logic declaims the validity of religion and metaphysics, then we need to reorient ourselves with regard to these two as well.
To believe Theodore Adorno, it is barbaric to write poetry after Auswitz. And to believe Michael Foucault and Edward Said, it would be impossible to think of any social situation without relating it to the politics of power and oppression. And of course, after the great movements in Feminist thinking it is virtually impossible to understand any situation without relating it to the ideas of gender and politics. Likewise race, class, and ideology—these concepts have all altered our ways of understanding the present. [Cite Foucault] In such a situation how could we relegate the very idea of nature, to the background? What we understand by nature most certainly has a bearing on what we make of ourselves. And our understanding needs necessarily be holistic and not discriminative. The efforts of environmental philosophers, historians and cultural geographers would enable us to understand the profound implications of the natural environment and our ways of responding to it.
Environment , Aesthetics, and Ecocriticism:
Thus in our understanding of the world we live in we need to reorient ourselves with regard to the values and our ways of response. It is my strong contention that aesthetics belongs to the order of values of which ecological value too forms a significant part. In fact the value which we attribute to the environment cannot be seen distinct from our general aesthetico-ethical frame of reference. The value which we attribute to the environment is holistic and complete and not peripheral or derivative. Aesthetic value cannot be and should not be dismissed as subjective (in a Cartesian sense) when considering the value of environment and issues pertaining to conservation and preservation.[4] The ecological activism that globally politicized these issues has come to be known as the Green Movement. There is a green politics and even a green speak! And over the last couple of decades a whole aesthetics of the green has also emerged under the name of ecological criticism or eco-criticism[5]. In the great welter of socio-political theorizing that had held sway over the last half of the twentieth century the concerns of the human individual and nature were virtually submerged. After the death of the author the individual artist/poet ceased to have any space to speak afterwards, and after the closure of the text, history ceased to exist at all. If one were to take the pains of going over the warp and woof of socio-political theorizing carefully, one can perceive the struggles of the author and the text in the light of meaning production. When we reinstate class, race and gender along with the voice of nature we regain the fuller meaning of human’s being. When Henri David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” and when Aldo Leopold spoke of the land ethic, writing in his foreword to A Sand County Almanac (1948): “[t] here are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot…”, no doubt, they were giving voice to an aesthetics of commitment and engagement.
Eco criticism: Contexts and Relevance
This brings us to the immediate contexts of ecological criticism or ecocriticism. Literature and art have always shown deep affinities with nature, however, the academic critical pursuit of this interdisciplinary field of enquiry has developed fairly recently. It has come to be known as ecological criticism, or ecocriticism in short. Among the many factors that led to this recognition of environmental art and literature—finer distinctions have also been drawn between nature writing and environmental writing, etc—are the growing public awareness of profound ecological crisis consequent to many conservation and Green movements the world over, as well as the historical development of contemporary social and critical theory. It is in this context that the work and critical practice of most ecocritics who endeavour to direct public attention to the ecological values embedded in literary texts become contemporary and relevant. Scott Slovic (2004) has drawn attention to the fact that despite traditional interactions between humans and the land that figure prominently in the literatures of the world, literary scholars and other specialists in the arts and humanities (the visual and performing arts, history, philosophy and related disciplines) have almost solely concentrated their studies on human experience and expression, seldom considering the ramifications of human behaviour for the planet and the impact of nature on human experience. Ecocriticism is an attempt to organize and understand the human and non-human interactions and interrelationships.
It might sound quixotic if one were to state that eco criticism is among the many things an attempt to foreground the environmental roots of nature and human nature. What has literature and aesthetics got to do with the discourse of modernity or urban planning or even the quality of development? In fact one learned Vice Chancellor of our University once asked me this directly: what has an English Literature academic got to do with environment and ecology? Isn’t the study of literature confined to imaginative creations like poetry and fiction? There are of course several ways to respond to this query. Apart from the fundamental aspect of sheer ignorance of fields beyond one’s own after one has become too engrossed in the technicalities of academic sophistication and specialization, the other is the inordinate fright of breaking free into dominions of disciplinary discourse that are religiously maintained even today. Hence the subtitle of the book: literature, ecology, meaning, to initiate attention to the interrelationship of imagination and the world out there.
In his recent book, Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature, Patrick Murphy points out that the rapidly increasing number of published aesthetic texts concerned with nature, environmental issues, ecology, place, regionalism, and inhabitation has gained sufficient critical mass to generate an entire field of ecologically influenced literary studies—ecocriticism. Perhaps this could be looked upon as being more of a movement than a method. The emergence of ecocriticism has been compared to that of the feminist movement by one of its pioneers in the U.S., Cheryl Glotfelty (1996), in its practice of rediscovering early writers, rereading the classics from a ‘green’ perspective and the attempts to conceptualize the subject in a theoretical way. Ecocriticism thus has as much links with the feminist movement and thinking as with the development of (or critical engagement with) theory per se. It runs deep roots in culture and history. Like New Criticism necessitated by the European Modernist movement ecocriticism has multiple roots.
In her lengthy essay Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice, Serpil Oppermann has contented that the roots of ecocriticism and postmodernism are at their deepest interconnected. ISLE, 13.2.(Summer 2006): 103-128)
The postmodern ecocritical theory fosters not only ecological perceptions of our connection with the natural world, and perceives nature as a process of unfolding and dynamic flow, but also contests the dominant ideological discourses behind various representations of nature. This is a model of reality which has an integrative, participatory, and a non dualistic framework. In this respect, this “transformed postmodernism”… shares the same ecocentric vision of environmental discourses..
Further, on the connection of multiple points of view and pluralistic vision of postmodernism and ecology, Laurence Coupe has phrased the argument brilliantly in his general introduction to The Green Studies Reader:
…it is precisely because green studies addresses the consequences of the technological project of modernity, with its accompanying intellectual arrogance, that it finds hope in postmodernism’s provisionality and pluralism, given ecology’s emphasis on the creativity of organic life and on the need for biodiversity. At the same time, it is committed to resisting the global theme park which we call “postmodernity,” and so must be especially careful to distinguish this condition from that complex body of ideas, potentially more favourable to ecology than to consumerist capitalism, which we call ”postmodernism”. Ofcourse,we should bear in mind Charlene Spretnak’s distinction between “deconstructive postmodernism” which fosters “a nihilistic disintegration of all values” and “ecological or reconstructive postmodernism,” which seeks opportunities for creativity and growth.(General Introduction,p.7)
Primarily, ecocriticism could be seen as a product of the rising environmental concerns—this is not to reduce this movement to being but an offshoot of something else, but, on the other hand it would reveal its global significance and current relevance. Then of course, there is this deep-felt post-deconstructivist crisis in the human science academia, a sense of being deprived of direction and momentum. Ecocriticism reintegrates the text and the world, history and narrative, meaning and value. While it poses challenges to any universal value system, it attempts to reinstate the living experience of reality and multidimensionality of experience. Ecocriticism calls for a paradigm shift from the human-centric to the bio-centric, which transcends the mutually exclusive categories of centre and periphery. As Robert Kern puts it:
…ecocriticism… depends upon our willingness as readers to marginalize, if not completely overlook, precisely those aspects and meanings of texts that are traditionally privileged or valorized …. What ecocriticism calls for, then, is a fundamental shift from one context of reading to another—more specifically, a movement from the human to the environmental….from the exclusively human to the biocentric or ecocentric…a humanism informed by an awareness of the more than-human.
Robert Kern, Ecocriticism—What is it Good For? ISLE,7.1.Winter 2000, 9-32
Finer distinctions have to be drawn between literature and writing: while the literary kind includes the imaginative and fictional, writing of a broader nature goes beyond the fictional into non-fictional narrative. Further distinctions have already been drawn between nature writing and writing for nature. While nature writing could be either natural history information or personal responses to nature, writing for nature would be something more self-reflexive and self-aware, philosophically as well as scientifically–like philosophical interpretations of nature and the human-nonhuman integration. Environmental texts tend to interrogate the human/nature divide and focus on the human accountability to the environment.
Much has happened in the wake of the controversial essay by Lynn White[6] that drew attention to the interrelationship of nature, science, technology and Christianity. The patriarchal Christian world-view, according to White has been instrumental in fostering a utility-oriented and exploitative view of nature, while science and technology have become its handmaidens. Ecofeminism has been another major intellectual challenge to this patriarchal world-view. Many feminist intellectuals the world over have drawn attention to wide spread environmental domination and damage as another effect of androcentricism.
The following are some significant aspects of Ecocritical studies:
1. Environment and ecology— towards a basic awareness of nature and environment
2 Writing about nature and nature writing—poetry, fictional/non fictional narratives about nature
3. Rereading history— exploring critically the contexts of European Romanticism , Colonialism, postcolonialism etc
4. Women and nature—ecofeminism
5. Reclaiming the past—tracing roots of environmental writing and awareness– Especially in non-Anglo-American situation—traces of environmental culture, environmental wisdom
6. Religion and society and nature
7. Environmental philosophy and environmental ethics
8. Environmental geography and landscape studies
9. Landscape, culture and memory—mythical and spiritual connections of the human and the non-human world
What is to be done?
Michael Branch, another American critic writes quite prophetically of the future of ecocriticism:
The recent acceleration of scholarly activity in the areas of environmental ethics, environmental history, ecofeminism, and ecotheology provides a clear indication that environmental consciousness is increasingly being reflected in both academic discourse and the institutional structures which underwrite that discourse. Environmental scholarship has finally infiltrated the discipline of literary studies, where it variously appears under the rubric of nature writing, environmental literature, nature/culture theory, place studies, ecofeminism, and a number of other subdisciplines which may be constellated around the term ecocriticism. The green writing is now on the wall—or, more precisely, the palimpsest—of literary studies, and today’s burgeoning ecocritical scholarship will be tomorrow’s curricular reform. (ISLE. 2.1 (spring 1994)
Ecocriticism could also be seen as a method (as distinct from what Murphy was uncertain about). If we could reorient our critical and conceptual tools we can rediscover our intimate ties with nature, and towards that end ecocriticism is also a methodolgy. What is now called for is a shift in our perceptions. Nature is not that something out there that excludes the perceiver, the feeler and the thinker. Nature is not peripheral but holistic and complete. (Perhaps as distinct from feminism or postcolonialism, or subaltern studies, ecocritical frames of reference that directly incorporate or address nature cannot accost the very entity to stand in testimony either for its defense or at variance or counterpoint. Can Nature speak for its own? Or worse still, isn’t the language of nature the language of culture?)
Nevertheless, Ecophilosophy would encourage us to perceive change at every point of time and it would orientate us towards a rediscovery of our long lost ecological wisdom. When we attempt to retrace the historical roots of ecocriticism and ecological wisdom in our spiritual texts, we are not regressing to fundamentalist values, but only consciously reconnecting with our indigenous roots meaningfully. What is now called for is an intensive study of our tribal and folk culture and simultaneously an extensive study of environmental movements in other parts of the world – because both the global and the local are of equal significance for us. After all, we have only one earth and we all share the skies and water and air. And ecocriticism might show us how to go about it. We need to recognise the urgency of evoking our ecological wisdom. Our constructions of our environment and our lives have become so removed from the organic unity of the poetic and the spiritual and so how could we sense and see the elemental harmony that is so apparent to the poet…? The Upanishadic wisdom of delight in dispossession is there for us to reclaim. It is not through domination and assertion of right and possession that we relish the universe but by an aesthetic distancing. Further, the values that ecocriticism hastens to establish are far from that of the colonial as well as consumer-oriented capitalist culture. At every point ecocritical theories have challenged domination, power, and authority. Thus, the voices of the minorities, the underprivileged, the subaltern and marginalized would be heard distinctly (paradoxically enough!).
Introducing ecocriticism into our hard-core curriculum (in Indian Universities especially) would thus mean a rereading of our intellectual and cultural inheritance. Perhaps we could reintegrate our value systems and regain our sense of balance and harmony. Not through a strategy of homogenisation and universalisation but through a recognition of difference and an understanding of the many. Passion and compassion, to recall the teachings of Bhagavan Buddha, could be discovered at the core of ecocriticism. One can even speak of eco-dharma, because at the heart of the problem is the issue of pragmatic as well as harmonious existence—to dwell in nature…poetically.
Now that we have come to certain cross roads in human evolution and development we need to reconsider our contemporary paradigms of progress, history and development. We cannot continue in the old ways of wanton living and wasteful thinking. Neither can we call all our present-day ways of living to a complete stop. Nor can we retrace our steps in history and memory. The literature of nature is nevertheless replete with tales of sagacious living by communities of human beings at one time in balance and harmony with nature—rife with ecological wisdom or rather environmental wisdom! Equally plentiful are tales of dislocation and destruction—of non-human habitat and the living world, of species extinction and bioregional mismanagement. We have to become wise to all these. To believe Seyyed Hossein Nasr:
There must be a radical restructuring of the intellectual landscape to enable us to take this type of knowledge of nature seriously, which means to accept the findings of modern science only within the confines of the limitations that its philosophical suppositions, epistemologies, and historical development have imposed upon it, while rejecting completely its totalitarian claims as the science of the natural order
(Religion and the Order of Nature. NY,Oxford: OUP, 1996.p 287)
The text, as I said earlier, need to spill over on to the globe—it should not remain with in the confines of theory and counter-theory. After all, the hole in the ozone layer is all too real and not a mere theoretical fantasy however we choose to look upon it. Speaking of nature, as Laurence Coupe has phrased it, is speaking for nature as well, intellectually as well as ideologically and politically.
All problems of living, to believe Sri Aurobindo, are problems of harmony. And all problems of nature are problems of human nature too.
The essays in this volume seek to explore and problematise this vast field of human experience bordering non-human nature, in a sincere and whole-hearted manner with openness and commitment. Methodological and disciplinary differences notwithstanding, the attempt here is a collective search for the holistic understanding of nature and human nature. Of course, with full realization that there are no final and incontrovertible answers either!
References
Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Ed. Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.
Branch, Michael, Ecocriticism: Surviving Institutionalisation in the Academic Environment, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.2.1. (Spring 1994) 91- 99.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Glotfelty, Cheryl and Harold Fromm, ed. The Ecocritical Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Hardy, Friedhelm. The Religious Culture of India: Power, Love and Wisdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Kern, Robert. Ecocriticism—What is it Good For? ISLE. 7:1.Winter 2000, 9-32.
Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books,1970. (First published in 1949 by OUP)
Murphy, Patrick. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlotttesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Murphy, Patrick, ed. Literature of Nature: An International Source Book. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Religion and the Order of Nature. New York, Oxford:OUP, 1996.
Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. JBaird Callicott and Roger T Ames. New York: State University of New York, 1989.
Oppermann, Serpil. Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice, ISLE, 13:2(Summer 2006) 103-128.
Rolston III, Holmes. Aesthetic Experience in Forests. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 56:2. Spring 1998;157-166.
Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. London: Zed, 1988.
Slovic, Scott.H. and Terrell F Dixon, eds. Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Ed, Laurence Coupe. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Thoreau, Henri David. Walden.1854. Boston: Beacon, 1997.
White, Lyn. “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967):1203-07.
[1] The select essays collected in this volume were previously presented at the First International conference of ASLE India (Nature and Human Nature: Land, Landscape and Cultural Constructions of the Environment) during September 2006, in the Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India. See MURALI SIVARAMAKRISHNAN Edited NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE: LITERATURE, ECOLOGY, MEANING. New Delhi: Prestige Press, 2009.
[2] The direction of this argument is not to pitch science against aesthetics, but to reveal the integrated nature of both in generating deeper dimensions of human experience. Writing of aesthetic experience in forests, the philosopher Holmes Rolston has argued: True, those who can count the needle fascicles and get the species right, if they never experience goose pimples when the wind whips through the pines, fail as much as do the poets in their naïve romanticism. Nevertheless, only when moving through science to the deeper aesthetic experiences that are enriched by science can the forest be most adequately known. (160)
[3] Environmental damage is certainly not a recent phenomenon. Human culture in its evolution—ever since the invention of the wheel and the plough– has been in close struggle with non-human nature even from prehistoric times, and so was the concern for nature, as evidenced by the occurrence of environmentally cautious narratives and discourses more so in non-western civilizations. However, large-scale destruction and species annihilation has been made possible only with the advent of science and industrial revolution.
[4] The sublime could be the point of intersection of aesthetics, science and religion. “ the line between aesthetic respect and reverence for nature is often crossed unawares, somewhere in the region of the sublime” (see Rolston, op cit, p.164). Again, Ernst Meyr, one of the celebrated biologists, says: “Virtually all biologists are religious, in the deeper sense of this word…The unknown and may be unknowable instills in us a sense of humility and awe.” (quoted in Rolston, p. 166.)
[5] While in the US this is known as Ecocriticism, in Europe it is better known under the rubric of Green studies. It would be interesting to take note also of the debate whether this concern for the environment and its interception in the literary is or specifically not a mere concern or indulgence of developed countries. See “Ecocriticism at the MLA: A Roundtable,” ASLE News, 11(1), 1999.
[6] White, Lyn. “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967):1203-07. This is the most widely quoted and cited text in this context. For a detailed discussion of Lyn White’s controversial article see also Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. J Baird Callicott and Roger T Ames. New York: State University of New York, 1989.
IMAGES- WORDS- REFLEXIONS 