Political Ecology

Does a Bear Shit in the Woods? Not in Germany

On a cold day in January, I (along with half of Britain) sat glued to the telly and watched, enchanted, as a Northern Bottlenose whale who had made her way up the Thames and into the heart of Central London several days earlier was harnessed and lifted gingerly onto a barge in an attempt to save her life. The first Bottlenose spotted in the Thames since 1913, the purpose of her impromptu visit to the city was not entirely clear. Some speculated she’d taken a wrong turn at Margate and got lost; others saw it as a rather maudlin suicide attempt; still others surmised she’d come up for a day’s sightseeing, like many an urban tourist before her. Whatever her intent, she was not long for this world. A Herculean rescue effort mounted by the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, observed by thousands of people gathered at points along the Thames and hundreds of thousands more on continuous, multiple-channel news coverage, ended – tragically for those who found the episode ineluctably captivating, none-too-soon for those who found it unbearably twee, and definitively for the whale herself – when she expired in convulsions aboard the barge that was transporting her for release into the Thames Estuary.

With understandably more ambivalence, the German public spent the latter half of June tracking the exploits of a wild brown bear as he toured the Bavarian countryside, snacking on sheep and chickens along the way. Believed to be the first wild bear to wander freely in Germany since the early nineteenth century, “Bruno” sauntered across the Alps from Italy, where he had been released as part of a wildlife restoration project, making for a temporary diversion from the World Cup until he was shot dead on June 26. Initially greeted with enthusiasm by both the public and German authorities, Bruno quickly wore out his welcome when he began tearing into local livestock, belying initial claims that he would keep largely to himself and pose no threat to the human population. After a futile attempt to bring him down with tranquilizers, officials declared open season on the “Problembär,” as Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber aptly called him, and old Bruno was subsequently laid low by a hunter whose identity has not been disclosed.

And with good reason. Bruno’s reckless sojourn across Bavaria quickly elevated him to the status of celebrity with a widespread following, including a website devoted to his adventures in which groupies could follow developing news stories, purchase Bruno-embossed commodities, partake in a Bruno hunt (shooting tranquilizer darts, not bullets), and express their affection (and later, mourning) in a Bruno blog. His execution, while greeted with relief by some, sparked an angry outcry among Bruno’s fans, with several conservation groups calling the shooting both unnecessary and illegal and the regional SPD demanding the resignation of Bavarian Environment Minister Werner Schnappauf.

The untimely demise of both Bruno and the Bottlenose are symptomatic of the fickle relationship between wilderness and people in the West, a relationship that has swung like a pendulum from what philosopher Andrew Light (1995) has called the classical to the romantic: from wilderness as a repository of fear, dread, and corruption, an ancient view reflected in our efforts to tame and civilize wild spaces and their denizens, to wilderness as a place of beauty, purity and innocence, a more recent attitude reflected in our efforts to restore and preserve wilderness and wildlife we previously sought to destroy. In the classical view, we are the noble and civilized ideal, vulnerable to the siren call of the Panpipe and the brutal savagery of the primeval wood. In the romantic view, nature and humanity have exchanged places; we are the threatening and brutal menace, poised to contaminate nature’s purity with our sullying presence. Far from the dehumanized place we often imagine it to be, wilderness is a thoroughly human fabrication in both views, shifting according to our own relationship to it:

Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem (Cronon 1996:69-70).

That nothing is “natural” is a familiar refrain by now, but Roderick Nash (1982) and many others have put materialist legs under this social construction by pointing out that our change of cultural heart stems from a change of geographical circumstance: we couldn’t love wilderness and the various “savages” that inhabit it (from wild bears to wild Indians) until we had tamed it, rendering it docile with the axe, the plough, and the gun. As with so many “others” first neutralized in fear and then embraced in contrition through the process of colonization, wilderness became palatable only once we removed its sting. Yet with the taming comes a certain sense of loss, and wildlife restoration projects such as the one that set Bruno free in the Alps are a product of our niggling fear that taking the unpredictability out of wilderness robs it of its very essence.

Bruno is one of several recent reminders that we can’t often have it both ways: wilderness, if it is to preserve even a semblance of wild, must necessarily retain its bite, or dwindle to a pale mockery of the very idea of itself. The classical and romantic views of wilderness aren’t as mutually exclusive as they might at first seem; the latter requires wilderness to retain some characteristics of the former in order to maintain faith in its own illusion. As a consequence, our uneasy negotiation between the two often turns around and bites us in the ass – sometimes literally, as activist and self-professed “bear-whisperer” Timothy Treadwell learned too late, succumbing to a gruesome death by grizzly attack in Katmai National Park, Alaska: a wilderness romantic caught in the jaws of a classical wilderness menace.

Bruno’s sad tale reminds me of another bear that once wandered the German landscape, if only in the twilight realm of bedtime stories. In the Grimm fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” two sisters befriend a talking bear who comes to their cottage door one stormy night and begs for shelter from the swirling snow. The girls take him in and dust him off, then frolic with him before the fire until he begs them to be gentle and spare his life. He leaves the next morning, but not before catching a bit of his fur on the door handle, revealing a flash of gold beneath. The bear, of course, is no mere bruin, but a prince cursed by a wicked dwarf who has stolen his treasure and bewitched him. At the end of the tale, he kills the dwarf and sets himself free, then marries Snow White and sets his brother up with Rose Red.

Whatever the meaning of this tale in its original context, in the modern world the Bear Prince is an apt metaphor for our ambivalent if hopeful attitude toward wilderness. In Bruno, many saw gold, a princely treasure unjustly stripped from the landscape in the name of “progress” and righteously restored in spirit of paternalistic contrition that accompanies the benevolent dictatorship through which humanity appears to rule this planet. Our own control, of course, is a grand illusion, as we are reminded when nature – whether we call it Bruno or Katrina – escapes the wilderness we have created to contain it, disregards our feeble dictates, and shits wherever it pleases.

Citations:

Cronon, William, 1996. The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. In William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.

Light, Andrew, 1995. Urban Wilderness. In David Rothenberg, ed. Wild Ideas. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Nash, Roderick,1982. Wilderness and the American Mind. Third Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Harriet the Sly: Science, Snake Oil, and the Survival of the Shrewdest

True story: a few years ago, while teaching anthropology at a major urban university, I asked my undergrads to define "evolution" in a single paragraph and submit it anonymously, no name required. In swanky pedagogical terms, it was a "low-stakes" assignment, a way to jump-start an informal discussion about the common myths that pervade the public perception of natural selection before we got down to the nitty gritty of human origins. I expected a range of responses, from muddled Lamarckian fallacies to oft-repeated but ill-understood survival-of-the-fittest mantras to expert disquisitions on Mendelian genetics. What I did not expect, being a bit wet behind the ears, was a sermon. "Evolution is a communist lie meant to steer you away from the path of righteousness and into godlessness," wrote one. "Long live Christian Science! The heathens will pay on the day of judgement." Fortunately, I had dismissed class and wandered back to my office before discovering this missive, and only wound up spitting coffee all over my computer screen instead of drenching the front row of the lecture hall like Shamu landing a backflip. I've kept that scrap of paper, because it's the most remarkable thing a student has ever handed me. And I've never figured it out: was it an honest proclamation or a piss-take? I would prefer to think that some wise-ass with a penchant for schadenfreude saw an opportunity to put one over on a young and all-too-obviously earnest professor, and had a good laugh at prospect of my discomfiture. I didn't have the balls to bring it up in class the following week, so I'll never know. No matter; lesson learned. Next time I'll dispense with the touchy-feely schtick and give the little bastards a pop-quiz. And baby, it's going to count.

I'm reminded of this incident as word comes from down under that the Methuselah of the animal kingdom, Harriet the tortoise, has died at the venerable age of 175. Harriet's claim to fame, aside from her extraordinary longevity and the scandalous fact that she was mistaken for a male for well over a century, is that she is reputed to have been an associate of Charles Darwin, who traveled to her home in the Galapagos Islands around the time of her birth and returned with several specimens of her kind. Regardless of whether Harriet and Darwin were actually personal acquaintances, her death is a reminder of how young the science of evolution is, and how vulnerable its hegemony in the world of ideas.

Harriet shuffled off this mortal coil at a moment in history when evolution is under the gun politically and sentimentally -- from the heartland, where school districts are engaged in heated debates over the place of so-called "creationism" in American classrooms, to the shire, where a recent poll revealed a remarkable degree of agnosticism on the matter of evolution among the British public. Scientists worldwide, meanwhile, are fighting back with Galilean determination, having recently nailed a Luther-like proclamation demanding that human origins be taught on the basis of evidence rather than faith to the front door of the global church. And when the eggheads emerge pale and squinting from the laboratory and start screaming blue murder, you know that something big is afoot.

My own position on the "threat" posed by creationism is one of sustained cynicism. While I'm as susceptible as the next heathen to the same sporadic bouts of indignation, despair, and bug-eyed incredulity at the sheer tenacity of Bishop Ussher's latter-day acolytes, nevertheless I find it difficult to maintain an unmitigated degree of hysteria about the creationism bugaboo. Science and religion have never been mutually-exclusive rackets, logically or historically. The relative infancy of the scientific endeavor calls for a healthy degree of humility about the extent our knowledge, beyond which lies a vast realm of conjecture. Many scientists whose work habitually pushes the edge of human understanding are deeply spiritual people, and comfortably so. Science itself is no static, homogeneous monolith, but a maelstrom of struggle which should be invigorated rather than threatened by conflict and dissent. Insofar as innovation entails hypothesis and falsification, science itself proceeds largely upon leaps of faith: hunches, intuitions, shots in the dark. And certainly science is no untouchable singularity hovering in some mythical, rarefied atmosphere above the hurly-burly of social production; the pursuit of science, like that of faith, is an immanently social and political act. All of these are good reasons to think that science and religion, as different modes of knowing the world, can coexist, however grumpily, without a cataclysmic clash between the erstwhile custodians of ecumenical insight that both sides seem eager to provoke in the current climate.

If there is any clear "winner" in the battle between iconoclasm and creed, it's capitalism: a fickle, expedient, and insatiable parasite suckling greedily at the tit of Athena. Capitalism thrives upon the production of knowledge, and in its own turn, shapes its course indelibly. Levins and Lewontin put it succinctly:

Modern science is a product of capitalism. The economic foundation of modern science is the need for capitalists not only to expand horizontally into new regions, but to transform production, create new products, make production methods more profitable, and to do all this ahead of others who are doing the same. Its ideological underpinnings are congruent with these needs and also with the political philosophy of the bourgeois revolution -- individualism, belief in a marketplace of ideas, internationalism, nationalism, and rejection of authority as the basis of knowledge (Levins and Lewontin 1996:197).

The "knowledge" produced under the auspices of capital accumulation is a mongrel canon at best; in the main, profit seems to depend upon the steady supply of a functional science -- one that creates widgets that work, wagons to carry them, and weapons to secure the expansion of their markets. But in the interstices of this rational grid, capitalism seems equally satisfied to turn a profit from snake oil -- miracle cures, quack remedies, mystical placebos -- and eminently placed to convince people that only commodity consumption can cure their purported flaws. What matters to capital is not content, but profitability.

So if the fundies can find a way to make creationism turn a profit, they've got half a chance of giving Darwin a real run for his money in the hegemony market. In the meantime, I'm sufficiently convinced of the lucrative potential of rational science to trust that its explanatory power can weather any serious assault from the tick-tock lobby. Certainly the spectre of social regression to a period in human history when religious authority dictated acceptable thought -- and I believe this is the dark dystopia evoked by the fear of creationist ascendancy -- strikes me as dubious.

But in the odd whimsical moment, I can't help but wonder if Harriet, having departed our own troubled shores for bluer waters, might not bump into her old friend Chuck, and have a conspiratorial titter at the tempest in a teapot the two of them cooked up some century and a half ago.

Citations:

Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin, 1985. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

How High's the Water, Mama? Rising with Our Hemlines

If there remains any question that it's de rigeur to go green, the May 2006 issue of Vanity Fair should lay to rest all lingering doubts. The well-heeled wags at Conde Nast have sounded the call for a "New Environmental Revolution" on a splashy Annie Leibovitz cover featuring erstwhile radicals George Clooney, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Al Gore, with a beatific Julia Roberts hovering above the stylishly-mossy eco-Bolshies like a latter-day Eve in an emerald Bill Blass ballgown and leafy crown. Alongside such thought-provoking headlines as "Sex and the City for Teens" (p. 100) and "Our Oscar-Party Scrapbook!" (p. 78), the UK cover invokes the dire spectre of global warming as "A Threat Graver Than Terrorism" (than terrorism!) and promises to predict which cities will be underwater by the year 2100 (p. 136). Even in the wake of Katrina, the accompanying photoshop of Manhattan up to its cockles in seawater looks excessively apocalyptic, but if Vanity Fair can make Al Gore look sexy, then I suppose anything is possible.

Global warming, of course, is no joke, and by all reasonable accounts will indeed require a radical and global political economic restructuring to mitigate -- which is precisely why the juxtaposition of "revolutionary" incitement alongside the glib pronouncement that "Green is the new black" (Editor's letter, p. 16) is so depressing. But the mind-boggling irony of claiming to re-radicalize nature by turning environmentalism into the political equivalent of a Prada handbag pales in comparison to the the Orwellian absurdity of the eco-icons VF showcases as paragons of environmental virtue. The clear-cut winner in the bizarro-environmentalist sweepstakes has got to be Lord John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum, an allegedly "green" company whose rickety infrastructure recently leaked more than 250,000 gallons of crude onto the Alaskan North Slope. "It is seemingly contradictory, if not somewhat perverse, for an oil giant to place itself at the forefront of efforts to reduce carbon emissions" (p. 112), VF concedes. Well spotted. This brazen celebration of BP's logic-defying greenwashing is slightly less contradictory, however, than the condemnation of the Bush administration for its environmental record on page 16 and subsequent eulogizing of the "creation care" of The "Good" Reverend Richard Cizik, who encourages his evangelical followers to "live their lives in conformity with sustainable principles" but opposes a woman's right to choose abortion, on page 130. Other "revolutionaries" include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hollywood groper and Governor of California, Hank Paulson, Chairman and CEO of the Goldman Sachs group, and Zac Goldsmith, "eco-aristocrat" and environmental adviser to Tory leader Dave "homeboy" Cameron. If there is any underlying theme connecting Vanity Fair's eco-heroes, it's their shopping habits: most of them either buy or sell purportedly green commodities, the hybrid Toyota Prius ranking as the most sought-after accessory of the season. Julia Roberts buys Seventh Generation diapers; George Clooney drives a zero-emissions Tango; Edward Norton purchases solar panels from BP (double kudos!); Jennifer Boulden and Heather Stephenson of Ideal Bite advise conscientious shoppers on their apple and shampoo consumption; Ed Begley Jr....I'm not quite sure what he does, but it appears to involve standing around looking very concerned. The selection of such vapid role models is all the more unfortunate as it trivializes VF's more credible choices, like Kenyan activist Wangari Muta Maathai, who has earned her environmental stripes doing a hell of a lot more than choosing econappies over Pampers.

The Special Green Issue isn't a total loss; Michael Shnayerson's article on Appalachia (p. 144) is well worth the read, and to its credit depicts coal mining as a matter of environmental justice whose toll on the rural poor is as devastating as its toll on the landscape from which they derive a wage. Mark Hertsgaard's global warming piece is informative if run-of-the-mill (and occasionally silly, opening, as it does, with Her Maj's concerns about losing her view of the Wash out the parlour window of Sandringham). Al Gore's article ("The Future Is Green," p. 105), meanwhile, is laced with the usual platitudes and some predictable if well-deserved digs at Dubya on both 9-11 and Katrina. It's also studded inexplicably with Chinese characters (China, of course, being a global leader in environmental progressivism), presumably in a bid to secure his New Age street cred with the feng shui set. Altogether, readers are left not so much with the urge to start a revolution as the urge to splurge on a new wardrobe in suitably militant shades of khaki, but that's exactly the point: as we learned from September 11, shopping is the sacred duty of every patriotic American in the face of disaster.

It was over eight years ago that Neil Smith warned of the cooptation of environmental radicalism:

We have won a major victory by putting nature squarely and ineluctably on the popular political agenda, but we have also suffered a major defeat insofar as the agenda of politics as normal has largely digested, institutionalized and marketized the politics of nature. Compared with the late 1960s and 1970s when the politics of nature erupted, fin de millennium angst about nature is widespread but of low intensity; we're all environmentalists now (Smith 1998:272).

While the turning of the millennium has come and gone, nature angst shows no sign of abating any time soon; indeed what Cindi Katz has termed "apocalyptic environmentalism" (Katz 1995:276) seems ghastlier than ever, thanks in part to some truly spectacular recent reminders of human failure in the face of nature's awesome power: Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami. Nature as an item of conspicuous consumption, in the meanwhile, is a story as old as the hills; the rich and famous have coveted their slice of pristine green since there has been an objectified "nature" to covet and a leisured class with the wherewithal to colonize it. The ideological coupling of the two in a placating politics of eco-consumption is a more recent phenomenon, but entrenched enough for Vanity Fair to be rather more than fashionably late to the party.

Memo to Graydon Carter: capitalists are not revolutionaries, dahlink. And I would humbly submit, dear reader, that if the salvation of the world now lies in Ed Begley's furrowed brow, then when the waters do rise, we'll be up the proverbial creek.

Citations:

Katz, Cindi, 1995, "Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature." In Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener, eds. Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order. New York and London: Guilford.

Smith, Neil, 1998, "Nature at the Millennium: Production and Re-enchantment." In Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.