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By the 2000s, environmental awareness had permeated much of
the country’s institutions and everyday life. The nation’s public schools
made concern for the environment an integral part of the curriculum.
Edenic murals showing mountains, oceans, and forests filled
with wildlife came to grace school walls and children learned to speak
unselfconsciously of Mother Earth. Recycling programs encouraged
people to think about the impact of their way of life on the world
around them. Organic food experienced a surge in popularity, appearing
on the shelves of mainstream supermarkets. Concern for the
environment had become a majority position. By the mid- 1990s, a
stunning 90 percent of Americans agreed that “Justice is not just for
human beings. We need to be as fair to plants and animals as we are
to people.”
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.
Briefly stated, these premises centered 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 seventeenth century, animals
were simply unfeeling machines, incapable of emotions or pain. As the
accomplishments of science earned it increasing prestige, this purely
utilitarian view of nature became the dominant mode, further reinforced
by the success of industrial capitalism founded on a scientifictechnological
paradigm. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed
in The Communist Manifesto, the modern world was built largely through
the “the subjection of Nature’s forces to man.”
This subjection was so complete it virtually eclipsed humankind’s
past, and with it, the traditional unity between humans and the rest
of creation 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. Premodern
creation myths typically highlighted a tribe’s moral relationships to
animal and plant species important to its survival. On the Great
Plains, the Lakota Sioux told how a powerful spirit, White Buffalo
Calf Woman, brought the sacred pipe and the buffalo to them—and
how both pipe and buffalo must be treated with profound respect.
Along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, Native American tribal
myths explained that the salmon they caught were actually the children
of salmon- people who lived on the bottom of the sea; each year
the salmon people changed their young into salmon and sent them as
a gift, a blood sacrifice bonding the two peoples. Beyond any par tic -
u lar group’s connection to any par tic u lar creatures and places, the
premodern cosmos possessed a kind of enchantment: Since animals
and plants and places had spirits, people could communicate with
them through rituals, prayers, and meditation. In an enchanted cosmos,
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 its 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. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his
avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life,
no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain harbors a
great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can he speak to
things, like stones, springs, plants and animals.”
This idea of the human world as separate from the rest of nature
never gained complete acceptance in the West. There were always a
few mavericks and romantics who saw such isolation as wrong in substance
and unbearable in spirit. Over generations, they repeatedly
fought back, launching waves of protest, both cultural and political.
Led by such diverse figures as Henry David Thoreau and Herman
Melville, John Muir and his successors in the public lands movement,
photographers such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, and scientists
like Rachel Carson, these protests have ebbed and flowed, risen in
power and then become marginalized once again.
But 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. Just how fast global warming is proceeding remains
a legitimate scientific question, but there is no longer a question of its
reality, or of the threat that it poses. Species extinction is accelerating
to a thousand times beyond what fossil rec ords indicate is a normal,
evolutionary rate. Polar bears were listed as a threatened species by
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser vice in 2008 because their icy habitat
was thawing; reports of bears drowning while swimming between increasingly
distant ice floes conjure up haunting images of what the
future might bring.15 Salmon have nearly vanished from the Northwest
because dams impede their migrations. Ivory- billed woodpeckers
have disappeared from southern swamps because of clear- cut logging;
after years of habitat loss to development, some butterfly species
in the Florida Keys are down to a few dozen members. Tropical rain
forests in the Amazon and Indonesia, long renowned for their rich
biodiversity, are losing thousands of square miles each year to logging
and fires set by ranchers and farmers to clear their lands.
Moreover, the current change is much broader, deeper, and more
varied than what has come before. Virtually every part of contemporary
culture, from the highest realms of science, theology, art, and
literature to the mundane world of commercial tele vi sion programming,
has experienced its revolutionary influence. Already, mainstream
ge ne ticists openly discuss the idea of human- animal kinship,
while major Hollywood films such as The Whale Rider enthusiastically
promote the idea of cross- species bonding. Even children’s movies
reflect a radical shift in the portrayal of human- animal relationships:
whereas coming- of- age classics like The Yearling (1946) and Old Yeller
(1957) portrayed the killing of a beloved pet as a necessary step toward
maturity, newer tales, like Disney’s Brother Bear (2003), feature
heroes that choose to remain forever in the animal kingdom. The ultimate
goal of this sweeping change, which I call “the culture of enchantment,”
is nothing less than the reinvestment of nature with spirit.
Flatly rejecting modernity’s reduction of animals, plants, places, and
natural forces to either matter or utilitarian resource, the culture of
enchantment attempts to make nature sacred once again.
Of course, not every person touched by the culture of enchantment
will devote their whole lives to it, in the style of Angelo d’Arrigo or
Julia Butterfly Hill. But however dissimilar and partial their commitments,
people respond to the culture of enchantment because it offers
them something they need (and cannot find elsewhere in consumerist
America): transcendence, a sense of mystery and meaning, glimpses of a
numinous world beyond our own. The spiritual connections made to
animals and landscapes almost invariably lead—often intentionally,
sometimes not—to a new relationship to nature in general. And nature
perceived as “sacred” is allowed to exist on its own terms, for its own
sake, valuable simply because it is there. For nature to retain its mystery,
it must retain its autonomy: While its products may be used by
people, it is not to be exploited or perceived as a mere resource for human
consumption. The culture of enchantment, then, alters the fundamental
meanings that the West has given the natural world, imagining
a new covenant between people, land, and creatures.
The implications of this shift are enormous. If first Luna and then
Old Glory can be reenchanted, whole forests or entire mountain
ranges or coastlines might come to command our love and respect.
Even degraded and polluted landscapes—the kind often found in and
around cities—might gain our compassion and be deemed worthy of
care. In creating spiritual and moral reasons for reconceiving man’s
relation to nature, the culture of enchantment poses profound challenges
to modern institutions, raising standards that few, if any, can
now meet. But though no one knows what changes would have to follow
from a conviction that nature is spiritually alive, the struggle for
enchantment is a crucial part of the larger struggle over the kind of
culture and society humanity will have. How that struggle began, the
forms it has taken, and its prospects for success are the concerns of
this book. The stakes could not be higher. Enchantment is the last
remaining utopian dream. |
