The Art of Ecology

“Make it new.” Ezra Pound’s famous charge for Modernism (translated from Confucian text) always strikes me as interestingly relevant when thinking about ecology as a reconstructive philosophical method. “The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an inventory, a discovery is of little worth. The very name Troubadour means a ‘finder,’ one who discovers,” Pound tells us. Environmental philosophy wonders how we become finders of that which our society has lost, of biotic relationships and sensate connections, in a world so cluttered? Where do we begin? How do we take inventory and thereby refine our skills as artists (or troubadours perhaps) of ecology?

The root oikos, meaning “home,” lends to the idea of the ecological artist as one who might dwell creatively with, in, and of her surroundings, nurturing a sense of belonging through artistic engagement. In following the logos portion of this relationship, the artist makes studies, attempts to discover its contours and composition. She inhabits a place as an aesthetician, becomes confluent with her specific environment, allowing beauty to supersede artificial imposition, control, and poverty. She attempts to deconstruct her own estrangement from the land, to actively involve herself in its goings-on. Home stands in contrast to places of work, places of commerce and industry; it organizes itself around the sheer fact of subsistence, rather than narrow economic interests or products. In whatever place we call home there are no contrivances or obligations to stand between us and our surroundings. As such, we strive for beauty in all facets of our home life, just as we do for ourselves: moral beauty, familial beauty, emotional beauty, physical beauty, etc. We attempt to secure for our household a conduciveness to growth and flourishing. We must learn to self-identify with our ecologies as we do with our homes. In becoming ecological artists, and taking Pound’s injunction seriously, we begin with these same facets of our larger habitat, take inventory of them, and engage them critically and creatively.

As I toyed with earlier, beginning, and more specifically, beginning from a terrestrial ground—a ground that retains the textures and landforms upon which real living creatures might subsist—in other words, beginning geocentrically, stands in contrast to philosophical beginning, which seeks out jumping-off points tailored to its own purposes. Moreover, philosophy likes to give its beginnings special status apart from that which is already underway. An obvious example, Plato’s image of the earth, of a dark cave, of shadows buried beneath the surface, aligns earthbound existence with ignorance and illusion, while higher truths, absolute forms, transcend, hang in the sky, emanate blinding light. For Descartes, the idea of beginning is radicalized, but epistemology roughly conforms to the vertical schema of Plato’s allegory. What we have inherited is a Gnostic history, by and large, setting Somatics against Pneumatics, earth against heaven. We are only at home in heaven, and so our time on earth is merely a temporary detour on the path of eternity, therefore deprived of any real significance. The goal of illumination is thus one of transcendence, the dream of flight. Transcendence manifests itself in contrast to impermanence and being bound to the earth, both of which seem primary features of ecological understanding.

Even the legacy of collapsing such dualisms, either through circumventing the distinction or formulating some sort of monism fragments and reflects our Gnostic tendencies. If first we can desire to stand wholly on the side of the Somatics, inverting the hierarchy, or at least revolting against it, we might later be able to work out a phenomenology that better serves our purposes. But even this move would remain in the transcendent realm of philosophical beginnings. How do we become Somatics, rather than merely extend to them our moral support? How do we turn away from the possibility of flight altogether?

In thinking the evolutionary history of the ostrich, the emu, or the penguin, the obvious question arises: why stay grounded? What is the particular environmental niche that affords sacrificing flight? In our case, like other flightless birds, we have perhaps lost the predatory threat that would invoke flight. If at one point in history it was necessary, we must at least now recognize the need for new skills: to run, swim, and stick our heads in the sand. Carrying the dead weight of Pneumaticism in the postmodern world has anesthetized us to earthly problems, made us indifferent to Somatic threats: climate change, overpopulation, social injustice, genocide, industrial farming, pollution, etc. These are challenges that must be solved by a thoroughgoing and practical humanism, not a faith in transcendent ideals or cosmic justice. But our inheritance of these problems is part and parcel of an inheritance of transcendent solutions. Against Gnosticism we have the sort of monism that issues a capital “N” Nature, a transcendent Earth, or else an Earth created from Heaven. Even the naturalism of modern science has done little to reconcile the transcendent human realm with its immediate ecological schema because it can be so easily broken off from the rest of everyday human experience.

Furthermore, we suffer from a congestion of ecological information. How can we contextualize the intricacy of a highly developed, technological, globalized, consumer culture in the same glance as the intricacy of our biosphere? It seems at once easier and more difficult than any other time in history. The innovation of mass-communication and information technology generates new kinds of ecological experiences, and thus new existential factors to grapple with. Immersion in “cyberdelic” experiences, for example, alters our very orientation towards information. It socializes us towards an ecology that reaches beyond previous forms of communication. We are no longer passive receptors of information situated in front of a screen, we are interactively screen-oriented, and plugged into a collective network of other interactive screen-oriented beings. Deep cyberdelic experience entails a fundamental alteration of consciousness via these networked interactions. A more cynical take on such a view might ask what state our consciousness is being altered from. The pervasiveness of information technology makes it more likely that the alteration is historical, rather than a temporary experience analogous to drugs. Similarly, we can trace not only a cultural gap but also a fundamental psychological difference between members of a consumer-based society and that of a communalistic society, for instance. Citizens of consumerism are existentially bound to the structure of capitalism and the culture of its products (listen to: “All Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash). Modern identity easily depends just as much on the promises of consumer culture as it does upon personal relationships and meanings.

In the shadow of such anthropological behemoths it seems unlikely that science alone could produce an ecological understanding robust enough to redirect society away from certain environmental doom. Ecological awareness depends upon much more than the reliability of science. Additionally, the attempt to assimilate ecology into a consumer model (via the “greening” of products and businesses) is especially dangerous, as it reifies a sense of moral accomplishment without actually addressing the problems. It also fails to view consumerism, and subsequently society at large as being ecological structures. In facing our environmental problems from within this context, we tend to turn towards our legacy of transcendence, through which we view Nature as Other, or worse, as Product. The idea that ecological restoration can be purchased by supporting green business hypostatizes an understanding of ecology that is attenuated by consumer consciousness. Specifically, it excludes human concerns from ecological concerns. By viewing ecology as just one problem of humanity, we fail to grasp what is meant by ecological understanding. An organic understanding of ecology is one that attends to relationships of any kind: social, biotic, political, economic, moral, etc. It is this openness to the human and more-than-human significance of relationships that the idea of ecological artistry might be better suited for.

"Why do you leave me, wounding me by the wingbeats of your flight? Alone: what shall I use my mouth to utter?"

Most of this will be quotation for my own sake. I’m trying very hard not to touch semiotics. But I’m curious about the practical and qualitative difference between a nominalist perspective of nature and one that does not posit language as the ground of experience. Truthfully, I think it’s a rather boring debate, but the ideology that would follow from (or lead to) either view seems, at least, not completely irrelevant to the field of ecology. I think with Dewey (who stands by experience not for the sake of philosophy, but for the sake of humanism) or James’s pragmatism we might avert having to choose sides by simply saying that whichever yields the more beneficial and fruitful sort of experience in specific contexts (ecological, for example) should be adopted, since this isn’t the sort of debate that one could otherwise solve. Even with such contextualism it would never be safe to assume that we can reach fully beyond the “text” of being human. For Dewey, in his Peircean voice, this would run counter to the spirit of experimentalism…we must be vigilant. Even with James, as Rorty quotes him, “The trail of the human serpent is over all.”

But this wouldn’t limit us to thinking that whatever is real begins and ends with our experience. We are included in the world, but our inclusion is entirely provisional. The fact that curiosity irks us into wanting to come down hard and fast one way or another on the issue, and stick to that decision, stands apart from the problems that we encounter—problems of aesthetics, ethics, or politics that resist bifurcation and clean distinctions. In practice, it seems, we simply end up asking whether we are privileging a literary experience in our sensuous experience, or a sensuous experience in our literature. In doing a phenomenology, where we might think of David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous as a model for ecology, it seems to me that the differences of methodology are primarily aesthetic. Moreover, the aesthetic is ethical and political. That is, we take up a certain mode of attentiveness with regard to ecology for the sake of our own personal, social, and cultural interests, and that attentiveness is realized in terms of feeling, sensuousness, somaticity, etc.

For language, then, the connecting up of word to gesture and gesture to the world is certainly an axiological project, and is dealt with in as many different ways as there are writers and poets of the more-than-human world. Analytic epistemology aside, what does our perspective on language and experience tell us about our experience of ecology? Below are passages from David Abram sketching the evolution of language which I think hearkens to the intersection of aesthetics and ecology:

With the advent of the aleph-beth, a new distance opens between human culture and the rest of nature. …The pictographic glyph or character still referred, implicitly, to the animate phenomenon of which it was the static image; it was that worldly phenomenon, in turn, that provoked from us the sound of its name. The sensible phenomenon and its spoken name were, in a sense, still participant with one another—the name a sort of emanation of the sensible entity. With the phonetic aleth-beth, however, the written character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon…but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth. There is a concerted shift of attention away from any outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image, away from the sensible phenomenon that had previously called forth the spoken utterance, to the shape of the utterance itself, now invoked directly by the written character. A direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured. (pg. 100-101)

The efficacy of these pictorially derived systems necessarily entails a shift of sensory participation away from the voices and gestures of the surrounding landscape toward our own human-made images. However, the glyphs which constitute the bulk of these ancient scripts continually remind the reading body of its inherence in a more-than-human field of meanings. As signatures not only of the human form but of other animals, trees, sun, moon, and landforms, they continually refer our senses beyond the strictly human sphere. (pg. 97)

Reconciling our fascination towards the more-than-human field of meanings with our deepest urge to conquer them for solely human meanings is a funny challenge for ecology because both sentiments are more or less codependent. Without language, poetry, and the highest achievements of imaginative thought—in short, without belonging to a human culture—our experience of nature and our lives would be completely different. On the other hand, without a field of meanings that are more-than-human, that reside in a space that is fully other than that of language, our ecology would be monotonous, repetitive, and incestuous. In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey seems to grasp the heart of the matter:

What shall we name those four unnamed formations standing erect above this end of The Maze? From our vantage point they are the most striking landmarks in the middle ground of the scene before us. We discuss the matter. In a far-fetched way they resemble tombstones, or altars, or chimney stacks, or stone tablets set on end. The waning moon rises in the east, lagging far behind the vanished sun. Altars of the Moon? That sounds grand and dramatic—but then why not Tablets of the Sun, equally so? How about Tombs of Ishtar? Gilgamesh? Vishnu? Shiva the Destroyer?

Why call them anything at all? asks Waterman; why not let them alone? And to that suggestion I instantly agree; of course—why name them? Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone—they’ll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us.

But at once another disturbing thought comes to mind: if we don’t name them somebody else surely will. Then, says Waterman in effect, let the shame be on their heads. True, I agree, and yet—and yet Rilke said that things don’t truly exist until the poet gives them names. Who was Rilke? he asks. Rainer Maria Rilke, I explain, was a German poet who lived off countesses. I thought so, he says; that explains it. Yes, I agree once more, maybe it does; still—we might properly consider the question strictly on its merits. If any, says Waterman. It has some, I insist.

Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name—hension, prehension, apprehension. And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains—those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone monoliths—and it is we who are lost. Again. Round and round, through the endless labyrinth of thought—the maze.

Amazing, says Waterman, going to sleep.

Abbeyisms, Endless Mountains, and Animal Loneliness

A story in three parts, but not in any order:

One part consists simply of me telling you that, as a form of experimental aesthetics (or is it aesthetic experimentalism, or perhaps aesthetical experiments?), I’ve taken to amping up my politico-socio-linguistic-cultural-anthropological playfulness by injecting everyday encounters and situations with somewhat absurd vernacular flourishes; namely, I’m attempting to learn and utilize the all-too-outmoded tradition (for an East Coast suburban-born academic type, anyway) of speaking in aphoristic cowboyisms. More seriously, I’d like to spend some time learning folk languages, beyond the stifling esotericism of philosophical etymology. Edward Abbey, the iconic bearded face of the American desert, has become a sort of hero to me in this respect. He seems most at home criticizing Kant when he is spitting out rabid profanities and whiskey-laced colloquialisms. However one might go about articulating an irreverent environmentalism, or a sardonic ecology, few could be as successful as Abbey. It seems fitting that the voice of wilderness should be so wild. Anyway, just a thought.

The other two parts follow. One corresponding plainly to setting, the other to some further reflections:





The Endless Mountains region of northern Pennsylvania has a somewhat misleading name, considering a topographical view would reveal that the area consists more of plateaus, gorges, valleys, and hills, all carved out by thousands of little streams, than it does mountains. Nevertheless, looking from the ground, the horizon does seem to give way to the appearance of an endless mountain range. My hiking companion and I decided on a route that would follow Rock Run, a particularly lovely stream with some of the coldest flowing water imaginable. The stream meanders down a narrow valley, rushing deep and furiously into small chutes and gullies. As a result, one will find some of the most beautiful rock formations and waterfalls along its banks. We camp where the stream intersects another little run, affording a spectacular swimming hole. Unfortunately the wintery July weather makes the idea of full submersion less than inviting.

The next day we enter a vibrant young forest with short broadleaf trees spread out amongst a vast hilltop of ferns, interrupted only by a dark band of conifers following a bitter little creek. We comment on the likelihood of encountering deer in these woods, on account of the low foliage and sunny fern-blanketed meadows. Heck, I’d just as soon waste an afternoon here on my back, taking in this sweet aroma, watching the shadows of the trees pass me over. And then, sure enough, not fifty yards further, we spot a young doe.

She sees us, halts, and just at the moment any rational deer would leap away, she takes a few steps closer. My friend and I look at each other with surprise, retaining our stillness. She inches closer, eventually stopping on the trail about twenty feet away. She cranes her neck, sniffs curiously at the air in front of us, looks up and bucks her head, searching for our meaning. We both simultaneously return the gesture. Satisfied with our response, she casually strolls on up to meet us, eager to join our hiking party. As pleased as we’d be to accommodate her, we decide on the humane course of action and attempt to frighten her off. We leap at her, but she is reluctant. Be afraid of things that look like us, we tell her. But she doesn’t seem to understand. She looks hurt. After more noise and antagonistic motions we get her to back off a good fifty yards, but she is still watching us, confused and sad. That little doe ain’t right, I think. Perhaps she’s lost or orphaned, with no one to teach her these grown-up facts about the world. If she doesn’t learn about the dangers that await her, she’s a goner.

And with that, her desperation and loneliness are forgotten. Mostly. That is, they are recanted here for you, like an old song, a short story, or an animated Disney movie. But through art, through the recollection of art, there is also forgetting. Only in flesh, it seems, is there really interiority to loneliness. The songs that are about loneliness, that remind us of loneliness, that make us lonely, provoke the flesh, tease it, into wanting to reassume the precise circumstances of when we first felt this way. They ask us to rewind the reel to that one heartbreaking scene, to trace our steps back to the exact location of every memory encumbered by tragedy, regret, sorrow. We wrangle with metaphor and imagery in order to ease the very physical pain in our chest. And so, we have the medical symptoms, the racing pulse and dull abdominal ache (the seat of melancholy) but we cannot blame anything but imagination. Hypochondria causes us to want to act. Why not physically locate all of our memories? Why not take a road trip to pay a visit to all of the pangs of years gone by? Why not simply approach a stranger, as a last resort, and hope that they will listen to our sob story?

When it is the loneliness of the other, and moreover the nonhuman other, the flesh and body become crucial to empathy. Common sense, wearing his weekend clothes (just a plain old t-shirt and jeans) calls us on our anthropomorphizing free-spiritedness regarding the issue. He essentially calls us unmanly, smiles at the camera with a kind of rapport that we have not yet attained, and gets a laugh from the live television audience. Maybe they’ll feel sorry for us poor softies. Nothing emasculates better than coarse populism. “How can I descend to such anthropomorphism?” Abbey asks. “Easily…” it is but “foolish, simple-minded rationalism which denies any form of emotion to all animals but man and his dog.” Perhaps, when affronted by mortality or finitude (such as the kind found through tragedy and in looking at mirrors) it is only natural to retreat into a plane of ideality and transcendence. But we are always eventually pulled back down to the earth, to our bodies and to the bodies of others, by new pains. Why is it that the idea of loneliness frightens us most when it is identified as radically corporeal, as existing only in corporeal beings? That is, at the slaughterhouse, at the hospital, on the deathbed. The sooner we accept it, the sooner we can discover that corporeality does not mean isolation. Even if the possibility of isolation always hangs over our heads, only the most stolid and disingenuous creature could ignore the rich hive of relationships in which we are all situated. But isn’t that precisely what makes us lonesome? Our experience of relationality is highly attuned to the termination of the relationships we care about. Cut off from what we once took for granted, we give in to anxiety. In this way, ecology is perhaps the loneliest of sciences, tracing out relations through dense biomass, the ecologist is the keeper of the Creation and Destruction mythologies.

Corporal loneliness is most poignant precisely because bodies are that which are interwoven with other lives. We are both afraid of and drawn to other bodies in the same way that looking into a mirror is both startling and indulgent, alien and familiar. Somatic and sensate contact with the world is a point of fascination for the live organism, and the more we worry about this fascination the easier it is for us to work towards withdrawal, towards self-pity. To deny the nonhuman other loneliness is to deny it a body. It approaches us out of fascination, the same raw animal instinct that drives human nature. Somatic proximity, somatic apprehension, as Professor Acampora suggests, furnishes a space for aesthetic and ethical insight.

Assateague

Driving over Verrazano Bridge, across Sinepuxent Bay, one is hopeful, anxious. There is optimism that this sliver of shoreline is somehow protected from the more grotesque beach-goers that are native to the East Coast. As an individual who is repulsed by most things called “beaches”, but is nevertheless enamored of the beauty to be found in the convergence of ocean and terra firma, all I can do is hope. Unfortunately, Assateague Island State Park is not much different in terms of culture from the tourist towns of New Jersey where I spent more than a few childhood summers. Just after crossing the bay I see signs directing traffic, pointing to campgrounds, displaying entrance fees. Soon thereafter, the particular species of beach tourist that I disdain so well makes its unsightly appearance. Cars are backed up in front of me, waiting to pay for parking. A man who apparently does not understand how to shift gears on his rental bicycle rides by like a frantic circus clown. And so, my optimism shifts to further south, beyond the state park roads, to the more remote stretches of island. Granted, the undeveloped feel of the state park certainly stands in contrast to something so monstrous as Ocean City to the north, for example. To call it pristine would commit to an untruth though.

But if you’re willing to pay a bit more for your solitude in terms of mileage, to leave the state park behind and venture into the Assateague Island National Seashore, and most of all, if your constitution is such that you don’t mind suffering a few miles of obese sunbathers, rowdy children, and inebriated college co-eds, all walled-in by lines of enticing coolers filled with every beverage imaginable under the blazing summer sun, you might find it a worthwhile trip. If it weren’t for one thing, perhaps: the National Park Services allow motorized vehicles on the beach. Kilometer marker after kilometer marker, SUVs and pickups congregate at the waters edge, hurtling themselves further and further south, like me, trying to escape the calamity of the tourists and campgrounds and pay-per minute shower stalls. Thing is, these more adventurous sunny summer lovers and their sticky-faced offspring, or future offspring, are not quite schooled in Leave-No-Trace ethics and the unspoken moral courtesies of the backcountry hiker. The singular reason this slovenly lot exists is the leisure afforded by the combustion engine. On foot, close to the ground, such family excursions would not only be limited to a few, lightweight pieces of cargo, they would pay greater attention to how many soda cans they have to kick out of the path in front of them. Moreover, they might have to make conversation with each other, or with the birds, the horses, the mosquitoes, and the biting flies. In short, they might actually come into prolonged contact with an ecology beyond their windshields.

After obtaining a backcountry permit from a teenaged looking ranger, snaking through an RV lot, talking to a dreadlocked surfer, and walking down a paved bicycle path, I leave the state park boundary after about a mile. I face the 35 or so remaining miles of island, hoping to find an uncrowded corner. I am greeted by the periodic park n’ play beach bums, foam flotation toys spilling out of their trunks. I keep heading south, racking up miles, and eventually the vehicles become scarce. There is no potable fresh water available, so I carry with me about a gallon. My pack is heavy. I wonder to myself whether I really needed to bring a sleeping bag. Perhaps I could have done without the tent. I could have planned on simply erecting a shelter with my tarp, staying close to the beach, and hoping for a relatively bug free night. Walking through the sand with all this weight is slow going. Not to mention strenuous. I finish another mile in double the time of my usual walking pace. Feral ponies pick at scrub grasses in the dunes, indifferent to my plight. I see a lovely mare, speckled white and brown.

“Which way you headed darling? Mind if I hitch a ride?” No answer. “I’ll leave you to it then, I guess.” I keep on, sweaty enough that I think to myself I’d no longer be presentable at any civilized establishment. Probably a mutually beneficial fact. The ocean looks inviting, but I’m holding out until I can secure a proper place to lay my spread.

I eventually reach my designated site and make camp. It seems most of the vehicles have cleared out. I treat myself to a violent plunge in the drink. The waves are abrupt and powerful. I look up and down the shoreline and soon observe an apparently humanless landscape. I am surprised by how startling such solitude is. This solitude has a different quality than that of being alone in a forest. You never feel quite alone in a forest. There is life everywhere. Here, the sand and water overwhelms. The island is boastfully desolate. You are made ever-aware that there is no one around to save you from the riptide’s stealth pull. I am glad. The unthinkable scale of the ocean, the solitude of the beach, and my finite existence forms what seems to me a perfect illustration of mortality. Hyperbolic mortality, one might say. Otherworldly lonesomeness.

Back at camp, I remember I am not alone. A family of horses passes through the dunes. Supposedly colonial relics that swam ashore after their galleon sunk. Noble, romantic Spanish stallions that threw it all away for an American Pioneer Life. Or maybe they were just abandoned by settlers. I wonder if lying dormant somewhere in their brains, or else passed down through their ungulate folkways, remain distant memories of their domesticated origins. Could there be some evolutionarily neutral idiosyncrasy in their behavior that hints at a past life spent in the stables of famous conquistadors? Mulling these thoughts over, I stretch out a canopy, shade myself from the sun and succumb to a pleasant afternoon nap. I am awakened by a curious squawk. I look down past my feet to find a small inky bird with yellow and red spots hopping comically towards me. A Red-winged Blackbird. I appear to be in his territory and he seems worried. I assure him I mean no harm. He conducts some further investigations and eventually hops away.

The wind kicks up. In this sunburnt sandscape one feels as though every drop of moisture has been ripped particle by particle from flesh. I refill my canteen with my water reserves and down half of it without taking a single breath. The sand is everywhere, wearing away slowing at my skin and my gear. I've only been here a few hours and I can imagine a very robust sort of insanity that might follow from such exposure. I am reminded of images from Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes. Each grain of sand, gliding frictionlessly around its comrades, slowly rounding out everything, making it smaller, reducing it to sand. It seems the opposite of water, but is just as colossal a force.

In the remaining daylight I build a small fire, inhale the sweet fragrant smoke of burning heather and marsh elder, and await the sun’s much anticipated departure. I eat some dried fruit and throw a can of beans on the embers. The temperature drops. Now it is time for the insects to make an appearance, and they do. I indulge myself with some final complaints about state parks and their willingness to destroy intimate encounters with wild places, not to mention the preservation of that wildness, for the sake of increasing visitor statistics. Why allow motorized vehicles to storm through a place that is perfectly accessible by foot, horseback, or even bicycle? I eventually grow weary of this line of thought, the stars beaming down clean and bright, and I imagine the sounds of horses, island ghosts roaming around in the night. The human noises have left them, and now, the ocean is the most constant physical force in the universe. Do they even hear the waves crash anymore?

The Grounds of Criticism

What parallels can be drawn between the pragmatist desire for a method of criticism that will reconstruct policy and practice in light of new ecological wisdom and the seemingly more metaphysical flavor of much environmental Continental philosophy? In short: there is greater commonality than at first glance. Moreover, there are fruitful conversations to be had between the two.

Firstly, the reconstructive, praxis-oriented focus of American pragmatism finds itself beginning and ending in human experience. Therefore, to secure the “groundmap of criticism,” to even address the problems we face, environmental philosophy turns to our modes of engagement, of interaction, of belonging to an ecological community. It asks about our experience of ecology, our immediate sense of the world we inhabit. In other words, it takes experience as metaphysics and metaphysics as method. For pragmatism (at least in the Deweyan vein) criticism is shored up by ethical and aesthetic knowledge about how we are “in and of” our environment. With such moments as those found in “The Live Creature”and in Art as Experience, we get a glimpse of Dewey as metaphysician—parts of Dewey that perhaps don’t fit into Rorty’s more deconstructive pragmatism. But Dewey only takes these measures for the sake of learning something about how we might cultivate better [read: more robust] ways of approaching problems. That is, he takes metaphysics as a method of criticism. Incidentally, I find this aspect of Dewey to be the most useful and effective tool available for environmental philosophy. The purpose of ecology, for pragmatism, is not to map out reality for the sake of philosophy or science—it is a mapping in the most general sense, in light of natural and cultural schemas, for the sake of enriching our experience of the actual relationships by which there is intercourse between living creatures and the world. This is not merely a detour, as many people misreading the word ‘instrumentalism’ to be something much narrower might suspect. The end goal of pragmatism is not policy and practice: it is to reconstruct a fuller, more meaningful, and more satisfying experience from which policy and practice can draw from.

On the Continent, a newer and improved strain of environmental philosophy than that of several decades ago is to be found in the works of Deleuze and Guattari (especially A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy? and Guattari’s Three Ecologies). The provocation towards a “geophilosophy,” in an age where mass media, consumerism, and “integrated world capitalism” have dulled the brilliant birdsong of the more-than-human community to a weedy chirp, holds the same emphasis upon enriching the experience of ecology as pragmatism would. And for geophilosophy, the question of locating a starting point for criticism finds an answer not all that different: the obvious place, the ground beneath our feet. Both environmental pragmatism and geophilosophy, despite coming out of very different cultural contexts, eventually turn towards a sort of broad phenomenology of ecology. Granted, there are differences. But overall, the intersection of culture and nature that we find in Three Ecologies as well as in Experience and Nature marks a strikingly similar point of departure for conducting environmental criticism. It is a point that stands in contrast to movements such as Deep Ecology, which champions access to intrinsic properties of nature apart from the human schema of perception.

Anyway, if one were to conduct such a criticism, beginning with a phenomenology of ecology, I think it would be interesting enough to turn towards this idea of geophilosophy as concerning the primacy of being an earth-bound creature, in constant transaction with its surroundings. Shannon Sullivan offers a great comparative exposition of a Deweyan and Merleau-Pontyan notion of “transactional bodies” and the permeability of skin in Living Across and Through Skins that I think would illuminate this line of thought. But I’m also intrigued by the “geo” component of geophilosophy. Turning towards the ground, the earth, is a powerful gesture that I hope to one day be able to understand. It is a common expression in philosophy to speak of something as the ground of something else, signifying primacy or necessity. Even in this metaphorical usage alone we see that the ground is the unconditional support upon which all of our projects and activities depend. But in the contemporary world, “grounding” philosophy seems a shallow project, and its assertions quickly run aground. Among other things, problems arise with respect to dogmatism, absolutism, and epistemic presumptuousness. But we shall put these philosophical difficulties aside for now and maintain a humbler sense of the term. To truly discover the ground, for our purposes, means that we must turn, not to metaphor, not to an imagined ground, but to the actual ground. We must see it as the ground of grounds, not epistemologically, but ecologically. Without the grass, the sand, the clay, the topsoil, the glacial till, the bedrock, etc. there could be no philosophy, politics, or poetry. There could be no photosynthesis and no subsequent trophic levels. Without a specific terrestrial morphology we would be abandoned and floating. It seems a stupidly apparent, yet neglected fact.

For pragmatism, discovering the ground is to cultivate a form of geopiety without the need for intellectualism, spiritualism, idealism, holism, or intrinsic value. It is to recognize that all human means and ends are situated, foremost, upon a diverse and finite earth. That is, for radical empiricism, observing the ground beneath us establishes a mode of immediate knowledge in an exquisitely broad and general scope. To feel out the ground, to let it find context in our projects, is to take up a starting point in experience that is immanently meaningful. What purpose or interest could we devise that does not find its value in our lives as terrestrial animals? The skin of the earth is written into our biology, our evolution. To discover the ground is to see the earth as a shared context of all terrestrial life. I do not want to suggest that the ground is absolute, or certain, or even that it is complete apart from us. Such a claim cannot be evaluated but from our own grounded, human perspective. Understanding the ground as a shared biotic context only makes sense to us in terms of the distinctly human dramas we live through on its surface. However, I'm not claiming that discovering the ground is the only beginning for philosophy. But it is one beginning, and for environmental philosophy it is perhaps an appropriate beginning.

When enjoying a journey by foot (the only way to take such adventures), the ground is the singularly most pervasive feature of one’s environment. The constant topographical struggle, the textures, the obstacles, the friction, the sense of weight and space, the forgiveness or resistance, all converge upon this one fact of existence. The rhythm struck between gravity, earth, body, and human will is simultaneously the most gratifying and frustrating force conceivable.

I quickly peruse these reflections one last time while I am at camp. I bid last night’s comfort adieu. Finally, my burden reluctantly taken up, I hit my stride. I work my boots into a comfortable driving momentum. Underfoot: a cake of quietly decaying plant and animal matter. I notice lush congregations of fiddleheads surrounding dense mud. My body is plastered to this world on top of everything else, exposed and vulnerable to the gaping sky. When we are guilty of forgetting the ground as this sensuous and ever-changing arena of experience, we become preoccupied with the ideal, the over-thought and the under-felt. We become anesthetized by the narrow and selfish anxieties we create for our own amusement. We forget that we are caked in there too, or that we are like the fiddleheads, extending slowly and delicately out into the world. As William James offers:

Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one’s body, grows and grows.

The Importance of Beginning

"What are you doing now?" he asked, "Do you keep a journal?"— So I make my first entry today.

To begin, to set out, is the liberating event towards which I can muster all but the final pulse of needed energy. This is especially true the second day in on a long hike. After a day of abuse, my poor frame, still soft from weeks of civilized laziness, is slowly renewing an acquaintance with the strains of shouldering a heavy pack over harsh terrain. To emerge into the morning air from a warm sleeping bag under such conditions probably requires at least a momentary lapse of insanity. Even up and enlivened by a splash of cold stream water there is the tendency for procrastination. I linger around camp, preparing food, taking down the tent, putting off the inevitable pain of rejoining my pack’s weight with my aching body.

And so it goes for writing. With day after day of thesis research in public libraries filled with beach-bound book borrowers, of walks around the park, of walks around every park in the county, I convince myself reading anything and everything will be important and relevant. If only I can pull my eyes away from the back of the cereal box and pick up my journal again perhaps I can relearn what it feels like to cajole words onto a page. I push tentatively on something meaningful, something I want to say, or that I think you want to hear. But the physical impetus to delay beginning, to stay at rest so to speak, is the more agreeable route.

Until, perchance, a branch gives way, or a sweeping gust moves in, or a robin collects and redistributes accidental passengers. Of the infinite causal originations that exist in this world, emanating out in every direction, is it too much to ask that a tiny wavelet should befall me. What is the real difference, when all is said and done, between scratching down that clever turn of phrase on the back of this hotel brochure—the one that I would elegantly use to mystify and allure strangers in the hotel bar if I were a much different sort of fellow and if I were in a whiskey commercial—and the very moment that first photon of sunshine kisses a newly sprung seedling. It's all the same kind of activity: an egg is hatched, or a lightening bolt struck, or a rock is sent glissading down a canyon by the sandled shoe of a proud AAA member. An idea gets set into motion, bold and blooming.

But the opportunity to postpone liveliness, or activity, or engagement haunts every stage of its being. If I want to ride this idea out, prolong its course (no matter how provisional) I better demonstrate some graceful footwork. But I am clumsy. And I'd honestly rather be out doing something else...doing something lively. As Annie Dillard puts it in The Writing Life, writing appeals only to the subtlest of senses...life smells a lot better than the written word. But I am stupid. This idea before me is ambiguous and vulgar and it is mocking me. Pursuing it is like trying to remember the melody of an old song. How does one catch it? Dillard relays a story told by Ernest Thompson Seton about an Algonquin woman and her baby, abandoned in the Arctic one winter after the rest of her camp had starved:

The woman walked from the camp where everyone had died, and found at a lake a cache. The cache contained one small fishhook. It was simple to rig a line, but she had no bait, and no hope of bait. The baby cried. She took a knife and cut a strip from her own thigh. She fished with the worm of her own flesh and caught a jackfish; she fed the child and herself. Of course she saved the fish gut for bait. She lived alone at the lake, on fish, until spring, when she walked out again and found people. Seton's informant had seen the scar on her thigh.

I want to carve a book out of my thigh. Most of all, I want to stave off lethargy and dullness. I want to not return stagnation's calls. This is the time for new resolutions: for recovering the local and the relational in a concisely worded paper focusing on the American philosophical and environmental tradition. It is the time for transforming something into something. For moving from the park to the forest. For making strange new friends. It is the time for growing beards, for making sketches, for naive proposals, for no longer shopping at that one store that I hate but always end up at out of convenience anyway. For no longer shopping at any stores! Time to rise up and set out for the next mountain ridge.