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CHAPTER 9 Phenomenology on (the) Rocks IRENE J. KLAVER “Athos, how big is the actual heart?” I once asked him when I was still a child. He replied: “Imagine the size and heaviness of a handful of earth.”1 Humanity has become a major earth-shaping force—acknowledged even by the United States Geological Survey. We radically change our future, our past, the future of our past. “Evolution itself” almost disappeared in a layer of black slick when an oiltanker, latest mammoth of cultural selection, ran aground on the Galápagos rocks, spilling tons of diesel fuel into the archipelago’s waters. Iguanas, giant land tortoises, miniature penguins, flightless cormorants, they all held their breath for a week: could this be the last selection nature/culture had in store for them? As in a Greek drama, it was up to the winds to decide—but where Agamemnon could placate the winds by offering Iphigenia to them, there was no king of cormorants to sacrifice his daughter on the beach. They were well disposed to Darwin’s living museum, anyway, and did not wash the oil ashore. Of course, this was just an “incident,” an “accident,” but, given the ever-increasing volume of commodity transportation in a global economy, the word “risk” turns increasingly into a euphemism for inevitability. The effects of the presence of mankind are pervasive and ubiquitous; modernity has established itself solidly as globality. With a global culture and a global economy spanning the planet with worldwide webs, multinationals, mass media, and mass migrations, the earth seems to have turned into a human-dominated world. Globalization is often viewed through the critical light of the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture and seen as a homogenizing force, dulling the imagination through commodification and obliterating cultural and natural specificity, 155 effecting a general uprootedness—if not disappearance—of cultures and species. However, without underestimating the eroding force of unbridled transnational corporate rule—legitimized by WTO, IMF, World Bank, and NAFTA—it has been global Internet networking that has created a most forceful global alliance of local communities to counter the destructive policies of a global market.2 Globalization is far from a simple phenomenon. Furthermore, anthropologists, such as Arjun Appadurai, have shown convincingly how many cultural traditions have undergone a revival through incorporating international cultural elements and how local identities have been reinterpreted in terms of cultural globalization. Appadurai speaks in this context of “vernacular globalization” and contrasts the expected scattering and demise of cultures with a “globalization of differences,” a revitalization in new connections.3 Thriving communities of hindus in Houston, sikhs in California, in short: global processes create as well as displace regional distinctiveness.4 Also in the realm of environmental awareness, globalization, I want to suggest, has not resulted solely in uprootedness, but has also brought us down to earth. Confronted with the global effects of human doings, we experience the fragility of natural constellations and hence our own vulnerability . Where, for writers such as Bill McKibben, the global effects of humanity inaugurate the “end of nature,” I want to claim that in our global world, nature is more alive than ever. Undeniably there are huge problems, with potentially devastating consequences for many ecological communities, including ourselves. But no longer does the earth appear as simply a stage for history. On the contrary, nature is increasingly experienced as an intrinsic constitutive part of our lives. It has acquired relevance , and the earth has turned into a field of significance. For the first time in history, nature is entering the political domain as a serious presence instead of a taken-for-granted background. The Greeks made a distinction between “simple natural life,” common to all living beings, zoê, and a “qualified life,” a “particular way of life,” proper to an individual or a group, bios. The first realm was for the home. Only the second one was at play in the political realm of the polis. Giorgio Agamben calls the “entry of zoê in the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—the decisive event of modernity.”5 Indeed, more than ever nature is contested terrain. At the same time, as William Cronon emphasizes, “This silent rock, this nature about which we argue so much, is also among the most important things we have in common. . . . It is, paradoxically, the uncommon ground we cannot help but share.”6 Sharing this uncommon ground means realizing that nature is intertwined with culture. Just as...

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