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9 The “Environment” Is Us
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter nine The “Environment” Is Us Books dealing with ecology and environment are now a vast industry , an avalanche of information and opinion that exceeds anybody ’s ken. The “environment” itself keeps growing, enlarging, encompassing , so that the environment of 1998 is a very different thing from what it was on the first Earth Day in 1970. The sheer number of disciplines that have evolved since Aldo Leopold’s landmark A Sand County Almanac of 1949 is startling—environmental medicine, environmental history, environmental engineering, environmental ethics, social ecology, green travel, green farming, conservation biology, eco-feminism, ecocriticism , animal rights, to name a few—exceeding in subtlety and complexity such early concerns as emissions, toxic waste, acid rain, and cancer clusters. On the World Wide Web alone the information is daunting, hopeless, beyond belief. In fact, the term “environment” now seems inadequate, a misrepresentation of the current state of affairs. After the Industrial Revolution, human beings came to be seen as more or less autonomous creatures who had been placed in an “environment” that they could use as they wished or even, in some perverse sense, do without. Understood rather literally, the environment was the stuff that surrounds us: factories, automobiles, trees, skies. Now, however, the center around which the environment wraps is getting smaller and smaller (or larger and larger) as what formerly seemed adventitious to the Imperial Self begins to look more and more essential to its very constitution. The “environment,” as we now apprehend it, runs right through us in endless waves, and if we were to watch ourselves via some ideal microscopic time-lapse video, we would see water, air, food, microbes, toxins entering our bodies as we shed, excrete, and exhale our processed materials back out. Western through and through, I say this without any flirtatious gestures toward Zen, any practical sense 95 that individual things are an illusion (in a philosophic sense, everything is an illusion), or any lapse of faith in the Imperial Self. The “ecocentric” rant (“I’d sooner shoot a man than a grizzly”) that briefly served Edward Abbey and Dave Foreman with such bravura showmanship has had its day, and now Abbey and Foreman seem as imperially selved as anybody else, if not more so. (Though Foreman has since become a mainstream eco-pussycat.) Three almost randomly chosen new books from the environmental deluge work together, when read as a group, to heighten one’s sense that the environment has ceased to be a wrap and looks more and more to be the very substance of human existence in the world. The first of these takes an “inside” approach (via subjectivity), the second an “outside” approach (via public policy reform), and the last is a philosophic overview of the influential theory of “deep ecology.” The writing styles and mentalit és are as unlike as their contents. Bodies in Protest: Environmental Illness and the Struggle over Medical Knowledge1 by Steve Kroll-Smith and H. Hugh Floyd is a study that comes perilously close to disaster but somehow manages to add up to more than its liabilities. Written by two professors of social science, the book is weighed down by portentous Foucauldian melodrama, not merely employing but repeating to distraction every cliché in the cultural studies lexicon, so that it often reads like a boilerplate whose blanks have been filled in with its ostensible subject. The authors seem to regard the clichés as the essential part of their achievement, but if they had all been left out, little would have been lost—and the gain might have been a shorter, more impressively “original” essay. Both their cultural studies theme (endlessly repeated) and their somewhat lumbering social science style are typically represented by the following: Throughout this book, the idea of EI [Environmental Illness] as a new way of knowing the body in its relationship to built environments is revealed in the activities of ordinary people who claim the right to theorize their bodies and thus shift the social location of theory construction from experts to nonexperts. The contours of this new knowledge become more visible as we record how these theorists change the definitional strategies of science from a focus on nature and the person to a critique of society. Finally, the political efficacy of 96 ecology [3.92.130.77] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:39 GMT) MCS [Multiple Chemical Sensitivity] is measured by its rhetorical power to convince the world that modern bodies and the...