Notes
Notes Chapter 1. Ecology, Epistemology, and Empiricism 1. The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. Less than two weeks later National Guard troops killed four Kent State University students during a war protest; ten days after that, police shot students to death during war protests at Jackson State University. It is not hard to understand why environmentalism, with its far more soothing images and its promise of common ground, became the retreat (in either sense) of many young reformers. 2. McColley,“Milton and Nature,” p. 424: “I hope it will become a maxim of literary study and teaching, especially in this age of ecological crisis, that attention to the relations between human beings and the natural world should be included among the principal approaches to literature.” Boehrer’s Shakespeare Among the Animals and his Parrot Culture show that such approaches are beginning to reach studies of Renaissance culture. Nonetheless, Estok, “Teaching the Environment,” complains that “there has been almost no work done that looks seriously at how representations of the early modern natural environment fit into” other literary-critical discourses, including politicized ones. 3. E.g., Bate’s The Song of the Earth, p. 267, which also briefly explores the depredations of Social Darwinism. Soper’s What Is Nature? pursues this anxiety in a more elaborate philosophical vein, while seeking to integrate realist and constructivist assumptions concerning nature. 4. Several different approaches to this question appear in the Environmental Justice Reader, ed. Adamson, Evans, and Stein. 5. According to the OED, the use of “representative” in the political sense is a Caroline innovation. Manley, Convention, pp. 259–62, offers an admirable discussion of the emerging emphasis on consensus in both politics and natural philosophy. More generally, Manley proposes“Convention”as a third term complicating the nature-art dyad. I believe that—though subsumed by Protestants and empirical scientists into the largely pejorative category of art (whereas it was once synonymous with one sense of “nature”)— “convention” recovered its connection to nature as people began to recognize that the physical reality they perceived was partly constructed and fundamentally probabilistic. 6. E.g., Guarini’s Il pastor fido, Act 4, and Tasso’s Aminta, 1.2.320; Samuel Daniel’s Pastoral begins, “Oh, happy golden age/Not for that rivers ran/With streams of milk”; cf. McFarland, Shakespeare’s Pastoral Comedy, pp. 46–47. In Jonson’s masque The Golden Age Restored, Pallas promises fountains of milk. 7. John Parkinson’s 1629 Paradisi in Sole is merely one example of the thenwidespread notion that humanity could build its own new Edenic gardens; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 236, explores the associations between gardens and the lost paradise. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science , pp. 237 and 243, offers further examples. 8. Cf. Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild, and Ortner,“Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” 9. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 12.58; all citations of Milton’s works in this book will be based on Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes. 10. Though the topic is different, this book may therefore be considered a methodological companion-piece to my study of mortality-anxiety, The Rest Is Silence. Having upset some (Foucauldian) readers of that book by discussing the continuities of human experience and other (more traditionalist) readers by discussing the differences in human experience at different cultural moments, I wanted to state explicitly here the kind of argument I will be offering. Again I am trying to highlight a largely transhistorical problem that local circumstances amplified into a crisis, and to encourage close readings and large cultural changes to illuminate each other. 11. Walker, The History of the Creation (1641), p. 193; quoted by Harrison, Rise of Natural Science, p. 211. My defense thus resembles John Lyly’s defense of mixed genre in the prologue to Mydas: “If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole world is become an hodge-podge”; quoted by Manley, Convention, p. 199. 12. See, for example, Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature, and the sophistication of that model by a third term in Manley, Convention, 1500–1700. 13. Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, p. 99; quoted by Martz, The Paradise Within, pp. 35–36. Another intriguing instance is Cotton Mather’s assertion that “the first Age was the golden Age: to return unto that, will make a man a Protestant, and...
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