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5 / Don DeLillo’s Postmodern Homesickness: Nostalgia after the End of Nature The cover of the 2006 edition of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature features a yellow bird, chest skyward, eyes half closed, feet curled in mortal repose. Combining fear and nostalgia in a way reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s powerful fable, McKibben’s introduction to this edition laments that the planet “means something different than it used to. Something less than it used to” (xxiii). To dramatize our environmental loss, he tells this short parable: “Imagine that you have hiked to the edge of a pond in the forest and stand there admiring the sunset. If you should happen to look down and see a Coke can that someone has tossed there in the rushes, it will affect you differently than if you see a pile of deer droppings. And the reason, or at least one reason, is our intuitive understanding that the person who dropped the Coke can didn’t need to, any more than we need to go on raising the temperature of the planet. We are different from the rest of the natural order, for the single reason that we possess the possibility of self-restraint, of choosing some other way” (xx, original emphasis). The idea that “we are different” refers to what McKibben sees as the human capacity to decide when technological “progress” has gone too far, an idea he explores in his treatise on genetic engineering , Enough: Staying Human in an Endangered Age. The Coke can also represents another kind of difference, though—what McKibben sees as a qualitative difference between the human-made and the natural worlds. McKibben began charting such difference in the late 1980s with The End of Nature. The first text to coin the term “postnatural,” this book chronicles not just change but loss, as it mourns the demise of a “set of DON DELILLO’S POSTMODERN HOMESICKNESS / 163 human ideas” in which we conceive of “nature as eternal and separate” (8). McKibben insists “we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us—its separation from human society” (64, original emphasis). Even if it is only our “ideas” that have changed, The End of Nature feeds into a prevalent version of nostalgia in which nature is a pure, originary, “separate” environment that humans have corrupted. The past serves as an idealized counterpoint to our steady decline. Now that climate change is generally accepted as an urgent global issue, The End of Nature has warranted a second printing. But McKibben first published it in 1989—right about the time the Harvard researchers were patenting OncoMouse. In his new introduction he looks back on that decade as a time of relative innocence, marked by his own youthful prose and cautious optimism as well as genuine uncertainty about climate change in the scientific community. Even though scientists had not reached consensus, McKibben was not the only one worrying that fundamental changes in human-nature relations were under way. Scholars were noting similar shifts, sometimes with measurable nostalgia of their own. In his influential Simulacra and Simulations, published in 1988, Jean Baudrillard questioned the very nature of reality: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.” Although Baudrillard himself asserted that “nostalgia for a primary Reality is . . . a primitivist fantasy that covers over our realization that there is no such thing as primary Reality,” the phrase “what it used to be” reflects a broader cultural nostalgia for a time when “the real” presumably was real (qtd. in Hamming 32). A few years later, Fredric Jameson posited that under capitalism’s most recent regime all that remains of nature is our nostalgia for “some organic precapitalist peasant landscape and village society, which is the final form of the image of Nature in our own time” (34). Jameson further argued that the “new decentered global network” of capitalism’s latest stage had become powerful enough to infiltrate even the “precapitalist enclaves [of] Nature and the Unconscious ” (38, 49). Capital had co-opted, penetrated, or colonized not only all of culture but all of nature as well.1 Just as Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Frederick Jackson Turner, and others in the early twentieth century were nostalgic for the American frontier, Jameson’s metanarrative betrays a late-century version of this narrative-emotion, in which capital’s final frontier, nature, is officially closed.2 Some amount of nostalgia is understandable, perhaps...

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