The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture

Notes

185 Notes Introduction 1. My argument is in line with those of Charles Mills, Laura Kipnis, and others who use notions of disgust and trash to understand how dominant discourses rationalize social control based on corporeal marginality. Charles W. Mills, in “Black Trash,” for instance, argues for a “shit-disturbing standpoint of black trash” (74), while Laura Kipnis, in “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” argues that disgust toward the female bodies in pornography reinforces elite feminist identity. 2. Environmentalist disgust toward overpopulating masses is well documented , and one need only do a cursory discourse analysis of media coverage of Occupy Wall Street to detect the anxiety about the health concerns associated with the congregating of masses of people. In this Foucauldian brave new world, “human rights” of health and safety trump the civil right to congregate, protest, and exercise free speech. As the logic goes, all those shit-producing bodies are a threat to the body politic. Similarly, thinking in terms of an ecological shitprint helps illuminate the disgust implicit in this corporeal rendering of the concept of an ecological footprint. 3. I use this term as a play on the term “politically correct,” in order to point out the ways that these social categories reflect cultural politics, not necessarily biological truths, even as the full rhetorical weight of nature backs them. 4. A note on terminology: I use the term “disabled body” to refer to the associations of its social construction (maimed, lacking, dependent, physically and/or mentally “invalid” according to dominant standards of “normalcy,” etc.). As I discuss in chapter 1, the category is not as stable as my use of it here might suggest, of course, and critical disability studies scholars challenge the binaries of abled/disabled, social/individual, and mental/physical that are assumed in the term. If, as I argue here, the environmental crisis is a crisis of the body, then disability is a crucial lens through which to understand the crises, or perceived crises, of both the body and nature. 5. Thanks to Rachel Ann Hanan for this insight about how our environmental values are implicit in—and indeed even constructed by—our language itself, down to the seemingly innocuous part of speech, the preposition. Such an insight suggests that language precedes, if not creates (as opposed to inhibits), 186 Notes our connection to nature, an argument that is increasingly being taken seriously in the fields of ecopoetics and eco-semiotics. 6. Many theorists have thus contended that race is elided in concepts of space, such that urban is a metonym for blackness. Yet, as Linda Nash’s Inescapable Ecologies has shown, polluted spaces are not necessarily urban, and certainly the contemporary urban dweller is more environmentalist in terms of ecological footprint than the average American rural dweller. Thus, mapping dirty spaces and dirty bodies is a much more complex undertaking than these categories allow. 7. I say “continue to be sculpted” to highlight the fact that, as I outline in this book, colonialism and capitalism were both enlivened by the sacrifice of the bodies of their others. The contemporary examples I examine herein continue a history of this phenomenon. What is new is not the use of bodies to materially support the ruling order; rather, it is the resurgence of the body in environmental discourse. 8. I use environmentalism and conservation interchangeably, although I concede that these two terms have different origins and connotations. Indeed, these two terms differ historically from the term preservation as well. I recognize that many historians argue that environmentalism as we know it now did not emerge until the late 1960s with the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring, and that it could therefore be considered anachronistic to call either preservation or conservationism environmentalism. Given this potential historical fallacy, I want to highlight what environmental literature scholars like Mazel are trying to argue, which is that what we consider the environmental movement today had its origins much earlier than the 1960s. I am interested in the aspects of the roots of the modern environmental movement that echo both Muir and Roosevelt, Marsh and Thoreau, Carson and Abbey—such as the role of the pastoral and Miller’s notion of nature’s nation, for example. Chapter 1 1. The distinction between valuing nature as refuge or resource occupied Progressive Era environmentalists, who were divided between conservationists (who preferred protecting nature as resource) and preservationists (who wanted to protect nature for refuge). To these groups, the projects of...