In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter one Keeping Faith with the Source Our postmodern age encourages each of us to think of multiple selves acting in different contexts—at home, at work, at leisure—negotiating positions on the dilemmas we face and the decisions we make, not with a coherent ideology, philosophy, or worldview, but with improvised versions of provisional positions. When we speak in this age, we apparently do so with the differently situated voices that make up the shape-shifting postmodern self. Yet this is also the age of holism, of the yearning for a sense of the self as a whole, of a drive toward the reintegration of the self with the natural world to counter postmodern instability and disconnection. The word holism had to be invented in the early twentieth century (Merchant 1980, 292) to recover an ancient notion that Ted Hughes translated from the Latin of Ovid (43 b.c.–a.d. 17?) that sustained the Golden Age of Greek myth: This age understood and obeyed What had created it. Listening deeply, man kept faith with the source. (Hughes 1997, 8) Nature as an organic whole used to include the human species because, as the twentieth-century translator knowingly puts it, our species used to be able to “listen deeply” to the information in the larger rhythms and local details of “the source.” In the Golden Age our species knew and understood what had created it and recognized itself as a part of the holism of nature. In our postmodern age we dismiss this Arcadian image as an idealized pastoral myth. At the same time, however, we still recognize our need for a practice that will enable us to “listen,” and we apply all our technological resources to the task of finding it, while often rejecting (or simply ignoring ) any reports we receive from our listening scientists that would require changes in economic practices. But if we are to listen, we need to reclaim from idealization the notion of “holism” in pragmatic ways that will enable us to live our best (and continuously revised) guess at what it might mean to “keep faith with the source.” 3 4 keeping faith with the source Postmodern Dilemmas We live in an age that is concerned about the extent to which our species has contributed to the death of nature from activities that Ovid suggested began with “the Age of Iron” when “Earth’s natural plenty no longer suf- ficed” (Hughes 1997, 12). We are aware that our species has materially altered nature, as Bill McKibben argued in his book The End of Nature (1990). At the same time, James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (1979) has been used to argue that nature, as an organic biosphere that is not benign toward any one species, including our own, will adjust to the evolutions of parts of itself . Hence, there is a need to understand the dynamics of nature in which our lives are embedded. Both McKibben and Lovelock challenge anthropocentric notions of “harmony” and “balance.” But there is also a need for a rigorous reexamination and pragmatic reclamation of these notions from cozy idealization. New senses of harmony and balance are precisely what our species needs to discover for itself in relation to nature’s dynamics, as ecological economists such as Partha Dasgupta are now arguing (2005). At this point nonscientists can be forgiven their confusion as literary scholars, mediating contemporary ecology, offer wildly different versions of the dynamics of nature. For example, Glen Love (2003), following Joseph Carroll (1995), embraces an evolutionary biology that recognizes the emergence of universal features as a result of adaptation, while Dana Phillips (2003) reports that ecologists long ago abandoned Lovelock’s systems approach to nature in favor of a less determinate evolutionary randomness. Meanwhile, the global temperatures keep climbing, the poles melting, and the sea levels rising (for a sample of news from three hundred scientists see Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment). We know that this is not good for us and that our environmental crisis is a cultural crisis that we need to confront. The British government’s chief scienti fic advisor, Sir David King, has been instructed to stop saying that global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism (Independent, 9 March 2004), although the Pentagon has apparently been advising the Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern” because it is recognized that this threat to global...

Share