Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone

143 ECOCRITICISM IN THE UNREGULATED ZONE Cheryl Lousley [E]cological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about “the environment.”… It is a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency. —Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking (2006) The relations of democracy and knowledge are up for materialized refiguring at every level of the onion of doing technoscience, not just after all the serious epistemological action is over. —Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan © _Meets_Oncomouse™ (1997) In striving to call public attention to ecology, to “protect the environment,” to value nature, and to insist that there are laws of nature that even capitalism must respect, environmentalism politicizes nature, ecology, and environment. Just as feminism makes it a little more difficult to take women for granted, environmentalism makes it more difficult to take nature for granted, to view nature as an endless sink for the waste products of capitalist production, as a free resource ready for appropriation, or as a predictable, steady-state backdrop to social and cultural life. The parallel is not coincidental: as numerous environmental feminist thinkers have shown, both women and nature have been figured as supplements to modernity—superfluous additions or secondary matters—that turn out to be essential to its thought and productivity.1 However, just as feminism finds that its politicization of women’s lives ends 144 Cheryl Lousley up showing that the very category of woman cannot be taken for granted, but rather is constituted through political discourses and practices, so, too, does environmentalism find that nature, even in the most material sense of the term, is a power-effect, not an objective or transcendental ground for politics. The politicization of nature thus brings about a political and epistemological free fall, where nothing is certain, including the evidence on which we base our environmental criticism. To take my cue from Larissa Lai’s 2002 novel Salt Fish Girl, we find ourselves in an “Unregulated Zone.” In the speculative fantasies of Salt Fish Girl, the Unregulated Zone lies outside the secured boundaries of the corporate strongholds that have replaced nation-states in the mid-twenty-first-century Pacific Northwest. Populated by sweatshops, unidentified viruses, barter networks of the unemployed, human clones, and genetically modified organisms mutating in a changing climate, the Unregulated Zone riffs on the popular tradition of environmental dystopia and the neoliberal erosion of welfare state protections. Salt Fish Girl is also a novel of hope, however. Structurally, the Unregulated Zone is a place without recourse to a transcendent authority— not to the laws of a state, not to a corporate contract, not even to predictable laws of nature—and this is what makes it a contested space of both nightmares and political possibility. It is a space where “the relations of democracy and knowledge” are indeed “up for materialized refiguring” at every single level, from DNA to climate, as much as from the family to the nation-state (Haraway , Modest_Witness 68). Although many environmental critics pull back in horror from such premises , I turn to science studies, particularly the work of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, to find a more robust mode of environmental criticism and politics that can take them into account. Beyond the “nature-endorsing” or realist and “nature-skeptic” or social constructionist positions within social theory lies a more nuanced path that grapples with dynamic assemblages of human and non-human actors (Soper 23). I use Lai’s novel as a companion for thinking through ecocriticism and environmental politics because, like the science studies approach that partly inspires it, the novel takes the Unregulated Zone as a political opening—a place from which we might reconfigure ecological relations and, in the process, also recast, as Lorraine Code argues, “modes of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency” (5). Mediating Materials In What Is Nature? Kate Soper outlines a stalemate between two positions in social thought, loosely termed realist versus critical or postmodern. Critical Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone 145 theorists from Marx onwards have argued that the appearance of something as if it were merely there, natural or given, accessible to immediate contact, occludes its socio-material underpinnings, such as, in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, the capitalist relations of property and exchange that underlie rural landscapes. By showing how the “natural” is historical, cultural, and fabricated, Williams made the underlying property and labour relations publicly visible and...