Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 1-7

Introduction

A few years ago while reading Paul Taylor's Respect for Nature in my environmental philosophy class, a quiet student, a member of the Blackfeet nation, raised her hand, asked "But why no respect for rocks?" Thinking she'd missed a simple conceptual point—that having a telos, that is, having interests or at least things in one's interests, is a necessary condition for having standing—another student explained it to her. "But rocks are alive and do have interests," she replied, and then proceeded to tell us a story that was cosmologically, morally, and aesthetically as rich as Plato's highly poetic closure to Book X of the Republic, the book in which, ironically, he rails against the social and moral degeneracy of poetry. Her story, the short version, took a full, glorious half hour. "Can't argue with that," another student said when she'd finished. Nor with Virgil. In the Metamorphoses, Pyrrha and her husband Deucalion, the sole survivors of a devastating world flood, are told by the oracle to "veil your heads, loosen the girdles of your garments and throw behind you the bones of your great mother." So they went down a hillside, veiled their heads, loosened their tunics, and began throwing stones just as they'd been told. "Who would believe what followed, did not ancient tradition bear witness to it? The stones began to lose their hardness and rigidity, and after a little, grew soft. Then, once softened, they acquired a definite shape. When they had grown in size, and developed a tenderer nature, a certain likeness to a human form could be seen, though it was still not clear: they were like marble images, begun but not yet properly chiseled out, or like the unfinished statues. The damp earthy parts, containing some moisture, were adapted to make the body: that which was solid and inflexible became bone. What was lately a vein in the rock kept the same name, and in a brief space of time, thanks to the divine will of the gods, the stones thrown from male hands took on the appearance of men, while from those the woman threw, women were recreated. So it comes about we are a hardy race, well accustomed to toil, giving evidence of the origin from which we sprang" (Metamorphoses, Book I).

Like the stones Pyrrha and her husband threw, the greater than human world, in the hands of an apt narrator, begins to acquire a definite shape, a certain likeness to human form even as it retains its mysterious otherness. And a story's rhetoric resonates in morally nuanced ways, ways that elicit from a reader what Henry James called "perception," "seeing a complex, concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; taking in what is there, with imagination and feeling" (152).

Martha Nussbaum says only narrative can "adequately state certain important truths about the world, embodying them in its shape and setting up in the reader the activities that are appropriate for grasping them" (6). For example, narrative requires the attentive reader to grapple, imaginatively, with intellectually and emotionally bewildering choices between incommensurable goods, with complex characters that we learn to trust and perhaps emulate or as importantly not to trust and never to emulate, with risk, and unpredictability. Narrative is not just aesthetic window dressing for an analytic argument, or a sort of case study of a general principle, or watering down a complicated point for the introductory ethics classroom. A narrative is "drawn from the concrete and deeply felt experience of life in this world and dedicated to a fine rendering of that life's particularity and complexity" (5). It cannot be reduced to or paraphrased in a principle, which is not to say that principles are irrelevant.

Should environmental philosophers pay attention to narratives because they contain...