The Metahybrid Environment: Rewilding, Religion, and the Buffalo Commons Novel

In 2013 environmental historian Paul Sutter noted that in the past two decades the idea that all environments are "hybrid"—mixtures of natural and cultural forces—had fundamentally changed how scholars tell the story of people's interaction with nature. Borrowing a phrase from historian Daniel Lord Smail, Sutter wrote that "hybridity has helped loosen … 'the grip of sacred history.' Environmental historians have replaced Edenic ideals—in many ways particular to American environmental thinking—with a commitment to seeing environments as necessarily historical, produced by forces of change, human or not, over time. They have rejected the notion that environments transformed by human activity are sullied and fallen" (96). The resulting picture of a natural world "without Eden or sin," he noted, had "challenged declensionist narratives and pushed American environmental historians into new terrain," but it had also been profoundly unsettling (97). In a world where humans didn't spoil virgin wilderness but only altered already hybrid environments, how could we come to terms with the real and irreversible harm we have wrought on our world? In a word, what about the Anthropocene? Hence, Sutter wrote, this brave new hybrid world remains "a disorienting place" (97). His choice of words hints at a rich irony: even as scholars tell stories of our gradual disentanglement from sacred histories and geographies, the language we use to tell them often evokes religious narratives of expulsion and bewilderment. Turns out leaving sacred history behind is harder than we thought.

Sutter didn't invent this story, of course. Part of "the trouble with wilderness," William Cronon wrote more than two decades ago, was how deeply rooted the concept was in Judeo-Christian traditions that authorized Euro-Americans to understand wilderness as a demonic place of "moral confusion and despair" and conversely (by the late nineteenth century) as an untouched paradise "frequently likened to Eden itself" ("Trouble" 70, 72), resulting in a tendency to neglect more familiar environments closer to "home" (89). In a similar vein, Carolyn Merchant identified Christianity as the source of a dominant cultural "recovery narrative" that relates "the long, slow process of returning humans to the Garden of Eden through labor in the earth" ("Reinventing Eden" 133); but whereas environmentalists and feminist critics had attempted to rewrite that narrative's "progressive ascent" as a "declensionist plot" of environmental damage (154), Merchant challenged the linear thrust common to both narratives and called for a "new story" altogether (159), a more "chaotic, nonlinear, nongendered history" modeled on chaos theory (157). Histories of particular landscapes similarly jettisoned religious narratives. Richard White complained that "popular environmental writing tells an old Judeo-Christian story. Work is a fall from grace. In the beginning no one labored" ("Environmentalist" 175). To dispel this myth he chronicled a Columbia River in which work defined the fundamental connection between the river and its inhabitants, and in which longstanding Indigenous practices of arduous, skilled labor dispelled the "tendency to romanticize and even invent pasts in which the planet was nurturing and humans simply accepting and grateful" (Organic Machine 18). No Eden, this West. Capitalism may have been the primary force responsible for the Dust Bowl, as Donald Worster argued in his classic study of ecological disaster on the southern Plains, but Christianity was its handmaiden: "God, we knew, had put us here to subdue the earth," Worster recalled of his own early education on the Plains (Dust Bowl 245). His personal intellectual odyssey, and ultimately his contribution to the field, was a matter of replacing these religious fictions with the "natural realities of the region," including evolution, ecology, and economics (245).

Each of these influential accounts is an example of what philosopher Charles Taylor has termed "subtraction stories," narratives that explain the rise of secular modernity as a process in which people gradually have "lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge" (22). Telling history this way is like stripping layers of paint from an old wooden door until at last you uncover the natural grain glowing underneath, what Taylor calls the "underlying...