Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies

chapter 12 Melancholy Natures, Queer ecologies catriona mortimer-sandilands One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. —Aldo Leopold It is as if the land secretes pheromones testifying to its abuse, detectable only by those who are themselves damaged. —Jan Zita Grover Sandy rang to say Paul is now very ill. I feel furious and impotent, why should this happen? Lovers shriveled and parched like the landscape. —Derek Jarman A contemporary echo of Aldo Leopold’s famous comment about environmental awareness as a “world of wounds” is currently reverberating around assorted blogs, Web pages, and other internet conversations. Entitled “The World is Dying—and So Are You,” the short piece (originally a 2001 op-ed commentary in the LA Times) begins with the following diagnosis: At the heart of the modern age is a core of grief. At some level, we’re aware that something terrible is happening, that we humans are laying waste to our natural inheritance. A great sorrow arises as we witness the changes in the atmosphere, the waste of resources and the consequent pollution, the ongoing deforestation and destruction of fisheries, the rapidly spreading deserts, and the mass extinction of species. (Anderson 2001) The article goes on to use (loosely) Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s popular theory of grief (1969) to suggest a series of stages through which this “ecological 332 Desiring Nature? grieving” might proceed both societally and individually.1 Kübler-Ross notwithstanding, it is the imperative that ends the article that is worth considering. Anderson writes: “It’s necessary to face our fear and our pain, and to go through the process of grieving, because the alternative is a sorrow deeper still: the loss of meaning. To live authentically in this time, we must allow ourselves to feel the magnitude of our human predicament” (Anderson 2001). While I have some discomfort with Anderson’s chosen language of “authenticity,” the idea that there is a relationship between an engagement with environmental loss and environmental responsibility, and that meaning is gained in negotiation with something that can be seriously considered grief over the condition of the world, suggests a dimension of environmental thought that has not been particularly well explored even if the fact of that loss seems, as Anderson himself describes, an allpervasive condition of modernity. There are exceptions: SueEllen Campbell , for example, in an elegant narrative nonfiction account of coming to understand the many layers of meaning of a part of the New Mexico desert that contains, at once, millennia of geological and biological history and the apocalyptic legacy of Los Alamos, confronts that lack, the absence of a societal and personal story of loss and grief in which to place environmental understanding: Was this [place] just the same old sad story, the one about human violence, the endless damage we do, may always have done, to ourselves , everything around us? Yes, I thought, but that didn’t make it simple. I couldn’t even tell myself that if humans are violent and destructive, the natural world, at least, is peaceful and enduring, not while I lay with my back pressed tightly against the remnants of enormous volcanic explosions and the cold winter earth stole my own body’s warmth. (Campbell 2003, 5)2 Campbell’s response to human destructiveness is both emotional and sophisticated . Her increasing awareness of environmental fragility is cause for profound sadness and, indeed, her own prolonged depression. She does not, however, respond to her sadness by romanticizing a pure and everlasting nature to oppose to anthropogenic destruction, but instead develops a complex and meaningful position in which destruction and loss are always already part of the character of the place where she lies: “transience was and always had been everything” (40). But Campbell is a rarity: by and large, as this essay will explore, there is in late capitalist nature relations a patina of nature-nostalgia in place of Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies 333 any kind of active negotiation of environmental mourning. Specifically, I will argue that Anderson is right—at the heart of the modern age is indeed a core of grief—but that that “core” is more accurately conceived as a condition of melancholia, a state of suspended mourning in which the object of loss is very real but psychically “ungrievable” within the confines of a society that cannot acknowledge nonhuman beings, natural environments...