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380 380 seven / Green Paradoxes One of the oddities of people’s interactions with their surroundings is that individuals who love, respect, or show fascination with nature often contribute , deliberately or inadvertently, to damaging or destroying it. Navajo spiritual guides have claimed that “digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium . . . is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.” Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about one hundred Navajo healers, has put it more bluntly: “As medicine people, we don’t extract resources.”1 And yet coal and uranium mining, the latter banned on their lands only in 2005, have for decades sustained the Navajo economy. The consequences have long been apparent—mining and power plant emissions have dirtied the waters and dulled the skies of their reservations—but only recently has the Navajo Nation made sustained calls to heal environments. In “Letter to Send in a Space Capsule” (2010) the contemporary American poet Lucille Lang Day amplifies this paradox: “We built enough nuclear bombs to incinerate or irradiate all life and fill the atmosphere with ash / . . . As we burned fossil fuels / to run our factories and cut down forests / to build our towering cities, the Earth / grew warmer, the air turned grayer, / and the polar ice caps crumbled into the sea. / One by one, flowers, frogs, worms, and birds / began to disappear. It may sound strange, but most people cared deeply about the planet / and each other.”2 It does sound strange, but as the speaker of “Letter to Send” suggests by talking about “people” and by introducing herself simply as someone who “lived on the third planet circling an ordinary star,” these ambiguities characterize the relationships of many human cultures with the nonhuman.3 Environmental degradation would be difficult enough to contain if the attitudes propelling it were entirely and obviously ecophobic. But damage to landscapes is even harder to prevent and remediate because people’s basic sympathy toward the nonhuman regularly accompanies behaviors that unleash (un)expected harm. Whether propagated by governments or private organizations, popular environmental discourse often underscores the need to respect other species, develop closer ties to the nonhuman, even learn to Green Paradoxes 381 “love nature,” on the assumption that such approaches will promote environmental health. Sometimes these attitudes translate directly into actions that benefit the planet’s ecosystems. Yet many literary works argue that little prevents well-meaning individuals and even proclaimed environmentalists from acting in ways that harm ecosystems. The Chinese writer Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) depicts this dynamic most clearly, featuring an animal that is denied freedom, even life, by the very individual who adores it; Chen Zhen imprisons and ultimately kills the wolf to which he has become deeply attached. Chapter 5 discussed how Wolf Totem shows human abuse of the environment accelerating even in the face of easily predicted and highly undesired consequences. The present chapter is concerned less with conflicts between conditions and behaviors than with gaps between attitudes and behaviors, especially the phenomenon of loving nature to death. Like most texts treating the relationships between indigenous peoples and their environments, Wolf Totem offers examples of people (Mongols) with great respect for animals who nevertheless occasionally kill them somewhat gratuitously. More significant in this novel is the ambiguous relationship of an outsider with one of the grassland’s animals. Unlike most Han Chinese, who openly detest wolves, Chen Zhen is fascinated by them. Averting a wolf attack not long after his arrival on the Inner Mongolian grasslands, and fascinated by the orderly retreat of the animals, he “fell under their spell, experiencing a combination of fear, reverence, awe, infatuation, and obsession toward the wolves of [this region]. For him the Mongolian wolf was not at all a living thing that merely had touched his soul. Instead, it was a living thing that had already struck his soul.”4 His soul not just touched, but struck (jue bu shi jinjin chuji le ta de linghun, er shi cengjing jichu le ta de linghun de shengwu), Chen Zhen is completely mesmerized and wonders how the animal can exert such a powerful pull over him (ruci juda de xiyinli). One night during his first winter on the grasslands, after watching a dramatic struggle between a wolf and domestic animals plus their human owners, he decides to learn as much as he can about these impressive creatures and imagines raising one himself...

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