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Monday, March 5, 2012

Micro-Excerpt: Our Eyes Alone Are Not Enough

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
as caricatured by Christopher P. Cranch
The  theme of the talk I gave at UCSB tonight—our eyes alone are not enough—came from this passage that appears toward the end of the third chapter of Moby-Duck, pages 136–137. 


You might be inclined to see in the controversy over Gore Point the sort of tempest that invariably brews in provincial teapots, especially in geographically isolated provincial teapots like Homer. Rightly or wrongly, I was inclined to see in it something more: a parable of environmentalism in the information age. All the time, all over the world, in the coal towns of Appalachia and Hunan, in the fishing villages of New England and Indonesia, near landfills in Virginia and the Philippines, near incinerators in Hawaii or the Bronx, on farms in the valleys of the Mississippi and the Amazon, similar debates about our vexed relationship to the natural world are playing out. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the fundamental unstated question at the heart of the arguments I heard in Homer was this one: How do you measure the value of a place?




In America, this question has always pressed on our minds with unusual urgency. Our contradictory thoughts about nature in general and this so-called New World in particular eventually gave rise to a kind of pantheistic religion, the early scriptures of which were written by New England transcendentalists. Like all religions American nature worship has since its inception undergone a series of schisms and reformations and inquisitions, prophecies of the transcendentalists ossifying into sentimentalities and platitudes, only to give way to new prophecies (the Book of Muir, the Book of Teddy, the Book of Leopold, the Book of Carson, the Book of Hardin, the Books of Brower, Berry, Wilson, Dillard, Lopez, McKibben, Pollan), spawning denominations as numerous and as internecine as those of the Protestant Church: Preservationism, Conservationism, Agrarianism, Wise Use, Environmentalism, Ecology, Deep Ecology, Organic Agriculture, Biodynamic Agriculture, Biophilia, Locavorism, Green Christianity, Green Consumerism. Now, in the information age, Nature goes by as many names as Allah or Yahweh, and assumes as many forms as the Bodhisattva.

What should we value in a place? Beauty, Emerson said, for in the “immortal” beauty of nature a sensitive poet might perceive the discreet but harmonizing designs of “the mind of God.” And the organ with which both beauty and Divinity could best be perceived was, for Emerson, the eye. “The eye,” he wrote “is the best of artists.” Herein, I would suggest, lies one of the seeds of our present confusion. Beauty, like beautification, can be deceiving.

If beauty is the paramount value of a place, what sort of aesthetic adjustor gets to make the assessment, especially now, post-Darwin, when it’s hard to credit the notion that in nature we can glimpse “the mind of God”? If Brad Faulkner finds Gore Point more beautiful with its midden heap than without, and Pallister more beautiful without than with, who resolves the dispute? Perhaps then we should measure the value of a place by its usefulness. Usefulness to whom? A miner? A beachcomber? An ecotourist? An albatross? A copepod? A chronically restless artist, such as Rockwell Kent, seeking contact with primal energies? Our generation? Generations of the future?

Such distinctions might seem academic, but how we imagine a place determines how we value it, and how we value a place determines how we allocate our tax dollars or charitable donations—what actions we choose to take, which places we choose to save and what it means to save them. Is beautification tantamount to salvation? Sometimes, perhaps, but not always. And in the information age, which is also the age of images, and the age of public relations, and therefore the age of make-believe—when beautification can be deceiving, when what appears to be a crying Indian turns out to be a con artist for hire—our relationship to the natural world is, it seems to me, more vexing than ever. Our eyes alone are not enough.

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