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| Ralph Waldo Emerson, as caricatured by Christopher P. Cranch |
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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