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The Metahybrid Environment: Rewilding, Religion, and the Buffalo Commons Novel
Western American Literature Pub Date : 2021-03-26
Jerome Tharaud

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Metahybrid EnvironmentRewilding, Religion, and the Buffalo Commons Novel
  • Jerome Tharaud (bio)

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 [End Page 351] 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 [End Page 352] 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...



中文翻译:

杂种环境:野性,宗教和布法罗公地小说

代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:

  • 元杂交环境的野性,宗教和布法罗公地小说
  • 杰罗姆·塔劳(Jerome Tharaud)(生物)

2013年,环境历史学家保罗·萨特(Paul Sutter)指出,在过去的二十年中,所有环境都是“混合的”(自然和文化力量的混合物)的观念从根本上改变了学者们讲述人们与自然互动的故事的方式。萨特(Sutter)借用了历史学家丹尼尔·洛德(Daniel Lord Smail)的一句话,写道:“杂交有助于放松……'神圣历史的掌握'。环境历史学家已经承诺,将环境视为必然是历史的,随着时间推移而变化的人类或非人类所创造的历史环境,从而取代了美国环境思想所特有的伊甸思理想,他们拒绝了人类活动改变了环境的观念。被污秽和堕落”(96)。他指出,自然世界的最终结果是“没有伊甸园或罪过”,

萨特当然没有发明这个故事。威廉·克农(William Cronon)撰写了超过二十年的文章,这是“旷野的麻烦”的一部分[End Page 351以前,这个概念在犹太教-基督教传统中有多深厚的根基,该传统授权欧裔美国人将荒野理解为“道德混乱和绝望”的恶魔之地,反过来(到19世纪末)则理解为一个未曾触及的天堂,“经常被比喻为Eden本身”(“麻烦” 70、72),导致倾向于忽略更接近“家”的熟悉环境(89)。与此类似,卡罗琳·商贾(Carolyn Merchant)认为基督教是一种主要的文化“恢复叙事”的源头,该叙事涉及“人类通过繁重的劳动而回到伊甸园的漫长而缓慢的过程”(“重塑伊甸园” 133);但是,环保主义者和女权主义者批评者试图将叙事的“渐进式上升”改写为“ 破坏环境的情节”(154),商人挑战了两种叙事共同的线性推力,并呼吁建立一个“新故事”(159),这是一种基于混沌理论(157)的更为“混乱,非线性,不分性别的历史”。特定风景的历史也同样抛弃了宗教叙事。理查德·怀特(Richard White)抱怨说:“流行的环境著作讲述了犹太人-基督教的古老故事。工作是从恩典堕落。最初,没有人劳作”(“环境主义者” 175)。为了消除这个神话,他记载了一条哥伦比亚河,在该河中,工作确定了河与居民之间的基本联系,而在当地,长期的艰苦而熟练的劳动实践却消除了这一现象。 ”有机机械18)。没有伊甸园,这个西部。正如唐纳德·沃斯特(Donald Worster)在他对南部平原的生态灾难的经典研究中所论证的那样,资本主义可能是造成沙尘暴的主要力量,但基督教却是它的维护者:“上帝,我们知道,已经把我们征服了这里,沃斯特回忆起自己在平原上的早期教育(“沙尘暴”Dust Bowl) 245)。他的个人智慧之旅,以及最终他对该领域的贡献,都是用“该地区的自然现实”代替这些宗教小说,包括进化,生态学和经济学(245)。

这些有影响力的叙述都是哲学家查尔斯·泰勒(Charles Taylor)所说的“减法故事”的一个例子,这些叙事解释了世俗现代性的崛起,因为人们在这一过程中[End Page 352]逐渐“失去,摆脱或解放了”。自己来自某些较早的,局限的视野,幻想或知识的局限”(22)。用这种方式讲述历史,就像从一扇旧木门上剥去了几层油漆,直到最后您发现了下面发光的天然谷物,泰勒称其为“底层...

更新日期:2021-03-26
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