Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros

by Marian E. Lupo, Aug 28, 1999

"The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. . . . . Somehow we have become autistic. We don't hear the voices," responds Thomas Berry, a cultural historian, to Derrick's Jensen's question, "Why is story important?" in Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1995). Jensen, who holds a degree in Mineral Engineering Physics and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, began this project by posing the question, "How do we live more peacefully on the Earth?" to an arresting array of environmentalists, naturalists, biologists, sociologists, feminists, historians, theologians, artists, writers, and indigenous philosophers. The resulting book, as exciting in its originality as it is dangerous in its depth , is a dialogue between Jensen and the speakers, as well as a dialogue among the speakers that represents, as Jensen says in the introduction, "a communal effort at working through some of the greatest and most difficult questions ever faced by human beings."

Jensen and the speakers in this book do ask great and difficult questions: Is there a direct relationship between environmental destruction and other forms of oppression such as misogyny or genocide? What is involved in the experience of grace? Given that humans are causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet, can there be hope? What's the connection between language and the healing of the earth? Do you see any way either to reform or get rid of the idea of corporations? What will happen if we have available to us a virtually inexhaustible source of energy? Is technology good or bad? What are the full dimensions of its effects? Can it be reformed? Are we better off with it or without it? How do we remember to listen?

The answers, rich, thoughtful, and diverse, are heartful, if not rabidly hopeful. Many of the voices in this dialogue, particularly those who have worked in the environmental forefront for decades, take it as a priori that the Earth is in crisis, that the Earth is on a respirator and we are tugging at the plug. Dave Foreman acknowledges that we may not only lose "1/3 of all species on Earth in the next forty years," but also that "the only large mammals left in another decade or two will be those we consciously choose to allow to exist." Regarding the survival of the large mammals known as people, Charlene Spretnak states that the most likely prognosis is "slow death by poisoning" from nuclear waste and toxic buildup. John A. Livingston, who teaches in the Environmental Studies graduate program at York University, questions the ethics of his practice of revealing the extant destruction to his students because "young people have to think positively. They have no option."

Although they respond to the issues of ecocide and species suicide, none of the voices in this dialogue pander to the rhetoric of eschatology that prevails in our time, the alarmist rhetoric propelling the apoplectic partying, the apocalyptic praying, and the anxious preparations for sputtering computers, all because of the Julian calendar. Both cynicism and The Endtime approach are just silly, given the depth and duration of the destruction and our current time/space coordinates. Rather, as Dave Foreman states, we must acknowledge that "all of us alive now are members of the most important generation of human beings who have ever lived, because we're determining the future, not just for a hundred years, but for a billion years. When we cut a huge limb off the tree of natural diversity, we're forever halting the evolutionary potential of that branch of life." Moreover, as several speakers in this dialogue explain, the consequences of destroying natural diversity are catastrophic to our species.

Even conceiving of the catastrophic consequences of the destructive behavior of Western culture poses its own problems, "because there is hardly a place in our minds for human life being threatened" on such a scale, says Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., who has studied catastrophes such as Hiroshima and Nazi genocide, and who believes that we require "the level of consciousness" that survivors can bring and "ways of applying that consciousness in life-enhancing directions." Yet another problem of conception is posed by the need to grasp quickly the unprecedented scale of destruction wielded by the "megatechnology," Jerry Mander's term for the system of television, computers, trade agreements, supranational economic bodies, satellites, telecommunications, genetic and space technologies, and the objects they serve the most, the transnational corporate oligarchy. Finally, perhaps the most intractable problem of conception is posed by the relative comfort that most of us currently enjoy.

In addition, in English we hardly have the language we need "to find a way to speak first the problem, the truth, against destruction, then to find a way to use language to put this back together, to live respectfully, to praise and celebrate Earth, to love," as Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist reveals. Still, one of the most encouraging threads that runs through this web of dialogue is the speakers' insistence on the need for new stories and new metaphors as they rattle the old metaphors to show how empty they are. "Survival of the Fittest" should be recast as "Survival of the Cooperative." "Fit" itself should not be understood as a noun but as a verb. "Assimilation" is a metaphor for cultural genocide. "White" is an invented term, another misleading metaphor. As Jerry Mander observes, the metaphor of "neutral technology" is itself not neutral, "as it produces a passivity about our role in technological evolution." Both "development" and "resource" are "plastic words," which Neil Evernden defines as words that have been given authority by virtue of their use in science and then "relocated back into the vernacular," where they "sound important but don't really mean anything." Our culture and language suffer from "hardening of the categories" according to Max Oelschlaeger. Our categories have filled up, "become ossified," and "no longer carry the sustaining nutrients of life." We need language that expresses deep emotion, ideas of wildness, and reverence for wildness.

One of the most powerful medicines for recovery from autism is story, because through meaningful stories our life becomes meaningful. According to Thomas Berry, "the universe is the great story," but it "can be understood only if a person has some sense of how the universe functions as articulated entities that have their own spontaneities, their own voices, their own ways of expressing themselves." To hear these voices requires, as Linda Hogan says, the stance of reciprocity, "a practice of attentiveness and an attitude of respect." In addition, instead of hearing the stories of disinformation, propaganda, and advertising, we must actively build communities by creating our own stories and by listening to the stories of other people. David Orr explains, "Stories bind us to places because they are about specific people in specific localities. People with a storied past tend to be placed people."

Place is another powerful medicine for recovery from autism and another encouraging thread that runs through this web of dialogue. "We are place," Dave Foreman says, just as the "condor does not end at those black feathers at the tips of its wings. It's the rising thermals over the Coast Range. It's the rocky crag where she lays her egg. It's the carrion she feeds on. The Condor is place." Rather than accepting the dualism inherent in Western philosophy, which requires a discontinuity between self and the rest of nature, we need to consider that we are affected, "often at very subtle levels, by the fact that we are embodied and embedded," urges Charlene Spretnak. And we must understand the natural system of the particular place in which we are embodied and embedded, both to learn the importance of the natural system and to know who we are "in terms of place," according to Peter Berg, who originated the term "bioregion." It is through this understanding that we are able to reinhabit that places where we live, to become native to them, to restore and maintain them and to find sustainable ways of satisfying human needs.

This book is invaluable for those of us in the Scioto River bioregion. We may not have Condors or Giant Redwoods, but we do have places of beauty and wildness, even if some of those places are only as wild as a cornfield or a cow. In addition to presenting these dialogues in short chapters that permit the reader to surface from and process the thought-provoking material, Jensen prefaces each dialogue with a brief discussion of the speaker's background, work, and publications. Thus, of one wants to further explore Arno Gruen's discussion of the psychology of destruction and the creation of the psychopaths that increasingly determine political movement, one can read his The Insanity of Normality -- Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness. Similarly, if one was interested in David Ehrenfeld's debunking of popular technological and biological myths, one could read The Arrogance of Humanism or Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium, in which he offers, according to Jensen, "concrete suggestions for ways to build a sustainable life." Jensen himself is currently associate editor of the magazine Transitions. Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature , Culture, and Eros won the Critics' Choice award in 1995 as one of the ten best "nature books" for that year, which is too bad, since to categorize this book as a "nature book" is surely one of the best examples of that terminal illness called "hardening of the categories."