Amber's Presentation on Neil Evernden - Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy

Hello All,

Below you will find the full text of my presentation notes. It comes out to four pages in Word, so feel free to skim through until you find something that is particularly interesting to you. I apologize for the length, the class handout I prepared was only two pages, the extra is what I would have said aloud in addition to what I was going to hand out. Since this is virtual, you get everything! 

:) Amber

Neil Evernden - Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy

Humanities vs. Science

-       Typically, when we think of environmentalism we think of science. However, Neil Evernden would have us consider the benefit the humanities can have to the preservation of the environment.

-       He sees the exclusive association of environmentalism with science as “contain[ing] the seeds of the movement’s destruction” (92).

-       Evernden believes “Failure is inevitable because of the movement’s willingness to address the developers perpetual question: ‘What good is it?’ Accepting the validity of that question entails denying the validity of the preservationist movement” (92).

-       This was interesting to me because I had not realized that the question of preservation was framed in this manner. I also did not realize that entertaining the question is tacit approval of an attitude that I do not agree with. If I go ahead and try to answer that question then I am already agreeing that the basis of environmental value is only its value to humans, which is not something that I actually believe.

Whooping Cranes and Subjectivity

-       The example of whooping cranes illustrates how basing the justification for preservation on that organism’s utility is completely human-centered.

-       What happens when we frame environmental debate in terms of usefulness? What about things that are not "useful"? Without utility we are left with a defense more in the "pathetic fallacy" realm. PF makes defenders who use it seem out of touch with the “real world”.

Subversive Science

-       Ecology appears to support preservationist aims but in the end supports the same "wrong" conversation, that of "utility" but in a different form: "If we can't proceed with a certain development without undesirable consequences, then obviously it is the role of the ecologist to find a way for us to proceed with the development while avoiding the consequences."(93)

-       Although it might appear that ecology is not really a subversive science, it does retain a subversive element. "The really subversive element in Ecology rests […] upon its basic premise: inter-relatedness" 93).

Inter-relatedness vs. Intermingling

-       The Western mind sees humans as “inter-related”. We interact and have an affect on each other but man is somehow set apart from everything else.

-       Rather Evernden would have us realize that we are actually intermingling.

-       If we stick to the idea that we are only inter-related then we will continue to believe that there is a way to circumvent the damage caused by our current approach to the world. Instead we need to be infinitely more careful. He brings us back to the idea of the “subversive science”.  "Ecology undermines not only the growth addict and the chronic developer, but science itself" (93).  Ecology undermines science by showing that we can’t dissect and dissever elements of nature from one another.

-       Evernden follows this with a bunch of examples that show how intertwined and inter-tangled we are with other organisms. The most interesting of example, for me, was the "realization that mammalian evolution could not have occurred as rapidly as it did by mutation and natural selection alone." The idea that "groups of species, perhaps even whole communities of organisms, could, in a sense, co-evolve" is both amazing and terrifying (95). It also clearly demonstrates Evernden's idea of "intermingling" and the fact that we are not in control.

-       The point of all of this ruminating has been to call our attention to the fact that it is impossible for "the proper study for man" to only be man "if it is impossible for man to exist out of context, […] the desire of some in the humanities to deal only with the fragment of reality they term 'human' is nonsense" (95). Again, Evernden draws our attention to the value the humanities have to the "scientific" study of the environment/ecology/ preservation/ conservation.

-       Evernden addresses those that would resist the idea of intermingling: "It is much easier for us to think in terms of anti-pollution campaigns than to contemplate a fundamental error in our set of cultural assumptions" (96).

-       It is easy to think of things as segmented and separate. If we see ourselves as integral features of the environment it is much more difficult to deny the damage that we cause and accept the fact that the ultra-luxurious life that capitalism tells us that we deserve is incompatible with the finite resources of our world.  

-       An example of one of those erroneous cultural assumptions would be western conceptions of religion. If someone is told all their life that God loves them and proof of that is that he gave them the world, he even sacrificed his only son to save them, it seems pretty clear in that scenario that the world is for them to do as they will with it, just like any other really cool present from a beloved parent. The problem comes in thinking that this story is the only possible story. This is not the only attitude with which we can approach the world.

Aesthetic Response

-       Evernden then moves on to the aesthetic experience to reinforce the connection between man and the environment. He denies the aesthetics that is dependent on measuring as another case of science interfering in the province of the humanities.

-       He supports Dewey’s idea of the aesthetic experience, that it "lies in the relationship between the individual and the environment, not simply in the object viewed, nor in the mind of the viewer" (97).

-       This idea of individual-in-environment leads him to the different conceptions of self and an explanation, perhaps, for why we see ourselves as separate from the environment.

Dispersed Self/Bounded Self/Cogito Self 

-       Dispersed Self - Cichlid self, I am my environment, the further into my territory you come, the more of me that you encounter.

-       Bounded Self - Non-propertarian self, an individual within an environment, bounded by the limits of my physical self

-       Cogito Self - Essential Self, since cogito ergo sum, I am my mind. Even if you are touching my body, you are not encountering "me".

-       Implications of each of these "self to setting" relationships: The further restricted the perception of self is, the less interaction there is between the self and setting.

-       "The whole world is simply fodder and feces to the consumer, in sharp contrast to the man who is in an environment in which he belongs and is of necessity a part" (99).

Tourist vs. Resident

-       Tourist = superficiality, Resident = history. A resident is part of the place and his involvement is an aesthetic one.

-       Northrup Frye – “the goal of art is to 'recapture, in full consciousness, that original lost sense of identity with our surroundings, where there is nothing outside the mind of man, or something identical with the mind of man’” (99).

-       Landscape portraits rather landscape paintings. The landscape artist is "giving us an understanding of what a place would look like to us if we 'belonged' there, if it were 'our place'" (99).  A landscape artist helps us know a place, s/he makes the world personal. This reinforces how the humanities can help us see ourselves as within nature.

-       Evernden hypothesizes that we do not have a sense of place because of the "state of sensory deprivation" that is common in the urban environment (100). The scarcity of obvious “Nature” and the frenzied pace of the urban environment makes “genuine attachment to place very difficult” (101).

-       The self-in-things rather than the self-in-place. The urban dweller goes in search of commodities to fix his sense of self rather than to gather his sense of self from his place in the environment (101).

The Pathetic Fallacy is not a fallacy

-       The "Pathetic Fallacy is a fallacy only to the ego clencher" or those who hang to the Cogito Self for dear life (101).

-       "Metaphoric language is an indicator of 'place'--an indication that the speaker has a place, feels part of a place"(101). The pathetic fallacy has been used as a false charge against those who use emotional metaphoric language to describe the non-human because everything we encounter is part of the human and we are part of it.

Everything is everything

-       Evernden wants us to recognize " that the establishment of self is impossible without the context of place” and that this “casts an entirely different light on the significance of the non-human,” and it also “underlines the futility of quantitative" ratings to define the value of our surroundings (101).

-       Since there is no self without surroundings, the right to place is the province of the humanities. "The 'deep ecological movement,' […] demands the involvement of the arts and humanities" because without examining the underlying causes of environmental damage we will never develop a way to live in our environment without destroying it (102).

-       Evernden sees the arts as " vitally needed to emphasize […] the intimate and vital involvement of self with place" and to help us see that "There is no such thing as an individual, only an individual-in-context, individual as a component of place, defined by place" (102).  

-       He ends with the reminder that "It's no good passing the buck to ecologists--environmentalism involves the perception of values, and values are the coin of the arts. Environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning."

Environmentalism and Aesthetics: A Brief Comparison of “Beyond Ecology” and “Coleridge and the Economy of Nature”

                Evernden, in “Beyond Ecology,” leaves the reader with a deceptively simple notion that “environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning” (103). This statement, at first glance, might invoke the usual connotations of the humanities where subjectivity and “opinionated” reasoning reign supreme. I perhaps made this evaluation because of the usual responses from scientists and engineers, which usually impart little to no hope for the humanities to “understand” or discuss science or the environment. Though, Evernden supports this statement in uniting the concepts of both experiencing and interpreting the environment simultaneously while also not simply putting a value on nature. The knee-jerk reaction of the ecologist, as Evernden points out, is to “build in utility to the argument for preserving natural places” (93). This argument for utility is built upon the mutual assumption held by both social sciences as well as the physical sciences in respecting the “all-consuming importance called man” (95). As Evernden points out, the search for some sort of value present in nature for humans might be the wrong methodology for justifying the preservation of whooping cranes or other endangered creatures. Science cannot interpret the world alone but must work in tandem with the humanities to develop a mutual respect between humans and nature.

                McKusick, in “Coleridge and the Economy of Nature,” supports the idea of the sciences and the humanities working for or with one another in that “language [can be characterized] as a living thing or an integral organic system, either through the coinage of new words or the recovery of archaic ones” (8). Yes, it seems like a simple method for uniting the concepts of the sciences and the humanities, but this idea extends beyond a simple metaphor or the simplistic observation that language is our device in communicating any sort of information that is scientific or aesthetic. More importantly, it seems science and the humanities are interconnected simply because the observations that take place in poetry, such as Coleridge, display a “relation to the natural environment and his aesthetic principle of organicism likewise entails reference to the linguistic habitat of a poem as an essential determinant of its meaning” (8). Given such a relation between the environment and language, it seems there is a symbiosis or cooperation amongst the two systems. This relationship is necessary for humans to both interpret and interact within nature, but it is important to observe there is no “value” or hierarchy placed upon the “use” of nature for the benefit of society. The relationship between the aesthetic and the scientific gradually became an issue, as discussed by McKusick, “due to human intervention in the natural world [that was viewed by scientists] as tending toward the improvement of the landscape and the development of natural resources” (2). There are obviously ubiquitous benefits for the manipulation and integration of nature in modern society, but it seems there is an even greater need to spur thought for our relationship and symbiosis with our natural environment rather than assuming our unquestioned dominance over it.  

Beyond Ecology

I thought that Neil Evernden’s article “Beyond Ecology” raises many interesting points regarding humankind and its relationship to the non-human environment. He discusses this relationship within the context of “interrelatedness” but he takes this issue far beyond the notion of a casual connection. Instead, he interrogates whether or not humans and non-human elements are completely independent entities. In one instance, he explains that different bacteria can transfer an extra chromosome to other bacteria or to another species in general. This example undercuts preconceived notions that each creature is completely distinct from the other and highlights how the natural world is dependent on each other. I think Evernden is alluding to the idea that the boundaries within nature (including mankind) are much more fluid than we thought. It seems that he is encouraging us to take a more holistic approach when we consider what is natural and what is not. He argues that the only way we can understand human nature is to also study man within the context of the natural environment, not outside of it (95). We are accustomed to perceiving man onto himself and easily forget that man is deeply connected to his surroundings. Everden’s article attempts to bridge the gap between our preconceived notions of man with the reality of our relationship with the natural world. Although he makes a valid point, I think it becomes quite difficult to do so because over time, we have hidden nature from our sight. 

With the onset of urbanization, we do not see a inherit connection to nature; it seems as though mankind and nature are independent of one another. Evernden argues that “we not only see ourselves not part of the environment, we are not even part of the body. We, the real us, is concentrated in some disputed recess of the body” (98). Even on the few occasions when we attempt to connect with the natural world, we do so within the context of modernization. This eliminates any possibility of noticing our interconnection with the natural world. In order to perceive the interrelatedness that Evernden refers to, we must first begin to reframe our perception of man and nature, otherwise it will be difficult to reimagine the boundaries between them as anything but stable.  

Evernden brings up another interesting point when he urges us to include humanities within the conversation of ecology. He points out that we are misguided to believe that only the natural sciences are capable of understanding nature. He explains that the “significance of a place is a personal thing, and the battle for the right to know ‘where I am from’ is not one to won by environmental impact assessments and benefit-cost analysis” (102). I think he is right in the sense that since we are interconnected with the natural world, we need to utilize the social and the natural sciences in order to have a better understanding of our relationship with nature.  I think the field of humanities opens many opportunities for exploration that goes beyond the functionality of nature, but I’m unclear on how it would do so. Although Evernden stresses the importance of including humanities within the study of the natural environment, he does not provide a clear explanation on how this new approach would translate in practice. 

“The Distinctiveness of Humanity:” A Response to Neil Evernden’s Argument of Human Inter-Relatedness to Nature

In “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy,” Neil Evernden questions the wisdom of science on insisting upon the subject/object binary necessary for the observation and measurement of the objective, external world, arguing that concomitant with the aforementioned binary is a devaluing of the role of the arts and humanities in deciding what is most important in environmentalism. At the very heart of the issue, as far as Evernden sees it, is humanity’s insistence on seeing themselves meaningfully distinct from the environment at large. Following such a belief, is that nature ends up being valued above all for its utility to human life, that is, for its “resources,” a term that Evernden apparently finds loathsome, (“slurp of chunks of the world’). Attempting to destabilize this sense of human distinctiveness, Evernden takes great pains in stressing Ecology’s most positive contribution to date in the environmentalism debate: how inter-related is everything in the environment, meaning, that, as humans,“we can’t do as we wish without pay a price [for it]” (92). Throughout the article and with great attention to detail, Evernden attempts to show how difficult, if not impossible it sometimes appears to be, to consider a human being anything but a biological amalgamation of sorts. The implication, of course, is that the human sense of an individual self among the flesh is merely an illusion, and given humanity’s history of polluting the environment, a dangerous illusion at that. 

While I enjoy and appreciate Evernden’s biological analysis of, for instance, the stomach’s collection of living organisms, or the lichen’s being composed in reality of two distinct organisms, lost in the scientific minutiae of everything about the natural world he describes are just the sort of human concerns that he claims are most important. Part of the problem with his argument is how needlessly complicated he makes a human being out to be. Scientist and engineer Ray Kurzweil makes the profound point in the following of how important it is in science to approach a problem with the appropriate level of complexity, as clarity about a potential solution often will depend on a certain conceptual distance, as it were, from the details of what is being observed: 

It is important that we build models of the brain at the right level. This is, of course, true for all our scientific models. Although chemistry is theoretically based on physics and 

could be derived entirely from physics, this would be unwieldy and infeasible practice. 

So chemistry uses its own rules and models. We should likewise, in theory, be able to 

deduce the laws of thermodynamics from physics, but this is a far-from-strait forward

process. Once we have a sufficient number of particles to call something a gas rather than a bunch of particles, solving equations for each particle interaction becomes impractical, 

whereas the laws of thermodynamics work extremely well. The interactions of a single molecule within the gas are hopelessly complex and unpredictable, but the gas itself, 

comprising trillions of molecules, has many predictable properties. (Kurzweil ch. 4)

After reaching a certain microscopic level of examination, human beings are, too, hopelessly complex and unpredictable, full of various lifeforms, each having their own peculiar traits and manners of existence. Yet, when determining human values, little of any of this knowledge helps one get any closer to determining what matters most to us as human beings. How, for instance, would one's studying or being made aware of the various examples of bacteria in the human stomach ever lead a person to the knowledge of the Sistine Chapel? Or Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon? Or the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse? In other words, peer too closely at a human being and what is missed is how all that is gathered together in that blink of an eye ultimately composes a complete and distinct person, someone with dreams, hopes, fears, desires, and loves. No amount of studying biology or the larger environment can ever teach a person what it means to be human. And my argument in no way should be interpreted as an attack on science. I love science. We need science. In a word, the kind of bare facts that Evernden’s argument depends on are just that: meaningless in themselves, and empty of human subjectivity, and therefore, incapable of explaining or bringing us any closer to a definitive understanding of what makes homo sapiens more than just biological entities but more importantly, distinct persons of, for lack of a better word, spiritual value.