University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

(USC Thesis Other)

The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content THE ORGANIC METAPHOR DEMYSTIFIED:
RHETORIC OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERV ATION
IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING

by
Shiuh-huah Serena Chou

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Shiuh-huah Serena Chou

ii
Acknowledgements

I dedicate this dissertation to my grandmother, Shiu-Fan Lee, and my parents,
Liang-kai Chou and Shih-deh C. Chou for their love and support.
I also wish to thank my advisor, professor Panivong Norindr, for his insightful
advices as well as guidance and patience. My graduate mentors, professor Dominic
Cheung and professor Gloria Orenstein, provided inspiration throughout my initial
research in nature writing and ecocriticism. Professor William Handley gave me
comments and helped me see things from a different angle.
Special thanks go to Dr. J. B. Rollins, for his encouragement, my adopted
American “parents,” Zdenka and Frank Manuele, and my sister, Shiuh-dih.

iii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Abstract

Introduction

Chapter 1: Pruning the Past, Shaping the Future: A Critique of David Mas
Masumoto’s Organic Imaginary

Chapter 2: In Search of a Biotic Community and an Ecocentric Self: Rachel
Carson, Deep Ecology, and the Organic Metaphor

Chapter 3: When Wilderness Becomes Landscape: Organicism, Preservation
Ethics, and the (Re)location of the Wild in Barry Lopez’s Arctic
Dreams

Conclusion: Organic Aesthetics Revisited

Works Cited

ii

iv

1

21

84

140

195

201

iv
Abstract

The Organic Metaphor Demystified: Rhetoric of Environmental Change and
Environmental Preservation in Contemporary American Nature Writing examines the
common experience and the symbolic associations of the organic in American nature
writing, focusing in particular on the intersection between the politics of
cultural/environmental preservation and the organic –– a vital concept in the
contemporary organic movement, deep ecological ethics, the science of ecology, and
indigenous cosmology. As a discourse that carries specific imagery and meaning
with regard to the idea of nature as a living organism that contains in itself an intrinsic
order, the organic and its holistic implications have lent their critical force to
environmentalism in its critique of the capitalist and technological transgressions of
the mechanistic paradigm. Contextualizing David Mas Masumoto within the
traditions of pastoralism and agrarianism, this thesis first reveals the ambivalence of
the organic as a narrative strategy that is capable of “preserving” the stability of nature
and the authenticity of minority cultural tradition against socio-economic
transformations, and yet in its continuous attempt to impose on what seems to be a
complex, dynamic “nature” a moral/ideological/structural order, reconfigures a static

v
image of nature. My reading of Rachel Carson then shows how her (re-)situating of
the human subject and the toxicology in the organic circle, in a food chain where
humans are reduced to a biological collectivity, in fact bespeaks a landscape of
liminality, where nature and culture intersect and interact, and a middle passage
bridges ecocentric and anthropocentric ethics. Building on Carson’s revision of the
organic cosmology, Barry Lopez’s investigation of the organic as place made visible
through the process of interacting with the spatial invites the study of the preservation
of nature and aboriginality in the context of cultural geography as a pastiche.
Together these works manifest in their respective ways a politics and aesthetics of
preservation that celebrates the organic as a measure of cultural hybridity and
environmental diversity.

1
Introduction

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and
waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to
the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not
waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s
just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as
waters.
–– Ch’ing-yüan, trans. Alan Watts

In the epigraph to this introduction, Ch’ing-yüan, a Chinese Zen master, reflects
on his quest for enlightenment, remarking that this process mirrors the different steps
of looking at nature. The idea of “see[ing] mountains once again as mountains, and
waters once again as waters” of the last stage suggests the importance of finally
trespassing beyond physical boundaries and cultural borders to embrace both the
material and the metaphysical mountains and waters. Ch’ing-yüan’s poem embodies
some of the key concerns of this thesis, which proposes to rediscover “organic nature”
as the formal and philosophical roots of nature writing. His teachings on the process
of approaching nature bring into question some of the fundamental assumptions
writers and critics make about “nature” and nature writing, that posit nature writing as

2
a genre characterized by what ecocritic Thomas J. Lyon claims as “the absolute
durability of certain subject matters, themes, and affirmations” (1).
1

As a literary genre, the precursors or tributaries of nature writing, according to
conventional literary historians, have their roots in pastoral literature, natural history,
spiritual autobiography, travel writing, and Romantic poetry, and could be categorized
into “literature of the nonhuman environment” and “literature of personal
identification” (Fritzell 78).
2
Nature writing, as John Elder proclaims in a lecture at
the 1995 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference,
refers to “a form of the personal, reflective essay grounded in attentiveness to the
natural world and an appreciation of science but also open to the spiritual meaning
and intrinsic value of nature” (qtd. by Wallace and Armbruster 2).

1
According to Thomas J. Lyon, nature writing is “one of the most stable genres in literature” (1).

2
In Nature Writing and America, Peter A. Fritzell identifies “literature of the nonhuman environment”
and “literature of personal identification” as the two traditions that have helped to form what is called
the American nature writing today. As Fritzell notes, “literature of the nonhuman environment”
includes works of “taxonomic biology, natural history, geography, geology, biology, ecology, bestiaries,
herbals and field guides, and works of impersonal nature appreciation and promotion,” and “literature
of personal identification” encompasses “diaries, and personal journals, as well as more finished forms
of autobiography, which includes spiritual autobiography and the ‘confession.’” Here, the choice is to
borrow Fritzell’s terms and his grouping of the different tributaries of nature writing because they seem
more comprehensive and inclusive than others. Critic Don Scheese, for example, puts more weight on
“natural history” and “Ancient Greek pastoralism” in his mapping of the major precursors of nature
writing, and thus presents a more specific and consequently narrower view. See Frizel 66-68, and
Scheese, Nature Writing 11-38.

3
In defining the direction of this study, the intention, here, specifically, is not to
undertake narratives of the nonhuman world in general, nor that large corpus of work
that explores human contact with or experiences in “nature” in verse or fictive
narrative forms. Rather, this thesis considers the notion of nature, as an organic
system, where individuals participate in the ongoing process of change and
development, in the context of contemporary American nature writing and
ecocriticism. In Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment
(2003), Glen Love writes: “[i]nsofar as much contemporary literature and criticism
has insulated itself from the biological and the natural world, nature writing seems to
have responded to that lack and to have provided a growing contemporary audience
with that sense of an ecological reality check that they do not find elsewhere” (87).
To abide by this most rigid, and orthodox categorization of nature writing is to
illustrate and to debunk, within this allegedly most authentic and environmental form
of representation, the myths that “green means nature” and “nature denotes
environmental-friendliness.”

4
Even though nature writing takes on both the generic characteristics of the
literature of the nonhuman, as well as literature of personal identification, literary
critics have focused their analyses primarily on the identification or discovery of the
self. Among scholars of the literature of personal identification, the desire for the
pastoral –– or what Leo Marx defines as a yearning for “a simpler, more harmonious
way of life ‘closer’ (as we say) to ‘nature’” –– is a central concern (xii-xiii). While
the subject matter and the narrative form of nature writing (i.e. nonfiction prose
narrative) in many respects engage in delineating the “real” world and uncovering the
complexities of environmental and social relations, green rhetoric nonetheless
foregrounds an uncomplicated, ahistoric understanding of “nature,” as well as a nature
writing that is transfixed in transcendentalist, organic thought, and oblivious to the
materiality of the natural environment. Organic, more specifically, engenders not
only the conviction of transcendental fixity –– that society and art, should mimic
“nature,” but also the Aristotelian notion of the universe as a living organism, where
its parts operate in keeping with each other into a greater, unifying whole. Against
this definitive position, this thesis explores the purported potentialities of the organic

5
as a rhetoric that is capable of rejuvenating the purity, order, harmony, and
permanence of the environment, as well as the indifference of the organic tradition to
the materiality and the social-constructedness of the nonhuman world.
Ecocriticism as a recognizable critical school of thought emerged in the early
nineteen-eighties in response to nuclear annihilation, environmental contamination,
population growth, and the extinction and the loss of wild species and lands.
3
At the
same time, the endeavor to read “nature” and nature writing as physically and morally
(inherently) good became conspicuous. Acknowledging conventional literature and
literary studies’ insulation from and romanticism towards the “outside” world, Cheryll
Glotfelty, for instance, looks into ecocriticism, or what she designates as “the study of
the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” for a critical stance
that would be able to respond to contemporary environmental crises (xviii). As an
“ecologically oriented literary criticism,” the emergence of ecocriticism, for Karl
Kroeber, corresponds to the urgency to address the “abstractness that afflicts current

3
According to Glotfelty, the editor of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, the
term ecocriticism was first coined in 1978 by William Rueckert in his essay “Literature and Ecology:
An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” By ecocriticism, Rueckert meant “the application of ecology and
ecological concepts to the study of literature” (Glotfelty xx). In The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty
points to 1993 as the year ecocriticism emerged as a recognizable critical school.

6
theorizing about literature,” and to “think beyond self-imposed political and
metaphysical limits of contemporary critical discourse” (1). Through this process,
ecocriticism, as Lawrence Buell concurs, seeks “to redefine the concept of culture
itself in organicist terms with a view to envisioning a ‘philosophy of organism’ that
would break down the ‘hierarchical’ separations between human beings and other
elements of the natural world’” (Future 21-22).
Paradoxically, the idea of a pristine, orderly, interconnected, and thus “organic”
nature, is preserved and enacted exactly through the notion of nature writing as a
transcendent, “organic” literary form –– as a first-person, non-fiction narrative that
accounts for and reflects on the experience of identifying, naming, describing, and
characterizing, firsthand, the overall “order” of the environment. What prompts the
conception of nature writing as a genre capable of capturing the truth and authenticity
of “nature” is, on the one hand, nature writers’ participant observations, and their
scientific methods of investigation that transmitted the transparency of representation
and the immediacy of experience. The notion of a nature regulated by a systematic,
universal law, on the other hand, is, in fact, embodied in nature writers’ adherence to

7
the systematic study of the nonhuman world of natural history tradition, which
prefigures a “quest for insight into the order of nature” (Farber 4). As Paul
Lawrence Farber proposes in Finding Order in Nature (2000), “[i]n the discipline of
natural history, researchers systematically study natural objects (animals, plants,
minerals) –– naming, describing, classifying, and uncovering their overall order” (2).
Sustaining nature as order through both the understanding of nature writing as an
“organic” literary form, and the encapsulation of nature writing as a genre that invests
in the study of the organic structure of a nature, supposedly characterized by order and
stability.
Nature writers and ecocritics, since the nineteen-nineties, as Buell notes, have
moved beyond earlier green movement’s preoccupation with the organic, to “question
organicist models of conceiving both environment and environmentalism” (Future 22).
In reaction against the notion of nature writing as a transparent literary form that
mirrors “nature,” and immanent within itself a cosmic order, unadulterated by
historical changes and society’s materialist exploitation, ecocritics such as Kathleen R.
Wallace and Karl Armburster, urge scholars to move “beyond nature writing” to

8
expand the constricted boundaries of “nature” (1-2). Urbanism, environmental
justice issues, and the formulation of an ethnically diverse, green, cultural perspective
mark the central precepts of their concerns. To consolidate the theoretical grounds of
pastoral and wilderness narratives, critics such as Joseph Carroll and Glen Love turn
to evolution theory, chaos theory, and other ecological principles in their salute to
nature’s intrinsic order.
First second-wave distinction is not tidy and distinct.
4
In second-wave, green
discourse, the perpetuation of the image of a static nature through an organic
framework, and the organicist ideal of harmony and permanence. To state the
concept in perhaps unfair and reductive terms, the logic behind the mainstream
ecocritical mentality that “nature-is-good vs. culture-is-evil” (e.g., deep ecologists’
ecocentric ethics), and the radical allegation that “nature-is-trivial vs.
culture-is-important” (e.g. environmental justice criticism’s human-centered position)
are similar. Both camps endorse the dichotomous relation between “nature” and
“culture” –– a binary where “nature” and “culture” are essentialized through their
critique of industrialism’s despiritualization and capitalism’s commodification of the

4
Cf. Buell The Future of Environmental Criticism 17-18.

9
natural world. Given that order, stability, and interconnectedness are also qualities
imbricated within the mechanistic cosmology or the metaphor of the machine, forging
an environmentalist’s claim against society’s exploitation of the environment, by
celebrating nature by focusing on its sense of pattern, equilibrium, and oneness,
reveals the problematic uses of metaphor in ecocritical discourse. Protecting nature
on behalf of its organic qualities energizes a logic that has also legitimized the
protection of nature based on its naturalness.
In Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980), cultural historian Raymond
Williams embarks on “nature” as an unstable term loaded with socio-historical
connotations when he writes that “nature,” the idea, “contains, though often unnoticed,
an extraordinary amount of human history … both complicated and changing, as other
ideas and experiences changed” (67). The contention against the conceptualization
of nature as a transcendental reality, without cultural context is, similarly, rejected in
environmental historian William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground (1995). He writes,
“[p]opular concern about the environment often implicitly appeals to a kind of naïve
realism for its intellectual foundation, more or less assuring that we can pretty easily

10
recognize nature when we see it and thereby make uncomplicated choices between
natural things, which are good and bad” (“Introduction” 25-26). In green discourse,
“nature” is either locked into the role of being a mystic other that resists society’s
colonization and exploitation, demanding a respect of its agency, or it is deprived of
its materiality, and, thus, resolutely reduced to the sociopolitical realm as cultural
artifacts or a social constructs.
Through the exploration of context from which the metaphor “organic” is drawn,
clearly, a variety of values, choices, and restrictions have determined human relations
with the nonhuman world, and associated “nature” with organic principles of purity,
order, and interconnectedness. This thesis demonstrates how these values have been
attached to images of organic nature in organic agricultural landscapes, ecological
food chains and ecosystems, and the wilderness preservation systems, and how these
suppositions provide the means, or convenient supports, through which environmental
ethics are validated.
The vision of a holistic earth is denigrated by organic farmers, deep ecologists,
and wilderness preservationists, whose indulgence in organic cosmology as a modern

11
incarnation of a pristine nature, makes manifest their belief that “organic” nature is
capable of rejuvenating a world, whose order has been disrupted by material
exploitation and philosophical abstraction. What nature writers and ecocritics seem
to overlook is the fact that when they present their claims in non-Western terms,
ecological sciences, natural philosophy, and organicist philosophy, without
scrutinizing the specific cultural and historical contexts in which these organic
concepts operate, they, in fact, rendered their arguments as tautologies and truisms.
As Cronon notes, “when we label a problem as ‘natural,’ we imply that there’s not
much we can do about it. It’s just the way things are, and we’d better get used to it”
(“Introduction” 30). In ecocriticism, critics have both deferred and entrusted the
moral innocence of a “transparent” nature, its role as an ultimate and absolute ethical
authority, to the organic. Although most critics have developed a keen awareness of
the cultural implications of “nature,” they remain neglectful of the materiality and the
historical context of what they called an “organic” nature, and how their methods of
protection and representation may still participate in the abstraction and
systematization of nature. Just as “nature” has been equated with goodness, tenets of

12
organic farming, theories of ecological organicism, such as “balance,” “harmony,” and
“stability,” are deemed axioms because of their non-artificial and non-anthropocentric
appearances. Projected from this modern organicist concept is an innate sense of
goodness.
Many questions must be raised and addressed: Why do both nature writers and
ecocritics continue to devote their attention to concepts and theories that privilege and
sanction a natural order characterized by interconnectedness? To what extent does
this critical appreciation for the organicist tradition reiterate Enlightenment
rationalism, and subscribe to a cosmos of latent, mechanical parts, rather than a
dynamic living nature? Grounding the discussion within the “nature vs. culture”
debate, this thesis explores the various dimensions of the organic: How organic
connotes more than a harmony of a collective world of plants, animals, and natural
landscapes. Among the myriad works from which to choose, the focus of my
attention is on a number of contemporary nature writings that complicate, and, at the
same time, challenge ecocriticism through the organic metaphor. In the texts
analyzed, the organic –– as a trope –– emerges either as a pastoral ideal, an important

13
concept in the ecological discipline, or a cosmological view. These different ways of
understanding the organic bring to the fore a picture of nature and nature writing
characterized by change, rather than stability.
Leo Marx’s discussion of the “pastoral design” in The Machine in the Garden
(1964) is significant in the sense that it illuminates organic farmers and writers of
organic literature’s concerns for these contradictory attitudes toward nature.
5
Listed
as one of the “fifteenth most frequently recommended books” by ASLE, Marx’s work
is instrumental in complicating the romantic pastoral as a trope that accentuates the
tension between anthropocentric and ecocentric modes of consciousness.
6
In Marx’s
analysis, literature of the pastoral tradition is dominated by the paradox between the
longing for the order of an idyllic retreat, and the desire to exploit and transfer nature
(natural resources) for further cultural and material advancement and changes. For
him, the tension between the sense of harmony and security in an enclosed, organic

5
In The Machine in the Garden, Marx distinguishes the ‘pastoral ideal’ from the ‘pastoral design.”
By ‘pastoral ideal,’ he refers to the sentimental kind of pastoralism, one characterized by “the illusion
of peace and harmony in a green pasture” away from reality (24-25).

6
“Top Fifteen Choices” is a short bibliography appendix to “Recommended Reading,” a more
comprehensive reading list compiled by ASLE. The books listed and recommended are based on a
poll of 150 subscribers to the electronic-mail network of ASLE. For a complete list, see The
Ecocriticism Reader 393-399.

14
pastoral nature, is, in fact, accentuated by the anxiety arising from civilization’s
encroachment from outside. He writes, “[i]f we regard the [romantic] movement …
as a ‘protest on behalf of the organic view of nature,’ then the contrast between the
machine and the landscape would seem to embody its very essence” (19). While
generating a melancholic tone that could be read as a poet’s subtle critique of society’s
endless quest for wealth and power, it is this vision of a lost secluded world of
simplicity that has, paradoxically, inspired, the “pursuit of happiness,” motivated
society’s techno-scientific intrusion into that natural environment, and further invited
the remembering of what had been lost. Overturning the image of the pastoral as a
world of everlasting order and bliss, Marx’s remark evokes pastoral literature’s
attention to the evanescence of idyllic satisfaction in a pastoral landscape of natural
changes.
Identifying “change” or “reality” as crucial elements in pastoral discourse,
Marx’s work opens a line of inquiry into the study of pastoral landscape as narratives
of simple, rural lives of perpetual happiness. Most critics, however, seem to
overlook the fact that Marx’s argument does not fully elucidate and complicate

15
perceptions of “nature” and nature writing, and ecocritics are unaware of how their
own celebrations of the organic sustains the legacy of the pastoral ideal. With the
title and the metaphor, “The Machine in the Garden,” Marx suggests that the
intrusions of “machines” (society or civilization) in the “garden” (natural, or rural
landscape) is the prevailing theme of pastoral literature. Yet this central metaphor
also reveals the problematic assumptions underlying Marx’s notion of the pastoral
design, which anticipated the paradoxes that lie within the notion of organic farming
as a cultural of “natural” agricultural practice. On the one hand, although the
pastoral landscape is transfigured as a garden, as a liminal space where the forces of
nature and cultures clash, “nature” is still set as the binary opposite of “culture,” and
invigorated as an organic world of perpetual order and innocence. On the other hand,
identifying the “machine,” the metaphor for technology, society, civilization, as the
loci of change and disorder in idyllic garden, Marx’s metaphor also reaffirms a static
“nature,” outside history, and unchanging, except through human agency. Marx’s
conceptualization of pastoral design as a subversive literary device that is quick to
respond to changes, rather than an articulation of escapism, is undermined by his

16
idealization of “nature” as a site of order, and reinstatement of the “nature–culture”
binary.
Writers of organic farming and ecocritics alike have attempted to enrich pastoral
and nature writing by characterizing them as a literature that recognizes the tangibility
and complexity of the real world. The reprinting of pioneering works of organic
farming, in the last ten years, including Franklin H. King’s Farmers of the Forty
Centuries (2004), Christopher James Northbourne’s Look to the Land (2005), Sir
Albert Howard’s The Soil and Heath, G . T. Wrench’s The Wheel of Health and A
Hunza Trip with Dr. Bernard Jensen (1990), signals the coming of the “organic” age.
In the popular environment movement, organic farming, defined loosely, serves as the
antithesis of modern farming practice, which relies on synthetic herbicides, fertilizers,
and other forms of technological control of the production process. Organic
agricultural methods are associated with the re-envisioning of an authentic nature, and
a revival of local, traditional heritage, as opposed to the Western anthropocentric and
capitalist paradigm.

17
David Mas Masumoto’s narratives, while endorsing popular beliefs about the
differences between conventional and organic farming, challenge this powerful
dichotomy with his constant attempts to invigorate and maintain his Asian American
heritage. The loss of an old peach variety, or the invention of a Japanese American
ceremony, environmental or cultural “change,” or the Buddhist notion of
“impermanence” are components of Masumoto’s definition of organic methods of
farming and modes of life. This thesis begins with an investigation of Masumoto’s
narratives, exploring how “organic” has been conceptualized in popular imaginary as
purity and an embodiment of “natural,” even though organic farmers’ experiences of
harmony, order, and purity, are constantly embellished by nature’s changes, and
irregularities.
This thesis turns to Rachel Carson’s last book, The Silent Spring (1962), a
narrative that launched the modern environmental movement (or ecopopulism) in the
1970s, and initiated both environmental justice criticism’s human-based positions, and
deep ecology’s ecocentric stance. For these two supposedly opposing ecocritical
schools of thought, Carson manifests in different ways a shift in the representation of

18
nature and in the defining of mankind’s moral obligations to the environment. Both
camps, however, promulgate the notion of interconnectedness, an inherent property of
organic nature, overlooking that a “nature” interconnected through either the food
chain (e.g. environmental justice criticism), or the ecosystem (deep ecology) in fact
deconstructs the “anthropocentric vs. ecocentric” ethical and aesthetical schisms.
The analysis of Carson shows how her (re-)situating of the human subject and
toxicology in the organic circle, in a food chain where humans are reduced to a
biological collectivity, in fact, bespeaks a landscape of liminality, where nature and
culture intersect and interact, and a middle passage bridges ecocentric and
anthropocentric ethics.
In Masumoto’s narrative and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the organic
metaphor is one of the pivotal forces that have enabled the destabilizing of the rigid
boundaries between “natural vs. cultural” and “anthropocentric vs. ecocentric”
positions. The inherent paradox between the notion of “nature” as both the parts and
the unitary whole, and as both the process and that final ideal state achieved through
those processes, challenges traditional notions of nature as an order capable of being

19
controlled or preserved in stasis. Redefining the parts that constitute the ideal whole
by returning the humans and toxicity to the circle, and the emphasis on the organic
process of change open, indeed, the horizon of organic farming and assuage the
conflicts between ecocentric and environmental justice criticism. In keeping with
poststructualist and postmodernist belief in the fragmentation, relativity, and, thus, the
instability of values and perceptions, Masumoto’s and Carson’s narratives reveal
critical appreciation for a nature of fragments, and regulation by a series of evolving
changes. For nature writers and ecocritics, this notion of nature as change is
embodied in the chaos theory. This notion of nature as a wild chaos presumably
capable of disrupting the social and cultural not only questions the accuracy of the
representation of “nature,” but also defies the conceptualization of “nature” as, and the
association of the organic with, a sense of order and interconnectedness in the
discourse of organic agriculture and green movements. In Barry Lopez’s Arctic
Dreams (1986), however, the association of the Arctic, the last frontier, with nature’s
autonomy, only unravels a preexisting order when the notion of chaos is construed as
“disorderly order.” Locating the wild in the Arctic, and redefining the wild as

20
nature’s most uncontrollable, and thus, most authentic force, Lopez nonetheless
disclosed “wilderness” a realm that is without human, and “wilderness preservation”
as an ethics that celebrates “wilderness” as an ideal order, insulated from the tarnish of
history and time.
The common experience and symbolic associations of the organic in American
nature writing creates a dialogue between the politics of cultural/environmental
preservation and the organic. As a discourse that carries specific imagery and
meaning with regard to the idea of nature as a living organism that contains in itself an
intrinsic order, the organic and its holistic implications have lent their critical force to
environmentalism in its critique of the capitalist and technological transgressions of
the mechanistic paradigm. Together these works manifest, in their respective ways,
the possibilities of a politics of preservation that celebrates the organic as a measure of
cultural hybridity and environmental diversity.

21
Chapter 1

Pruning the Past, Shaping the Future:

A Critique of David Mas Masumoto’s Organic Imaginary

Nature is the supreme farmer and gardener, and .. the study of her ways will
provide us with the one thing we need –– sound and reliable direction.
–– Sir Albert Howard (1873-1947)
1

§ Finding Order: Masumoto and the Poetics of Organic Farming

Upon monitoring his fields, David Mas Masumoto, a third generation Japanese
American farmer living in present day Fresno, California, reflects on his experience
substituting pheromones for pesticides in his organic orchard, and suggests that
organic agriculture is a cultural practice through which farmers respond to the
intricacies and rhythms of nature.
2
Recounting his experience “giving up his feeble
attempts to control the natural chaos” (285), “tast[ing] the salt of sweat and geography

1
See Howard’s introduction to the 1945 edition of Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable
Mould.

2
Pheromones are chemicals produced by living organisms. Masumoto, for instance, uses the sex
pheromones of oriental fruit moth, a pest harmful to peach, to disturb its mating habits and
reproductions.

22
of dust” (xii), and growing accustomed to the diverse patterns and changes” of nature
(19) in Letters to the Valley (2004), Masumoto’s nature writing reiterates slogans and
vocabularies of pioneers and practitioners of the organic movement, such as Sir Albert
Howard’s postulation in this chapter’s opening epigraph. In a nutshell, organic
farming serves as the antithesis of modern industrial agriculture, which relies on
synthetic herbicides, chemical fertilizers, genetic engineering, and other forms of
technological control of nature in the production process. Contrary to what most
loyal consumers of organic products believe, “organic farming” has existed for
centuries and the origins of the organic movement can be traced to the 1840s, as a
response to the introduction of artificial fertilizers as an alternative method of
cultivation.
3
As an environmental protection movement that has gone well beyond
the preservation of soil fertility, the criticism of Western chemical industry, and
energy-intensive forms of food production since its origin, organic farming is largely
understood as an articulation of what Philip Conford notes in The Origins of the

3
For a historical discussion of the origins and genealogy of the organic movement in Great Britain and
the United States, see Philip Conford’s The Origin of the Organic Movement (2002) 15-17.

23
Organic Movement as the “positive acceptance of the natural order and intention to
work with its laws” (17).
4

What is, therefore, striking about Masumoto’s and Howard’s remarks is not so
much the similarities between their idealist aesthetics and philosophy, but the extent to
which organic cultivation provides a common grammar and narrative shape for both
literary and cultural criticism, and the reconfiguration of ecological landscapes.
Most notably, Masumoto’s seem to speak with assurance of his attempts to farm
according to the rhythmic order of the cosmos as organic enthusiasts have done for
decades, even though “nature” has been recognized as both an unstable concept,
loaded with socio-historical implications, and a complex material reality, embedded
with economic and cultural values, especially since Raymond Williams and William
Cronon’s investigations of “nature” and its various representations.
5
In spite of

4
The commonly used “environmental movement” refers to conservation and preservation projects as
well as campaigns and measures against environmental degradation in general. The conscious choice
is not to distinguish earlier conservationism from the historic-specific environmentalism since the
1970s. As geographer, Thomas R. Vale demonstrates in The American Wilderness, “the same
fundamental concerns that characterizes the beginnings of the conservation movement typify those of
modern environmental movement,” and that “[s]pecifics may have changed, but the threads that
connect issues to issues backward in time are stronger than the imaginary lines that divide one period
from the next” (49).

5
As Williams writes in “Nature” (1976), “[n]ature is perhaps the most complex word in the language”
(219), and in Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980), nature, the idea, “contains, though often
unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history … both complicated and changing, as other ideas

24
recognizing and underwriting “chaos” and “change” as what characterize an organic
farm, Masumoto continues to celebrate nature’s order, practicing the teachings of
Lady Eve Balfour, the founder of the first organic agricultural society, the Soil
Association (1946). Balfour writes, “[d]isorder and chaos are not natural phenomena.
Left to herself, Nature always produces order. It is Man who causes chaos by his
persistent attempts to resist or ignore natural laws, an attempt doomed to failure from
the start” (qtd. in Merrill 181). The National Organic Foods Production Act of 1990
first appointed the National Organic Standards Board, which established, after a half a
century, criteria and certification regulations not only for organic production materials
and practices, but also for their handling and accreditations in the United States. Yet
the need for standardization also evinces the controversy or bewilderment over
various conceptions of organic farming and products, suggesting that the notion of
organic is conceptual, and may well be open to the interpretations of an amalgamation
of ecological, social, and ethical factors like that of “nature.”

and experiences changed” (67). In the Introduction to Uncommon Ground (1995), environmental
historian William Cronon makes a similar point on the perception of transparency of nature when he
contends that “[p]opular concern about the environment often implicitly appeals to a kind of naïve
realism for its intellectual foundation, more or less assuming that we can pretty easily recognize nature
when we see it and thereby make uncomplicated choices between natural things, which are bad”
(25-26).

25
The supposed oppositional characteristics between conventional and organic
systems of production, suggested earlier, unravels, interestingly, that popular beliefs of
“organic” have taken the place of “nature” to manifest what was previously thought to
be a mystified, if not naïve reality of stability and order. The notion of organic
agriculture and animal husbandry as “natural,” and the further conceptualization of
“natural” as radically that absent of work or human-instigated influence are explicated
by titles of organic farming, such as organic pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka’s The
Natural Way of Farming (1985), and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) organic
gardening expert Bob Flowerdew’s Organic Bible: Successful Gardening the Natural
Way (2003) and The No-Work Garden (2006).
6

Celebrating the concept of organic as “natural,” and, henceforth, as farming “by
neglect,” many organic farmers and agribusinesses aspire to build on federal listings
of permissible inputs, whose technological focus anticipates the industrialization,
commodification, and, subsequently, the popularization of organic products and

6
Masanobu Fukuoka (1913- ) is the founder of “no-till grain cultivation.” His works have been
translated widely into English during the nineteen-eighties, and influenced American agrarian writers,
and organic and/or sustainable farmers, including Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. His works will be
discussed in the third section of this chapter in relation to Masumoto’s organic narratives.

26
agricultural approaches.
7
While most environmental scholars and organic supporters
welcome the wide appeal of organic farming and products, they nonetheless show
great ambivalence towards the standardization of organic production, which, for them,
undermines the ecological and social implications of the ideal of “farming in nature’s
image” (qtd. in Guthman 2). Organic cultivation, more specifically, has become
“less dependent on how a grower manages production than on what crops he or she
grows” (Guthman 173). Pragmatism on input and output regulations, and on profit
and cost engenders an indifference towards the impact upon which a centralized,
capitalist food production mechanism makes on the “conversation of wildlife habitat
and natural environment” (Lampkin 5-6), and on social issues that range from the loss
of jobs to rural population decline. Drifting away from its original aspiration to
cultivate what Lord Northborune (1896-1982) argues as a “way of life,” organic
farming, critics fear, has become a “business” that fails to embrace “working with
nature” through the holistic philosophy of organic cosmology (17).
8
Why has the

7
See, for instance, Karen Klonsky and Laura Tourte’s “Organic Agricultural Production in the United
States: Debates and Directions” (1998).

8
Cf. Nicolas H. Lampkin’s “Organic Farming: Sustainable Agriculture in Practice” (1994) 5-7, Laura
B. Delind’s “Transforming Organic Agriculture into Industrial Organic Products” (2000), 203-205,
Vijay Cuddeford’s “When Organics go Mainstream” (2003) 4, Morven G. McEachern and Joyce

27
notion of the organic persisted in underwriting utopian visions of pastoral harmony so
compelling for consumers, writers, and ecocritics alike, in spite of literary and cultural
critics’ interrogations of the prevailing assessment of “nature” as the locus of pristine
landscape and moral purity?
9
How has the organic remained more or less an
ahistoric, transcendent concept, and an uncontested material reality that continues to
reproduce the nature versus culture binary? In marking a tradition that idealizes the
“organic,” the intent is neither to dismiss organic landscape as a backdrop of the
subjective projection of images and ideas, or as an objective material reality devoid of
any valuations; nor is the claim for organic imaginary a simple, contemporary
environmentalist repackaging of the pastoral mode as it enacts idealized images of
rural landscapes. Rather, my aim is to question the assumptions behind the much
taken-for-granted terms such as “nature” and “natural order” to pinpoint the cultural
fantasies and blindness of organic discourse.

Willock’s “Producers and Consumers of Organic Meat” (2004) 534-537, and Julie Guthman’s Agrarian
Dreams (2004).

9
For a comprehensive survey of consumers’ attitudes toward organic farming and products in the
United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, see Cuddeford’s “When Organics go
Mainstream” 14, Henk Verhoog, Mirajam, Edith Lammerts van Bueren, and Ton Baars’ “The Role of
the Concept of the Natural (Naturalness) in Organic Farming” 37-44, and McEachern and Willock’s
“Producers and Consumers of Organic Meat.”

28
Given that Masumoto’s organic imaginary makes manifest his attempt to
maintain nature’s intrinsic order against both environmental depletion and
socio-cultural transformation brought forth by the industrialization of agriculture, his
nature writings often foster discussions of the pastoral. Though also aligned with
agrarian writers for his celebration of stewardship and rural life, the predominance of
the critical appreciations of Masumoto’s narratives as specifically pastoral is
significant. While redirecting the reader’s attention to the political and ideological
potential of “harmony in nature,” Masumoto and organic imaginary’s vision of
“nature,” as both a pastoral refuge and a source of order and stability, obscure,
paradoxically, the “economic facts and relationships” acclaimed by agrarian writers
(Berry, Commonplace 238). Glossing over Virgilian and Jeffersonian virtues of
“industry, thrift and measured self-interest” in its spiritual pursuit of oneness, organic
farming’s most trenchant critique of industrial agribusiness, its dogma of “working
with nature,” is debilitated as it mystifies and distorts the agrarian “realities of labor
and hardships” (Garrard 109, 33).
10

10
Thomas Jefferson’s espousal of family citizenry as the backbone to the American Republic is
thought to be the modern heir to Virgil’s agrarian ideal. Cf. Greg Garrad’s Ecocriticism 33-34,
108-113, and Wendell Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace 236-248.

29
One possible way of understanding the positions or the functions of “nature,” and
the relations between humans and nonhumans in the formulation of the organic
farming discourse is to envision them through the hypothetical lenses of biophilia and
topophilia. In Biophilia: the Human Bond with Other Species (1986), renowned
evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson examines human’s relation to nature from a
socio-biological perspective, pronouncing “biophilia,” the human affinity to “life and
life-like process,” an essential biological component of human behavior (1).
Exploring the dialectical relationship between space and place through different
modes of experience in Space and Place (1977), geographer Yi-fu Tuan finds
permanence and stasis essential elements upholding “place” as a moment of pause ––
as a furnace for security, integrity, as well as the longing for the openness, freedom,
and threat ramified by “space” that he calls “topophilia.”
11
Wilson’s and Tuan’s
accounts are of course in the first instance narratives and representations of biophilia
and topophilia. On one level, however, the emphases that Wilson and Tuan placed
on the physiological and evolutionary bases of affinity to nature privilege a
deterministic approach. Such postulations normalize the bond between humans and

11
See, also, Tuan’s Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974).

30
nature, so much so that “the love for and the protection of nature,” for nature
enthusiasts, have not only become inevitable and “necessary consequences of being
human,” but also the pastoral notion of attunement with nature has been given
substantial and legitimate justifications (Vale 214).
12
On another level, in
thematizing and normalizing humans’ natural kinship with “nature,” a certain attitude
and value toward nature have been constructed. Though the definitions and
boundaries of “nature” and/or of “place” formulated by Wilson and Tuan deviate, their
concept of “affinity to nature and/or place” connote harmony, order, constancy, or, in a
subtler sense, symbiosis and stability. The point, here, is that the affection for nature,
and the bond between humans and place, as Wilson and Tuan argue, are two common
human emotions among many, and, as ecocritic Glen Love observes, they have been
the central concern of pastoral literature from ancient times to the present (66).
13

Importantly, however, is the recognition that the fixation on Masumoto’s organic

12
Biophilia, as Vale remarks, “appeals to many nature enthusiasts for its suggestion that aesthetic
sensitivity has an innate genetic basis,” and yet humans, may also be “genetically subject to Tuan’s
topophilia, an ‘affective bond between people and place’” (214).

13
Love’s argument on the biological roots of pastoral literature, and his identification of the
interconnections between human beings and nature as the central concern of the pastoral since ancient
times is based on Wilson’s notion of biophilia. See, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and
the Environment 67-83.

31
imaginary as pastoral narratives informs a discourse that, in itself, prescribes the
aesthetic, philosophical, and political sensitivity for, and the moral supremacy of, a
sense of order and harmony that had predominated the ecological sciences and
environmental protectionist enterprise until the late nineteen-eighties.
14

The degree to which the espousal of harmony and order as key elements to the
healing of the land and the purification of the human spirit formulates a constructive
theory remains arguable, and has been tackled by nature writers with great
ambivalence. How does an organic farmer such as Masumoto respond to the nature
versus culture dialectic, which, as Leo Marx and Don Scheese remark, is the
centerpiece of American pastoral ideology?
15
In what ways has Masumoto’s organic
imaginary propelled such pastoral tropes as “harmony,” “interconnectedness,” and
“permanence,” celebrating and legitimizing the relations between humans and other
biological entities to an apparent symbiotic order? How does he contest
agribusiness’s mechanistic exploitation and conceptualization of nature –– one in

14
In Discordant Harmonies, Daniel Botkin writes that “[u]ntil the past few years, the predominant
theories in ecology either presumed or had as a necessary consequence a very strict concept of highly
structured, ordered, and regulated, steady-state ecological system” (9).

15
Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, and Scheese’s Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America
1-8.

32
which nature is construed as inanimate and static? Yet, that Masumoto’s yearning
for an idyllic retreat, in addition to soliciting a sense of transience or escapism that
characterized pastoralism, evokes his persona as a Jeffersonian self-sufficient yeoman
elicits the following questions: Has what ecocritic Greg Garrard notes as the agrarian
trope of “dwelling” unequivocally become instrumental to organic imaginary’s
critique of industrialist ethos of nature manipulation? How does Masumoto’s
experience “working with nature” defy the “practical harmony” ingrained within
agrarianism’s “long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry,
and death, of rituals, life and work” (Garrard 113, 108)? The value of these
questions regarding the social and “practical” functions of nature writing and pastoral
literature that have mesmerized generations of literary scholars is not so much that
they provide a critical context for discussing the possibilities of the organic imaginary
as a social critique.
16
Rather, they function as a lens for the valuation of the ways

16
In Practical Ecocriticism (2003), Glen Love reflects on his role as an ecocritic, and maintains that he
chose the term “practical” to call attention to a discourse that “aims to test ideas against the workings of
physical reality, to join humanistic thinking to the empirical spirit of the sciences, to apply our nominal
concern for ‘the environment’ to the sort of work we do in the real world as teachers, scholars, and
citizens of a place and a planet” (7). Karl Kroeber made a similar point earlier on in Ecological
Literary Criticism (1994). His attempt is to encourage the development of an ecological-science
oriented literary criticism that “escapes[s] from the esoteric abstractness that afflicts current theorizing
about literature, seizes opportunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies
more socially responsible” (1).

33
organic farming serves as a medium through which both the reverence for and the
ambivalencies of what is an organic landscape are articulated. This more nuanced
argument forces us to reconsider the organic as an environmental practice that
trespasses its presumptuous idealism and ideologically-neutrality.
These questions regarding the poetics and politics of organic imaginary call
attention to the much revered “natural order” in organic imaginary, and its failure to
address “change” in the sense of the economic realities of the ecological and
socio-cultural household. Celebrating natural order and aestheticizing the experience
of working with the complex natural system, the organic movement is both a means
and an end to what is an ecologically benign and socially just, alternative agricultural
practice, and mode of life. To the point of a regulated, stable, ecological system,
Masumoto’s nature writings sustain the rhetoric of the organic movement; in fact, his
narratives not only recognize the normative principles of, and assign ethical values to,
what is an essential, inherent natural law, but also find the holistic doctrine of
organicism capable of forging a critique of pesticide poisoning, soil depletions, rural
displacement, and other social, ecological problems linked to hegemonic means of

34
food production. To be fair, in claiming change and instability of the cosmological
norm, Masumoto’s accounts of organic farming indeed challenges its stereotype as a
transcendent experience of divine, natural order. Sanctioning “change” as the new
guiding “order,” however, his endeavor to position organic landscape, and
self-sufficient, local, traditional modes of farming against both the hegemonic
agricultural paradigm and romantic, pastoral order forms an oppositional, if not
nostalgic sentimentality. The conception of natural order in Masumoto’s nature
writings, and the cultural and political implications of farming and living in an
environment permeated with change at a time when “eco-realists” and
poststructuralists alike, however, warn of the fictiveness and the cultural
constructiveness of nature and natural order. Does Masumoto’s notion of
“change” –– or “order,” as I will later argue –– alludes to what nature writer Berry
notes as “a limit of perception” in the experiencing of nature (Home Economics 3)?
Or, argued here, does the emerging critical appreciation for “change” in organic or
ecocritical discourse signals a further insecurity for and a lingering desire to redress
variabilities?

35
The validity of “natural order,” and the manner by which “nature as change” is
formulated both unsettle the solidity of this moral and epistemological grounding of
the organic movement. Organic farming’s gospel of “working with nature” as a
process through which farmers and environmentalists participate in socio-ecological
system pertains to what Terry Gifford contends in Pastoral (1999) as a post-pastoral
critique. Masumoto’s endeavor to celebrate the organic, as both a dynamic material
reality, whose existence is simultaneously projected with fantasies and ideologies, and
as an environmental protection enterprise that is equally defined and reconfigured by
multiple sets of values, indeed, correspond to post-pastoral discourse in the
appreciation of both nature’s beauty and chaos (152-153): the recognition of “a
creative-destructive universe equally in balance” (153), and the awareness of “nature
as culture and culture as nature” (162).
17
His conflation of “nature as order/design”
and “nature as chaos,” nonetheless, unravels the organic movement’s philosophical
underpinning as one that incorporates and builds on complementary and sometimes
contradictory understandings of what is an organic nature. Focusing on the ways the
collapse of traditional boundaries of nature modifies the presumptions of the purity

17
All from Gifford.

36
and stability of rural landscapes, and the continuity of traditional heritage, what
follows is the analysis of the problematics of establishing organic landscapes, and
local, traditional heritage as the locus of moral and aesthetic order, and as the site of
resistance to the influence of modern agribusiness.

§ Discovering Chaos: Masumoto and the Politics of Organic Discourse

The pine was only maintained once or twice a year. It had a wild quality
about it, unlike the meticulously tended backyard Japanese garden variety.
It was living chaos, a reflection of the natural ebbs and flows of erratic
irrigations, unprotected frosts and heat waves, and inconsistent care from an
aging ethnic farm community. Yet out of this uncontrolled growth, these
two old-timers were sculpting a beautiful tree, simple and innocent. (36)
–– Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach (19995)

A rural California landscape. Small ancestral farmlands. Vineyards and peach
orchards of blooming wildflowers and dancing insects. A yeoman-artist enjoying a
fetching moment of harmony with nature. David Mas Masumoto’s most renowned
piece of nature writing, Epitaph for a Peach (1995), has named all the elements that a
reader could possibly desire in a pastoral romance. Well-received by its readers and

37
reviewers, Epitaph for a Peach, as the Norton Book of Nature Writing notes, has
established Masumoto’s reputation as a nature writer (1047). Despite its
“sentimentality,” its “naïve, lyrical and . . . repetitive” style, poet Maxine Kumin
writes in The New York Times Book Review, it is an important book on the legacy of
American family farming, whose “stoicism elicit[s] sympathy and admiration” (13).
The Los Angeles Times, in the same vein, celebrates Masumoto’s “romanticism” and
integrity amidst the peril tending peaches and raisin grapes, and locates his second
book, Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil (1998), in the heritage of Thomas
Jefferson, St. John de Crevecoeur, and other classic philosophers and writers of the
pastoral and agrarian tradition. Often compared to Michael Ableman, organic farmer
of Santa Barbara suburbia, Charles Fish, Vermont dairy farmer, and Victor David
Hanson, farmer and professor of classics, Masumoto and these writers are portrayed
as ascetics or iconic heroes who fought to rebuild harmony, and “restore luster to
small-scale, diversified farming and develop a mutually supportive relationship with
local communities.”
18
“[D]oes the pastoral still exist in contemporary writing?” asks

18
Although these three California writers seem to share the same goal, Martha Groves points out in her
article in The Los Angeles Times that while Hanson “seeks to shock people into awareness that family
farming is essentially a goner and that the nation is worse off because of it,” Masumoto and Ableman

38
Gifford who finds that the collapse of the country-city borderline while challenging
pastoral literature’s celebration of rural landscape, continues to bear witness to the
enthusiastic pursuits of pastoral visions (3-4). Responding to Masumoto’s reviews
and to Gifford’s interrogation of critics’ growing skepticism over the ideological
function of pastoral conventions raises the following question: Can organic
discourse’s belief in “natural order” and its attempts to envisage the rural landscape as
the locus of moral and ecological values be seen as twenty-first century’s successor to
the pastoral form?
For reviewers who read Masumoto’s nature writings as pastoral allegories that
participate in the reclaiming of modern Arcadia in the process of working with nature
and savoring personal memories, the most promising, and, arguably, the most
disturbing aspect about organic movement’s environmental critique is the moral and
aesthetic distance that it establishes for itself from hegemonic agricultural paradigm.
Masumoto’s admirers and critics have both amplified and mirrored his enthusiasm for
organic methods, the modern heir to small family farming, by transfusing his vision

seems to rely on “a strong dose of romanticism” (1). See Grove, “The Good Earth: Three California
Farmers write Books on the Pain and Joy Involved in Trying to Salvage Family Farming” 1.

39
with their own. Epitaph for a Peach, for instance, is deployed by anthropologist
Laura B. DeLind’s “Transforming Organic Agriculture into Industrial Organic
Products” rather problematically, as an authoritative voice on organic farming, to
question national organic standards’ goal of advancing a “socially and
environmentally sustainable agriculture and food system” (14). Without taking into
consideration the allegorical meanings and the fictive nature of Masumoto’s
autobiographical accounts, DeLind regards Masumoto as a valid, testimonial support
for her contestation against Organic Foods Production Act’s profit-driven, industrial
agribusiness logics.
19
Country Voices: The Oral History of Japanese American
Family Farm Community (1987), Masumoto’s first book and a historical narrative that
has provided the contextual material and established the narrative structure of his later
nature writings, is also referenced as a counter-narrative. In Lu Ann Jones and
Nancy Grey Osterud’s “Breaking New Ground: Oral History and Agricultural
History,” Country Voice serves an example of a historical narrative that has actually

19
In her introduction to the article, DeLind’s argument that [o]rganic growers have long recognized a
need for standards to ensure the integrity of their methods and products” is supported by Masumoto’s
remarks. She writes, quoting Masumoto: “[o]rganic growers work in conjunction with natural systems,
utilizing ecological relationships and balances and accepting the fact that having nature as a dance
partner means ‘constantly . . . switching leads’”(198).

40
come to terms with the discontinuities of historical memories, and the ethnic and class
dynamics of American agricultural history. Critics like DeLind, and Jones and
Osterud unanimously refer to Masumoto’s experience of “farming with nature” as a
compelling countervailing philosophy to mainstream American agricultural history
defined by industrial agriculture’s hegemony, and echo with book reviewers that
Masumoto’s accounts are effective narratives of resistance.
Critics, interested in formulating an environmental discourse that moves beyond
the simple nature-culture dichotomization, or beyond the binary reading of nature
writings as either romantic, pastoral epiphanies or covert political pamphlets, seem to
have taken notice of Masumoto’s organic critique of agribusiness’s exploitation of
both nature and farm laborers of ethnic minority lineage. Few, however, have
engaged his works in serious critiques to the extent with which the works of Wes
Jackson, Wendell Berry, and writers of rural, agrarian landscapes have been invested.
The 2006 MLA Bibliography, in fact, lists no entry on Masumoto’s works. Alice E.
Ingerson’s claim of Masumoto as a realist who takes pride in his Japanese philosophy
of “learning to fail” in a world of uncertainties, also remains unsettled, with respect to

41
the popular perception of Masumoto as a romantic, self-reliant yeoman who holds
faith in the power of the individual through working with land (255).
20
As the brief
introduction to Masumoto in the Norton Book of Nature Writing correctly explicates,
Masumoto’s “somber admonition” against the economic and environmental factors
that restructured small family farms, and his “Japanese-American perspective” are the
two most recognizable aspects of Masumoto’s works (1047). Beyond ascribing
Masumoto to either classic American pastoral tradition or a minority discourse
capable of challenging the hegemony of agribusiness, however, few critical analyses
examine Masumoto’s conceptualization of the organic in the context of pastoralism.
The discrepancies between those who celebrate Masumoto’s communion with the
organic “natural order,” on the one hand, and those who show no critical interest in the
presumed moral forces of the organic discourse, on the other, are also left
unresolved.
21

One feature that reviewers seem to agree upon is Masumoto’s mobilization of a
sentimental and melodramatic narrative style. These disparate responses toward the

20
“Learning to Fail” is the title to Masumoto’s essay in Epitaph for a Peach.

21
Cf. Maxine Kumin and Martha Groves’ reviews.

42
romantic notion of “working with nature,” however, call attention to the urgency for
pastoral and organic imaginary to accommodate the exploitation of idyllic nature on
both material and imaginative levels. Masumoto’s nature writings, as the reviews
suggest, imply a regressive move from the complexities and constraints of the urban
that simultaneously subsumes the protagonist into a highly stylized nature of
simplicity. Through this gesture of distancing or disengagement, not only has
Masumoto’s Arcadia become insulated against the complexities of the hegemonic
society, but also his accounts of organic farming come dangerously close to
(re)producing a discourse of nature that privileges purity and order –– and claims to
transmit transparently nature’s intrinsic value and the immediate experience of
nature’s harmony.
In the opening passage of Four Seasons and Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring
(2004), Masumoto constructs a geographical and moral landscape of the organic that
relies on such pastoral tropes as alienation, retreat, return, and nostalgia:

Ingredients for a peach: well-drained soils. Balance of trace minerals.
A few spring showers. Dreadful summer heat. Good cold winters.
Organic matter. Indigenous grasses (weeds). Legume cover crops.
Family generations working the land. And luck.

43
Peaches are supposed to be grown slowly, and I don’t try to change that
rhythm with large dosages of synthetic fertilizers or chemicals designed to
stimulate growth. I believe my California soil adds a distinctive local
flavor. . . .
However, efficiency, productivity, and speed have become the symbols
of success in farming. As a farmer, I face a challenge common to most
industries – a growing division between big and small. Agriculture has
become more of a business confined by narrow definitions of success and
price-as-bottom-line thinking. With the industrialization of farming,
farmers manufacture products, and decisions are made more and more by
managers and not by owner-operators. Neighbors talk less and less with
each other; we’re too busy sprinting from one chore to another. We’ve lost
the art of roadside talks – “collaborative practices” as an anthropologist
friend once called it – and the gatherings of pickups and farmers sharing
stories.
I rarely hear that phrase “farming as a way of life” to rationalize our
livelihood. Instead I sense that our farms are becoming impersonal, that
decisions are now based on business plans while personal responsibility is
exiled from the fields. Industrial peaches are not grown but made with
minimal variation. They’ve become a commodity produced for mass
consumption. (3-4)

In this passage, Masumoto reveals organic farming a cultural practice through which
farmers work with both their neighbors and nature’s rhythm, finding the right balance
of both soil minerals and for his spirits at the same time reviving local and traditional
legacies. Yet, as Masumoto adds later on, organic farming is also a series of
rejections of, and remedial actions against, the environmental, social, and moral risks

44
brought forth by the mechanization and commodification of a conventional food
provision system. Distinguished by its opposition to the industrial agricultural model,
a product, presumably, of a contaminated, materialistic society, the landscape of the
organic is closely bound up with the pastoral vision of a lost, paradisiacal felicity ––
with the supposed innocence of nature, the simplicity of rural environment, and the
authenticity of distant past. Idealizing organic farming, Masumoto’s quest for a new
social, environmental order in the countryside away form the monopoly of corporate
agribusiness pertains to the pastoral, to what Marx claims in The Machine in the
Garden (1964) as the “desire, in the face of the growing complexity and power of
organized society, to disengage from the dominant culture and to seek the basis for a
simpler, more harmonious way of life ‘closer’ (as we say) to nature” (6).
The moral authority of the pastoral or organic landscape, indeed, is prefigured in
the geographical and conceptual distance that Masumoto creates between “nature” and
“culture.” Within Masumoto’s conceptual map, the organic landscape, as a source of
environmental stability and social cohesion, depends first and foremost upon the
fetishization of nature as the object of desire on the part of those who find, in the

45
here-and-now, a reality of vagaries and complexities. Inciting the cry for a highly
stylized country-living, one where the voice of the disfranchised finds no resonance,
the political limits of Masumoto, like his aspiration, sprung from a sentimentality that,
in its idyllic retreat, its denunciation of the actual and the hegemonic, simultaneously
concedes the seeming innocence and emptiness of rural landscape.
In Masumoto’s reviews, however, neither the celebrating nor the discrediting of
the pastoral as an idyllic contrast to the urbane, and as a romantic vision are
themselves very persuasive. With regard to the increasing marginalization of
pastoral literature’s ideological capacity and its relations to the idealization and
abstraction of nature, Lawrence Buell notes in The Environmental Imagination (1995)
that “the newer scholarship stresses even more than the older scholarship did on
nature’s function as an ideological theater for acting out desires that have very little to
do with bonding to nature as such and that subtly or not so subtly valorize its
unrepresented opposite (complex society)” (35). This rising skepticism, as Gifford
remarks, originates from an inherent conflict between “the literary representation of
nature” (or, “the textual evidence”) and “the material reality” (or, “the economic

46
reality”) of pastoral literature (2). As Gifford asserts, “a farm worker might say that
a novel was a pastoral if it celebrated a landscape as though no-one actually sweated
to maintain it on a low income” (2). Unreserved exaltation of nature, for Gifford,
instigates pejorative remarks that “the pastoral vision is too simplified and thus an
idealization of the reality of life in the country” (2). More importantly, just as the
idealization of nature, and thus, the reading of literature as reality are both likely to
conceal appropriation of the environment as a resource for acting out desires that may
be self-indulgent, the insistence upon the reading of what Buell suggests as the
internal conflict between pastoral ideology as “projective fantasy” and as
“responsiveness to actual environments” likewise undermines the ideological potential
of the pastoral, with regard to its very “double-edged character” (Imagination 54).
The commentary on pastoral literature’s double-edgedness, or its self-reflexivity,
is first suggested in Leo Marx’s “Pastoralism in America,” where he argues that the
ideological potential of pastoralism, as “a nascent left-wing ideology,” lies within its
liminality, rather than the apparent contrast between the rural and the urban, and
between the visionary and the actual that enable the pastoral retreat (36). For Marx,

47
the pastoral figure’s in-betweeness, the state of being both a part of and apart from
nature as well as the society, first initiated the desire for retreat from the hegemonic
society, and yet, paradoxically, this position in-between the city and the country also
dispels the protagonists’ former illusions for the pastoral landscape, and eventually
helps gain a critical distance from nature and civilization (“Pastoralism” 38). While,
for critics, the conceptual paradoxes demonstrate exceptional reflexivity in their
manipulation of cultural stereotypes, such as rural settlement and urban landscapes,
the space, created through the process of distancing, produces, ultimately, a safely
sequestered vision of an ecological nature that might be helpful to the advancement of
ecological consciousness.
22
Construing Masumoto’s narrative as pastoral, the
disparity in responses towards Masumoto, thus, calls attention to his highly
embellished gestures of celebrating and appropriating “nature,” and delivers into the
precise critical discordance and contradictions that are elided for the sake of the
enactment of the utopian vision of the pastoral.
Focusing on that moment of escape or transcendence, as opposed to the
rootedness and the immediacy of his agrarian experience, Masumoto’s implicit

22
Buell, Environmental Imagination 51-52.

48
critique of agribusiness foregrounds the notion of harmony through nature’s order.
When portraying the life of his father as a farmer, whose decision to adhere to
traditional natural farming in the past depended solely upon the affordability of
synthetic fertilizers, Masumoto writes in Letters to the Valley (2004) that his father is
“a farmer caught in the ritual of nature, a cycle of life, a rite of passage from one year
to the next” (3). Though at times nostalgic and indulging, the devotion to “[work]
with, and not against, nature” like that of his father’s, as Masumoto rightly argues, is
what postulates organic agriculture as an amendatory method of cultivation. Indeed
positioned as a contrast to industrial forms of production, the logic of Masumoto’s
organic imaginary parallels that which essentializes “nature” and “culture,” and
dichotomizes “nature” and “culture” into a simple “nature-as-goodness versus
culture-as-evil” binary. I argue, however, that this self-conscious break from what is
cultural (i.e. chemical, artificial, industrialized, and urban) for organic purists, is far
from suggesting a positive acceptance of organic farming as an environmentally
friendly food provision system; rather, organic farming ascribes an ethics and modes
of life through which individuals respond to “an eternal feature of the natural order,”

49
known as the doctrine of “the Rule of Return” (Conford Origins 48). Conford, in
The Organic Tradition, defines the philosophy of the organic movement:

Organic methods are not . . . a matter merely of avoiding the use of
artificials; they require that the cultivator should encourage the fertility
which lies, actually or potentially, in the soil itself, and should regard the
soil not as inert matter but as a living organism. Such a definition is
circular but the idea of a circle, or cycle, is so crucial to the organic view of
the world that this very quality of circularity can be considered appropriate.
(1)

Organic cultivation, Conford insist, is about establishing a virtuous circle: “[n]ot all
farming before the invention of chemical fertilizers was organic” (Origins 17). In
the case of Masumoto’s father, although he was forced to use non-chemical fertilizers
out of economic reasons and his enactment of organic philosophy entails a lack of
agency, his experience participating in nature’s order sets forth a respect for the
supposedly harmonious functioning of nature to which many organic advocates aspire.
As a reformative social vision, organic discourse’s utopian critique of industrial
agricultural production and manufacturing is continuously made explicit by
Masumoto and organic supporters as predicated upon the intrinsic order of nature. In
“The Role of the Concept of the Natural (Naturalness) in Organic Farming,” Dutch

50
philosopher of biology Henk Verhoog and his colleagues examine the overflowing of
celebratory and ardent sentiments over the epistemic and ethical value of “nature” and
“naturalness” of an organic food provision system, suggesting that organic farming
has often been conceived as “automatically sustainable if the farmer takes the
harmony, stability, or ‘nature’ of the agro-ecosystem as its guiding principles” among
organic practitioners (37; emphasis is added). This conception of nature as a
dynamic but unified web of eco-organisms, whose inherent value exists independently
of human interests and valuations, and whose ideological associations with good
health and environmental integrity is reinforced by its level of naturalness, is similarly
underscored by Masumoto. Organic cultivation, as he points out, is about “allowing
nature to take over,” “as if the farmer has died (Epitaph 28, 38). The
characterization of organic nature as balance and self-regulatory, in fact, prevails in
the writings of organic pioneers and supporters. Advocates worldwide argue for the
fertility and the health of soil, defining the organic principle from the very start of the
organic movement as a philosophy that looks up to nature as the supreme farmer.
Foregrounding its theoretical basis in holism, this organic movement, that celebrates

51
nature’s order, draws on ecological and religious metaphors and concepts, such as “the
wheel of health,” “the order of Nature,” and the “trinity” of
“health-wholeness-holiness.”
23
These various manifestations of “the law of return”
are best illustrated by G. T. Wrench’s summarization of Sir Robert McCarrison’s
organic principles: “[t]ransference, transference, transference –– three transferences,
that is the secret of health. These three transferences –– soil to vegetable, vegetable
to animal, animal and vegetable back to the soil –– form the eternal wheel of health”
(129). Mandating nature as an autonomous, self-sustaining system constituting in
itself a set of normative rules, the organic discourse argues for the corrective and
remedial potential of “working with nature” through the theory of ecosystem energy
(re)cycling and the Buddhist eternal cycle of life, samsara. In this sense, the organic
discourse has articulated powerfully a holistic cosmology that has moved beyond the

23
The “Order of Nature” is mentioned when John Stewart Collis (1900-1984) suggested in The
Triumph of the Tree that a mountain slope consisting of soil without any vegetation on top never happen
“in the Natural Order” (62). And in “Reverence for God’s Law” (1942), H. J. Massingham
(1888-1952) writes that “health-wholeness-holiness, only the very rarest man of science is aware of this
trinity, a three-in-one. Average science will not stop men from preying on the soil as the
plumage –traders preyed on birds in the breeding season for the milliners” (The Organic Tradition 217).
This notion of the virtuous circle is entrenched within organic discourse, see, also, Adrian Myers 19-29,
and Conford’s The Organic Tradition: an Anthology of Writings on Organic Farming 1900-1950.

52
positioning of the organic as the binary opposite of what industrialized society
represents.
While the ethic, “working with nature,” embraces a yearning for harmony
popular in pastoral scenarios, the feasibility of such a precept, brings to the fore
problems regarding the representation of nature (and hence nature’s order) as a vital
component of a subversive environmental ethic. Aside from the fact that “working
with nature” serves as a laudable vision, the ideal of “working with nature” is a
concept that is constantly undermined by organic farmers’ anxiety and disappointment
over the degrees of “naturalness” retained when putting the organic principle into
practice. In Epitaph for a Peach, Masumoto writes of his confusion over, and
ambivalence towards, the plausibility of this organic principle, casting doubts on the
moral imperative of organic agriculture:

… I water my farm artificially, so I don’t think my vines or trees really
feel the drought. But in the last few years, there hasn’t been a bumper crop
of grapes, and old-timers claim it’s the vines reacting to a reduction of
irrigation water.
Which brings me to the realization that my vines and trees and
irrigation practices are abnormal to the region. There are no natural
survival mechanisms triggered on my farm. Everything I do is
manipulation. I can’t expect a miraculous, truly natural farming system to

53
automatically replace my old system. Wildflowers won’t just grow when I
start farming naturally. Likewise, my farm won’t “naturally” solve its
problems without my intervention.
When human beings first began to take care of a plant food source,
instead of simply foraging and fathering, when a clan started tending its first
berry patch, when farming was born, so was the manipulation of nature.
Farmers all manipulate nature, some more than others. And some practices
are more destructive than others. I may believe I can fool mother nature,
but it’s more as if she let me get away with a few things. She’ll naturally
take care of her wildflowers and let me struggle with growing peaches and
grapes in a desert. (14).

In this passage, organic farming is presented as an agricultural practice marked by a
sense of instrumentality, coerciveness, and anthropocentric and profit-driven
orientations not unlike that of the industrial agricultural paradigm. An organic
farmer’s guilt over his (in)ability to farm “naturally” is similarly revealed when
organic farmer and writer Michael Ableman confesses to the “compromises” that he
had made using “biological sprays” and “organic pesticides and fertilizers,” even
though recognizing that these products are “mostly safe” and “available and legal” for
organic growers (81).
Like Ableman, Masumoto begs pardon for using chemicals that “won’t harm
humans,” realizing that the gesture of farming, whether applying state-registered,

54
organic fertilizers or not, involves human interference (Epitaph 80). The artificiality,
and, hence, the unnaturalness and anthropocentricity of organic cultivation come
particularly to the forefront for Masumoto, a Californian organic farmer who learned
that the survival of his family farm is contingent upon the alteration of the natural
landscape on a large scale that engrosses federal, state, and individual powers. In the
East Valley, the location of Masumoto’s farm, the arid land was brought into
productivity by clearing of layers of hardpan and digging ditches, by private
appropriations of localized hydraulic systems, and the Wright Act of 1887, which
paved the way for the establishment of irrigation districts.
24
Even with his
determination to work with nature’s cycle and a landscape defined by and prospered
with change, Masumoto regrets that the organic method of cultivation is as much
about changing the landscape and human innovation and intervention as it is for
industrial practices (Epitaph 19-20). Such an essentialist position towards “nature”
concurs with Conford: “chemical fertilizers were artificial because they are the
product of theories, developed under laboratory conditions, which interpreted

24
For a historical investigation of agriculture landscape in California, see Carolyn Merchant’s edited
volume, Green versus Gold: Sources in Environmental History, especially sections on “Building the
Hydraulic Empire,” and “From Family Farm to Agribusiness;” see Guthman 89-109 for a geography of
California organic agriculture.

55
biological processes as chemical mechanisms” (97). Like many fervent
environmentalists, modifications of nature, for Masumoto, comply with forces that
exploit and interupt the stability and self-sustaining of the natural environment. The
burden of an organic farmer’s guilty conscience, as Ableman rightly observes, derives
from the fact that using these biological sprays “come[s] from the same mentality of
solving problems with a miracle cure” (81), which gave the farmer “a sense of
control” (78).
The assertions that even the slightest human presence in nature manifests, to
some degree, humanization, domestication, and contamination of the natural
environment underscore organic farmers’ anxieties over naturalness. Driving these
presuppositions, however, is the easy link forged between what historian Richard
White notes as “productive work in nature” and “destruction” among mainstream
environmentalists, which leads to either the condemnation of “all work in nature,” or
the capturing and reifying the sustainability of “archaic work” (171). As White
contends in “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and
Nature,” popular environmental imaginary tend to uphold that “certain kinds of

56
archaic work, most typically the farming of peasants, provides a way of knowing
nature,” and “creates a connection to place that will protect nature itself” (171). Like
historian Lynn White, Jr., who in his controversial article “The Historical Roots of Our
Ecologic Crisis” (1969), traces modern environmental deterioration back to the
anthropocentric orientations of Judeo-Christian theology and the advancement of
technology and sciences of the West, Richard White attests that the same conjecture
that “work is a fall from grace” has given rise to both the denunciation of intense labor
and modern technology, as well as the celebration of play and pre-modern forms of
production in mainstream environmental discourse (175). In seducing humans away
from the benign possibilities of work and violating the order of the Garden of Eden,
not only does the promulgation of the snake as devil’s crafted design, as a “machine,”
attribute the cause of the degradation of untouched paradise to technology, this “white
man’s” environmental story has also engendered the romanticization of non-industrial
agriculture, and other regional, local forms of labor in nature.
25

Although Richard White’s investigation of the ethnic and cultural connotations of
the story of the fall ended with his critique of the scapegoating of the “white man” as

25
Richard White 181.

57
the first and ultimate environmental manipulator, his attention to the role of the pious
“Indian peoples” discloses an undercurrent of orientalism in environmental narratives
(175). For both Masumoto’s critics and admirers, Masumoto’s public confession is
legitimate; the validity of his moral assertions, in fact, had been affirmed by
empirically confirmable evidences from South and East Asia. American soil
scientist Franklin H. King’s book, sensationally entitled, Farmers of Forty Centuries,
or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan (1911), and Wrench’s The
Wheel of Health: The Source of Long Life and Health Among the Hunza (1938), for
instance, have all argued that modern technology and the skillful maneuvering of
Western industrial agriculture, as history has demonstrated, are more destructive than
the agricultural methods practiced by Far Eastern peasantry. In The Wheel of Health,
Wrench notes of McCarrison’s philosophy on the primitive –– and organic ––
approaches of non-Western agriculture, which is thought to have sustained the
livelihood of millions of people over the centuries:

It is possible also that in this form of culture there is an excellence of
vegetable health which can be obtained by no other means –– in Hunza, for
example, there is that excellence, and plant disease is significant. It is
possible that by full repayment to the soil we alone get a full return. It is

58
known that our own agriculture is rather a loan from soil, for we never repay
it in full. We have worked our agriculture on the capital of the soil, and in
virgin land we have raided the soil. When the soil sickens we restore it or
strive to restore it by scientific doctoring; we return to it in the way of tonics
the nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, of which we have robbed it. (121)

Wrench, McCarrison, and organic supporters’ indictment of agribusiness’s
profit-driven, mechanized system of food production is further supported by the
over-exploitation that leads to the American Dust-Bowl in the 1930s, food
cooperatives’ genetic-engineering and contamination of seeds, and the intensification
of the growing processes of livestock, which leads to epidemics such as mad cow
disease, on the one hand, and the rich ambiance of harmony and permanence of
Eastern farming that manifests the “rule of the return,” on theother.
These pseudo-historical and ecological evidences succeed in establishing
tangible, legitimate testimonies that sanctify “labor done without modern machine”
(Richard White 178); they prevail, however, through a fancy for the supposed
oppositional qualities between what is a “modern,” “industrial” agricultural practice of
the West, and a “conventional/primitive,” “organic” method of the East, for what
Michael Soule contends as “the myth of western moral inferiority” (147). For

59
Wrench, agriculture was the “real desire” of the Tibetans of Baltistan, Chinese,
Koreans, and Japanese, and these “true agriculturalists” are not only “conspicuously
ahead of all their neighbours in brain and sinew,” but also “not military” (15-16).
Indeed this idealization of the East as a Shangri-la, an utopia where everyone enjoys
self-sufficiency, poses a sharp contrast to Pearl Buck’s portrayal of Chinese peasants
in times of famine and draught in The Good Earth, a novel also published around the
second and third decade of the twentieth-century. Most intriguing, however, is the
continuous consumption and resuscitation of these images of the noble-savage farmers.
In recent years, King’s Farmers of the Forty Centuries (1911, 2004), Northbourne’s
Look to the Land (1940, 2005), Howard’s The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic
Agriculture (1881, 2006), and Wrench’s The Wheel of Health (1983, 2006) are
reprinted.
26
These books, aside from Howard’s, all affirm unreservedly the
connection between “naturalness” with organic agriculture, and organic agriculture
with the East in their book titles. Masumoto’s persona as an ideal organic farmer is
also buttressed and marked by his Japanese heritage, “learning to fail,” in the face of

26
Wrench’s The Wheel of Health is reprinted in 1990 and retitled A Hunza Trip with Dr. Bernard
Jensen.

60
the impermanence of change, like a diligent Zen acolyte (Epitaph 63). As an earthly
paradise “not there,” the mystique of organic landscape, as well as the brutal fact that
farming involves human interference, in disclosing “working with nature’s rhythm” a
moment of transcendence or escape, subsumes organic imaginary to that of the
popular, sentimental pastoral ideal.
27
Reading the “use-abuse” equation in organic
discourse as an anomalous and emblematic one is possible, especially when prompted
by specific needs for addressing the human burden, subverting nature to technological
and industrial powers, and setting humans apart from nature in the process of
subsisting on nature. Organic supporters’ distinctly accusatory tone aimed at
industrial agriculture, however, is marked by an inattention to the historical and
material realities, which in organics’ reinstatement of the doctrine, “working with
nature,” relegates organic agriculture to a nature versus culture binary, and the domain
of an exotic, orientalized Asia.

27
Marx identifies two kinds of pastoralism: the “pastoral ideal” and the “pastoral design.” Unlike
the more popular, and sentimental pastoral ideal, the pastoral design, according to Marx, refers to more
imaginative, complex literary works, which call into question the illusion of idyllic harmony through
the classical metaphor of a machine –– a symbol for society’s progressive quest for power and wealth
that intrude into the pastoral garden of simplicity and order. See The Machine in the Garden 24-25.

61
A clear opposition to hegemonic food system’s centralized and mechanized
means of production, Masumoto’s vision of small-scale, diversified, family-based
farms that celebrates traditional ways of farming and conforms to nature’s cycles has
also been envisaged by American agrarianism since the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century. This battle cry against the centralized power could be traced to
Thomas Jefferson, who finds, in small family agriculture, the key not only to the new
republican democracy and egalitarianism, but also moral refinement and self-reliance.
In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), he writes, “[t]hose who labour in the earth are
the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made
his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue” (217). Jefferson’s most
trenchant political and moral statement, in fact, rested in the belief of discovering
God –– be it a natural law or final destiny –– through developing an intimate relation
with nature, affirming the link between nature and morality. “The convergence of
nature and piety,” a literary trope that conveyed the anti-Modernist, is also shared by
Henry D. Thoreau, who made explicit, in his pursuit of spiritual enlightenment at
Walden Pond, that economic and moral frugality go hand-in-hand (Buell, Imagination

62
129). Similarly, in the works of contemporary agrarianists such as Wendell Berry
and Wes Jackson, this claim for decentralized, primitive subsistence and the critique
of mechanized and intensified agriculture are most lucidly defined by contrasting
imageries of alienated, morally-deprived farmers and urban laborers with
self-sufficient farmers, whose gesture of working with nature’s way suggests a
transcendent passage towards spiritual sanctity and harmony.
What is at stake for organic farmers, then, is not so much their belief in nature’s
order –– or, in Ableman’s words, the “self-contained ecosystem where no products
from outside the system would be needed” –– as their confidence to “farm in nature’s
image,” and making it a vital component of the organic imaginary (81). Although
relying only seasonally on the employment of migrant Mexican wage labors,
Masumoto was reminded of his father’s warning that “[o]nce you start hiring a lot,
you’re not just a farmer anymore” (Epitaph 23). For Masumoto, farmers who
conflate husbandry with the bookkeeping of farm productivity and costs are actually
“farm managers,” who exploit both human labor and nature through modern
technologies in disguise (Epitaph 23) and replicate the reductionist and capitalist

63
rhetoric of industrial agribusiness; they have, in fact, gone astray from the changes
and patterns of each agricultural year, and from the identity of an organic farmer as a
“poet” (Scofield 3). Traditional, small-family farming, and the virtues of industry
and thrift have built a “farmer,” but the devotion of a farmer to cultivate “a way of
life” concerning the harvesting of “taste, texture, and aroma accompanied by stories”
is what defines organicity (Four Seasons 4, 20-21). Giving prominence to an organic
farmer’s role as a poet, the modalities formulated in Masumoto and the organic
imaginary evokes images of pastoral artist-yeoman.
The anxieties of an organic farmer could indeed be construed as the problematic,
relations inherent between an environmental claim (i.e. what it ought to be) and
environmental behavior (i.e. what it could be). Aside from the fact that ethical
claims grounded in scientific and empirical facts may be themselves value-laden,
remaining doubt is a rational assessment of the respect for nature’s intrinsic value –– a
value that is independent of human use and judgment –– as a vision and an ethical
claim for the organic discourse. Equally improbable is actual possibilities of the
adoption of natural order. For British philosopher John Stuart Mill, “nature” is used

64
to refer to three things. First, it is “a collective name for all the facts, actual and
possible,” second, “not everything which happens, but only what takes place without
the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man,” and third, the
Natural Law (92). The claim that humans ought to imitate nature, however, suggests
that

they are God’s work, and as such perfect; that man cannot rival their
unapproachable excellence, and can best show his skill and piety by
attempting, in however imperfect a way, to reproduce their likeness; and that
if not the whole, yet some particular parts of the spontaneous order of nature,
selected according to the speaker’s predilections, are in a peculiar sense,
manifestations of the Creator’s will (Mill 93).

And, most importantly, not only is “the notion of imitating the ways of Providence as
manifested in Nature . . . seldom expressed plainly and down rightly as a maxim of
general application,” the notion of nature as reckless and destructive is seldom
investigated in the discussion of natural order as a valid principle (Mill 93-94).
Two ambiguous moral and metaphysical speculations made about “nature” form
the critical tension on which Masumoto based his organic discourse. First, deflecting
the articulation of his anthropocentrism and instrumentality of his political agenda,

65
Masumoto and the organic discourse’s reliance on the concept of nature as a supreme
rule and ultimate standard proclaim a nature that is superior to, and distinguished from,
the acquired and the artificial. This epistemological meaning of nature, however,
challenges his own conception of the meaning of nature as a given norm, a guiding
principle to which all things conform and are a part. As Mill has suggested, the
belief in the emulation of nature’s ways not only imposes a charge of impiety on those
who run counter to what nature commands and approves, and thus undermining the
creativity and autonomy of human culture, but also raises questions about ascertaining
the ways of ethical principles of nature. An intrinsic, non-instrumental value exists
in the natural world, as professor of environmental ethics, Holmes Rolston III, rightly
insists, regardless of the fact that value always requires a valuer. Masumoto,
however, seems deeply disturbed by the belief that “[v]alue in nature [is] always
‘anthropocentric,’ human-centered, or at least ‘anthropogenic’ (generated by humans)”
(Rolston III 79).
28
Given that the organic practice is no longer natural and occupies

28
In “Naturalizing Values: Organisms and Species,” Rolston III argues that “[i]ntrinsic value in the
realized sense emerges relationally with the appearance of the subject-generator. This is something
like opening the door of a refrigerator, when things previously in the dark light up. But axiologically
speaking, nature is always in the dark – unless and until humans come (79-80); in other words,
“[n]ature is actually valuable only when it pleases us, as well as serves us. That seems to be the
ultimate truth, even though we penultimately have placed intrinsic value on nature, and take our

66
supposedly a better ecological or environmental position than industrial practices, the
pivotal question for Masumoto and the organic discourse, then, becomes concerned
with how the act of farming according to the Law of Nature, a cultural behavior, can
be attained and ascertained without defying the natural order of things on both ethical
and instrumental levels.
One could also dismiss the controversies over the valuations of organic farming
by claiming Masumoto to be a rhapsodic radical, whose frustration seems to have
derived from his idealization of organic cultivation as a corrective practice that could
radically rectify the supposed unnaturalness, and hence the shortcomings, of modern
industrial agriculture by emulating nature and its assumed moral goodness. Others,
however, agree with Masumoto’s claim but find in the ever pervasive presence of
machines and human the urgency and immediacy to further celebrate and consolidate
the autonomy of nature. With regard to the positions of agribusiness and non-/pre
industrial models of food production, literary critic William Conlogue notes:

Farm industrialization is not simply synonymous with the use of machinery
or scientific methods; preindustrial farmers used machinery –– horse-drawn

pleasure enjoying these natural things for what they are in themselves” (80).

67
seeders, for example –– and scientific methods such as fertilizers and
selective breeding. Agricultural industrialization requires farmers to
conceive of plans, animals, land, and people through a narrow mechanistic
frame that tends not to see them as living things. The industrial farm
works towards ever-greater control over nature as a factor in production
rather than working with it. Profit is the measure of the new farm, not a
family’s continuance on the land, its quality of life, or its relations to the
larger community. (16)

In Conlogue’s and Masumoto’s remarks on the farming “business,” the
carefully-established binary between industrial and traditional/organic farming is
challenged by the fact that both models involve the use of machinery and fertilizers ––
even though, as Masumoto evinces, levels of human interference and industrialization
differ markedly. The ways these two models intersect and cross boundaries is
significant. While, for Conlogue, the shared qualities between the two models
demand a more realistic and objective assessment of each, their similarities cast doubt
on Masumoto’s incentives to “work with nature.” Yet in neither of their remarks
does the breakdown of this distinction instantiate an understanding of the industrial
and traditional/organic models that surpasses conventional premises, or forge an
ethical claim that could legitimize traditional/organic farming as a “natural” and thus
more ecological practice without further positing it as primitive, non-Western, and

68
natural. The logic that differentiated the organic from industrial methods, hence, is
discounted by one that only compels such analyses. The collapse of the binaries
between organic and industrial methods, for organic supporters, only seems to further
invite the reinforcement of the organic as a mode of life that reckons natural order as
its normative principle.
The problematics regarding the precise manner with which organic farming
defines itself as a discourse of resistance and a way of life constituting in itself a set of
moral norms, further raises fundamental questions regarding organic agriculture.
Has the industrializing and globalizing of the organic sectors diverted organic farming
from what Julie Guthman argues in Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic
Farming in California (2004) as “the ideal of ‘farming in nature’s image,’” and turn
organic farming into what it originally opposed (2-3)? Why has organic discourse
continued to regard itself as an alternative “mode of living” that builds on natural
order, beyond its legal definition as an “ecological production management system
that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological

69
activity”?
29
Must the organic fulfillment be assumed to constitute a good? How
could natural order ultimately address and justify the moral concerns and
considerations of the organic discourse? Finally, how do Masumoto’s nature
writings, which conform to the organic belief in natural order but at the same time
paradoxically argue for change or chaos in nature, reconcile these questions?

§ Working with Nature: The Politics of Change and Preservation in
Masumoto’s Organic Landscape

A field is more than just trees and vines. It includes the roots under the
surface, the ground floor, the zones at the tops of the peaches and grapes.
“Think in three dimensions,” Everett concludes, “like the past, present and
future.” (177)
–– Masumoto, Harvest Son

Since the publication of Epitaph for a Peach , Masumoto published a series of
three nature writings capturing the last decade of his life as an organic farmer. These
books appeared when organic supermarkets have become the “latest corporate success

29
United States Department of Agriculture National Organic Standards Board. 1995. Definition of
“Organic.”

70
story,” and when sustainable practice and organic products become the focal point of
health, environmental, food safety and quality, and animal welfare issues among
consumers, activists, and higher education practitioners (Cuddedford).
30
Although
many become more and more anxious over the meaning of organic when “organics go
mainstream,” organic farming has captured popular imagination as an alternative
farming method and mode of living that responds to the modernization of production
methods and the globalization of the food market by (re)claiming, persistently, natural
and social order (Cuddedford). The critical appreciation for the organic ideal,
“working with nature,” as a prescription, indicates an urgency to pinpoint two
dilemmas within ecocritical scholarship. First and foremost, the endeavor to
(re)construct what ecocitic Karl Kroeber claims as a “holistic” discourse that redirects
attention to the “sensory, emotional, imaginative aspects of art,” and possibly, to
“connect cultural experiences to natural facts” (1-2) could be seen as a direct response
to the predominant emphasis on “the nature of representation,” rather than “the

30
The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, devotes its October 20, 2006, issue to “Creating
Sustainable Universities” for the commitments and accomplishments that “sustainable universities,” a
term derived from a United Nations report, have made over the past year to environmental, economic,
and social sustainability (A8). These green projects use clean energy and solar cells, green-roofing,
and sustainable farming to supply food for both the campus and local communities. See A8-A25.

71
representation of nature” (Philips x). Interestingly, Masumoto’s salute to a
community that builds on nature’s (intrinsic) order, along with the many celebrations
of nature and nature writing as the loci of harmony and stability, while addressing,
indirectly, the overemphasis on the social constructivist aspect of “nature,” as well as
the untranslatability of reality into textual representations, also constitutes an original
entry point into a radicalized understanding of organic agriculture. Masumoto’s
insights on nature’s “order” as one marked by chaos, change, and resilience, I argue,
stems from the Latin natura, a notion of nature that connotes the process of birth,
development, death, and rebirth –– the changing dynamics of the natural world, and
destabilizes the images of permanence with which the organic landscape has popularly
been associated since the beginning of its movement at the turn of the
twentieth-century. Although Masumoto preoccupies himself with the notion of
chaos as the new natural “order” and conflates his desire for order with his endeavor
to cope with change, the conception of nature as dynamic calls attention to both the
temporal and historical dimensions of the universe, redirecting organic imaginary’s
attention on “order” back to the process of working with nature. The paradoxical

72
notion of the organic as a landscape, whose order is defined by change, from the
perspective of pastoral tradition, enacts Masumoto’s liminal position in-between and
yet trapped within a pastoral retreat and an immediate material reality.
A close reading of Masumoto’s narratives reveals that the harmony of his idyllic
landscape is constantly interpolated by example after example of the ecological and
social changes through which his farm evolved. In Epitaph for a Peach, he writes of
the “chaos” that comes to shape both his organic farm, as well as the precise doctrine
of organic methods of agriculture and living “work with nature’s order:”

I used to farm with a strategy of un-chaos. I was looking for regularity,
less variability, ignoring the uniqueness of each farm year. But now my
farm resembles the old pine at the Del Rey Hall; wildness is tolerated, even
promoted. The farm becomes a test of the unconventional, a continuous
experiment, a journey of adaptation and living with change. I’ve even had
to change my ways of counting. It’s no longer important how many pests I
have, what matters is the ratio between good bugs and bad bugs. I try to
rely less and less on controlling nature. Instead I am learning to live with
its chaos. (37)

Changes, in Masumoto’s estate, literally “unfold daily” as “the peaches swell, fresh
green shoots continually reach for sunlight, [and] the weeds race to flower” (Epitaph
100). For him, the natural environment exhibits inherently high levels of variability:

73
“I live in that farmhouse and work the eternal lands. My world may seem unchanged
to casual observers, but they are wrong. I now know this: if there’s a constant on
these farms, it’s the constant of change,” declares Masumoto assertively (Epitaph 183).
Even though as he suggests, “visitors don’t want to acknowledge change here [in the
farms] because it would disrupt their sense of stability” and because “[t]his world at
least is supposed to stay the same,” the constancy, balance, and regulated natural order
that organic followers so much celebrate are found in actuality to depend on the
profound and far-reaching effects of irregularities, chaos, and change (Epitaph 209).
Leaving aside that “constant change” embodies the paradoxical encapsulation of
nature’s norm as inconstancy, ecological changes such as the “the changing landscape
beneath [a farmer’s] boots” (Epitaph 11), the temperature that “changes with the
different densities of growth” (Epitaph 11), the change of moisture of soil (Epitaph
111) are not only shown to permeate an organic agricultural landscape, but also
demonstrate an intrinsic and indispensable aspect of the biosphere.
In these instances, however, is a challenge to the stable notion of organic
landscape. Presented as spontaneous, unstable, and always in flux, Masumoto’s

74
organic nature no longer persists to embody harmony and order. More significantly,
this specific imagery of “change” questions the supposed binary between
“nature-as-order versus culture-as-change” prevalent in environmental discourse.
While the presumptuous notion of an organic landscape, as a closed-system, built on
static equilibrium, is deficient in Masumoto’s nature writings, the processes and
mechanisms of “change” in Masumoto’s organic landscape are identified to be both
cultural and ecological. Whether through the loss of a peach variety, the invention of
marketing strategies (Epitaph 3-4), or the growing patterns and life processes of
vegetation suggested previously, the organic landscape, for Masumoto, a
third-generation farmer in California, is characterized as the product of both natural
and cultural environmental processes in which change is the norm. Seeking to
negate the general stereotype that posited “change” negatively, in deterministic tones,
as inevitable intangibles of life, as the lack of control and agency, and thus signs of
dependency and vulnerability, Masumoto celebrates nature’s spontaneity as an
all-inclusive, self-generating and self-redefining organism and underscores the
importance of reestablishing contact with the original and the authentic with more

75
innovative novelties through organic practices. “Traditions must evolve,” claims
Masumoto, “otherwise they become acts without meaning, fossils from dead
civilizations, relics of a past that only remind us of where we were, not where we are
going” (Harvest 256). His alertness to the realities, and preoccupation with the
details of nature’s variations and agencies may be a deliberate rebellion against the
baggage that organic farmers are expected to carry as the last defender of order, which
only seems to further instigate his yearning for permanence. Posited within his
narratives as distinctly at odds with the more predominant and altogether more
common association of “environmental change” to a byproduct of modernization and
social progress –– as solely belonging to what is cultural Masumoto’s narratives calls
forth a more complex articulation of organic nature that complicates the idealized and
mystified image of organic nature.
For many environmentalists, however, to understand change as natural and
inherent in the ecological system is to renounce the underpinnings of
environmentalism, attesting to the naturalness, legitimacy, and the moral innocence of
human alterations and modifications of the environment. When exploring the ethics

76
of environmental management within the context of ecological history, professor of
biology and environmental studies, Daniel Botkin, raises the question that “once we
have acknowledged that some kinds of change are good, how can we argue against
any alteration of the environment?” (10). In Discordant Harmonies, he offered two
answers to the concern, but his rationale seems to generate even more uncertainties:

First, the failure to accept change leads to destructive understandable results.
It is only by understanding how nature works and applying this
understanding in our management of nature (or to speak more generally,
understanding our proper role in nature) that we can achieve our goal:
people living within nature, neither poisoning it nor destroying its
reproductive capabilities.
The second answer is that to accept certain kinds of change is not to
accept all kinds of change. Moreover, we must focus our attention on the
rates at which changes occur, understanding that certain rates of change are
natural, desirable, and acceptable, while others are not. (10-12)

Here, notably, Botkin’s statement is as much on the correlations between the
construction of nature as evolving and environmental behaviors as on ethical
assessment and value judgments, namely, whose nature and whose ethics?
31
His
assertion that nature is alive yet constantly in flux fosters the same set of sentiments as

31
These two questions are originally raised by professor of geography and environmental studies
James D. Proctor in his study of the beliefs of people of Pacific Northwest Forests and the implications
for forest management. See “Whose Nature?” 288.

77
claiming that nature is a dead cosmos of the mechanists. For many, the paradoxical
sense that nature’s order is something invented and interpreted is the equivalent of
contending for the absence of a natural law imposed by God. Without such moral
precept or the mathematical order of laws and identities, nature is subject to disorder,
sickness and decay. Masumoto’s construction of organic landscape as dynamic and
vitalistic, thus, comments indirectly (and negatively) on the possible connections
between organic farming and pastoral order. As Williams acknowledges, “organic”
refers to “the process or products of life, in human beings, animals or plants”
(“Organic” 227). Evoking the very specific meaning of the organic in modern
English, Masumoto’s insistence upon the mechanisms and process of change prompts
the re-assessment of the types of environmental change acceptable and desirable, the
protection methods appropriate, as well as the image and condition of nature which
the society at large protects. This vision/nightmare of finding organic nature a
landscape of original spontaneity and disrupted order is double-edged: it can be read
either as the loss of control to an increasingly aggressive and exploitative ideology, a
sign of existential moral individualism, or it can be used to reinforce and facilitate a

78
more complex understanding of the meaning of organic farming, which dwells on
neither the romanticization of the past and origin, nor in the mystified notion of
change.
Turning to his Buddhist religious belief and his Japanese heritage, Masumoto
notes in Country Voices:

Fu-Tsu-No-Hito/ordinary people.
Two kanji characters combine to translate into the word ordinary. “Fu”
which means “the universal” and “tsu” which means passing through.
Individuals with the universe passing through, that’s the meaning of
ordinary people” (230).

Masumoto’s conception of (organic) nature as transitory, of course, alludes to the
Japanese “Shi-zen” or “Ji-nen,” which, when translated, means “self-so-ness” or
original spontaneity, corresponds to its Latin etymon, natura.
32
Contexualizing the
transience of life within the backdrop of the organic landscape, Masumoto compares
organic farming to the art of practicing Zen: “How can I live with nature? By
learning to live with five worms and my stress?” (Epitaph 62). The ways to farm

32
For further discussions on the Japanese concept of Shi-zen, see Hubertus Tellenback and Bin
Kimura’s “The Japanese Concept of ‘Nature’” 153-155, and Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen 10.

79
organically, according to nature’s rhythm, appears to be “a Zen Master’s question” (52,
62), for Masumoto, a farmer who is in need of determining the right timing to
interfere in the “lifestyle,” or life cycle, of peach twig borer with what is a “natural”
bacterium scientifically (48-52), and uncovering the relations or causality between
these five “OFM” (Oriental fruit moths), and the commissions for his peach crop
(61-62).
33
In recognition of the one comprehensive and unchanging law about
nature/Nature in Japanese/Buddhist convictions –– impermanence –– farming
organically, in this sense, entails an awareness and articulation of nature’s processes or
the simultaneous presence of past, present, and future.
If organic agriculture, as organic pioneers have argued, originates from Asian
philosophies, Masumoto’s organic discourse, written in a very different historical
timeframe, outlines a utopian vision that subverts mystified images of docile, carefree,
oriental farmers of Shangri-La, insulated from the mundanity of modern civilization
and trivialities of hard physical labor. “Good pruning is really the art of taking away,
like a sculptor chiseling at a rock, working to uncover life inside. You work with the
past and see the future – adding to a living timeline” (Letters 4), insists Masumoto.

33
All from Epitaph for a Peach.

80
Masumoto’s organic landscape that build on “a fragile balance between the controlled
and uncontrolled” adopts a sense of creative energy to the vision/illusion of landscape
of eternity that have inspired organic supporters (Epitaph 111). A radical organic
pioneer that preached the idea of “learning not to control” as a way of abiding by and
submitting to nature’s processes is the aforementioned Masanobu Fukuoka ( 福
). Enjoying wide critical success, Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution is
celebrated by Berry along with other Western organic writers as an excellent example
of what can be done with his “do nothing” methods of farming (xiv).
The notion of “do-nothing” is a common motif within organic discourse. In the
title page of The One-Straw Revolution, an enlarged kanji character “ ” (wu, nothing,
or nothing-ness) that occupies one-third of the space resonates with the subtitle, An
Introduction to Natural Farming, acclaiming the connections between wu and the
notion of natural and non-interference as the essence of organic farming. The
publisher advertised Fukuoka’s work with a clear intention of promoting this visionary
farming practice as one would cultivate the spirits with the do-nothing philosophy of

81
Zen and Taoism.
34
For Berry and editor, Larry Korn, the link between “nature” and
“nothing” (as opposed to “nothingness”) is self-evident: wu is appropriated negatively
to mean less labor (Korn xviii), or a method “not against work” but “against
unnecessary work” (Berry xiv-xv). The fine line between the levels and the degrees
of participation or permissible interference is tenuous; and yet their readings, that
undermine nature’s agency and intricacies, and organic farming’s celebration of the
active participation of nature’s rhythm evinces a preoccupation with the notion of
“nothing” that Fukuoka initially attempts to condemn. He writes, “[m]y conviction
was that crops grow themselves and should not have to be grown. I had acted in the
belief that everything should be left to take its natural course, but I found that if you
apply this way of thinking all at once, before long things do not go so well. This is
abandonment, not ‘natural farming’” (13). In the words of Chinese Taoist
philosopher, Chuang-tzu (369-286 B.C.), “[t]he perfect man employs his mind as a
mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing” (qtd. in Watts 19-20). Exactly this
notion of “grasping nothing” and “refuses nothing” discloses Fukuoka’s absorption of
Taoist teaching –– which pronounces wu wei (literally translated as “‘not’ or ‘non’ ––

34
See pages xiii, xxxv, and the back cover.

82
‘action,’ ‘making,’ ‘doing,’ ‘striving,’ ‘straining,’ or ‘busyness’”) as “spontaneity” and
“trusting it to work by itself” in a state of wholeness (qtds. in Watts 19).
“Do-nothing,” Fukuoka contends, is not “not doing anything,” but the insight into “the
difference between natural and unnatural” (16). Like Fukuoka who discovers the
limits of anthropocentricity, Masumoto identifies the desire for scientific and
technological control, characteristic of modern methods of cultivation, to be the
obstacle that prevented Western civilization from glimpsing into the process –– the
interrelations and interconnectedness –– of nature. Like Berry, however, Masumoto
is trapped between the nature-culture, and the doing-and-not-doing dichotomy.
Gifford once argued that one of the fundamental aspects of the post-pastoral is
the “recognition of a creative-destructive universe equally in balance in a continuous
momentum of birth and death, death and rebirth, growth and decay, ecstasy and
dissolution” and “often this requires a recognition of the death process” (153).
Ecocritic Glen Love remarks similarly that the temporality and ephemerality of the
Arcadian vision is a reminder of the striking, original meaning of Et in Arcadia Ego:
“[e]ven in Arcadia there is death” (83). The process of death, extinction, and

83
environmental degradation, for him, “helps us ponder our relationship to the human
and natural world” (84). If Gifford’s momentum of life and Love’s insights on death
in pastoralism are manifestations of change or chaos, Masumoto’s notion of change in
what appeared to be a landscape of harmony and order registers an amplified version
of post-pastoral narrative. Although his recognition of the process of the natural and
human world through organic farming suggests a rhetorical move from organic or
pastoral harmony through his reidentification of change as death or loss, his nature
writings, nonetheless, dwells on images of natural order while playing with the notion
of chaos. Masumoto’s responsiveness to both natural and cultural transformations,
however, anticipates an environmental discourse/practice that deals with both
progressive and conservative impulses.

84
Chapter 2

In Search of a Biotic Community and an Ecocentric Self:

Rachel Carson, Deep Ecology, and the Organic Metaphor

The world we have lost was organic. From the obscure origins of our
species, human beings have lived in daily, immediate, organic relation with
natural order for their sustenance. In 1500, the daily interaction with
nature was still structured for most Europeans, as it was for other peoples,
by close-knit, cooperative, organic communities. (1)
–– Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (1980)

The previous chapter examined the representation of organic agriculture in
imaginative environmental texts, and revealed the impact of organic farming discourse
within contemporary “green” rhetorics and politics. The recognition of “nature’s
order” and “working with nature” as vital components of the organic doctrine suggests
a rhetorical move from the industrialist and capitalist logics of modern food provision
system to an alternative cultivation method that is ecologically sustainable and
ethically sound. Yet the identification of “nature’s order” as inherent within the
notion of the organic uncovers the paradoxes underlying this supposedly reformative

85
movement that originated in the late nineteenth century. While the fixation on what
appears to be “natural” and “harmony” risks casting the organic into either a romantic
category, the conceptualization of organic farming as ostensibly building upon an
organic order has not only resurrected, but also replicated mechanistic cosmology’s
celebration of nature as balance and design.
In an attempt to locate the concept of the organic in environmental literature
more precisely, this chapter reads the organic metaphor as eminently situated within
the ancient or premodern tradition of organicism. Organicism refers to “[t]he theory
that organic structure is merely the result of an inherent property in matter to adapt
itself to circumstances,” or “[t]he theory that everything in nature has an organic basis
or is part of an organic whole” (Oxford English Dictionary). Organismic, on the
other hand, ascribes to those “of or relating to an organism[,] of the nature of an
organism[,] or at the level of the organism” (OED). Within environmental history
and ecocriticism, organicism is often evoked in association with, and yet used
interchangeably for, pagan animism, vitalism, and/or holism to construct what is a
counternarrative to the dominance of mechanism. In her investigation of the decline

86
of organicism in relation to the rise of mechanistic cosmology in Western civilization,
ecofeminist historian, Carolyn Merchant, cautions:

… As a projection of the way people experienced daily life, organismic
theory emphasized interdependence among the parts of the human body,
subordination of individual to communal purposes in family, community,
and state, and vital life permeating the cosmos to the lowliest stone.
The idea of nature as a living organism had philosophical antecendents
in ancient systems of thought, variations of which formed the prevailing
ideological framework of the sixteenth century. The organismic metaphor,
however, was immensely flexible and adaptable to varying contexts,
depending on which of its presuppositions was emphasized. A spectrum of
philosophical and political possibilities existed, all of which could be
subsumed under the general rubric of organic (Death 1-2).
1

Here Merchant’s definition of the organic conforms to the concept of earth as a living
whole of coordinating parts. Her emphasis is placed on the well-integrated organic
unity, on an ethics of interconnectedness, rather than on, for instance, the dynamic
parts, or the integrative process of the organic.
2
Pronouncing organicism a theory
that stems specifically from the conception of nature as “a living organism,” however,

1
Critics such as Merchant, Dana Philips, Max Oelschlaeger, Donald Worster, Roderick Frazier Nash,
and Raymond Williams have been using “organic,” “organismal,” and “organismic” interchangeably.
To avoid confusion, this discussion follows Merchant’s argument, and usesthe most popular term,
“organic,” in examination of the organismic metaphor in various contexts. For the etymology of
“organic,” see Williams’ Keywords 229-229.

2
Cf. Stephen C. Pepper 280-283.

87
her attentiveness to the complexity, ambiguity, and elusiveness of the concept of
organicism is undermined by a non-reflexive, ahistoric view of the organic that she
has constructed, but initially attempted to critique. As a system of though that
carries specific imagery and meaning with regard to the idea of nature as a “product of
life” that contains within itself an intrinsic order, what are the present-day
manifestations and transmigrations of organic cosmology (Williams, Keywords 227)?
How has the organic metaphor been appropriated into larger ethical justifications of
environmental theories? In what ways has the organic trope helped forge a critique
on the allegation for nature’s instrumental value to humans?
Lending its critical force to green politics, the organic metaphor has persistently
been instrumental to activists and scholars’ radical indictment of the technological
optimism, the capitalist orientations, and the utilitarian and anthropocentric stance of
not only the modern socio-economic system, but also mainstream and popular green
rhetoric. In The Idea of Wilderness, Max Oelschlaeger defines the three major
worldviews or ethics that formed the essential moral claims of environmental
discourse:

88
Anthropocentrists see the human species as the most significant fact of
existence, and accordingly evaluate all else from a human standpoint.
Biocentrists take life rather than the human species as the central verity and
thus assign value to all other things relative to life; protection of a single
organism (as distinct from a species) is therefore important to a biocentrist.
Ecocentrists take natural systems as the dominant reality, such that even life
itself must be set in a larger evolutionary frame of reference that contains
inorganic components; protection of a species (rather than an individual)
and its supporting context is therefore critical to an ecocentrist
(Oelschlaeger 293).

As critics contend, “[t]he great majority of environmental organizations shun
extremism” (Lewis 2). Workable distinctions between the anthropocentrism of
dominant society, and the biocentric and ecocentric ethics of reformists are difficult to
discern (Oelschlaeger 292), and yet eco-radicalism could be identified by its espousal
of interconnectedness, or egalitarian theory.
In “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecological Movement,” Norwegian
philosopher and founder of deep ecology Arne Naess, writes that deep ecology is a
movement that rejects the “man-in-environment image in favour of the relational,
total-field image” of “organisms as knots in biospherical net or field of intrinsic
relations” (147). Acknowledging eco-radicalism as a multistranded movement that
has gradually become the dominant force in modern green activism, this chapter reads

89
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) in the context of one of the most radical sectors
of environmentalism, deep ecology, and its commitment to the ideal that “everyone
and everything is equally valuable as part of the whole” (Pojman 76). The organic
metaphor, in fact, has been integral not only to deep ecology’s denunciation of
tolerance for continued economic and technological development, but also to its attack
on the anthropocentric principles generated under the aegis of the conservationism of
mainstream environmental movements. Embodied within the organic notion of
interdependence is one of the most prominent justifications of deep ecology ––
egalitarianism between different species and diverse cultures.
Interestingly, while the “deeper ecological sensibility and sensitivity” of Carson,
the “patron saint of the Green movement,” serves as a source of inspiration to deep
ecologists, Silent Spring, for environmental justice critics, calls attention to the impact
of pollution on public health, as well as social deprivation and marginalization (Devall
and Sessions 94).
3
A rhetorical analysis of Carson’s narrative within the context of

3
See, for instance, T. V . Reed’s “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism” 150. A poll
conducted by environmentalists in 2006 by the Environmental Agency of England and Wales made
clear that Carson is regarded the world’s most important eco-hero throughout history. In “100%
Green,” Ian Christie writes, “Rachel Carson is seen by many environmentalists as patron saint of the
Green movement, a reputation based on the explosive impact of her 1962 book Silent Spring, a
passionate and revelatory account of the damage done by unrestrained use of pesticides” (25).

90
deep ecology reveals deep ecologists’ ultimate claim for local autonomy and the
continuity of traditional knowledge, sharing common ground with those fighting on
the side of environmental justice and the disenfranchised. In tracing the conceptual
roots of deep ecology to Carson, deep ecologists postulate “symbiosis” and
“diversity,” relying also on organic metaphors as environmental justice advocates
have, regardless of the fact that deep ecologists’ effort to mobilize equity and justice
received much less critical attention. As literary critic Vera Norwood observes,
historians and literary scholars in different camps all seem to credit Carson’s work as
that which inaugurated modern green movements, “[locating] her writing squarely in
the organic tradition that sees nature as home” (742). Claimed as the
ground-breaking work that launched the beginning of a new epoch for both deep
ecology and environmental justice criticism, Silent Spring has occupied a central
position, but I would like to suggest that it also marks a paradigmic break in the
representation of “nature,” and the epistemological understanding of mankind’s moral
obligations to the non-human world.

91
How, then, can Silent Spring be read differently? Does the shared metaphor
pose a challenge to deep ecologists’ normative claim, which subordinates human
interests to those of the planet? How much of deep ecology’s enthusiasm for
diversity is genuinely justified? To what extent does Carson’s narrative engender an
organic cosmology that could serve as the middle ground that bridges those who
defend an anthropocentric, and those who fight for biocentric or ecocentric ethics,
echoing Merchant’s view that the world we have lost, is one in which the humans are
not dislocated from nature? And finally, how does humanity situate the organic
within modern environmental debates? Consenting to Norwood’s view that the
organic occupies a central position in Silent Spring, the argument is that both the
discursive readings of Carson, as well as the understanding of the organic as either a
sphere of authenticity and purity or liminal landscape possible for diversity and
hybridity, result from the ambivalence of the organic as a narrative strategy. The
primary goal of this chapter is two-fold: first, to complicate the organic metaphor as it
relates to deep ecological notion of diversity and symbiosis as explicated in Carson’s
narrative, and second, to explore the problematics of foregrounding the organic as a

92
site that resists environmental deterioration and the globalizing forces of the
Enlightenment’s mechanistic cultural paradigm.

The Toxic Circle: Silent Spring and the Human Subject in Modern
Environmentalism

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.
Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept
the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere
was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their
families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by
new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been
several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even
among children, but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly
while at play and die within a few hours. (2)
–– Carson, Silent Spring

Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring was not exactly the first
environmental outcry, but, for deep ecologists Bill Devall and George Sessions, it
marked “the beginning of the Age of Ecology” (94).
4
Much literature, of course, has

4
Carson was memorialized as the “Mother of the Age of Ecology” by the Pennsylvania General
Assembly in 1991. “The Age of Ecology,” a phrase derived from the celebration of the first Earth Day
in 1970, refers to the post-World War II era, a time when ecology and ecological scientists such as
Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich, Rachel Carson, and others, have shaped
environmentalism. For environmental historian such as Worster, however, the publication of

93
been written, and many political campaigns launched on behalf of the protection of
“nature,” before environmental-ism emerged publicly as a recognized social
movement in the nineteenth sixties and seventies. Historian Ramachandra Guha
notes that green movements before the era launched by Carson focused on three
different areas: back-to-the-land, scientific conservation, and wilderness preservation.
5

One may take issue with Guha’s classification, but from Henry David Thoreau, John
Muir, Gifford Pinchot, George Perkins March, to Aldo Leopold, to name a few,
beautiful landscapes and endangered habitat and species have always been an essential
part of the green agenda, and an intrinsic part of its rhetoric. Whether in terms of the
conservation of nature as a resource for more efficient and economic productions, or
the preservation of nature as untouched landscape for its aesthetic, recreational, or
religious values, immediate responses to the intensification of industrialization and
modernization processes clearly predominate in early protectionist enterprises. The

Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic” in 1949 manifests a transition from a “utilitarian to an ecological
approach to conservation,” and marks the beginning of the Age of Ecology (Nature’ s Economy 284).
Here the reading of Carson is framed in the context of “the Age of Ecology,” but I am not saying a
biographical approach that dwell on the founding figure is not privileged here. Worster’s Nature’ s
Economy, and Devall and Session’s Deep Ecology also show that “the Age of Ecology” has multiple
origins.

5
Guha 6.

94
insistence on the image of a managed and sustained nature as a redemptive measure of
unlimited growth and excessive waste of progressivist ideology is well entrenched in
the green discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Far more than
a simple anti-modernist environmental articulation, however, Silent Spring occupies a
significant position as does Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’ s Cabin, another book
that “exploded against traditional American assumptions” (Nash, Rights 92).
According to Stephen Fox and Frank Stewart, Silent Spring is the text that ignited
modern environmentalism.
6

By contextualizing Silent Spring exclusively within what is construed as the
discourse of “modern environmentalism,” Carson’s narrative may be read in a
reductive fashion as one that centers its discussion on the applications and impacts of
pesticides. In his analyses of public and scholarly receptions of Carson, Craig
Waddel contends that “modern environmental movement –– with its emphasis on
pollution and the general degradation of the quality of life on the planet –– may fairly
be said to have begun with one book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring” (1).

6
In The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and his Legacy, Fox writes that “Silent Spring
became one of the seminal volumes in conservation history: the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of modern
environmentalism” (292). Stewart, similarly, writes in A Natural history of Nature Writing (1995) that
“Silent Spring encouraged the birth of the modern environmental movement” (164).

95
Similarly, T. V . Reed, in “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism,” attributed
the immense impact of Silent Spring to the “chain” that Carson built between “human
damage to nature” and human damage to humans” (150). In a similar but more
provocative manner, Jim Tarter pronounced that “cancer underlies implicitly the
book’s whole argument about the dangers of the new chemicals we are releasing into
the environment” (215). For him, Silent Spring encapsulates a “connection between
environmental exploitation and human exploitation or social justice” (215). As
Carson ponders, “[w]hy should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid
surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of
motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a
world which is just not quite fatal?” (12) What entitles Silent Spring, the book that
sets “the effective beginning” of “toxic discourse,” as Lawrence Buell argues, is
Carson’s enactment of the fear for world of contamination as “a universal
environmental discourse that connects affluent individuals, communities, and
societies” (Endangered World 35). Be it a “chain” or a “connection,” the toxic food
chain that Carson established between human and nature altered the direction of

96
mankind’s relation with the environment. As the epigraph to this chapter discloses,
Silent Spring powerfully (re)unites the fate of humans with the vulnerability of earth
through the imagery of the indiscriminate use of DDT
(Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) or other synthetic chemicals.
Literary critics’ observations evince a loose and indefinite association among
Carson, modern environmentalism, as well as issues of toxicity, public health, and the
natural world. Here I do not invoke these critics’ views to reduce Silent Spring to
simply a work about the effects of toxic chemical pollutants. Nor do I intend to
dismiss modern environmentalism as a homogeneous social movement that designates
the fighting of air and water pollution for the search of a better health its main mission.
Yet such a correlation brings attention to several assumptions made of “modern green
movements” in general. Without delving into finer points, one might speculate that
the need and the enfranchisement of humans seem to have coalesced “modern
environmentalism,” to which scholarly reviews of Carson referred, to the idea that
nature matters to activists primarily because of its relations to a higher hygienic

97
standard. Apparently, the toxic circle alleged by “modern environmentalism” is
human-based, and human-oriented, if not human-centered (i.e. anthropocentric).
A commitment to the historical contexts of the development of environmentalism,
however, does not necessarily evince a narrative that redresses the complexities of
environmentality. Here, historian Samuel P. Hays’ and Henry Roderick Nash’s
periodizations of green movements in the United States exemplify and enact the kind
of socio-historical approach, that, while dedicated to the reconfiguration of
environmentalism’s historicity, only raise more questions regarding the metaphysical
and normative assertions made of “nature” and “modern environmentalism.” In
Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States,
1955-1985, Hays comments negatively on the conceptualization of post-World War II
green ideologies within the tradition of conservationism, and argues that post-war
green movements were “far more widespread and popular, involving public values
that stressed the quality of human experience and hence of the human environment”
(13). For him, “[t]he conservation movement was an effort on the part of leaders in
science, technology, and government to bring about a more efficient development of

98
physical resources” –– “an aspect of the history of production that stressed
efficiency,” and distinct from the consumption cultures of post-war American green
movements which prioritized amenities (13). Concurring with Hays, Nash in The
Rights of Nature (1989) notes that “[o]ne of the most useful insights into recent
American history concerns that qualitative difference between ‘environmentalism,’ as
it emerged in the 1960s, and what used to be called ‘conservation.’ When Gifford
Pinchot coined the term in 1907, conservation stood squarely in the American
mainstream” (8-9).
The legitimacy of socio-historical analysis is not questionable. Nor do critics
fail to recognize the historical relevance of the transformation of green politics in the
nineteen-sixties made manifest by the publication of Silent Spring, as well as the
zeitgeist of a nation, overwhelmed by a fear of nuclear holocaust and in search of
what Hays indicates as a better life in terms of “home, community, and beauty” (22).
The immense impact of Silent Spring, as critics rightly argue, pertains to Carson’s
successful exploitation of rhetorics of the Cold War and the post-war economic

99
boom.
7
But, despite the fact that environmental movements in the early twentieth
century were dominated by late industrialist and capitalist’s resourcism that identify
nature as resources inserted into an efficient productive energy, they are not alone in
their claim for a human-centered ethic that serves human ends. In fact, in Hays’
analysis, the conviction that humans are the measure of all values also stood at the
center of the “modern environmentalism” most often associated with Carson’s
apocalyptic vision of public health. If, as Nash asserts, green rhetoric, in a broad and
generalized sense suggests both the right of humans for a healthy ecosystem, and the
right of nature itself to possess rights, Hays’ definition of “modern environmentalism”
seems to fall into the category that “it is right to protect and wrong to abuse nature (or
certain of its components) from the standpoint of human interest” (Nash, Rights 9).
Under this logic, the environmentalism fostered by Silent Spring is transformed into
another protectionist enterprise that foregrounds human obligations to the natural
world as residing within the human agent. Disagreeing with Hays on the very terms
of what characterizes and constitutes “environmentalism,” Nash turns to the

7
In “Cold War, Silent Spring,” Cheryll Glotfelty argues that “Silent Spring did instigate a new kind of
war by redirecting the language and concepts of the Cold War to apply to ‘man’s war against nature’”
(159). See also Waddell 9.

100
quasi-religious fervor for nature’s “intrinsic value,” or, what he calls, a “gospel of
ecology,” that subscribes to the ethics of “‘biocentricism,’ ‘ecological egalitarianism,’
or ‘deep ecology’’” (9). Silent Spring, instead, best illustrated the idea of “modern
environmentalism” and the ideal of American liberalism, articulating and defending
nature’s “natural rights” (Nash, Rights 7-11).
Critics and philosophers, of course, have been quick to enter into this debate that
centers around what Naess calls “the equal rights [of nature] to live and blossom,” and,
consequently, the legal and ethical definition of “nature” as a valuable right-holder
and moral agent (50). The capacity to defend nature’s inherent value, and, at the
same time, to displace the presence and traces of humans in “nature,” for many, means
a rightful, authentic justification to what is a non-anthropocentric, and
non-instrumental environmentalist stance. Surely whatever the role the “protection”
or “exploitation” of the nonhuman world serves, the presence of humans in the
nonhuman world, and human assessment of the nonhuman world not only situates
humans as the moral valuer and moral subject, but also encapsulates an
anthropocentric, or at the very least, an anthropogenic perspective that humans can

101
neither dismiss nor deny.
8
Transnational economies’ systematic exploitation of the
natural and human resources of the Third World, and the extensive transmigration of
toxic pollutants and nuclear wastes, through water, and air, as well as the exportation
and importation of hazardous industry from the North to the South, and the West to
the East, under collaborative pollution emission trading networks also proclaim the
“death of nature.”
9
Amidst a time when the pristine, untouched, and uncontaminated
ocean portrayed by Carson’s sea trilogy had become history, and in a world where
humans cannot disengage themselves from “nature,” and avoid making value
judgments except from their own viewpoints, what, then, is the meaning of claiming
an authentic nature?
10
How does one make a moral claim based on nature’s inherent
order? Is what Nash and deep ecologists asserted as green rhetoric’s paradigm break

8
Cf. Rolston III’s “Naturalizing Values: Organicism and Species” 76-86.

9
In The Corporate Planet, Karliner examines the melding of economic and environmental
globalization through what he calls the “corporate environmentalists.” For him, corporate
environmentalists “have fabricated an elaborate series of green veils through which they obfuscate their
responsibility for some of the most destructive activity ever unleashed upon the world” (xi). In
“Emissions Trading Systems and Environmental Justice,” similarly, Barry D. Solomon and Russell Lee
investigate the globalization of pollution, but through the pollution emission trading systems between
First and Third Worlds. Unlike Karliner’s radical critique, they argue for the reconsideration of toxic
hot spots from a local or an environmental justice perspective (32-45). The recognition of the
globalization of ecological toxicants, however, is accompanied by the globalization of
environmentalism, a product of Western cultural paradigm. See, for example, Ronie Garcia-Johnson’s
Exporting Environmentalism: U.S. Multinational Chemical Corporations in Brazil and Mexico (2000).

10
Before the publication of Silent Spring, Carson’s literary reputation rested on her trilogy that
celebrates the life and beauty of the sea: Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea around Us (1951), and
The Edge of the Sea (1955).

102
from previous, human-centered green movements –– a transition signified by Silent
Spring –– a mere fantasy?
To side with environmental justice critics, attacking the misanthropic,
anti-technology, and essentialist positions of those who uphold Carson and “modern
environmentalism’s” ecocentricity, would be too simple. Underwriting either the
intrinsic value of a pristine nature, or celebrating nature as simply a social construct, a
human idea entangled with words and ideologies, however, only further recuperates a
“nature versus cultural” binary that Carson ultimately rejects. Safeguarding nature’s
objective value in his discussion on the axiology of the “anthropic valuer” in
“Naturalizing Values: Organicism and Species,” Holmes Rolston III contends that

[w]e are likely to be concerned only if [the non-human world] matter to and
for us, and that is going to place humans right back at the center. Nature is
actually valuable only when it pleases us, as well as serves us. That seems
to be the ultimate truth, even though we penultimately have placed intrinsic
value on nature, and take our pleasure enjoying these natural things for what
they are in themselves. Without us there is no such pleasure taken in
anything. What is value-able, able to value things, is people; nature is able
to be valued only if there are such able people there to do such valuing.
Nature is not valuable –– able to generate values –– on its own, nor do
plants and animals have any such value-ability (80).

103
The value of human endeavor to “protect” a domesticated, humanized, or even
contaminated nature should not be invalidated by the claim, or the fact that, the value
of nature and nature-protection actions fundamentally involves human subjects or
human valuers. Neither should romanitics and environmentalists’ denigration of the
“use” of nature as “abuse” inhibit philosophical and normative investigations of the
external values of the nonhuman world, in both late industrial and modern green
ideologies. As Richard White maintained in “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do
You Work for a Living?’” “[m]odern environmentalists often take one of two equally
problematic positions toward work. Most equate productive work in nature with
destruction. They ignore the ways that work itself is a means of knowing nature
while celebrating the virtues of play and recreation in nature” (171).
Carson’s circle that encapsulates the manners through which organisms interact
and organize each other into a biotic community, by way of food transference,
evokes the all-too-familiar concept of the food chain first postulated by Karl Semper
in 1881.
11
Claimed by both environmental justice critics and deep ecologists,
however, the overridden (toxic) circle in Silent Spring is a metaphor of ethical

11
Robert P. McIntosh’s The Background of Ecology 72, 90.

104
complexity and ambivalence. Reading Carson within the two traditions together, in
fact, uncovers her endeavor to restore a symbiotic relation with nature through her
characterization of nature as a landscape of hybridity and liminality. In contrast to
ecologists’ original notion of the food chain, which focuses on the cycling and
transformation of energy as “nutrients” (as opposed to “toxics”) in a superorganism
from which humans are often exempted or abstracted, Carson’s circle is a
contaminated community where humans occupy a trophic knot. The re-grouping of
the humans into the ecological scene implicates both environmental justice’s concerns
for marginalized societies, as well as deep ecology’s commitment to the leveling of
human place with that of “nature,” depending on whether the prominence is given to a
human-centered position, or a relational, “ecological” subject position. Carson, as
Devall and Session argue, is one of the major ecologists and natural historians who
have extended the “narrow definition of ecology as ‘the study of natural
interrelationships,’” to incorporate “a biocentric perspective on the equality of all
nonhumans and humans” (85).
12
Leaving aside the fact that Devall and Session’s

12
Other naturalists listed are F. Fraser Darling, Charles Elton, Aldo Leopold, Paul Sears, William V ogt,
Eugene Odum, and Frank Egler. See Devall and Session 85.

105
brief remark on Carson eventually engenders a biocentric stance that invites critiques
of its antihumanist anarchism and romanticization of non-Western cultural heritage,
their celebration of symbiosis coincides with environmental justice critics who also
speak for the ethos of interdependence, on the very ground of nature’s image as an
interconnected web or a living organic whole.
The identification of environmental justice critics’ and deep ecologists’ readings
of the toxic circle as an epistemological duo, reveals the dynamics of the organic
metaphor. Yet, while the flexibility of the organic metaphor often leads to the central,
if not the most controversial, debate in green politics –– the argument over the ethical
validities of anthropocentric environmental stance, its suppleness embarks on a middle
ground that is a probable bridging of anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric ethics.
The diffuseness of the organic, whose holistic implication deep ecology enacts and
notoriously romanticizes, for instance, anticipates an “eco-fascist” position by erasing
an “organic” relation that environmental justice criticism affirms. As Merchants
notes, a wholehearted embrace of “organic community,” “mutual interdependence,”
and “evolution toward higher forms” often leads to a “fascist tyranny based on a

106
centralized organismic model” (Death 76). The organicist’s emphasis on the
autonomy of the parts, to the contrary, foregrounds environmental justice’s celebration
of the local, the traditional, and the marginalized, but its local centricity, likewise,
receive the charge of a lack of deep ecology’s more comprehensive, and “globally
informed” perspective. In Primitives in the Wilderness (1997), Peter C. van Wyke
writes:

In modern terms the most total ecological metaphor is the organicist
metaphor. . . . Organicist slogans such as the whole is more than the sum
of the parts, have been common currency in the environmental movement
for years. The use of such slogans is taken to be a kind of incantation to
proclaim a new and ecological understanding of things. The world isn’t
like a machine, it’ s like an organism. But what kind of organism?
Accounts vary. . . .
The problematic aspect of the organicist metaphor is in the total
reduction of the human to the biological. This often takes place as a
masking of the culture/nature opposition, whereby nature becomes the
totality of laws into which humans are entirely absorbed. (We recall
Commoner: Nature Knows Best.)
The kind of holism implied by the whole is more than the sum of the
parts can easily obscure the fact that the parts are still granted an ontological
primacy over relations. Moreover, it can also obscure the value of wholes
in creating social and historical characteristics of parts in their contexts or
environments. Through a kind of ideological mirror game, organicist
metaphors flatten out relations on the inside. What exactly are the
relations that are being subsumed into the totality of nature? To start with,
they are the increasingly ubiquitous global social relations of

107
(post)industrial capitalism. Following this, we could point to other
relations of social hierarchy, domination, and oppression –– from women to
“minorities” –– that are overwritten through organicist projections. (76)

Returning the human subject to the operations of a toxic circle of life, Carson’s
critique of the widespread use of DDT, or what she called, the “[e]lixirs of death,” not
only complicates the notions of nature and culture, but also bridges deep ecology’s
and environmental justice’s green endeavors (15).

(Dis)placing the Humans, Detoxicating the Circle: Reconfiguration of the
Organic Metaphor in Silent Spring

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living
things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the
habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the
environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite
effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively
slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century
has one species –– man –– acquired significant power to alter the nature of
his world. (5)
–– Carson, Silent Spring

108
In the opening chapter of Silent Spring, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” Carson portrays
a classic American suburban town in an idyllic landscape:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live
in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a
checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of
orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green
fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that
flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the
hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall
mornings. (1)

In this passage, Carson captures one of the most alluring dreams and metaphors in the
American imaginary: a pastoral setting of nature and civilization in perfect harmony.
This defining moment, however, is characterized by a dwarfed artist-protagonist
(Scheese 3) and an idealized country life that obliterated what Leo Marx suggests as
the tension between the sprawl of urban power, symbolized by the “machine,” on the
one hand, and the rural peace and simplicity of the “garden,” on the other (18). With
the subjectivities of individuals lumped and subsumed into one larger social,
ecological order, and nature, purified, romanticized, and frozen by time, the physical
as well as cultural realities, both, have (re)presentation in much simplified and

109
diminished manners. This moment of calmness, ironically, foreshadows an order of
a complex, interconnected web of life, soon to be interrupted.
13

For both environmental justice advocates and deep ecologists, the rhetorical force
of Silent Spring lies in Carson’s power to provoke an outburst of anger and unravel the
allegory hidden behind what is absent and negated in this archetypal scene of
American nature writing. The message that Carson delivers in the following
chapters is solemn and unequivocal. She writes, “[i]n this now universal
contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized
partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world –– the very nature of its
life” (6). Yet, the impact of the indiscriminate use of chemicals and synthetic
pesticides on the natural environment and human health in the long run, as Carson
declares, are “unseen,” “invisible,” and yet insidious, totalizing, and undetected by
post-Cold War Americans, who were haunted by the aftermath of the threat of nuclear

13
Listed as one of the “fifteen most frequently recommended books” by the Association of the Study
of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), Marx’s The Machine in the Garden is a book that has won
its reputation by complicating the idea of pastoralism as a mode for articulating and working through
the tensions between nature and culture on the one hand, and between anthropocentric and ecocentric
consciousness on the other hand (395-396). See, “Recommended Reading” in The Ecocriticism
Reader. Building on Marx’s argument, literary critic Scheese considers the tension between nature
and culture, and the protagonist’s “in nature but also dwarfed by nature” position to be two of the most
important tropes that dominated American nature writing (3). Agreeing with Marx and Scheese,
British ecocritic Terry Gifford asserts, in Pastoral, that many have undervalued the complexity of
pastoral literature.

110
genocide (41). Carson’s apocalyptic vision becomes all the more striking when she
clarifies how this pastoral harmony may actually turns into historic novelty, were the
folly to control the nonhuman world through pest-icides to persist. She explicates
this suicidal, technocratic arrogance: “[n]o witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced
the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves” (3).
Resonating with her anxiety over the extinguishments, and, hence, the absence of
“pests” in this biotic community, her critique of post-Enlightenment ideology, as
critics concur, have empowered humans with the rights to exploit and control nature,
by sustaining images of humans standing apart from “nature.”
14
According to
Carson, “[t]he ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the
Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists
for the convenience of man. . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a
science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in
turning them against the insect it has also turned them against the earth” (297).

14
The view that Judeo-Christian theology and Enlightenment ideology have nurtured a dichotomy
between humans and nature, and endowed humans the legitimate right to use and exploit nature is
shared by most environmental historians. See Lynn White Jr.’s pioneering discussion, “The Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1976). For an ecofeminist perspective, see, for example, Merchant’s
The Death of Nature.

111
Tightening the fate of humans with earth through a close-knit, and yet toxified, living
whole, Silent Spring redefines human-nature relation for a new environmental
discourse.
Building on Carson’s insights, environmental justice advocates, likewise,
demystify the pastoral scene, and insist that Silent Spring implicitly critiques this
feminized, and racial- and class-coded image of the classic American suburban
community. The appeal of this tamed and unspoiled retreat, as Raymond Williams
and Peter Coates note, depends first and foremost on the enclosure of the land, and,
henceforth, the displacement of the dispossessed for the amenity of rich elites –– a
process that began in eighteen-century commercial and industrial England.
15
As a
landscape of exclusion, this suburbia is a product of capitalism: a project that involves
the clearing of industrial manufacturing planets, for the sustaining of a landscape of
recreation and leisure, as opposed to a place defined by its everyday living, work, and
reproductive functions. While finding the carcinogenic effects of the heavy
application of DDT to be “universal” (6) and “total” (8), Carson repels discursively,

15
See Williams’ discussion of the re-construction of pastoral landscape in eighteenth-century England,
and the rise of capitalism in The Country and the City (1973) 105-106, and Coates’s reading of
landscape and its relations to the (re)distribution of power and natural resources within Western
civilization in Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times 111-114.

112
the privatization of lands as insulated, upper/middle class residential quarters that
propelled the establishment of industrial sites, urban slums, and landfill communities.
This suggestive but evocative vision foreshadows the publication of biologist and
cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber’s, 1997, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks
at Cancer and the Environment. Her narrative drew attention to the correlation
between “the disparate distribution of wealth and power,” and “the unequal
distribution of environmental degradation and/or toxicity” (Adamson, Evans, and
Stein 5). From an environmental justice perspective, this popular imagery of a
domesticated and highly maintained idyllic landscape, depicted at the onset of Silent
Spring, adeptly confronts the process of pastoralization, accentuating the notion of
isolated neighborhoods as cover-ups that bear a green disguise for a series of
conmmodification and racialization of nature that created downstream toxicity.
Silent Spring, however, is an extremely elusive text. Interweaving the destiny
of humankind with that of nature into a close-knit and yet polluted circle, Carson’s
reconfiguration of the pastoral convention comments directly and negatively on the
federal government’s unconditional support for the use of synthetic chemicals in

113
agricultural production and pest management around the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
The continuous endeavor to underscore normative potential of “mutual
interdependence” as human-centered and local-oriented, on the part of literary critics
and environmental justice advocates, however, suggests understanding this key
moment, otherwise. Underlying the organic metaphor of interconnectedness, in
addition, is the creative energy for wholeness that deep ecologists celebrate, as well as
a tension generated through the constant struggle of the parts, interacting with each
other, and conforming to the larger unitary whole.
With the subjectivities of individuals subordinated to an ecological collectivity,
and the agency of human subjects diminished, Carson’s evocation of the pastoral
imagery, along with that of other Euro-American literary pastoralists and naturalists,
epitomize for deep ecologists, an “organic wholeness” (67) that is fundamental to its
counterattack on the “narrow scientism and industrialism of the modern world” (82).
16

Defining the popular green movement and modern environmentalism as a “shallow

16
According to Devall and Sessions, [“t]he European romantic movement, beginning with
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s challenge to an overly civilized and refined Europe, and continuing with
Goethe and the Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, etc.),” and “[t]his movement
continued in American with Walt Whitman, the Transcendentalist Emerson, and Thoreau and Muir”
(82). For a complete list of the writers mentioned, see 82-85.

114
ecology movement” that can be reduced to the “[f]ight against pollution and resource
depletion,” for the promotion of the “health and affluence of people in the developed
countries,” Naess characterized the “deep, long-range ecological movement:”

Rejection of the man-in-environment image in favor of the relational,
total-field image. Organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of
intrinsic relations. An intrinsic relation between two things A and B is
such that the relation belongs to the definitions or basic constitutions of A
and B, so that without the relation, A and B are no longer the same thing.
The total-field model dissolves not only the man-in-environment concept ––
except when talking at a superficial or preliminary level of communication.
(“Shallow” 147)

Like Carson’s pastoral scene, Naess’s remark enacts the metaphor of a complex biotic
community. This idealized and yet abstracted pastoral imagery, for deep ecologists,
implicates a disengagement from the hegemony of modern social and political
structures, and manifests a visionary wholeness that bestows a biocentric equality.
As deep ecologists claims, “the study of our place in the Earth household
includes the study of ourselves as part of the organic whole,” and that “the search for
deep ecological consciousness is the search for a more objective consciousness and a
state of being through an active deep questioning and meditative process and way of

115
life” (Devall and Session 66). In their assertion for interconnectedness, the organic
metaphor not only contrastes starkly with the dominant cosmology, but has also an
interpretation and translation which connotes egalitarianism. Devall and Sessions
summarize the contrasts between the dominant worldview and deep ecology:

Dominant Worldview Deep Ecology
Dominance over Nature Harmony with Nature
Natural environment as resources All nature has intrinsic worth/
for humans biospecies equality
Material/economic growth for Elegantly simple material
growing human population of needs (material goals serving
the larger goal
self-realization)
Belief in ample resource reserves Earth “supplies” limited
High technological progress and Appropriate technology;
solutions nondominating science
Consumerism Doing with enough/recycling
National/centralized community Minority tradition/bioregion
(69)

Deep ecology’s organicist ethics of symbiosis and diversity proclaims a process that,
in its critique of both technocratic-industrial societies’ logic of reductionism, as well
as the dominance of “humans over nonhuman Nature, masculine over the feminine,
wealthy and powerful over the poor, . . . [and] the West over non-Western cultures,”

116
subverts simultaneously the social/biological hierarchies and boundaries (Devall and
Sessions 66). For deep ecologists, the doctrine of organic wholeness is both a means
and an end, corresponding to the root metaphor of organicism: “[t]he categories of
organicism consist, on the one hand, in noting the steps involved in the organic
process, and, on the other hand, in noting the principal features in the organic structure
ultimately achieved or realized” (Pepper 281). The teleological direction of deep
ecology, similarly, resides in “the integration appearing in the process that the
organicist works from, and not the duration of the process” (Pepper 281).
What also draws on this organic metaphor is the carefully established narrative
structure, through which Carson developed her claims against the non-discriminative
use of DDT, under the reductionist and anthropocentric metaphysics of the
Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. In her attempt to rectify the
conceptualization of DDT from “pesticide,” “‘miracle’ chemical,” and “panacea for
insect control” (Wilkinson 25) in the nineteen-forties American society, to what she
suggests as “biocide” (8), Carson turns to the integrative process of organicism.
Tracing the course of the food chain, her chapter “Elixirs of Death” is followed,

117
accordingly, by her chapters, titled “Surface Waters and Underground Seas,” “Realms
of the Soil,” “Earth’s Green Mantle,” “Needless Havoc,” “And No Birds Sing,”
“Rivers of Death,” “Indiscriminately from the Sky,” “The Human Price,” and “Nature
Fights Back.” The insidious impact of synthetic chemicals unfolds as each chapter
proceeds to document the transferring of DDT in the various trophic levels of the food
chain in a causal order. As Carson explains, “[o]ne of the most sinister features of
DDT and related chemicals is the way they are passed on from one organism to
another through all the links of the food chain” (22).
17

In this gripping plot of the unfolding food chain, however, Carson espouses the
image of a consistent, administrative “natural law,” where organisms: as herbivores,
carnivores, consumers, or decomposers, all connect through the passing on of the
(toxic) food/energy, despite the fact that this assimilating, regulating process of the
food chain, is a contaminated and poisonous one. Reinstating the pastoral rhetoric,
the narrative structure not only glides over the conflicts and violence inherent in the
interaction between “nature” and “culture,” but also the very terms and conditions of

17
For a discussion of the changing image of pesticides in America before and after Carson, see C.F.
Wilkinson’s “The Science and Politics of Pesticides” 25-46.

118
socially-imposed inequalities and biologically-inherent hierarchies, for the sake of a
highly polished unity. As Donald Worster maintains, the food chain as an ecological
law pertains to both the “corporateness of survival,” as well as the “nutritional
interdependence” among species (Economy 296). Although Carson makes clear that
she in no respect demands a complete prohibition of DDT, and that her critique of the
insecticides does not so much target their function, as to the indiscriminate and
ignorant applications of these biologically potent chemicals, Silent Spring’s
instantiation of the narrative course of “the stream of synthetic insecticides” through
the organic metaphor, solicits a totalizing and essentializing approach to the
environment (16).
18
Like Carson, who purports unity through the common bonds
shared by humans and living organisms, Naess, recognizes the mutuality of the
aspects of symbiosis, egalitarianism, decentralization, and classlessness as principles
that, in praxis, “[necessitate] some killing, exploitation, and suppression” (147).
In The Rights of Nature, Nash once notes that “[f]or many in Carson’s large
following her most compelling idea was the danger chemical insecticides posed to

18
In the second chapter, “The Obligation to Endure,” she writes, “[i]t is not my contention that
chemical insecticides must never be used. I do not contend that we have put poisonous and
biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of
their potential for harm” (12).

119
human health” (82). Like Nash, most critics recognize the contaminated food chain
as one of the most compelling images of Silent Spring. Contextualizing her
arguments within the organic tradition, Carson and deep ecologists’ message on the
coexistence of nature and culture, as well as on the corroboration among diverse
social and cultural groups, are well grounded. The fact that the ethical implications
manifested by the organic framework of Carson and deep ecologists, are,
henceforward, taken to mean biocentric equality; however, their implications face a
serious challenge when they are situated within the larger green debates. In spite of
the ethical disparities of, and the epistemological disagreements between these two
adversarial schools, Carson’s organic circle, as I have suggested, is a metaphor
claimed by those who seek a “middle ground” and defend the environmental rights for
the disempowered, as well as those who go to the other extreme and sanction
biocentric equality. The fact that both environmental justice critics and deep
ecologists justify their metaphysical positions through the organic metaphor reveals a
powerful and persistent paradox embedded within their organic conceptual
frameworks. Faith in the power of the organic to transcend and unite the destinies of

120
nature and human for the ideal of a more sustainable and stable environment
encounters, specifically, consistently destabilization and deconstruction by a subtext,
whose vision of the organic, as an animistic or vitalistic force, impinges upon any
previous presumptions for order and partnership, and, vice versa.
The ambivalence of the organic metaphor is foretold, and yet left unresolved, in
major theoretical texts of environmental history. These works, published between
the late nineteen-seventies, eighties and nineties, include Worster’s Nature’ s Economy
(1977), Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1983), Nash’s The Rights of Nature (1989),
and Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness (1991). Much like Carson’s Silent Spring,
organics, as a harmonizing force and an ideal that counterbalances mechanistic
paradigm’s reductionism, is a major motif defended by these critics. Grounding its
main thesis around the organic cosmology, Merchant is not the first, but certainly the
most prominent member who reads nature in this fashion. Identifying the feminine,
and, particularly, the “nurturing mother” as being central to the organic cosmology’s
principle of cooperative interdependence, her ecofeminist approach to Western
environmental history begins with the following remark on organic theory:

121
[I]t is not surprising that for sixteenth-century Europeans the root metaphor
binding together the self, society, and the cosmos was that of an organism.
As a projection of the way people experienced daily life, organismic theory
emphasized interdependence among the parts of the human body,
subordination of individual to communal purpose in family, community, and
state, and vital life permeating the cosmos to the lowliest stone (1-2).

She quickly proceeds to argue from and for the spirits of a benevolent mother earth
and proposes that nature is gendered. The Death of Nature analyzes three
ramifications of the “organic theme” in Western literature, art, and science since the
Renaissance. Merchant writes,

The primary view of nature was the idea that a designed hierarchical order
existed in the cosmos and society corresponding to the organic integration
of the parts of the body –– a projection of the human being onto the cosmos.
The term nature comprehended both the innate nature character and
disposition of people and animals and the inherent creative power operating
within material objects and phenomena. A second image was based on
nature as an active unity of opposites in a dialectical tension. A third was
the Arcadian image of nature as benevolent, peaceful, and rustic, deriving
from Arcadia, the pastoral interior of the Greek Peloponnesus. Each of
these interpretations had different social implications: the first image could
be used as a justification for maintaining the existing social order, the
second for changing society toward a new ideal, the third for escaping from
the emerging problems of urban life (6).

122
Here an organic worldview continues to maintain as sense of correlation through the
imagery of nature as a “living organism” of cooperative parts.
Two important implications of the organic cosmology, however, are overlooked
in Merchant’s and environmental critics’ readings of nature as organisms that
possesses, in themselves, inherent values. As illustrated previously, the internal
conflicts and power struggles between the parts and the whole in the pastoral scene,
are flattened and erased by environmental critics, for the supposed symbiotic
environmental order of an unifying structure. While the organic ideal of social
integration bespeaks a totalitarian police state, the leveling of social and biological
hierarchies through the modeling of organicism implies antihumanist anarchism.
19

Once the notion of nature, autonomous and possessing life, serves to establish the
bond between humans and nonhumans, and to contest against social constraints,
another ingredient that is also quickly abandoned is the animistic or vitalist aspect of
the organic cosmology. In The Death of Nature, Merchant celebrates nature as a
living organism. Yet her organicist environmental history, ironically, terminates with

19
For a discussion on organicism in the context of totalitarianism, see Worster’s Nature’ s Economy
329-330, and a discussion of anarchist implications of organicism, see Lewis’s Green Delusions 27-31.

123
this notion of a spontaneous nature, whose “wild and uncontrollable” female qualities
renders “violence, storms, droughts, and general chaos,” and the further sanctioning of
Western, patriarchal society’s domination of nature and subjugation of women (Death
2). Renouncing both the creative and procreative powers of the organic cosmos and
society (suggested by herself as the first variant of the organic theme), as well as the
dialectical tensions unified by an active force of nature (identified as the second
ramification of organicism), her environmental history is dominated by the overriding
imagery of Arcadia.
Defined mainly as a pristine landscape of moral innocence and environmental
stability, the notion of organic earth as Arcadia suggests nothing but a static, regulated
earth, identical to the mathematically simulated and engineered, inert nature of the
mechanistic paradigm.
20
In Merchant and deep ecological discourse, “nature” is
organic and animate only to the extent that it is taken to mean a pacified “nature” (i.e.
organisms or entities that exhibit signs of life or the will of living) –– as opposed to an
animistic “Nature” (i.e. a cosmos inhabited with souls and spirits, or shows signs of
agency as a whole). “Organic” has a translation that suggests the vital, dynamic

20
Cf. Nash’s The Rights of Nature 90-92, and Worster’s Nature’ s Economy 317-338.

124
forces of a complex universe, but the agency ascribed to nature/Nature, and to the
human subject remains an ideal. Nature and humans, in this syllogism, are
transformed into passive matters that are subject to the control of a greater law. Soil,
water, air, minerals, radiations, and these “inorganic” objects of nature examined in
Silent Spring, similarly, are excluded in the scene of contemporary environmental
affairs and debates.
Focusing more closely on the critical responses to Carson’s organic framework,
one finds in ecocritics’ eagerness to attribute to Silent Spring an “ecological
consciousness.” In Deep Ecology, Devall and Sessions declare openly that “[t]he
major contribution of the science of ecology to deep ecology has been the rediscovery
within the modern scientific context that everything is connected to everything else.
Thus, as a science, ecology provided a view of Nature that was lacking in the discrete,
reductionist approach to Nature of the other science” (85). Alluding to the “major
‘laws’ of ecology” postulated by American biologist Barry Commoner in The Closing
Circle: Nature, Men, and Technology (1971), they summarize their deep ecological
position vis-à-vis the laws of ecology:

125
1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch, or everything has to go
somewhere. (87)

For Devall and Sessions, ecological consciousness pertains to “a process of learning to
appreciate silence and solitude and rediscovering how to listen” (8); “[i]t is learning
how to be more receptive, trusting, holistic in perception, and is grounded in a vision
of nonexploitive science and technology” (8).
Consolidating the principle of biocentric egalitarianism and the philosophy of
cultural diversity through the notion of interconnectedness is a powerful and familiar
rhetorical strategy adopted by deep ecologists. Devall and Sessions’ postulation,
however, poses a question for the moment that it claims rightful ownership of the
organic imperative of interconnectedness. Aside from the fact that the claiming of
“interconnectedness” by both anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists challenges
the legitimacy of deep ecology’s egalitarianism, Commoner’s designation of these
four principles as “laws of ecology,” gestures toward the normative implications of
subsuming, particularly, the more generalized organic principles of

126
“interconnectedness” into the discourse of ecology. Given that the ethical holism of
interdependence is entrenched within the greater organic worldview, what is intriguing
is the ways in which ecology is enacted as what Merchant observes a modern
incarnation of the organic theme. How have ecological theories and metaphors of
interconnectedness fostered deep ecology, or de facto modern environmentalism? In
what ways have the introjection and appropriation of ecology into modern
environmental imaginary, instantiated the problematic reading of organic nature as an
orderly, controlled cosmos?
The science of ecology, indeed, closely associated with the organic principle of
interconnectedness. With the Greek term for household, “oikos,” as its etymology,
ecology (Ökologie), as a formal science, was established in 1886 by German zoologist
and interpreter of Charles Darwin, Ernest Haeckel (1834-1919). As a branch of
biology, ecology devotes itself to the study of the interactions between organisms, and
between organisms and their surrounding habitats. In an inaugural lecture at the
University of Jena (1869), Haeckel defines ecology as the following:

By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of
nature –– the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its

127
inorganic and to its organic environment; including, above all, its friendly
and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes
directly or indirectly into contact –– in a word, ecology is the study of all
those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the
struggle for existence. This science of ecology, often inaccurately referred
to as “biology” in a narrow sense, has thus far formed the principal
component of what is commonly referred to as “Natural History” (qtd. in
Keller and Golley 9).

Haeckel locates ecology within the tradition of natural history and modern biology.
As a scientific discipline that undertakes nature as a dynamic, spontaneous whole that
developed within itself an overarching order, ecology is redressed as an antithesis to
both the study of organisms as dislocated mechanisms in impersonal laboratories, as
well as the study of nature as segmented parts, delimited by systems of laws, as in the
science of physics and biochemistry.
21
Field observation of the “nature household,”
for him, elucidates a sense of habitat and environment that accentuates, not only the
value of the first-hand and the directly experienced, but also a cosmic order that builds
on both collaborative and rivalry relations.

21
The history of “biology” dates back to the prehistoric times, when people experienced “nature” as a
way of survival and understanding life. The modern science of biology, however, started during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the systematic methods of naming and characterizing. Cf.
Keller and Golley 3-4.

128
However suggestive Haeckel’s delineation of the discipline of ecology is,
“ecology” prevails in green discourse as a residue of Haeckel’s organicist cosmology.
With a unanimous voice, cultural historians and green critics celebrate holism in their
encapsulation of the science of ecology, embracing Haeckel’s ecological approach to
“nature” as a single, but complex organism of economic units, dwelling within their
indigenous natural habitats.
22
These scholars channel their insights on environmental
history, green ethics, and current environmental problems into the specific organic
framework, within which Haeckel substantiates his theory of ecology. As
philosopher David R. Keller and ecologist Frank B. Golley assert in their introduction
to The Philosophy of Ecology: From Science to Synthesis, ecological science infers an
“ecological worldview” that enabled the constellation of the theme of “interaction and
connectedness” in green movements (2). Ecological worldview can be developed in
the following ways: “[a]ll living and nonliving things are integral parts of the
biospherical web (ontological interconnectedness),” “[t]he essence or identity of a
living thing is an expression of connections and context (internal relations),” and “[t]o

22
Cf. Worster’s Nature’ s Economy 92, Nash’s The Rights of Nature 6-57, Keller and Golley’s
“Introduction: Ecology as a Science of Synthesis” 7-9, and Williams’ “Ecology” in Keywords 10-111.

129
understand the makeup of the biosphere, connections and relations between parts must
be considered, not just the parts themselves (holism)” (2). The emphasis on the
interrelations between humans and their physical surroundings, and the state of
including, encompassing, and being surrounded by “nature,” has its best elucidation in
the naming of contemporary nature-protection movements as “environmentalism.”
As Williams writes, the word “environment,” dates from the first-third of the
nineteenth-century, “in the sense of surroundings, as in environs” (111).
23
For
Hackel as for green discourse, ecology evinces a more holistic, non-instrumental,
personal –– and, hence, organic –– approach to the nonhuman world.
Deep ecologists, however, are among the few who are quick to call attention to
the anomalies between what Keller and Golley differentiate as “scientific ecology,”
and “literary/political ecology” (4-7). Insisting that the ecological notion of
interconnectedness is “ecophilosophical” rather than “ecological,” Naess pronounces
ecology a “limited science [that] makes use of scientific methods” in modern
environmental imagination (“Shallow” 149). For Naess, the messages of ecology are

23
The immediate forerunner of “environs” is the French word, environner (i.e. encircle, circuit) (111).
See Williams.

130
“twisted and misused,” when taken, primarily, to justify the claims for the health and
well-being of “nature,” on behalf of humans (Naess “Shallow” 147). In reparation,
deep ecologists demand “self-realization” or “identification,” expanding Haeckel’s
notion of “interrelations.” The realization of “self-in-Self’” is, thus, conceived as the
realization of the self in an organic whole (Devall and Sessions 67). As a process
that “inevitably widens and deepens the self through the process of identification”
(Naess “Ecosophy” 153), self-realization indicates “a spontaneous, non-rational but
not irrational process through which the interest or interests of another being are
reacted to as our own interest or interests” (Naess “Shallow” 152).
24
Distinguishing
themselves from the scientific, ecological approach to the nonhuman world, deep
ecology exalts “ecosophy,” the study of ecology as ecological wisdom (Naess
“Ecology” 37), and demands an “ecological identity,” defined by “the different ways
people construe themselves in relationship to the earth as manifested in personality,
values, actions, and sense of self” (Thomashow 3).
Although a less generalized, rigid, and extremist manner, deep ecologists’
trenchant critique of technological optimism conjoins with critics’ demystification of

24
The italics are in the original text.

131
scientism through the naturalist tradition. In Finding Order in Nature: The
Naturalist Tradition from Linnasues to E. O. Wilson (2000), Paul Lawrence Farber
traces the development of natural history, and argues that natural history departs from
early studies of biology, with its endeavor to “group animals, plants, and minerals
according to shared underlying features and to use rational, systematic methods to
bring order to the otherwise overwhelming variation found in nature” (2). Here,
Farber’s epistemological conceptualization of natural history follows the familiar
principle of interconnectedness –– the underpinning on which Haeckel buttresses his
theory of ecology, and the one tradition that persists in bestowing upon green
discourse its “wisdom.” His remark, however, sheds light on the problematic
position of “ecology” as both a subversive/prescriptive method of protection, as well
as an innovative method of representation, whose doctrines of interconnectedness
capture modern environmental discourse.
As established earlier, the foregrounding of self-realization and identification as
the definitive features of deep ecology reflects a ruthless dedication to the naturalist
tradition characterized by “unmediated relations”: “unmediated relations” not only as

132
a state of relations between organisms and organisms, and organisms and with their
habitat, but also as a method of accessing and representing nature. Personal
identities realized through “empathy,” “sympathy” (Naess “Shallow” 2), and
“intuition” (Naess Ecology 2), rather than logic and reason, has been construed as
transcendental moves that extend the self to include other organisms. Ultimately,
they consolidate deep ecologists’ search for a unitary order. In deep ecology, this
experiential immersion is encoded within the teachings of “the self, reflecting,
becoming, or connecting with the Self” of Transcendentalism and Eastern spiritual
traditions, such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy.
25

Understood as “an intensely felt emotional connection with the natural world,”
however, “unmediated relations” also underwrites the direct experience and
knowledge of naturalists’ field work (Philips 185). While many critics renounce
their lineage to the methodologies and the logics of scientific disciplines other than
ecology, their authorization of impersonal documentations and unmediated
experiences, as well as first-person, non-fiction narration, such as nature writing,

25
For a deep ecologist’s discussion of “self-less” action and its theoretical origin, see Naess’
“Ecosophy T,” 153-154, and Devall and Sessions’ Deep Ecology for specific reference to the Taoist
concept of the “organic self” 11-12.

133
nonetheless, participates in the claiming of the immediacy of experience and the
transparency of representation. More specifically, environmental writers and critics’
commitment to facts and the sense of the real as “organic,” and to the authenticity and
particularity transmitted through personal narratives, embarks on a belief in “organic”
representations. Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster’s “Introduction: Why
Go Beyond Nature Writing, and Where to?” (2001), and Dana Philips’ The Truth of
Ecology (2003) both reveal a critical concern for subscribing the “organic” as a way of
approaching and representing the nonhuman world. According to ecocritic, John
Elder, the definition of nature writing is “a form of the personal, reflective essay
grounded in attentiveness to the natural world and appreciation of science, but also
open to the spiritual meaning and intrinsic value of nature” (qtd. in Wallace and
Armbruster 2). Alluding to Elder’s definition of nature writing, Wallace and
Armbruster note the theoretical and imaginative limitations of a critical school that
gives prominence to the mimesis of personal accounts and documentations of the
environment (2). In much detail, Philips traces this preoccupation with “the nature
of representation,” as opposed to the “representations of nature” (x), and regrets that

134
many ecocritics have the inclination to believe, romantically, that “the organic
character of literature is a key to the organic character of nature” (141). Regarding
these “first-wave” ecocritics, he writes:

Some of them have claimed that literature, when it is at its greatest, is both
structurally similar and functionally the same as nature, by which they mean
that best sort of literature offers a perfectly reliable model for understanding
nature and that the best literary texts are all but transparent windows on the
world. Ecocritics who have made this claim are trying to revive the idea
that great literature is organic, without saying plainly that this is what they
are trying to do and without recognizing that, except for diehard aesthetes,
the organic concept of literature was directed more toward a method of
reading than toward a view of the ontological status of literary texts. (140)
26

For Buell, first-wave ecocriticism celebrates “environment” as natural environment,
and devotes itself to reconnect humans with the natural world, whereas second-wave
ecocriticism tends to “question organicist models of conceiving both environment and
environmentalism” (22). The continuous enthusiasm for the spontaneous and
instinctive relations between Silent Spring and Carson’s perceptual experience, and
between Carson and a nature of complexity and unity, reveals an enthusiasm for the
organic principle of interrelations.

26
Cf. Buell The Future of Environmental Criticism 21-23.

135
The celebration of an organic nature through the organic character of literature
predominates critical responses to Silent Spring. Michael A. Bryson, for instance,
contends in “Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment
from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology” (2002) that Carson “emphasizes
the complex, interconnected cycles of nature, stresses the importance of identifying
with and understanding the point of view of other organisms, and questions our faith
in the technological domination of nature” (144). His analysis, however, joined
ecocritics William Rueckert and many others, who, in their defense of the organic
ontology of literature, hastily associate nature writers’ mystical union with the
nonhuman world with a highly stylized, and value-laden notion of “ecology.”
Rueckert writes, “[p]roperly understood, poems can be studied as models for energy
flow, community building, and ecosystems. The first Law of Ecology –– that
everything is connected to everything else –– applies to poems as well as to nature.
The concept of the interactive field was operative in nature, ecology, and poetry long
before it ever appeared in criticism” (110). Here, a rhetoric conflates the differences
between the represented nature (i.e. the represented), and nature writing (i.e.

136
representation), and shows a deep suspicion towards critical and theoretical texts. In
an eager attempt to (re)claim human linkage to “nature,” ecocritics have not only
singled out “identification” and “interrelations,” and ascribed these conceptual tools to
the science of ecology, but also reconfigured “ecology” as a scientific discipline that
engages in the celebration of the “organic” trope, thematically, methodologically, and
structurally, without further questioning their conceptions of “ecology.” Devall and
Sessions’ Deep Ecology, a text that amalgamates their critiques with segments of
excerpts and quotations from literature and theoretical narratives of both Western and
minority traditions, epitomizes and reflects deep ecologists’ and ecocritics’ endeavor
for an organic world/text of symbiosis.
To problematize ecocriticism’s identification of the “organic” as central to the
investigation and representation of “nature,” however, does not necessarily suggest an
anthropocentric environmental position. Nor does it translate directly into a total
renunciation of “ecological” approaches to nature. What is important is the ethical
assumptions underlying ecocritics’ characterization of ecology as a new paradigm of
thought, that has forged an epistemological break with early environmental

137
movements through what is a more holistic method of studying, documenting, and
representing the environment. Farber’s observation on the naturalist tradition is a
reminder that the celebrated ecological methods of fieldwork, participant observation,
and personal documentation have their predicate, as much upon the experience of
what is personal, experiential, and actual, as upon a rational, systematic epistemology
that attempts to discover the order of nature. The success and popularity of Silent
Spring pertain to Carson’s expertise in the ecological sciences, as well as her literary
talents and the ethical appeal of her texts:

[t]he reason that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring … became one of those few
works of environmental writing to have an immediate and significant impact
on public politics, while several other well-researched contemporary books
on the same topic did not, was that this was an author also capable of
writing A Sense of Wonder. And reciprocally: had celebration of nature’s
beauty been Carson’s sole concern, her voice would have been lost to
history” (Buell, Future vii).

Within environmental discourse, however, her authority and credibility as an impartial
observer, if not a detached “outsider” of the biosphere, are often subservient to by a

138
critical appreciation for her persona as a naturalist/ecologist, and her
“human-in-nature,” or “women-in-nature” image.
27

The construction of the naturalist as an engaged and yet detached
insider-observer draws attention to two issues. First, a series of scientific data and
facts provided in Silent Spring register and provoke a sense of reality and truth that
spellbinds the public: the Latin scientific name for DDT (20), chemical structure
representations of organic compounds (19-20), statistics on residues of DDT in eggs
of birds (206), research testing of chemicals for sterilization (282-285), as well as
reports on innovative, and prescriptive methods of insect control (285-296).
Interestingly, embracing objectivity and empiricism, and, hence, effacing the
subjectivity of the speaker and observer, Carson’s scientific knowledge gives credence
to the factuality of DDT pollution, and validates her ethical position. The
preoccupation with the nature writer’s role as an impartial observer, or outsider, in the
process of capturing the “reality,” ironically, evinces a non-anthropocentric ethic,
which attempts symbiosis while, at the same time, creates a non-trespassible gap

27
In “Earthcare,” Merchant writes, “[t]he connection between the Earth and the house has historically
been mediated by women” (6), and Carson. is one these women who made “the question of the life of
the Earth a public issue” (7).

139
between humans and nature. Biospherical egalitarianism, as Naess himself notes,
could never be the reality (“Shallow” 147-148). Yet the unceasing demand for
“identification” and an “organic” method of approaching, representing, and protecting
“nature,” as well as the continuous hostility towards the rational, systematic
epistemology of the science, nonetheless, prescribes an “organic-as-good vs.
science-as-bad” binary that Carson ultimately rejects. Carson writes, “[i]t is not my
contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do not contend that we
have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands
of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm” (12). In the
effacement of the voice of the subject, the positioning of humans as a
participant-observer encapsulates “nature” as an organic structure where humans
remain outsiders.
Unlike Carson’s organic circle, the organic nature celebrated by deep ecologists
is a purified and selective one in which the human subject, reduced to its biological
functions, responds passively, as a whole, toward a natural order where the mechanics
of both “organic” and synthetic chemicals, and non-living and inorganic elements of

140
environment, are undermined. Calling attention to the “vital” role of the synthetic
chemicals in the food chain, as well as the role of humans as victims of toxic
pollutions they created, Silent Spring reconfigures a landscape of liminality where
nature and culture intersect and interact, and a middle passage that bridges ecocentric
and anthropocentric ethics.

140
Chapter 3

When Wilderness Becomes Landscape:

Organicism, Preservation Ethics, and the (Re)location of the Wild

in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams

In wildness is the preservation of the world. (19)
–– Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)

§ The Arctic: a Conceptual Wilderness

In the Wilderness Act of 1964, the United States Congress defines “wilderness”:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works
dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and
its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a
visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to
mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval
character and influence, without permanent improvements or human
habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural
conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily
by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially
unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive
and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of
land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in
an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or

141
other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value. (16 USC
1131).

This notion of wilderness as a tract of land, guarded against the encroachment of the
human influence, condemning the developmental and progress, is similarly reinforced
in the Oxford English Dictionary: “[a] wild or uncultivated region or tract of land,
uninhabited, or inhabited only by wild animals . . . a tract of solitude and savageness,”
and “[a] piece of ground in a large garden or park, planted with trees, and laid out in
an ornamental or fantastic style, often in the form of a maze or labyrinth.” With the
Wilderness Act, rugged and less disturbed natural environment is designated and
institutionalized as “wilderness areas,” and its “wilderness character,” under the
National Wilderness Preservation System, is managed “for the gathering and
dissemination of information regarding their use and enjoyment as wilderness” (16
USC 1131).
Pristine and stark, the Arctic conforms in most respects to this standard of
“wilderness” set by the federal government. In fact, Arctic regions such as
northeastern Alaska, was enshrined as the “Last Great Wilderness” by George L.
Collins and Lowell Sumner in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1953, and received official

142
designation as the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge (ANWR) in 1980.
1
For
tourists and nature enthusiasts, Alaska is America’s last frontier: the final opportunity
for settlement and development, the last remnant of the origin of civilization, and the
nation’s ultimate chance to (re)build a harmonious relationship with the natural world.
Wild land, embodied by Alaska, as literary critic Susan Kollin notes, functions as “an
important, national salvation whose existence alleviates fears about the inevitable
environmental doom facing the U.S.; like previous mythic frontier, it promises to
provide the nation with further opportunities for renewal” (43). And national parks
remain in governmental reports and popular imaginings as the “ultimate” in nature
protection and the “highest ideals” of wilderness preservation, maintaining, in an
unaltered condition, the original character and innate qualities of nature (Vale 96).
Intertwined inextricably with the politics of preservation, “wilderness” has continued
to express an appreciation of and satisfaction for the demand for what is an untouched,
virgin land.
The historical and conceptual framework of wilderness preservation, however,
serves as a point of departure rather than a point of arrival for my investigation of

1
See Collins and Sumner’s “Northeast Alaska: The Last Great Wilderness.”

143
Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
(1986). As the subject matter of Lopez’s nature writing, Arctic is referenced and
enacted repeatedly as what the subtitle of the book indicates as a “landscape” of
aspiration and desires, rather than a “wilderness” defined by a sense of stability and
permanence and the absence of humans.
2
While Lopez substitutes the more trendy
term “landscape” for “wilderness,” his Arctic, I contend, continues to crystallize
classic imagery of “wilderness” as a rustic, uncharted country of ferocity. Yet, as
Roderick Nash, William Cronon, Max Oelschlaeger, and Thomas Vale’s suggest, what
appears to be a transparent “wilderness” maybe, in fact, artifacts, if not social
constructions, shaped by economic manipulations and human perceptions and
conceptions.
3
The Wilderness Act and ANWR demarcate wild regions for permanent
preservation, but they have not resolved the controversy between “wise-use” and
planned development of wild nature of conservationism and the aesthetic and spiritual
commitment of preservation ethics. Nor have they prevented wild regions such as

2
See, for instance, Edward Hoagland’s “From the Land Where Polar Bears Fly,” Michiko Kakutani’s
“Books of the Times,” and Susan Kollin’s “The Wild, Wild North.”

3
Cf. Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting
Back to the Wrong Nature,” Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness.

144
the coastal plain of the ANWR from a series of oil and gas explorations that began in
the early 1920s, and buttressed national security needs. Both the material form and
boundary, as well as the symbolic and representative meaning and value of
“wilderness,” are open to debate and subject to the manipulations of humans –– with
special provisions given to natural resource prospecting, and with other de facto
uncultivated land under governmental reviews and public hearings for wilderness
designation.
4
Lopez’s postulation of “landscape,” in this sense, calls attention to the
problematic celebration of “wilderness” as a tangible and coherent material reality and
concept.
In his renunciation of the term “wilderness,” Lopez, in fact, revises the
time-honored American wilderness tradition: a century-old conviction established
through the environmental narratives of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo
Leopold, and culminating in the Wilderness Act. As Lopez asks in the preface to his

4
8.9 million acres of the northeast coastal region of Alaska was first protected for its wildlife and
recreational values as the Arctic Range. This initial Range is, together with an area twice that of the
original size of the Arctic Range, was then renamed the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge under the
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. Although protected under ANWR, in
compromise with Senate, Section 1002, the coastal plain was neither designated “wilderness areas” or
an area open to oil development. Cf. Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind 272-274, Roger
Kaye’s Last Great Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (2006)
and Daniel Nelson’s Northern Landscapes: The Struggle for Wilderness Alaska (2004).

145
narrative: “what I wondered, had compelled me to bow to a horned lark? How does
the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it? How does desire
itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?” (xxvii). With no rising sun
during winter months and with most of the land locked in snow all year long, the
permafrost indeed enhances this illusion of the Arctic as a land of permanence. The
frigidity of the glacier literally functions as a “preserving” device: “[t]he cold, dry
arctic air might have preserved, even down to its odor, the remains of a ringed seal
killed and eaten by [Arctic travelers and hunters] 800 years ago” (Lopez xxv). His
humble respect for the wild as well as his persistent hope to rehabilitate, maintain, and
henceforth bring back the aesthetic and spiritual values of the wild environment have
aligned and affiliated him with his wilderness predecessors. By questioning the
particular ideological origins, intentions, and contexts that shape one’s conceptions of
wilderness, this self-reflexivity, he distances himself from those who regard
preservation as an organic, transparent method of capturing what is an authentic
nature, embodied by “wilderness.” For Lopez, the seemingly changelessness of the
wilderness areas consumes the homogenization of the foreign, as well as the

146
instability of the meanings and values of wilderness. Inscribed with imaginations
and desires, Lopez’s Arctic is conceptualized as what renowned geographer of cultural
landscape Pierce F. Lewis defines in 1979 as a “human landscape” –– “an unwitting
autobiography, reflecting our taste, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in
tangible, visible form” (12).
The running thread of this chapter is the idea of wilderness preservation not only
in the sense of its supposed technical capacity for encapsulation and the mimetic
(re)presentation of the intrinsic order of the natural world (i.e. wilderness), but also,
somewhat paradoxically, in the sense of material imprints and conceptual framing
which express human activities and ideology. The emphasis on the social
constructedness and cultural determinedness of “wilderness,” of course, does not
necessarily negate the material reality of the natural world, and vice versa. Lopez’s
conceptualization of “wilderness preservation” as the sustaining and perpetuating of
what is a highly unstable, culturally or humanly created imprint is paradoxical. This
ambivalence, however, also comments indirectly and negatively on the encapsulation
of wild earth as a land of permanence when the natural world is also conceptualized as

147
a backdrop to human activity, denied of agency. Lopez writes of desert lands and the
North and South Poles: “there are in fact no primitive or even primeval landscapes.
Neither are there permanent landscapes. And nowhere is the land empty or
undeveloped. It cannot be improved upon with technological assistance” (411).
This chapter examines how “wilderness” has grown into something more than a
landscape, “a product of cultural processes,” denied of subjectivity and agency, to
manifest a creative force of natural world that contests against the radical distinction
between the subject and object, body and environment, and facts and values (Heise
507). In what ways has Lopez’s vision prefigures what professor of philosophy and
religious studies Oelschlaeger recognizes as a “cosmic synergism,” a “cosmic
wilderness” that embodies in itself a multifaceted, interactive process, constantly in
the state of generating, negating, and regenerating both lives and meanings (321)?
What is at stake when this new “cosmic wilderness” is reconfigured as an animate, or
living organic earth of change physically and metaphorically in Arctic Dreams?
What does preservation mean when both the materiality and the perceptual and
conceptual meaning are ever contested and negotiated? The vision of “wilderness”

148
as organic chaos on the part of Lopez and environmental critics, I argue, signals a shift
in methodology and ideology in environmental discourse, coinciding with
postmodernist’s efforts to destabilize the rigid boundaries of meanings and values.
This break from the mechanistic worldview, in addition, reflects a recent effort to
question wilderness preservation’s desire to not only exert control over but also
impose order on what might be a natural world. Underneath the enthusiasm for and
skepticism of the sustaining of “wilderness” are what environmental historians have
identified as the meanings of “protection” (Vale 4-6), and of the protection and
consumption of preservation as a transparent and authentic protectionist measure in
the sustaining of nature.
Turning to an earth in a state of motion, if not constant unpredictability, the claim
of wilderness as a landscape that both embodies and interacts with the cultural,
demonstrates a critical appreciation for a piece of land, whose “wildness” gives
prominence to the dynamic and overpowering presence of the natural world.
Embedded within the organic processes of life, the configuration of the Arctic as a
landscape of wildness of change reveals the continuous positioning of preservation as

149
an environmental practice that allegedly transcribes “wilderness,” the last remnant of
the pristine environment, as authentic nature. The demystification and
historicization of the concept of Artic wilderness as change through the organic
metaphor, paradoxically, underwrites an underlying belief in “order,” “balance,” and
“interconnectedness” that also pertains to the organic ideal that transcends the parts
and processes into an complex whole.

§ Wilderness Unbound

[W]ilderness is not just the preservation of the world, it is the world. (285)
–– Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness

Arctic regions have long captured Western imagination particularly as an
expansive geography of opportunity and adventure. The extremities of the land and
its abundant economic resources have drawn the immediate attention of not only
scientists and geographers but also commercial narwhal and walrus hunters as early as
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Expeditions had mixed motives; but the

150
images of the Arctic most vigorously sustained in histories and personal reflections of
polar regions are described in sublime terms. Often encapsulated as a gateway to
“the meaning of life” (Tuan, “Desert” 148) or to what Cronon suggests as a “glimpse
[of] the face of God” (“Trouble” 73), this majestic and yet life-negating frozen desert
evokes notions of the sublime –– a sense of astonishment and reverence instigated by
encountering the overpowering obscurity and grandeur of wild and remote landscapes.
Unlike swamps, grasslands, and “less sublime landscapes,” the rugged mountains
and alpine meadows of northeastern Alaska have been enshrined by American
wilderness preservationists as a symbol of unspoiled, pristine nature, and managed as
wildlife sanctuaries in enclosed national parks (Cronon, “Trouble” 75).
5
In their
celebration of Arctic’s natural wonders, alluring accounts such as Muir’s Travels in
Alaska (1915) foreground Alaskan Arctic as America’s “last frontier,” subsuming, at
the same time, wild Arctic regions into a national park discourse recognized by
Cronon as valorizing the wild as paradoxically a “domesticated sublime” (75).
According to Muir, the founder of the national park system, “[t]o the lover of pure
wilderness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world. No excursion

5
On Alaska as a “wilderness mecca,” see Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind 275, 280-281.

151
that I know of may be made into any other American wilderness where so marvelous
an abundance of noble, newborn scenery is so charmingly brought to view” (11). As
one of the first cruise ship tourists to Alaska, Muir remarks,

Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond
description. To sketch picturesque bits, definitely bounded, is
comparatively easy –– a lake in the woods, a glacier meadow, or a cascade
in its dell; or even a grand master view of mountains beheld from some
commanding outlook after climbing from height to height above the forest.
These may be attempted, and more or less telling pictures made of them; but
in these coast landscape there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness,
such a multitude of features without apparent redundance, their lines
graduating delicately into one another in endless succession, while the
whole is so fine, so tender, so ethereal, that all penwork seems hopelessly
unavailing. (11-12)

The grandeur and foreignness of this uncharted space are awe-inspiring. Yet, for
Muir, it invokes anything but the contemplation over the meaning of the ambivalence
of a delightful and yet desolate sublime landscape. His notion of Alaska as a
well-ordered cosmos contrasts sharply with Arctic Dreams, which unravels the Arctic
as a landscape whose order and permanence are disrupted constantly by a sense of
complexity and unpredictability. Lopez writes, “[a]spects of the arctic landscape that
had become salient for me –– its real and temporal borders; a rare, rich oasis of life

152
surrounded by vast stretches of deserted land; the upending of conventional kinds of
time; biological vulnerability made poignant by the forgiving light of summer –– all
of this was evoked over the Bering Sea” (126). Although here Lopez describes more
specifically the Canadian Arctic, and Muir, south eastern Alaska, both are in fact
intrigued by Arctic sublimity. This limitless, “uncultivated” geography, however, is
defined quite differently. While Muir’s narrative conceptualizes the Arctic as the
perfect design of a God and reveals an attentiveness to the grandeur of the landscape,
a view commonly shared among nineteenth-century Romanticists, Lopez’s is more in
accord with the frightful irregularities of the eighteenth-century Burkean sublime.
6

The transition from Muir’s to Lopez’s reflections of the Arctic demonstrates a pivotal
shift in the conceptualization of de facto “wilderness;” in the history of wilderness
appreciation and American preservationism, it indicates the giving away of the
appreciation of wilderness as a locus of cosmic order to one characterized by disorder.
In her critique of various travel accounts of Alaska, Kollin suggests that this
geographically untamable and foreign terrain, unlike other margins of civilization, not
only “begs to be explored” but participates in what Lawrence Buell calls the aesthetics

6
See Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful 101.

153
of the “not there” (48). The “no there” of nature writing, according to Buell, is a
rhetorical gesture that give pretense to the “not there” of the foreign, a process that
domesticizes uninhabited and conceptually blank space through emptying its
foreignness, and filling and ordering it with familiar imagery imported from home
(68).
7
For both Muir and Lopez, the uncultivated Arctic, like the American western
frontier, is a place that invites exploration and definition. The Arctic, for them, first
enacts a liberating escape from the repressive patterns and fixed orders of
modernization and rationalism, serving as a perfect cornerstone for the testing of one’s
individuality or masculinity. The transformation of the unknown into the ordinary,
such as that found in Muir’s accounts, subsumes an alien land into familiar
Euro-American landscape settings; it, in fact, reveals the notion of expeditions “a
pursuit of the wild.” In appropriating the foreign and declaring the absence, the “not
there,” of the strangeness of the alien environment, the process provides expeditionists
a sense of intimacy that not only further encourages but also shapes their exploration

7
For a discussion of exploration as a form of escape, see Tuan’s “Desert and Ice” 139-140 and
Escapism 5-7, 17-19. For a critique on the workings of the “not there” of nature writing in a
postcolonial context, see Buell’s The Environmental Imagination 79-82. For a critical discussion of
the process of appropriation specifically in the context Arctic exploration and as gendered and racially
marked, see Lisa Bloom 1-14.

154
and construction of both the self and the landscape. What ensured explorers the
comfort and security on an expedition is precisely this familiar and yet often
constraining artificiality of “home place” that first initiated their desire for alienness,
adventure, and freedom. As Lopez points out, “[w]e turn these exhilarating and
sometimes terrifying new places into geography by extending the boundaries of our
old places in an effort to include them. We pursue a desire for equilibrium and
harmony between our familiar places and unknown spaces. We do this to make the
foreign comprehensible, or simply more acceptable” (278). By charting the
unfamiliar, accounts of exploratory adventures often transcribes heedlessly the foreign
into conventional social orderings and imaginary, in spite of their attention to the
process of text or knowledge making. Giving meaning to the meaningless while
maintaining firm connections between reality and its representation, these accounts
assume authority over a cosmic and narrative order of constructed, artificial natures.
Like Muir, Lopez is astounded by the extraordinary spectacles of the Arctic.
Celebrating the Arctic as a terrain that is constantly changing, reconfigured, and
remapped by the glaciers and ice caps, Lopez’s Arctic journey suggests, however, a

155
critical appreciation for the transient and unstable aspects of the natural world found
nowhere in Muir’s preservationist assertions. “The pattern is not the same here,”
proclaims Lopez (20). This dynamic land, for Lopez, seldom indicates a digression
from order or an interruption of nature’s enduring permanence, and hardly serves as
an invitation to the further mastery of earth’s unpredictabilities and thus its
randomness, in the ways it had for Muir. Nor does the seeming emptiness of the
Arctic translate as a plea for the filling of the blanks with the familiar, legitimizing
thus Western explorers’ access to, and their incorporation of, the foreign that
correspondingly silenced and erased voices of the other. Rather, the nonconformist
setting of the Arctic sublime appeals as a source of disorder that questions personal
convictions and defies conventional moral and social standards. Lopez writes,

The edges of any landscape –– horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a
river around a canyon wall –– quicken an observer’s expectations. That
attraction to borders, to the earth’s twilight places, is part of the shape of
human curiosity. And the edges that cause excitement are like these where
I now walk, sensing the bird toying with gravity; or like those in quantum
mechanics, where what is critical straddles a border between being a wave
and being a particle, between being what it is and becoming something else,
occupying an edge of time that defeats our geometries. (Lopez 123)

156
The emphasis on cosmic change and the notion of indeterminacy as the mystique of
wild nature marks an epistemological and stylistic shift in the appreciation and study
of “wilderness” in American environmental tradition, and has been valued by Lopez’s
readers and critics as a particularly intriguing feature of Arctic Dreams. As with
American nature writers such as Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, the endeavor “[t]o
overcome the absurdity –– the meaninglessness and destructiveness –– of man’s
estrangement from the natural world” has been identified as one of the main
objectives of Lopez’s account of the wild (Slovic 137). In Arctic Dreams, however,
feelings of desolation over unconventional setting, as well as existential questions
over the absurdity of individual subjectivity within the history of the planet, are
encapsulated as consequences of self-indulgence in presumably the objectivity of
scientific analysis of the natural world. Lopez’ journey and his direct contact with
the foreignness, and thus, the “strangeness” of an alien land, in this sense, have
become an allegory for the epistemological process of coming to terms with what is a
wild nature.

157
Depicted as a space that “truly exceeds these cultural demarcations,” Lopez’s
Arctic has been valorized as a rich arena that helped formulate a “globally informed
and locally concerned” environmental perspective that sees both the “permeable
nature of all environments” as well as the historic contingencies and the
constructedness of political, territorial, and biological borders (Kollin 69).
8

Pertaining to the dynamic and aberrant rhythm of the natural landscape is also the
elusive, nondirectional storyline of Arctic Dreams: a narrative design that has come to
accentuate the “mystery of navigation” (Limerick 92), as well as, the fundamental
instability of language and what is perceived to be the “reality.”
9
The strangeness of
the grotesque land, as nature writer Edward Abbey remarks in Desert Solitaire (1968),
intensifies the experiencing of “the bare bones of existence, the elemental and
fundamental, [and] the bedrock which sustains us,” enhancing an environmental
perspective that transcends “all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, [and] even
the categories of scientific description” (6). Lopez and his critics also underscores

8
“Think Globally, Act Locally” is a popular axiom originated by professor of microbiology,
experimental pathology Rene Dubos at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in
1972. It refers to the argument that environmental problems should best be approached from a global
perspective with careful attention to local concerns and ecological, economic, and cultural differences.

9
For detail accounts of Lopez’s notion of storytelling in relation to what Scott Slovic notes as the
“particularizing of the exotic,” see Slovic 141-147.

158
this “irritatingly and uncharacteristically uncooperative” land as geographical terrains,
whose topographical simplicities and formidable extremities blur conventional
boundaries between self and other, and between facts and values (Lopez 12).
10

Lopez’s attentiveness to the condition of the Arctic, as renowned historian Patricia
Limerick acknowledges, is predicated not simply upon “what the Arctic is, but how
humans of different backgrounds interpret it” (92). This complex conceptualizing
and valuation process calls attention to the urgency of coming to terms with the
workings of one’s initial sense of space and time when encountering a foreign land.
Just as Muir, Lopez and his critics find in wilderness a sense of freedom. This
escape, however, is construed as a liberation, not only from social constraints, but also,
more importantly, one’s own conceptual framing of the natural world.
Lopez’s accounts of various factual, fictional, and mythical stories of wild
animals and unfamiliar landscapes, for critics, brings awareness to both the ways
“stories” connect audience to the “more-than-human world,” and the ways the
rhetorical stance of a storyteller and his audience determine the boundaries of
environmental ethics (Sumner 31-38). The wonders of narwhals at Lancaster Sound,

10
See, for instance, Tuan’s “Ice and Desert” 139-140, 154-155.

159
at times, does not have to “mean anything at all” even from the perspectives of Arctic
oil and gas gougers during the era of disruptive oil exploration in the nineteen-sixties
(Lopez 128). At other moments, the ability of the Arctic to transcend conventional
assumptions of the land intensifies not only the shaping impact that the natural world
may have on human imagination but also on the constructedness and allusiveness of
the accounts and perceptions of the natural world. Lopez’s and his critics’
enthusiasm to unfold the provisionality of the notion of “wilderness,” as well as the
unstable process of the making sense of “nature,” depend upon the renunciation or
revision of the conception of earth as an orderly, static, and pristine entity regulated by
a ruling principle, a cosmic law. Characterized by “change,” “disorder” and
“disturbance,” the image of nature as a dynamic organism is a pertinent metaphor for
an environmental discourse that struggles to tackle more directly and effectively the
aftermath of unprecedented social and environmental change. The creative,
self-generating autonomous forces associated with organicism, however, casts doubts
on conventional wilderness preservationists’ belief in a cosmic order and their
continuous search for a new environmental order and norm.

160
For Lopez as well as for nature writers and ecocritics, reassessments of the
environment through the metaphor of “change” rearticulate the moral orders and
cosmological statements envisioned and established by Muir and the wilderness
preservation tradition. These reassessments, which seem particularly relevant to
ecological theories and the logics of capitalist society, reveal that competition and
disturbance rather than stability and equilibrium are the norm to both natural and
cultural environments. Like Muir and early preservationists, whose belief in a
well-proportioned nature in equilibrium are well-grounded in the sciences, Lopez and
his critics’ conceptualization of nature and their scientific claims, too, are given
credence by objective, empirical data. This change in the perspective of nature
writers and ecocritics around the nineteen-nineties, in fact, parallels an earlier
paradigm shift in the discipline of ecology and the sciences: a radical transition from
the view of the natural world as a unit of homeostatic, interdependent superorganism
to a complex system of fragmentation, randomness, and disturbance that took place
during the nineteenth-fifties and sixties. The former are represented by Alexander
von Humboldt (1769-1859), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and the generation of

161
Frederick E. Clements (1874-1945) and Eugene Odum (1913-2002), and the latter are
given a prominent place from the theories of ecologist Henry Gleason’s
“species-individualistic models,” meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s “Butterfly Effect,”
and biologist Daniel Botkin’s notion of “discordant harmonies.” The examples of
disruption, unconstraint, and disharmony in the wider American post-Word War II
ideology, and the empirical evidence of disturbance by ecologists working on arid
lands and developing countries, has been translated into environmental and ecological
studies. These social contexts have challenged the hegemony of the notion of
equilibrium of forest and systems ecology in Europe and North America, contributing
to the dominance of “disorder” as the ruling principle of the universe.
11
But
skepticism towards “order” as the authentic “representation of nature” does not
necessarily lead to structuralist and post-structuralist questioning of what Dana Philips
suggests as the very “nature of representation” (Philips x).
12
Environmental

11
See, Lesley Head’s Culture Landscapes and Environmental Change 36-38 for empirical, and
scientific challenge and the revision of the ecological discipline. For discussions on social influence
on the paradigm shift in the field of ecology, see Michael G. Barbour 247-250; N. Katherine Hayles’
“Introduction: Complex Dynamics and Literature and Science” 6-8; Worster’s “Nature and the Disorder
of History” 75-77, and The Wealth of Nature 166-168. For the shift of critical appreciation of nature
in ecocriticism, see Heise 510.

12
In The Truth of Ecology, Philips speaks specifically of the metaphorization and spiritualization of
ecological concepts and terms. See, for instance, Barbour 247-250 and Worster’s “Nature and the

162
historians and critics often overlook that while they are searching the sciences for
validations to their conceptualization of chaos as the new social norm, they have
overemphasized the impact of social, historical circumstances on the construction of
knowledge. In their responses to post-World War II cultures, “nature as chaos”
becomes a sign post to their new ecologist perspective. Guided by scientific and
cultural milieu of post-war era, concepts such as “uncertainty” and “irregularity” most
often associated with wild earth, prevail much like the notion of harmony of early
ecology and classical sciences in contemporary environmental discourse. “Chaos”
becomes the much-needed new evidence and model to the intrinsic property of reality.
Environmental writers and scholars after the nineteen-nineties embrace “change,”
“disorder,” and “chaos” enthusiastically as adequate philosophical undergirding, as a
validated cultural thesis, to a new protectionist perspective, an ethical foundation, that
addresses the “reality of nature.”
Along with the emergence of the rhetoric of disorder, Lopez’s reconfiguration of
Arctic wilderness as a self-governing organism of change also appears to be in accord
with an environmental discourse that contrives to challenge the mechanistic

Disorder of History” 75-77.

163
worldview for its subjugation and systemized exploitation of “nature,” defining it as
passive, inert matter. Illustrating the point are Carolyn Merchant’s concluding
remarks to her discussion of “earth as change” in the “Order out of Chaos” chapter of
her book. In Reinventing Eden (2003), she investigates the challenges imposed on
classical sciences by the so-called the “new-sciences”: chaos theory, complexity
theory, the notion of discordant harmonies, as well as the Gaia hypothesis made
famous by scientist James Lovelock. She declares,

The disorderly, ordered world of nonhuman nature must be
acknowledged as a free autonomous actor, just as humans are free
autonomous agents. Nature limits human freedom to totally dominate and
control it, just as human power limits nature’s and other humans’ freedom.
Science and technology can tell us that an event such as a hurricane,
earthquake, flood, or fire is likely to happen in a certain locale, but not when
it will happen. Because nature is fundamentally chaotic, it must be
respected and related to as an active part.
These new approaches to science are consistent with new narrative
about the natural world and humanity’s place within it. . . . But could a
postclassical science embodying such a vision be accepted by mainstream
society? If so, it might be consistent with new ethical guidelines for
humanity’s relationship with the environment –– an ethic of partnership
among humans and between humanity and nature. (220)

164
In this passage, Merchant’s positioning of the natural world exemplifies the specific
environmental discourse that compels such conceptualization of disorder. Here she
abridges the historical development of the new subjects of scientific inquiry that she
traces earlier. Yet in this conclusion, as in her book’s subtitle The Fate of Nature in
Western Culture, one detects a further desire to reach closure, to prophesize, to
prescribe treatments or solutions, or to dispense oracular wisdom for a fast-burgeoning,
and future-oriented movement such as environmentalism.
13
“Nature” as an
autonomous actor of agency and identity, demanding partnership, is first closely
associated with the organic concept of the world: with “process or products of life, in
human beings, animals or plants,” and, from the etymology “organ” and “organism,”
with the aesthetic and philosophical concept of a unified whole of integrative,
interdependent, and yet diverse parts known as organicism (Williams 227).
14

Through the “free autonomous actor” metaphor, Merchant associates chaos in the
natural world and the sciences with organic change, and hails change and
unpredictability as the ontological and cosmological basis of the natural world, if not

13
In The Future of Environmental Criticism, Buell notes of the desire to reach closure or prescribe
solutions in environmental narrative. See Buell 128.

14
See also Stephen C. Pepper’s World Hypotheses 280-283.

165
the fundamental ethical or theological principle of an environmentalism determined to
restore, preserve, and liberate the fundamental order of earth from purportedly the
control and manipulation of the mechanistic paradigm.
But as The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book cautions, “much so-called
moral disagreement is really empirical or scientific disagreement” (VanDeer and
Peirce 9). What is undermined is the problematics of revising the fundamental
theory of a discipline, or fostering a new ethics or worldview guided by empirical
facts, which may in fact be empirical claims. Merchant’s figuration of changing or
evolving earth as autonomous and organismic is replicated in a number of
authoritative accounts of environmental histories, even though most historians are
reluctant to go as far as Merchant, and also Lovelock’s Gaia (1979), in identifying, so
directly, this recently revitalized earth as an active, living, volatile organism, and
claiming a modern revival of organic cosmology. Critical texts that foreground the
unruliness of earth include Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies (1990), Oelschlaeger’s
The Idea of Wilderness (1991), Donald Worster’s Nature’ s Economy (1977), The
Wealth of Nature (1993) and “Nature and the Disorder of History” (1995), and plant

166
biologist Michael G. Barbour’s “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties” collected in
Cronon’s Uncommon Ground (1995).
15
“The idea of nature as a living organism had
philosophical antecedents in ancient systems of thought. . . . The organismic metaphor,
however, was immensely flexible and adaptable to varying contexts, depending on
which of its presuppositions was emphasized,” remarks Merchant (Death 2). Among
its various embodiments, Merchant remarks, is the “nature as disorder” claim of the
new sciences, whose metaphorical predecessors in Euro-American history trace to
both the symbol of the uncontrollable witch that represents natural disasters, as well as
to the power of God manifested through irregular and fearsome wild landscape such
as mountains and gorges (Death 127).
16
Whether as a sign of life, or as a potential
for immanent change, “change” implicates a spontaneous, organic process of
becoming that engenders a sense of autonomy, if not disorder, that attenuates the
universal orderings of social conventions under the rational, mechanistic laws of earth.
Given that this change is construed as emerging from within the earth subject itself,

15
See especially Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies; Oelschlaeger 316-321; Worster’s Nature’ s Economy
405-412 and The Wealth of Nature 156-170.

16
Nature as uncontrollable, as “the power of God,” alludes most often to, more specifically, Burkean
sublime, and is to be distinguished from the nineteenth-century Romantic perception of sublime
landscape, which stresses the infinity and majesty aspects of nature as signs of the “creation of God.”
Cf. Botkin 93-99, and Merchant’s Death of Nature 2, 127-148.

167
rather than exerted from external rules of a prescribed model such as that in a machine,
this emergent novelty, while being subversive for the critics, also commits to a
complex unity that fosters a sense of interdependence. The fact that organic
philosophy is encoded within the notion of change and forms part of these narratives
at all calls for a study of the role of the concept of organicism as a metaphoric trope
and as a scientific concept in an emergent environmental ethics that celebrating the
stability and the “preservation” of nature’s dynamics.
For Lopez, “nature as a living organism of change” is both an empirical fact and
an ethical claim that apply to earth’s totality as well as its constituents. Upon reading
eighteenth-century English explorer William Scoresby’s account of Greenland, Lopez
compares Scoresby’s experience walking over moving pack ice to the experience of
surviving on “the back of some enormous and methodical beast” (215). With power
derived from the inner tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life,
Arctic is “large, alive like an animal” (392-393). In Arctic Dreams, the notion of
nature, as change, is most commonly correlated with what Merchant has characterized
as an earth of spontaneous, internal rhythm, which is not only symptomatic of life, but

168
also beyond mechanistic causal explanations and mathematical abstraction and
reduction. Like Merchant, Lopez, too, stresses both the living and nonliving entities
or systems as essential to the biological process of earth, a mega-organism whose
continued existence and nourishment provides the subsistence for all living creatures.
As he remarks on the migratory habits and adaptive instincts of Arctic animals,
“[w]atching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and
then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migration as breath,
as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The
long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the
fall” (162). The migration of animals such as snow geese, caribou, lemmings, walrus,
and whales in and out of their native habitats registers the notion of changing nature as
exemplifying “organic” (i.e. living and growing) properties on two levels: the concept
of nature as organisms pertains to not only the particular living entities, but also, from
the relations between the particular living entity to each other and to the composite
whole indicate, a living superorganism of both organic as well as inorganic physical,
chemical, and geological elements and forces. As Lovelock rightly argues, “it was

169
not life that did the regulating but the whole thing, life, the air, the oceans, and the
rocks. The entire surface of the Earth including life is a superorganism and this is
what I mean by Gaia” (vii). Living organism is more than a metaphor or a rhetorical
device that accentuates the unsteadiness of earth for Lopez. Contending against the
prestige of the view of earth as an assemblage of operational but replaceable parts,
subject to the operations of a mechanistic unity, Lopez’s evolving Arctic, like Gaia,
finds nature’s agency manifested by and contingent upon the internal interactions
between both its animate and inanimate components.
Debates that centered on the moral basis of the “rights of nature” as natural rights,
of course, have long been the central concern of philosophers and ethicists, and the
equity of earth have been studied extensively within the contexts of the ethics and
politics of wilderness preservation by environmental historians: whether living beings
have legal rights or not, whether signs of life, sentience, memory, or the unique
valuing capacity define a living entity, or whether “nature” is in fact comparable to a
complex, animate super-organism.
17
Although neither Lopez nor Merchant extended
their arguments to defend the legal rights of living beings to thrive and prosper by

17
Cf. Nash The Rights of Nature.

170
celebrating an earth maintained by its own active, sustaining forces to the extent of
being “dark, wild, turbulent, and uncontrollable,” they, in fact, question the legitimacy
of human domination of the natural world on the basis of the agency or the equal
inherent properties of living entities from a deontological environmental ethical
position (Reinventing 213). In its celebration of a self-governing, living earth, the
battle against human exploitation of the natural world claims the “rights of nature”
from the natural rights position of a liberalist tradition closely linked to the struggle
against racial, gender, socio-economic oppressions in American history. Projected in
opposition to a passive and inert mechanistic earth governed and henceforth controlled
by the rational and predictable pre-programmed mathematical laws, “change” is a
process of becoming rendered into manifestations of the individuality and
idiosyncrasies of what is an organic, autonomous earth. Pronounced signs of agency
or life, the once wild, turbulent, and uncontrollable forces of earth have become potent
metaphors for a discourse that attempts to break free from the totalization and
deterministic trajectory of mechanistic cosmology.

171
Popular images of the Arctic carry specific imagery with regard to wilderness.
For Lopez, the organic Arctic embodies a system of unregulated force that, in its
struggle against the rigid order on which the society and the universe operate, has
been promulgated as the antithesis of civilization and also represents the most
authentic forces of earth. As the nexus in which the energies to unpredictable
changes, incessant disturbance, and individualistic associations embed, Lopez’s
organismic earth is closely associated with “wilderness” as the antithesis of
civilization –– with an aspect of earth that remains authentic, unbreakable,
incomprehensible, and controllable in the environmental imaginary.
To return to the notion of wilderness in Arctic Dreams, Lopez’s Arctic reminds
that “nature as change” implicates both the reality of nature as an autonomous
organism as well as the epistemological process through which the biological and
geographical outlook of the natural world is conceptualized. Since the publication of
Dana Philips’ The Truth of Ecology (2003) ecocritics have brought to the forefront
questions of, and the problematics over, the uncontested adoption of ecological
concepts and ecological terminologies as metaphors in nature writing as guides for

172
moral reasoning and as structural models for society.
18
Interestingly, a closer reading
of Arctic Dreams reveals the “wilderness-as-organismic-change versus
civilization-as-mechanistic-order” binary opposition, carefully developed by Lopez’s
critics, is dismantled by Lopez’s underlying attention to the details of order and
permanence. On a journey north, for instance, Lopez notices that “[a]lmost
everywhere you wander on the open tundra you find whole dead leaves, preserved
flower parts, and bits of twig, years of undisturbed organic accumulation” (26). In
awe of the migrating patterns of the whales, birds, and caribou, he declares that he has
also “discerned the ground from which some people have derived so much of their
metaphorical understanding of symmetry, cadence, and harmony in the universe (160).
Arctic wilderness, for Lopez, also appears to be that subliminal landscape of harmony,
order, and moral goodness celebrated by Romanticists and wilderness preservationists
since the nineteenth-century.
With regard to the discrepancy between the Arctic as a source of change and as a
locus of order in Arctic Dreams, one wonders whether Lopez’s straying from his
acclimation of “change” creates an unsettling narrative and ideological anomaly that

18
Philips 42-82.

173
only further accentuates allegorically the dynamic systems of a untamed nature, as
well as the inevitable fluidity and partiality of knowledge. In World Hypotheses,
philosopher Stephen C. Pepper writes, “[t]he categories of organicism consist, on the
one hand, in noting the steps involved in the organic process, and, on the other hand,
in noting the principal features in the organic structure ultimately achieved or realized.
The structure achieved or realized is always the ideal aimed at by the progressive
steps of the process” (281). The properties of “any organic or integrative process
and its achievements,” according to Pepper, consists of

(1) fragments of experience which appear with (2) nexuses or connections or
implications, which spontaneously lead as a result of the aggravation of (3)
contradictions, gaps, oppositions, or counteractions to resolution in (4) an
organic whole, which is found to have been (5) implicit in the fragments,
and to (6) transcend the previous contradictions by means of a coherent
totality, which (7) economizes, saves, preserves all the original fragments of
experience without any loss (283).
19

Vibrant change and an ideal stasis of integrated parts, in short, are both characteristics
of the concept of organicism. Are those scattered remarks on order, in Arctic Dreams,
aberrations amidst a world defined by change, or do they expose environmental

19
The emphases is original.

174
critics’ inexorable faith in permanence and a stable cosmic order? How does the
conflation of order and disorder enact what critics such as Merchant and Botkin have
observed as “disorderly order,” a notion of nature as fundamentally an instantaneous,
self-regulating, and yet unified super-organism?
20

In order to tackle the ambiguous and unstable representation of wilderness as
change, a discourse eminently entangled with organicism, it is useful to attend to
chaos theory, a scientific theory on which ecocritics built their concept and from
which they appropriate their organic metaphor of the irregularity and unpredictability
of the natural world. Worthy of consideration is N. Katherine Hayles’ analysis of the
notion of disorder in chaos theory in “Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature
and Science” (1991):

The chaos has been negatively valued in the Western tradition maybe partly
due . . . to the predominance of binary logic in the West. If order is good,
chaos is bad because it is conceptualized as the opposite of order. By
contrast, in the four-valued logic characteristic of Taoist thought, not-order
is also a possibility, distinct from the valued differently than anti-order.
The science of chaos draws Western assumptions about chaos into question
by revealing possibilities that were suppressed when chaos was considered
merely as order’s opposite. It marks the validation within the Western

20
Cf. Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies; Merchant’s Reinventing Eden 216-220; Hayles’s “Introduction:
Complex Dynamic in Literature and Science” 1-2.

175
tradition of a view of chaos that constructs it as not-order. In chaos theory
chaos may either lead to order, as it does with self-organizing systems, or in
yin-yang fashion it may have deep structures of order encoded within it.

In either case, its relation to order is more complex than traditional Western
oppositions have allowed. (3)

Also known as the complexity theory, chaos theory here refers to the scientific study
of complex, dynamical systems, whose interactive processes exhibit a disorder that
defies the usual methods of mathematical calculation, reduction, and representation.
Unlike popular understanding of chaos, that without order, chaos theory underwrites
the randomness, fragmentation, and instabilities of the context of scientific and
ecological inquiry as channels to what may be seen as a higher order of creative
energies. Chaos theory, more specifically, engenders “extremely complex
information” rather than “an absence of order”–– an order that is either seen as the
self-organization that emerged spontaneously from disorder, or as the hidden, complex
patterns or structures that pre-existed within the disorderly, random systems (Hayles,
“Complex Dynamics”1).
21
Within an extended but finite scale, what appeared to be

21
This first branch of chaos theory is represented by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger’s Order Out of
Chaos: Man’ s New Dialogue with Nature (1984), and the latter by Benoit Mandelbrot’s The Fractal
Geometry of Nature (1983), Robert Shaw’s “Strange Attractors, Chaotic Behavior, and Information
Flow” Zeitschrift für Naturforschung 36A (1981): 79-112, and Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect” in
“Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wing in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?” (1972);

176
random, broken, and fractured are in fact self-similar patterns known as fractals. As
John Briggs writes in Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos (1992), “[c]haos theory tells the
story of the wild things that happened to dynamical systems as they evolve over time;
fractal geometry records images of their movement in space” (22). Chaos theory
ponders over the universal applicability of Newtonian mechanistic laws and deductive
models of causal explanation to this universe of dynamical, self-regulating systems
the same time it attempts to tackle the “unruliness of turbulence by bringing it within
the scope of mathematical modeling and scientific theory” (Hayles, Chaos Bound 15).
Disorder, as Hayles remarks, “does not interfere with self-organizing processes,” but,
instead, “stimulates self organization and, in a certain sense, enables it to take place”
(“Complex Dynamics” 12).
Let us compare Hayles’ remarks on chaos theory to Lopez’s epiphany, one in
which he is mesmerized by the migrant Arctic animals:

What absorbs me in these birds, beyond their beautiful whiteness, their
astounding numbers, the great vigor of their lives, is how adroitly each bird
joins the larger flock or departs from it. And how each bird while it is a

reprinted in Carolyn Merchant ed., Ecology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1994),
360-362. See Hayles’ Chaos Bound for discussions on the historical development of chaos theory
8-15.

177
part of the flock seems part of something larger than itself. Another animal.
Never did I see a single goose move to accommodate one that was landing,
nor geese on the water ever disturbed by another taking off, not matter how
closely bunched they seemed to be. I never saw two birds so much as
brush wingtips in the air, though surely they must. They roll up into a
headwind together in a seamless movement that brings thousands of them
gently to the ground like falling leaves in but a few seconds. Their
movements are endlessly attractive to the eye because of a tension they
create between the extended parabolic lines of their flight and their abrupt
but adroit movements, all of it in three dimensions (154-155).

For many readers, what Lopez evokes, here, is, indeed, a sense of harmony, a moment
of oneness between the natural world and the isolated protagonists that have inspired
nature writers and wilderness lovers since the late nineteenth century. But that
momentary peace and awe stir more doubts and raise more questions than they have
initially purported to comfort and answer. Metaphors of wilderness as agency or
intuitiveness are instrumental to the resistance of the abstract reductionism and
objectivity of positivist sciences, and the constraints and oppressive fixity of modern
society. They are, moreover, born of organicism and chaos theory. A closer reading
of organicism and chaos theory, however, further complicate the ontological, cosmic,
and ethical meanings of “chaos” and “order.” It undermines the absolute, clear-cut
binary oppositions between the presumptuous environmentally corrupting

178
“nature-as-order,” mechanistic cosmology on the one hand, and the environmental
sustainability of the organic, a “nature-as-chaos” position that Lopez is thought to
deliver throughout his narrative.
First, the movements of the birds, while drawing attention to the tensions created
by each of the particular migrant waterfowls and making manifest the organic concept
of change, become that which characterizes Arctic wilderness as the locus of disorder
and revised popular perception of wilderness as harmony and order. What is less
clear is how this notion of wilderness which lacks unity and harmony is once again
quickly dismantled when readers are reminded that, in spite of the autonomy the
waterfowls exhibit, each bird is also pronounced an intricate part of a larger animal ––
an ecosystem, a super-organism, or a complex system that displays on a macrocosmic
level self-organizing autonomy. From a holistic ecological perspective, “one great
animal,” indeed, recapitulates Lopez’s attempt to reconfigure the migrant waterfowls
as one holistic, self-regulating, biotic community, and serves as an adequate metaphor
for nature’s harmony and order: the notion of an internal equilibrium is in fact
embedded in this imagery, which characterizes “ecosystem” in its climax phase, a

179
final state within which “a complex organism [is] inseparably connected with its
climate and often continental in extent” (qtd. in Philips 54). From the point-of-view
of chaos theory, the imagery of the recursive ordering and reordering of the
waterfowls into “one great animal” also alludes to “the images of the ways things fold
and unfold, feeding back into each other and themselves,” known as the fractal
(Briggs 23). As John Briggs notes, “[c]haos theory tells the story of the wild things
that happen to dynamical systems as they evolve over time; fractal geometry records
images of their movement in space” (22). Within a finite but extended scale, the
“one great animal” not only demonstrates a complex and yet predictable geometric
trajectory, but is also shown to contain an identical, self-similar pattern and structure
to that of the individual migrant birds. Calling attention to both the intuitive parts, as
well as the dynamic processes of the totality of natural world, Lopez forestalls, in the
quotation above, what chaos theory suggests as a cosmic order, an overall pattern or
telos that has either existed before or beyond the incessant changes and the
individualistic associations of the natural world.

180
With insights from organicism and chaos theory, Lopez’s readers might be
tempted to infer that Lopez’s wilderness displays agency, but that inherent dynamics
are ultimately elided for the integrity of a cosmic whole or the ideal stasis of the
perfect form. When situated within the greater framework of Arctic Dream, the “one
great animal” also suggests a trajectory, a direction towards equilibrium. This
harmony, however, is to be distinguished from the encapsulation of harmony as one
that gave primacy to the formal stasis and homogeneity of the whole, and denigrate
change as anti-order. “Order” and “harmony,” instead, implicate a symbiotic
structural interrelation between the autonomous self and its dynamic surrounding
environment. The emphasis on wilderness as “disorderly orders” or Botkin’s
“discordant harmonies” is best illustrated and summarized by the following remark on
the northern circumpolar ecosystem from Arctic Dreams: “the northerly ecosystems
regularly experience severe biological disturbances related to normal weather patterns
(the ‘unseasonable weather’ blamed for the loss of a citrus crop in Florida or the early
emergence of hibernating bears in Montana.) Arctic climatic patterns are further
characterized by unpredictable and violent weather” (31-32).

181
To conclude that Lopez’s identification of the “one great animal” pronounces an
undertone of belief in a cosmic order is to overlook both the unstable and ambivalent
meanings of this imagery, as well as the complexity of the inverse relations between
what is construed as “order” and “chaos” in environmental discourse. The
importance of “one great animal” and the northern ecosystem imagery is, firstly, their
redefinition of chaos as “discordant harmonies,” and their reassertion of the
underlying order and stability of the universe. Yet, also worth examining are the
underpinnings of these new visions of wilderness, their framing of the “chaos”
imagery and organismic allusions, which foreshadow the need for a new ecological
model or narrative story, especially amidst an age characterized as ecological,
epistemological, and ethical wilderness.
On the one hand, scientists have shied from the term “chaos,” finding it a
convenient conceptual tool used casually by dilettantes to accentuate their beliefs in
the absence of order, rather than designating the inexhaustibility and complexity of the
orders of the universe.
22
The principle of order or harmony still retains its credibility
in environmental discourse, despite the effort of the new sciences and environmental

22
Cf. Hayles Chaos Bound 8-9; “Introduction: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science” 2-3.

182
historians to celebrate the dynamics and the perpetually changing energies of the
natural world as the norm. On the other hand, the concept of ecosystem,
superorganism, or the “complex of biotic community and physical environment” may
have provided scientific validity to an environmental perspective that claims complex
order as a counter-model to mechanistic paradigm’s emphasis on the totality as the
sum of the parts (McIntosh 196). Yet ecocritics seem to overlook the long histories,
diverse approaches, and the sometime obscure attributes and boundaries of
“ecosystem”: ecosystem, in fact, is a discipline of ecology as much grounded in
empirical, field observations as in abstract mathematical analysis and reductionism,
and a concept torn between its holistic conception of the community through
interrelations and its reductionist study of the invariant parts or systems as the
whole.
23
The lingering of this early twentieth-century ecological concept in
environmental discourse thus offers a venue for disclosing the ways this cosmic order
continues to serve as an ecological anchor to the future of wilderness preservation.
As Philips explicates, “early ecologists often forgot that they were relying on the
analogy of individual organism as key to the understanding all biological relationships,

23
Robert P. McIntosh 193-202.

183
including numerous relationships that were presumed to be organismal without being
located, bizarrely enough, in particular organisms” (57). The organismic concepts of
unity and superorganism in ecosystem theory were at odds with the scientific
definition of “organism” in modern biology, which refers specifically to an individual
animal or plant, and, at most, plant communities that exhibit some of the
characteristics of organisms.
24
What Philips’s recognition of this false analogy
reveals is not merely that order, stability, and even the concept of ecosystem are
inaccurate metaphors for and misconceptions of organisms or the fundamental reality
of what is a more fragmented and unregulated earth. This problem with
misappropriation, more meticulously, unfolds how ecosystem and the science of
ecology also depends upon the mechanistic paradigm, relying on its reductive
mathematical modeling and systematic observation of the patterns of earth, and
sharing its belief in an overall harmonious, balanced, pacified natural system.
25

24
For discussion on A. G. Tansley, the British ecologist who coined the term “ecosystem,” and his
critique of the ecosystem concept in “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational concepts and Terms” (1935),
see Philips 60-62.

25
Cf. Paul Lawrence Farber 1-5; Merchant The Death of Nature103.

184
The ambivalent place of “order” or “change” cosmology is most strikingly
revealed when both are claimed and implemented as underpinnings to the abuse and
the defense of the natural world, and both associated with the mechanistic and
organismic conception of earth. In his claim for a “planetary history” that addresses
the interactive human-nonhuman relations for instance, Worster identifies two
scientifically-valid but radically opposed Modernist views of nature: “[o]ne side of
science told people that nature was a thing of beauty and integrity, a set of laws that
must be obeyed, an order that must be respected and protected. . . . On the other hand,
science also told laymen about a nature that was power inchoate, power latent and
potential, power waiting for human ingenuity, power that should not be left dormant”
(“Vulnerable” 18). The philosophical and ecological implications of “order” and
“change,” however, are reversed in Merchant’s ecofeminist account of modern
environmental history, which also strives to pinpoint the ideology or cosmology that
presumably denigrated the environment. She writes,

Mechanism, which superseded the organic framework, was based on the
logic that knowledge of the world could be certain and consistent, and that
the laws of nature were imposed on creation by God. The primacy of
organic process gave way to the stability of mathematical laws and identities.

185
Force was external to matter rather than immanent within it. Matter was
corpuscular, passive, and inert; change was simply the rearrangement of
particles as motion was transmitted from one part to another in a casual
nexus. Because it viewed nature as dead and matter as passive, mechanism
could function as subtle sanction for the exploitation and manipulation of
nature and its recourses. (Death 102-103)

In both Worster’s and Merchant’s accounts, the notion of order pertains to the
invariant repetition of the passive, deducible constituent parts of the mechanistic
paradigm rather than an organizational, structural order of internal relations and a
sequence of successive processes that leads to a complex, organic unity, or an order
that existed before chaos. Mechanistic order enacts the view of nature as the grand
design of a creator in which humankind is “apart from” and not restricted to, rather
than “a part of,” and yet has been interpreted as the metaphysical basis to both
environmental protectionism as well as exploitation (Oelschlaeger 316). Worster’s
and Merchant’s remarks, in fact, draw attention to how the economic-based
conservationism as well as aesthetic- and scientific-oriented environmental
preservation both share the modernist faith in a static, cosmologic law. While the
economic-based conservationist notion of nature as commodities is in accord with
modernist view of earth as replaceable, inert parts, preservationist belief that human

186
ingenuity can help restore earth to its original natural system or preserve its natural
cycles holds a modernist humanist position. The reintroduction of the policy of
“prescribed natural fires” to national parks since 1968, for instance, indicates a change
of perspective in preservation ethics from the emphasis of the wild as disorder, as
undesirable interruptions or terminations of a regulated, continuum of order, to
original agents of landscape formation that impair both human-induced
“improvements” and “damages.” Environmental critics of course have questioned
the legitimacy of preservation ethics on the basis of its attempt to manage the wild
through technological control. For them, a nature preserved is a built environment,
and this false nature sustains both a vision of a mechanically regulated earth, and a
scientific-engineered approach to the natural world. And yet, this contest against
scientific arrogance, however, has also been blamed for its hands-off policies, which
presumes not only “nature knows best” but a human-nonhuman dichotomy.
26

If, as Merchant claims, “[t]he organic and mechanical philosophies of nature
cannot . . . be viewed as strict dichotomies” (Death 103), and “[t]he real world is both

26
Thomas R. Vale’s The American Wilderness: Reflections on Nature Protection in the United States
30-31, 111-112. William R. Jordon III’s “Restoration, Community, and Wilderness” 28.

187
orderly and disorderly, predictable and unpredictable, controllable and uncontrollable,
depending on the context and situation” (Reinventing 213), what is at stake, then, is
not simply what represents reality, but how such representation of reality is formulated
and contextualized.
27
“Order” and “disturbance,” both properties immanent to the
natural world, both important metaphors and models of organic and mechanistic
cosmology, and both factors manipulated to justify industrial exploitation and
environmental protection, henceforth, accentuate environmental scholars’
preoccupation with “change.” Their endeavor to challenge the deterministic fixity of
the mechanistic framework, paradoxically, leaves humans in an existential position,
longing for the loss of the sense of continuity and permanence.
28
The urgent
question, for Lopez’s critics and environmental scholars, is to address what
contributes to the predominance of wilderness as “change,” and “change” as
“disorderly order,” as opposed to “orderly disorder,” in a world governed by both
order and change, and to illustrate “the ambiguity of what is meant by ‘protection’”
(Vale 8).

27
Emphasis is added.

28
For the existential position of humans in a world of ecological chaos, see Botkin 188

188
§ Wilderness Preservation: A Nature “out of” Time

Whatever the “the rightness” or “wrongness” of the civilization we continue
to invent, wild nature and national parks represent –– however imperfectly
and however dependent on our continued care –– ecological anchors to our
own and the planet’s past. (133-134)
–– David M. Graber, “Resolute Biocentrism:
The Dilemma of Wilderness in National Parks”

In his exploration of evidence of environmental disintegration and artifacts of
Artic change, Lopez has enacted, in Arctic Dreams, a wild landscape from which the
most erratic, disorderly, and uncontrollable of earth originates and is sustained. With
ecological scientists’ inquiry into the fundamental existence of wild earth, “disorder”
has come to serve as a corrective to the assimilative, totalizing orders, and passes as
the last remnant of wilderness. “Change” and “instabilities,” likewise, manifest the
“epistemological wilderness” that traps humans with environmental scholars’
pondering over the plasticity of the concept of wilderness. “Photosynthesis
continues, as does respiration. But we have ended the thing that has, at least in
modern times, defined nature for us –– its separation from human society,” contends

189
Bill McKibben in The End of Nature (1989) (64).
29
As a nature writer who strives to
document transformations of an environment and of environmental perspectives
across cultures and times, Lopez fabricates a narrative of environmental history that
not only contemplates the meanings of environmental change, but also brings to the
forefront an earth claimed to have lost is original, discernible, spatial structure and
temporal direction. He alludes to natural history, one of the early tributaries of
nature writing, for historical references on the Arctic, consenting to both naturalists’
field observation and impersonal description, as well as their belief in an overarching
order or purpose.
30

In Arctic Dreams, Lopez strives to break free from deterministic causations
implicated in mechanistic conception of earth, finding “change” an inherent key to
“wilderness preservation” –– to the sustaining of an alternative order that legitimizes
the cultural, symbolic, and biophysical dimensions of a “nature” threatened with
extinction and pollution, and running out of time. But while Arctic Dreams is a

29
Italics in the original.

30
In The Background of Ecology, McIntosh notes of the three major question of Western thought
identified by Clarence J. Glacken are “(1) Is the earth purposeful made or designed? (2) Has the
environment influenced humankind? (3) Had humankind changed the earth from its pristine
condition?” (12). The questions, as McIntosh points out, occupy the center of the natural history
tradition. See also, Farber 3.

190
narrative that deliberates the various dynamics of change, this wilderness, defined by
its autonomy, in addition to being a larger cosmic order, is represented and preserved
eminently as a prototype that crystallizes such moment of wildness and anomaly
outside the erosion of time. Lopez’s conceptualization of the indispensability and
indeterminacy of wild earth exalts fragmentation and bio- and cultural diversity,
calling attention to environmental historians’ prescribing of the pristine, the local, and
the indigenous in the conclusion of their narratives.
31
In Arctic Dreams, however,
the conception of “change” remains fixed, ahistorically represented, and solicits
disturbance, degradation, and depletion only when “change” is claimed to be
implemented and enforced by humans, if not, explorers and societies of the West (176).
Commenting on the dissolution of aboriginal cultures of the Arctic, Lopez writes,

In modern times, of course, tribes like the Sadlermiut still disappear with
regularity in different parts of the world, or they are absorbed into Western
culture in a way that obscures or even obliterates their intellectual and
material traditions. These losses seem tragic and consequential, and they
are frustrating because they sometimes occur for reasons of indifference or
greed. They are not like the loss of the Thule. The Thule, on can feel, are
extinct on natural grounds, an event arbitrated by the landscape. The
eclipse of the Sadlermiut, however, seems to diminish us, because we are

31
See Merchant’s Reinventing Eden 240-242, Oelschlaeger 344-346, Botkin 194-197, Worster’s
“Nature and the Disorder of History” 78-83.

191
contemporaries, because we claim to be enlightened about the intrinsic
worth of life, and because we esteem compassion. The Sadlermiut were a
way to understand Southampton Island. A reflection on that harsh
landscape and the evidence of their success there leads to the conclusion
that we lost some wisdom about life with their passing. (190)

Without much attention to Arctic aborigines’ responses to the processes of
modernization and environmental calamities, and to their restoration, preservation,
and re-creation endeavors and ingenuity, Lopez approaches the traditional ecological
knowledge (TEK) of the polar region within the Rousseauian tradition of noble
savages. The Sadlermiut serves as part of the organic counterforce to mechanistic
reductionism, global technocracy, and transnational economy. The value of
environmental records resides in their illumination of the processes and mechanisms
of change undergone by the environment. Ruling time out, however, Lopez
ironically positions “change” both outside of the influence of temporal variables and
the historic trajectory of environmental degradation and protection, postulating the
wild as an authentic, original model that provides moral and political imperatives and
“compelling norms for the history of humankind” which environmental historians,
such as Worster, declare discovery (“Disorder of History” 72). As Pepper argues,

192
“[t]he root metaphor of organicism always does appear as a process, but it is
integration appearing in the process that the organicist works from, and not the
duration of the process” (281).
32
This teleological approach sacrifices the critical
power of Arctic wilderness as a “landscape” of human agency, historical particularities,
and “change,” undermining the temporal processes that appear in different scales,
forms, frequencies, origins, and functions of Arctic wilderness. Although acclaiming
wilderness as a volatile system and as a landscape tempered by human imagination
and desire, Lopez and environmental historians nonetheless retain faith, as naturalists
and organicists in the quest for order in the natural world.
Differentiating itself from historic and/or landscape preservation’s embellishment
of historical structures, natural landscapes, and the so-called built environment, the
discourse of wilderness preservation designates “wilderness” as specifically a nature
preserved from the continuous creation and re-creation of both human and nonhuman
forces (Fitch 13).
33
The purpose of my contention against this distinction is not to

32
Italics, original.

33
The root of historic preservation in the United Stated could be traced to the preservation of Mount
Vernon, the ancestral home of George Washington, by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in 1858.
This society has become the inspiration for organizations such as the National Trust for Historic
Preservation (founded in 1949), and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Even though

193
suggest that “nature” no longer exists, or “wilderness” endures only in the form of
artifacts or landscapes. Rather, such distinction reveals the urgency for
environmental discourse not only to address “nature” as a spatial concept defined by
series of interrelations but also to investigate the temporalities involved in the
sustenance and deterioration of the natural and cultural environment. Marcus Hall,
for instance, notes that “[b]y acknowledging that time makes or breaks landscapes,
restorationists are using history both to identify the need for restoration and to judge
its success. They ask the following questions: what was the state of a site before it
was degraded? What can be learned by the past failures and successes of restoring a
place? How has the endeavor of restoration changed over the last years or decades?”
(3-4). Restorations, preservations, re-creation, in fact, involves the processes of
“going backwards, maintaining the present and shaping the future” (Head 99), and the
debate over protection of the form, the function, or the principle, and the various

wilderness preservationists often insist on a “wilderness” of relatively pristine and unmodified qualities,
Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and “wilderness” protected in national parks, interestingly, are often regarded
as falling within the protective boundaries of historic preservation. For a complete discussion of the
philosophy, history, and approaches of historic preservation, see Fitch, James Marston’s Historic
Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (1995), Norman Tyler’ Historic Preservation:
an Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice (2000) and Robert E. Stipe’s A Richer Heritage:
Historic Preservation in the Twenty-first Century (2003).

194
temporal perspective. These essential questions that dwell on the passage of time as
well as the historical trajectory, implicated in a protection enterprises and narratives,
problematize the conceptualization of “wilderness” as an ideal form, sustained
through and yet fighting against the process of change. Wilderness preservation, as
accurate reproductions, if not originals, of the pristine remnants of nature, manifests a
belief in the organic form.

195
Conclusion:

Organic Aesthetics Revisited

Humans, society, industrialism, capitalism, and Enlightenment’s mechanistic
cosmology have long been singled out as targets for environmentalism and
ecocriticism. In these green movements and discourses that attempt to (re)build a
more harmonious relationship between “nature” and “culture,” the view of nature as
an ideal organic unity that consists of diverse, interactive parts becomes a convenient
tool through which environmentalists and ecocritics forge their critique of the
mechanistic paradigm that reduced nature to its commodities and uses. In a world,
presumably, disenchanted by Western sciences, and in a world where “nature” either
endures as a social artifact or a contaminated, recycled waste, the resurrection of
organic metaphors and principles engenders not only the triumph of environmentalism
over an ideology that sanctions the exploitation of the natural world, but also creates a
renewal of faith in the existence of a nature characterized by its purity, order, harmony,
and stability. The legacy of the organic is also sustained through nature writers’

196
persistent search for an overall cosmic law or order, while scientific precepts and
theories, and scientific methods of identification, documentation, and analysis no
longer offer a universal and steadfast approach and representation of the nonhuman
world. The belief in nature writing as a stable genre, through which nature writers
and environmental critics construct their green ethics and worldviews against a
chaotic and complex world of changes, is, paradoxically, deeply embedded within
nature writers’ beliefs in transparency, the “organic” properties of first-person, and
scientific methods of representation. As a subtle form of natural history, nature
writing is celebrated as a reliable medium that perpetuates and embodies the order and
permanence of the universe, creating an illusion of harmony. As cultural
imaginations invested with memories and reflections, nature writing celebrates a
nature of permanence and laments the loss of familiarity. Its romanticism and
nostalgia, however, are often reprimanded and ridiculed as reactionary works that
stubbornly resist natural and manmade changes of any kind.
The aesthetic and theoretical implications of the notion of change and chaos raise
pertinent questions over the role of nature’s agency, as well as conventional literary

197
and environmental scholars’ preoccupation with organic value and form. Narratives
of organic farmers/writers such as David Mas Masumoto, and ecologists such as
Rachel Carson, or simply nature writers concerned with wilderness preservation, such
as Barry Lopez, provoke fruitful disagreements about the fundamental reality of
“nature.” Drawing on empirical evidence of the ecosystem’s irregularity, instability,
and unpredictability since the nineteen-sixties, scholars of environmental sciences
claim that change, particularities, and contingencies are fundamental to life processes
and environmental sustainability, and are, in fact, creative necessities integral to the
healing and reviving of a global ecosystem. These approaches challenge popular
belief in an orderly, stable, and balanced nature, demanding not only a more critical
understanding of how “change” functions, and how “change” has been articulated in
nature writings and environmental protection projects, but also demanding a more
complex understanding of the dynamics of the organic principle. The organic, now
redefined as a disorderly order, and orderly disorder, challenges popular as well as
theoretical conceptualizations of nature writing as cultural memories suspended in
time. The new organic landscape becomes a site where the forces of change

198
constantly clash with the forces of continuity. In Masumoto’s, Carson’s, as well as
Lopez’s writings, the view of nature, or the experiential reality as permanent or
transient, is defined relatively by human perceptions. Organic landscapes, in fact,
contain a paradoxical marriage between continuity and change, and are constantly
being refashioned by both “natural” as well as “culture,” and are shaped by both
cultural traditions as well as innovations. In addition, the organic evinces a constant
interplay of the self and the collective, and of local, regional, and global processes.
As biologists and nature writer Fu-Shiang Jia ( 賈福 ) maintains, ecology or the Tao
of life is about change –– “change” in the sense of organisms’ adaptation to the
environment (135), and “changes” and “variations” created throughout the processes
of life and the interaction of differences (164). In Tao Te Ching, ancient Chinese
Taoist philosopher, Lao Tzu remarks that “Tao engenders One, One engenders Two,
Two endangers Three, Three engenders ten thousand things” (42). Alluding to Lao
Tzu, Jia contends that “diversity” (bu-tong 不 is “harmony” (da-tong ).
1

1
Da-tong, originally, refers to the ideal world –– a perfect world of equality, fraternity, harmony,
welfare, and justice in Mandarin Chinese. In this context, it suggests universality or harmony. This
sentence can also be translated as “diversity or particularity can be found within universality. The
translation is mine.

199
In response to readers’ critique of his ecocentric position, Taiwanese nature
writer Ren-sho Hsu explains his rationale closing his book, A Tune from Wilderness
( 2002), with a chapter titled, “Girl in the Wild, Deserted Village” ( 女 ). He writes:

Those who heard my lectures, or read my nature writings on nature and
ecology usually come to the idea that I give “other species” more
prominence as I would humans. They have come to such conclusion, I
believe, because they have only heard my talk once, or ready one or two
pieces of my narratives or fragments of them. They fail to realize that the
protection of nature and ecology is, in fact, the protection of ourselves –– of
our future, and our future generations.
…
I conclude this book with “Girl in the Wild, Deserted Village” to
inform my readers that “humans” and “children” still occupy the center of
my imagination and concern. (6-7)

Hsu’ commitment to the environment or green movement is unquestionable. As he
makes clear, nature writers’ and environmentalists’ concerns for wilderness or their
ecocentric positions do not necessarily engender misanthropy. In the same vein, the
environmental stance that celebrates urban spaces, as well as nature where one lives or
works, does not reveal an anti-environmentalist position. Hsu’s remark on
“wilderness” serves as a response to those who frown at enthusiasm for ecocentric

200
theories, resonating with and calling attention to the conception of “nature,” and the
metaphors and values that “Western” nature writers and critics often use to describe,
represent, and protect the nonhuman world.

201
Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1968.

Ableman, Michael G. The Autobiography of an Urban Farm. San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1998.

Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. “Introduction: Environmental
Justice Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy.” Environmental Justice Reader:
Politics, Poetics & Pedagogy. Ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and
Rachel Stein. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Barbour, Michael G.. “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties.” Uncommon
Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of Commonplace: the Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.
Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002.

---. Home Economics: Fourteen Essays by Wendell Berry. New York: North Point
Press, 1987.

Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice : American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Botkin, Daniel. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century.
New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Briggs, John. Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos: Discovering a New Aesthetic of Art,
Science, and Nature. New York: Touchstone, 1992.

202
Bryson, Michael A. Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American
Environment Form the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP,
2001.

---. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

---. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the
U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other
Pre-revolutionary Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. 1962. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.

Christie, Ian. “100 percent Green.” Your Environment 13 (2006): 14-25.

Chronic of Higher Education 20 Oct. 2006: A8-A25.

Coates, Peter. Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998.

Cogwell, Mathew T. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. New York: Nova Science,
2002.

Collis, John Stewart. “The Triumph of the Tree.” The Organic Tradition: An
Anthology of Writings on Organic Farming 1900-1950. Ed. Philip Conford.
Bideford, UK: Green Books, 1988.

203
Collins, George L. and Lowell Sumner. “Northeast Alaska: The Last Great
Wilderness.” Sierra Club Bulletin 38.8 (Oct. 1953): 12-26.

Conford, Philip. The Organic Tradition: An Anthology of Writings on Organic
Farming, 1900-1950. Bideford, UK: Green Books, 1988.

---. The Origins of the Organic Movement. Edinburgh, Great Britain: Floris Books,
2001.

Conlogue, William. Working the Gardens: American Writers and the
Industrialization of Agriculture. Chapel Hill: the University of North
Carolina Press, 2001.

Cronon, William. “Introduction: In Search of Nature.” Uncommon Ground:
Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 1995.

---. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William
Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.

Cuddeford, Vijay. “When Organics Go Mainstream.” Alternative Journal 29.4
(Fall 2003): 14-19.

DeLind, Laura B. “Transforming Organic Agriculture into Industrial Organic
Products: Reconsidering National Organic Standards.” Human Organization
59.2 (Summer 2000): 198-208.

Devall, Bill and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered.
Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1985.

Farber, Paul Lawrence. Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from
Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.

204
Finch, Robert and John Elder, ed. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. College
Edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002.

Fitch, James Marston. Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built
World. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Flowerdew, Bob. The No-way Garden: Getting the Most out of Your Garden for the
Least Amount of Work. London: Kayle Cathie Ltd., 2004.

---. Organic Bible: Successful Gardening the Natural Way. Londond: Kayle Cathie
1998.

Fox, Stephen. The American Conversation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.

Fritzell, Peter A. Nature Writing and America: Essays Upon a Cultural Type.
Ames: Iowa State UP, 1990.

Fukuoka, Masanobu. The Natural Way of Farming: Theory and Practice of Green
Philosophy. Trans. Frederic P. Metreaud. Tokyo: Japan Publications, 1985.

---. The One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming. 1978. Trans.
Chris Pearce, Tsune Kurosawa, and Larry Korn. New York: Bantam Books,
1985.

Garcia-Johnson, Ronie. Exporting Environmentalism: U.S. Multinational Chemical
Corporations in Brazil and Mexico. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004.

Gifford, Terry. Pastoral: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 1999.

205
Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Cold War, Silent Spring: The Trope of War in Modern
Environmentalism.” And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Carson's
Silent Spring. Ed. Craig Waddell. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois UP, 2000.

---. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” The
Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glofelty
and Harold Fromm. Athens: the University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Goldberg, Jonah. “Ugh, Wilderness! The Horror of ‘Anwr,’ the American Elite’s
Favorite Hellhole.” National Review (August 6 2001): 27-31.

Graber, David M.. “Resolute Biocentrism: the Dilemma of Wilderness in National
Parks.” Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction.
Ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995.

Groves, Martha. “The Good Earth: Three California Farmers Write Books on the
Pain and Joy Involved in Trying to Salvage Family Farming.” Los Angeles
Times 12 Dec. 1998: 1.

Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman,
2000.

Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California.
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004.

Hall, Marcus. Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature
and Science. V ol. Cornell University Press. Ithaca, 1990.

206
---. “Introduction: Complex Dynamics and Literature and Science.” Chaos and
Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Ed. N. Katherine
Hayles. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Hays, Samuel. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the
United States, 1955-1985. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Head, Lesley. Cultural Landscape and Environmental Change. London: Arnold, a
Member of the Hodder Headline Group, 2000.

Heise, Ursula. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism.” PMLA 121.2 (2006):
503-16.

Hoagland, Edward. “From the Land Where Polar Bears Fly.” The New York Times
Book Review 16 Feb. 1986: 1.

Howard, Albert. Introduction. The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the
Actions of Worms with Observations on Their Habits. 1881. By Charles
Darwin. London: Farber and Narber Limited, 1945.

Hsu, Ren-sho. “Girl in the Wild, Deserted Village.” A Tune from the Wilderness.
Taipei: Yuan-Liou, 2003.
女北流 2002

Ingerson, Alice E. “At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A
Multicultural Anthology.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 76.2 (June 2001):
255-56.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1801. New York: Penguin,
1987.

Jia, Fu-xiang. The Orbiting Planets. Taipei: Unitas Publishing Co, 2003.
賈福度北聯 2003.

207
Jones, Lu Ann, and Nacy Grey Osterud. “Breaking New Ground: Oral History and
Agricultural History.” The Journal of American History 76.2 (Sept. 1989):
551-64.

Jordan III, William R.. “Restoration, Community, and Wilderness.” Restoring
Nature: Perspective fro the Social Sciences and Humanities. Ed. Paul H.
Gobster and R. Bruce Hull. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times.” The New York Times 12 Feb. 12 1986:
C21.

Karliner, Joshua. The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of
Globalization. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997.

Kaye, Roger. Last Great Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge. Fairbanks: the University of Alaska Press, 2006.

Keller, David R. and Frank B. Golley. “Introduction: Ecology as a Science of
Synthesis.” The Philosophy of Ecology from Science to Synthesis. Athens,
Georgia: the University of Georgia Press, 2000.

King, Franklin, H. Farmers of Forty Centuries; or, Permanent Agriculture in China,
Korea, and Japan. Madison: Wis.: Mrs. F.H. King, 1911.

Klonsky, Karen and Laura Tourte. “Organic Agricultural Production in the United
States: Debates and Directions.” American Journal of Agricultural
Economics 80.5 (Dec. 1998): 1113-18.

Kollin, Susan. “The Wild, Wild North: Nature Writing, Nationalist Ecologies, and
Alaska.” American Literary History 12.1/2 (spring - summer, 2000): 41-78.

Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology
of Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

208
Kumin, Maxine. “The Ground beneath Our Feet.” The New York Times Book
Review 6 Aug. 1995: 13.

Lampkin, Nicolas H.. “Organic Farming: Sustainable Agriculture in Practice.” The
Economics of Organic Farming: an International Perspective. Ed. N.H.
Lampkin and S. Padel. Wallingford, England: Cab International, 1994.

Lease, Gary. “Introduction: Nature Under Fire.” Reinventing Nature?: Responses
to Postmodern Deconstruction. Ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease.
Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995.

Lewis, Martin W. Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

Lewis, Pierce F.. “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the
American Scene.” The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical
Essays. Ed. D. W. Meinig. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Limerick, Patricia N. “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern
Landscape. [Review].” The Western Historical Quarterly 18.1 (Jan. 1987):
91-92.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.
New York: Bantam Books, 1986.

Love, Glen. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology and the Environment.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

209
Massingham, H. J. “Reverence for God’s Law.” The Organic Tradition: An
Anthology of Writings on Organic Farming, 1900-1950. Ed. Philip Conford.
Bideford, UK: Green Books, 1988.

Masumoto, David Mas. Country Voices: The Oral History of a Japanese American
Family Farm Community. Del Rey, California: Inaka Countryside
Publications, 1987.

---. Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.

---. Four Seasons and Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2004.

---. Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1998.

---. Letters to the Valley: A Harvest Memories. Berkeley, California: Heyday
Books, 2004.

McCarrison, Robert. “The Wheel of Health.” The Organic Tradition: An
Anthology of Writings on Organic Farming, 1900-1950. Ed. Philip Conford.
Bideford, UK: Green Books, 1988.

McEachern, Morven G. and Joyce Willock. “Producers and Consumers of Organic
Meat: A Focus on Attitudes and Motivations.” British Food Journal 106.7
(2004): 534-552.

McIntosh, Robert P.. The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. 1989. New York: Anchor Books, 1999.

210
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and Scientific Revolution.
San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1980.

---. “Earthcare.” Environment 23.3 (June 1981): 6-13, 38-40.

---, ed. Green Versus Gold: Sources in California’ s Environmental History.
Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 1998.

---. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2003.

Merrill, Margaret C.. Eco-Agriculture: A Review of its History and Philosophy.
Biological Agriculture and Horticulture 1.3(1981): 181-120.

Mill, John Stuart. “Nature.” Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and
Application. Ed. Louis P. Pojman. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomas
Learning, 2001.

Muir, John. Travels in Alaska. 1915. Fwd. John Haines. San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1988.

Myers, Adrian. Organic Futures: the Case for Organic Farming. Foxhole,
England: Green
Books, 2005.

Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of Ecosophy. Trans.
David Rothenberd. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

---. “Ecosophy T: Deep Versus Shallow Ecology.” Environmental Ethics: Readings
in Theory and Application. Ed. Louis P. Pojman. Belmont, California:
Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2001.

211
---. “The Shallow and Deep, Long-Range Ecological Movement.” Environmental
Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. Ed. Louis P. Pojman. Belmont,
California: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2001.

Nash, Henry Roderick. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics.
Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

---. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

National Organic Foods Production Act. Pub. L. 101-624. 28. Nov. 1990. Stat.
3935.

Nelson, Daniel. Northern Landscapes: The Struggles for Wilderness Alaska.
Washington, D.C.: Resource for the Future, 2004.

Norwood, Vera L. “The Nature of Knowing: Rachel Carson and the American
Environment.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12.4 (1987).

Nothbourne, Christopher James. Look to the Land. 1940. Hillsdale, N.Y.: Sophia
Perennis, 2006.

Finch, Robert and John Elder, ed. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York:
W. W. Norton and Company, 2002.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J. A. Simpson and Edmund S. Weiner. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, USA, 1989.

Pepper, Stephen C. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence. Los Angeles and
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948.

212
Philips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Pojman, Louis P. ed. “Does Nature Have Intrinsic Value? Biocentric and
Ecocentric Ethics and Deep Ecology.” Environmental Ethics: Readings in
Theory and Application. Belmont, California: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning,
2001.

Proctor, James D. “Whose Nature?” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human
Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1995.

“Recommended Reading.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glofelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: the University
of Georgia Press, 1996.

Reed, T.V .. “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism.” The Environmental
Justice Reader. Ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein.
Tucson: the University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Rolston III, Holmes. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural
World. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988.

---. “Naturalizing Values: Organicism and Species.” Environmental Ethics:
Readings in Theory and Application. Ed. Louis P. Pojman. Belmont,
California: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2001.

Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The
Ecocriticism Reader. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens,
Georgia: the University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Sarver, Stephanie L. Uneven Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

213
Scheese, Don. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Scofield, A. M.. Editorial. “Organic Farming –– The Origin of the Name.”
Biological Agriculture and Horticulture 4(1986): 1-5.

Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry David Thoreau,
Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez. Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, 1992.

Solomon, Barry D. and Russell Lee. “Emissions Trading Systems and
Environmental Justice.” Environment 42.8(): 32-45.

Soule, Michael E.. “The Social Siege of Nature.” Reinventing Nature?: Responses
to Postmodern Deconstruction. Ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease.
Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1995.

Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the
Environment. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Stipe, Robert E., ed. A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-first
Century. Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Stewart, Frank. A Natural History of Nature Writing. Washington, D.C.: Island
Press, 1995.

Summer, David Thomas. “‘That Could Happen’: Nature Writing, the Nature Fakers,
and a Rhetoric of Assent.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 12.2 (Summer 2005).

214
Tartar, Jim. “Some Live More Downstream Than Others: Cancer, Gender, and
Environmental Justice.” The Environmental Justice Reader. Ed. Joni
Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. Tucson: the University of
Arizona Press, 2002.

Tellenback, Hubertus and Bin Kimura. “The Japanese Concept of Nature.” Nature
in Asian Traditions of Thought. Ed. Baird Callicott and Roget T. Ames.
New York: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Thomashow, Mitchell. Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.

Thompson, Gray D.. “Consumer Demand for Organic Foods: What We Know and
What We Need to Know.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 80.5
(December 1998): 1113-18.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walking. New York: HaperCollins Publishers, 1994.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Desert and Ice: Ambivalent Aesthetics.” Landscape, Natural Beauty
and the Arts. Ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1993.

---. Escapism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

---. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1977.

---. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

Tyler, Norman. Historic Preservation: an Introduction to Its History, Principles, and
Practice. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

215
United States. Dept. of Agriculture National Organic Standards Board. Definition
of Organic. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1995.

Vale, Thomas R. The American Wilderness: Reflections on Nature Protection in the
United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.

VanDeVeer, Donald and Christine Pierce. “An Introduction to Ethical Theory.”
Environmental Ethics and Policy Book. Belmont, California: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, 1994.

van Wyck, Peter C. Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing
Human Subject. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Verhoog, Henk, Mirjam Matze, Edith Lammerts Van Bueren and Ton Baars. “The
Role of the Concept of the Natural (Naturalness) in Organic Farming.”
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16 (2003): 29-49.

Waddell, Craig. “The Reception of Silent Spring: An Introduction.” And No Birds
Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Carson's Silent Spring. Ed. Craig Waddell.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

Wallace, Kathleen R. and Karla Armbruster. “Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature
Writing, and Where To?” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries
of Ecocriticism. Ed. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001.

Ward, Kennan. The Last Wilderness: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. California:
WildLight Press Inc., 2001.

Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.

216
White Jr., Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold
Fromm. Athens, Georgia: the University of Georgia Press, 1996.

White, Richard. “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’
Work and Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in
Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.

“Wilderness.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2
nd
ed. 1989.

The Wilderness Act. Pub. L. 88-577. 3. Sept. 1964. Stat. 78.890.

Wilkinson, C. F.. “The Science and Politics of Pesticides.” Silent Spring Revisited.
Ed. Gino J. Marco, Robert M. Hollingworth, and William Durham.
Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1987.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatoo and Windus,
1973.

---. “Nature.” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society; Revised Edition.
New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

---. “Organic.” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York:
Oxford UP, 1976.

---. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso Books,
1980.

Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1987.

Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1977.

217
---. “Nature and the Disorder of History.” Reinventing Nature? Responses to
Postmodern Deconstruction. Ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease.
Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995.

---. “The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History.” The Ends of Earth:
Perspectives on Modern Environmental History. Ed. Donald Worster.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

---. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Wrentch, G. T.. A Hunza Trip with Dr. Bernard Jensen. San Marcos, CA: Bernard
Jensen International, 1990.

---. The Wheel of Health: The Source of Long Life and Health Among the Hunza.
1938. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, INC., 2006.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Text with a view: turn of the century literature and the invention of the postcard

PDF

The translation of American comic strips in pre-World War II Japan and the origins of contemporary narrative manga

PDF

Blue‐collar, white‐collar: Raymond Carver's and John Cheever's versions of the American (anti) pastoral (a critical study); and, Beyond the lights and other stories (a short story collection)

PDF

Effects of economic incentives on creative project-based networks: communication, collaboration and change in the American film industry, 1998-2010

PDF

Driving change: copyright, car modding, and the right to repair in the digital age

Asset Metadata

Creator Chou, Shiuh-huah Serena (author)

Core Title The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 04/10/2009

Defense Date 01/29/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag deep ecology,nature writing,OAI-PMH Harvest,organic agriculture,Wilderness

Language English

Advisor Norindr, Panivong (committee chair), Cheung, Dominic (committee member), Handley, William R. (committee member)

Creator Email shiuhhuc@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m365

Unique identifier UC1213955

Identifier etd-Chou-20070410 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-398631 (legacy record id),usctheses-m365 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Chou-20070410.pdf

Dmrecord 398631

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Chou, Shiuh-huah Serena

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu