Robert Socolow says similarly:
The conservationists have separate languages for talking to one another, to politicians, and to their avowed opponents. Except when they talk to one another (and perhaps even then) they refrain all too often from articulating what really matters to them.15
Clearly the problem of deictic discourse comes to the fore here, a problem that has been noted by Laurence Tribe and John Rodman as well.16 What is most important is the manner of its emergence. It is not a problem here of a certain sort of speaking in search of suitable subjects or in search of a general justification of itself. Rather it is the experience of something in its own right, of nature in its primeval character, that seeks appropriate testimony in our speaking. If such speaking comes to pass, it breaks the continuity between the domination and respect of nature. Respect no longer springs from enlightened self-interest but is the recognition of something other in its own right. As Stone and Socolow point out, the technological universe is not hospitable to the language of such acknowledgment. Technology constantly threatens to undermine or crowd out deictic discourse of wilderness. To the extent that the latter is eloquent at all, it is so not by the grace or familiarity of its idiom but by the strength of the thing that comes to the fore in it. Nothing in this country, I believe, possesses similarly universal eloquence.17 Hence nothing is as likely to awaken again the exchange of deictic discourse in the public forum and then the practice of engagment which is the ground and end of such speaking. Given that in deictic discourse of nature the identity of the subject is evident, we are able to identify certain ways of speaking about nature as failures of deictic discourse where the mode of speaking and reasoning becomes, at the last moment, subvertible by technology.
The failures, so one may conjecture, arise from attempts to gain some distance from the immediacy of nature; they stem from an effort to be disburdened of the need for testimony and appeal and from a desire to refer instead to some general value.18 Reference to such a value suggests a justification for one’s devotion to nature, and the relative abstractness and generality of the value gives the putative justification an impersonal, objective air. Thus one might defend wild nature in the name of formal characteristics such as complexity or diversity and contrast such values with monocultures in agriculture and ecological impoverishment through the loss of species.19 But one would then have to welcome the transformation of desert lands into subdivisions since by any measure of complexity the latter surpass the former. More radically, one can question the value of complexity itself. Duane Elgin, clearly an advocate of the integrity of nature, tends to mention complexity in conjunction with clutter and urges us to reduce both in our lives.20 Do more substantive values such as beauty, stability, and integrity afford a justification for the defense of nature and perhaps even criteria for deciding what parts and tendencies in nature should be favored?21 The traditional notion of beauty has so suffered from the corrosive effects of the Enlightenment and technology that it is surely too tattered and tom to provide guidance. Rather than assuming that nature can be judged and defended in the name of beauty, one should hope to learn again what beauty is from the splendor of pristine nature. Stability and integrity, on the other hand, if formalized into a concept of homeostasis, are so flexible as to permit the justification of anything and everything.22
I am sure that defenders of nature, when faced with such objections, would not simply cling to their values and abandon nature, conceding that the indefensible should not be defended. Surely they would reply that the objections spring from a misunderstanding, that complexity is meant to be a natural richness, that beauty lies in the harmony of an untouched landscape, etc. There might accordingly be attempts to render the guiding values more precise so that they will be immune to counterexamples or trivialization. But that is simply to move the general and abstract characterizations of nature closer to the immediate and grounding experience of wilderness. As long as an explicit distance is maintained, however, between one’s characterization and one’s experience of nature, the former will remain vulnerable to a kind of subversion that the advocates of nature are unable to avert from their explicit position. Discourse of nature can hope finally to be successful only if it abandons the conceptual outposts and bulwarks and allows nature to speak directly and fully in one’s words. What will come to pass in such a speaking? It may tell us this:
I recall mornings, at the crack of dawn, on the Gualala River when we would walk up along one or another of the long gravel bars. As we approached the water in the gathering light, we sometimes perceived all up and down the length of a pool, such as Miner’s Bend, the breaking and swirling of a fresh run of steelhead trout. The day before there may have been only occasional fish showing, the vestigial fish, darkened from having already spent some days in fresh water. But on this morning the lower river is alive with new, silvery trout, fresh from the sea. On such a morning as this there is a temptation to dissipate one’s attention over too many fish and too much water; one makes a cast above where a broad back has just shown. But even as the drift begins there is a resounding smack on the smooth surface twenty feet upstream. Then two swirls appear forty feet below. Meanwhile your partner clear down at the tail of the slick is backing out of the river, his rod nodding in sweeping arcs, and a gleaming ten-pounder ascends from the water almost into the branches of that overhanging pine on the back opposite him. It is a glorious thing to know the pool is alive with these glancing, diving, finning fish. But at such moments it is well to make an offering in one’s heart to the still hour in the redwoods ascending into the sky; and to fish in one place, for one fish at a time. On such mornings, too, one may even catch nothing at all.23
But not everyone has Henry Bugbee’s poetical gift and his ease of moving between poetry and philosophy. Inept and unschooled attempts at poetry cause embarrassment and sometimes injury to what the poem was meant to present. Such injuries can happen even when the poem is good but the conditions of response are bad. As noted in the previous chapter, deictic discourse extends from the poetical to the political. In political discourse we speak in farther or closer approximation to what finally moves us. It is not always necessary or wise to speak poetically. Speaking by way of approximation is not only warranted by prudence but also by the kinship of significant things. The pool by Miner’s Bend on the Gualala River is not unlike many other stretches of rivers in the West, and Western trout streams share certain traits with Eastern streams, untouched streams have characteristics in common with solitary mountains, the splendors of nature are akin to those of music. These generic relations are apparent also in Bugbee’s account. Clearly, as we consider and present the traits of wider kinships, our language will become more general. Degrees of generality are natural to deictic discourse. They become detrimental only when generality is arrested at a certain point and congealed into an opaque value. The rule of approximation, on the other hand, is helpful and even indispensable when it is understood that deictic discourse of whatever degree of generality must remain translucent to the concrete things and practices that finally ground and animate such discourse. That significant things and practices are akin to one another is an ultimate given as is each of those things. These kinships are, as we will see in Chapter 25, an important condition for the reform of technology.
Having learned from wilderness and from poetry that is commensurate with it, we must now speak approximately and recollectively about the lessons that are to be drawn from these experiences for a principled reform of technology. This is deictic discourse in the philosophical mode, one that does not testify or appeal directly, as do the poetical and political modes, but reflects on the conditions that eclipse or disclose matters of ultimate concern and on the corresponding possibilities of poetical and political language. Deictic discourse of the philosophical kind is metapoetical and metapolitical. It is at a further remove from what finally matters and therefore in greater danger of becoming uprooted. Still, like poetical and political language, it takes
its warrant from the ultimately significant things. It moves at a higher level of reflection and abstraction because it is only here that crucial, perhaps mortal, dangers to ultimate significance become accessible. Philosophical reflection can hope to clear the ground for poetry and politics and thereby for focal things and practices.
We can begin these reflections and preparations by taking up again and continuing the story of the conquest of the North American continent from a slightly different but revealing angle. Leo Marx has traced the literary response, the deictic testimony, as we might say, to the incursion of technology into the natural landscape. In particular he has examined the attempts to reconcile the machine and the garden. He has looked at biographies, fiction, and other literary documents from the beginning of the republic to the first half of this century. He finally puts it this way, speaking of the protagonists in American fiction who have attempted to reconcile the machine with the garden:
. . . in the end the American hero is either dead or totally alienated from society, alone and powerless, like the evicted shepherd of Virgil’s eclogue. And if, at the same time, he pays tribute to the image of a green landscape, it is likely to be ironic and bitter.24
I think the analysis of technology which departs from the promise of technology and outlines technology in terms of the device paradigm opens up a more hopeful view. But Leo Marx’s findings provide a helpful backdrop.
In Marx’s account the symbol of technology is the railroad and the locomotive which ruthlessly invade the countryside with their tracks, noise, and disruption. This view of the matter is no longer adequate for two reasons. Technology is more comprehensive and insinuating than the symbol of the locomotive has it. The machinery of technology can still be obtrusive and disruptive, as in strip mining or highway construction. But technology shapes our lives mostly where its machinery is concealed and only its commodities are apparent. An affluent suburb is seemingly the incarnation of the pastoral garden that Marx’s authors see threatened by the incursion of the machine. And yet such a suburb is technological through and through. It is a pretty display of commodities resting on a concealed machinery. There is warmth, food, cleanliness, entertainment, lawns, shrubs, and flowers, all of it procured by underground utilities, cables, station wagons, chemical fertilizers and weed killers, riding lawn mowers, seed tapes, and underground sprinklers. The advanced technological setting is characterized not by the violence of machinery but by the disengagement and distraction of commodities.
The second way in which the relation of nature and technology has changed regards a subtle but important shift of balance. The authors in Marx’s book still see nature as the primary context. To be sure, technology defaces and threatens to destroy it. But they see the machine in the garden and not the other way round. If we recognize the pervasive and often stealthily transformative power of technology, we come to see technology as the new orthodoxy, the dominant character of reality. Nature in its pristine state now consists of islands in an ocean of technology. This shift changes the nature of wild areas. They now stand out as strictly extraordinary and thus as a roadless challenge to the ordinary ways of reality. One might take a negative and defeatist view of this shift of balance. “The ultimate problem lies in the fact,” Rodman says, now quoting Aldo Leopold, “that ‘the preservation of some tag-ends of wilderness, as museum pieces’ means that ‘all conservation of wilderness is self-defeating.’”25 Certainly, the wilderness as the overpowering and inscrutable setting within which we erect enclosures of civilization is a thing of the past, at least on this continent. Any attempt to treat what is left wild as though it were original wilderness will suffer defeat.
Though it seems at first that to liken wilderness areas to museum pieces is to make a devastating point, one should remember that museums can be salutary places where we are invited to a calm and reverent beholding of great works of art. Such contemplation can call us away from distraction and renew our vigor and confidence.26 Still, museum pieces have been deracinated and are dead. We will admire a late medieval Pietà, but we will not, in a museum, get down on our knees and share her seven sorrows. Museum pieces are essentially dead even when skillful display gives them a splendor they did not have in their original surrounding. In this sense, of course, the wilderness is not a museum exhibit. It lives and endures where it has existed from time immemorial. Its roots are planted in its native soil. It must be granted however, that there is a gradation between the fullness of wild life and the tokens of what the world was once like.27 There is a critical size below which an area is a sample rather than a thing in its own right. How are we to define that size? I think a clue lies in the profound and untutored excitement that one feels at the sight of big game in the wild. It is not just the mass and power of a bear or an elk that move us but the experience of seeing the expanse and fertility of the land focused in such a creature. In big game the land shows what it can bring forth, sustain, and shelter. And, obviously, the land in its wildness has been maimed and crippled past a critical point when it can no longer support mountain lions, for instance.28
But even where wild areas have retained this vitality, or perhaps precisely when they have retained it, they stand out sharply from the encompassing universe of technology where whatever comes forth is decidedly a human production. The way in which wilderness is now wholly other than technological civilization reminds one of the pretechnological relationship between the sacred and the profane.29 The shift of balance between nature and culture that was mentioned above can now be seen as an inversion. Whereas in the mythic experience the erection of a sanctuary established a cosmos and habitat in the chaos of wilderness, the wilderness now appears as a sacred place in the disorientation and distraction of the encompassing technology.30 This inversion, I think, is striking. Before I proceed to its explication, I need to make a point of caution. I do not propose that we transfer the traditional notions of divinity and worship from religion to nature. These concepts and their associated practices have generally become so desiccated that little would be gained in shifting them from one area to another. Rather, I think, it is now a matter of learning again from the ground up what it is to recognize something as other and greater than ourselves and to let something be in its own splendor rather than procuring it for our use. Nor do I claim that pristine nature is the only or the final realm where we can again encounter the divine and learn reverence. I am only saying that in this country the wilderness presents perhaps the clearest beginning.
When we come to know the wilderness, we learn something about technology and ourselves as well. To begin, let us consider a phrase that belonged to the standard rhetoric of the promise of technology when that promise was made most loudly in the middle of the nineteenth century.31 Technology, so it was said, would annihilate time and space.32 This was meant, of course, in the impatient spirit of liberation from the constraints of distances and from the burden of having to wait. The annihilation of time and space, that was the hope, would procure the instantaneous and ubiquitous availability of the riches of the world. Today we are becoming aware of the irony of a universe where we have no time and no place. There is still occasionally, as pointed out at the beginning of Chapter 13, exuberance at the thought of having escaped the traditional limits of time and space. But there is growing evidence, considered in Chapter 18, that the annihilation of time and space has been ironically successful in creating emptiness at the center of our lives.
In the wilderness, time and space are restored to us. The time of openness and activity begins with the rising sun which also discloses to us the lay of the land, the four directions of the compass.33 The sun outlines the time from the first dawn to the brightness of noon and the dusk of night. It assigns our activities their place, rising, breaking camp, hiking, resting, going on, and settling down for the night. The wilderness is also eminently spatial. It is, to begin with, clearly bounded. Though the legal wilderness boundaries are sometimes arbitrarily drawn from an ecological point of view and tho
ugh there is usually wild country on either side of the line, the boundary nonetheless divides the region where technology is always ready to rearrange matters for more convenient use from the wild area which changes of its own accord in the rhythm of the seasons and at the imperceptible pace of geological development. It is an area that does not speak of human deeds but is eloquent in its own right.34 Like a temple or a holy precinct, the wilderness is encircled and marked off from the ordinary realm of technology.35 To enter it, we must cross the threshold at the trailhead where we leave the motorized conveniences of our normal lives behind. Once we have entered the wilderness, we take in and measure its space step-by-step. A mountain is not just a pretty backdrop for our eyes or an obstacle to be skirted or overwhelmed by the highway; it is the majestic rise and elevation of the land to which we pay tribute in the exertion of our legs and lungs and in which we share when our gaze can take in the expanse of the land and when we feel the cooler winds that blow about the peaks. Arriving at the campsite, we settle down at a place that is favored with a dry and level spot, sheltered from the winds, with water nearby. We set up the tent to mark, at least for a time, the center of the wilderness; we establish an abode that constitutes a domestic circle within the precinct of the wilderness.36
The wilderness, finally, is eminently deep. A thing is deep if all or most of its physically discernible features are finally significant. Technology takes a shallow view of things and so begins their conversion into resources or devices. Once we look technologically at a pretechnological fireplace, we split off from the fullness of its features the function of procuring warmth as solely and finally significant. All other features are then considered part of the machinery and, being subject to the law of efficiency, become dependent and endlessly changeable. The technological view of a meal reveals an aggregate of tastes, textures, and nutritive features. They alone retain stable significance. How they come to be constituted and placed on the table is determined by the requirements of instantaneity, ubiquity, safety, and ease. When we look at a tree accordingly, we see so much lumber or cellulose fiber; the needles, branches, the bark, and the roots are waste. Rock is 5 percent metal and the rest is spoils. An animal is seen as a machine that produces so much meat. Whichever of its functions fails to serve that purpose is indifferent or bothersome.37 In the wilderness, however, we let things be in the fullness of their dimensions, and so they are more profoundly alive and eloquent.38 And as said before, the depth and force of the wilderness come to be focused before us when we see a bear, in its massive and rolling gait, foraging for tubers in the valley bottom, or a hawk circling high in the thermal updrafts, scanning the open slopes for ground squirrels.
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