Untapped Potential: Language and Method in the Environmental Debate

Ecological consciousness and concern for the integral relationship of natural and manmade

environments has risen dramatically since the 19th century, with concern in these areas impacting not

only science and public policy, but also cultural values and output around the world. As global

environmental issues have become more important, two opposing sides have emerged in this drama:

“green” proponents seeking ecological harmony and environmental justice, and actors seeking economic

development and financial gain through exploitation (“wise” or “otherwise”) of natural resources. These

two sides have employed a variety of rhetoric in their battles to frame their conceptions of humanity’s

relationship to the environment. These conceptions have been developed with various audiences in mind

—from the popular to the academic, from the poetic to the pragmatic, from the lay to the scientific. That

the opposing views are not always as antagonistic as is often believed—each with similar-but-different

aims that include the enablement of more constructive, productive and sustainable human and natural

environments—has led to interestingly overlapping language and terminology. A complete review of this

language and terminology since the emergence of environmental concerns in the 19th century is beyond

the scope of this paper, and so I shall look briefly at a few highlights.

Beginning (broadly) with the Romantic poets and the Transcendental writers in the U.S, a certain

“environmental consciousness” began to peek through the lines of American writing and commentary.

“Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf”

wrote Emerson in Nature in 1836. The tradition of the nature writer and poet, exemplified by Thoreau

and Muir and extending into the 20th century, kept the flame of this nascent environmental consciousness

alive—“The extraordinary patience of things! / This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban

houses—how beautiful when we first beheld it / Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean

cliffs,” wrote a modernizing environmental poet, Robinson Jeffers, in “Carmel Point” in the mid 20th

century. It was not until the 1960s and beyond, however, that the environmental activists (and their

opponents) really gained momentum, and began to require practical, convincing, science-based rhetoric

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to achieve their aims. One key term that emerged during this period is still commonly used today:

stewardship. The word captures the very essence of environmental concern and humanity’s responsibility

as the world’s supremely cognizant, profoundly moral/ethical being—in a word, the on-the-ground

“manager” of world environments. The word has roots going back as far as the Bible, and has been used

both by greens in support of protective, eco-friendly policies, and by exploitationists who believe that

earth’s natural resources can and should be used by humans within a free-market model of existence—

ostensibly prudently, and in any case these people want to “let [humanity] rule…over all the wild

animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground”—Gen. 1:26.

This environmental war of words continues, and the rhetorical strategies employed by the

combatants has evolved, as environmental crises have erupted, and as the range of impacted peoples

worldwide has grown. In the modern day the new eco-consciousness(es), at once practical and academic

(and often still poetic), are arbiters of the “early stages of what promises to be the next major transition in

environmental policy as policymakers, business leaders, and citizens seek to establish sustainability as a

concept and set of practices that can help to reconcile and integrate what have often been clashing

environmental, economic, and social values” (Kraft 17). Because of this more expansive outlook, the

current discourse in environmental studies and policies has taken unique new turns.

In “The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction in the 1980s,” Cynthia Deitering refers

to Martin Heidegger’s conception of the “standing reserve” in nature. Heidegger outlined a conception of

technology as instrumental and causal, both of which enable a process of revelation in which nature (by

way of technology) exposes (reveals, unconceals) its fruits for humanity. Thus, humanity has an overall

control of the “standing reserves” housed in nature, and, further, the revelation inherent in the process of

exploitation of natural resources is an essential truth in human existence. Although Deitering dismisses

Heidegger’s view in favor of a view of nature as now comprising “used up” waste and toxic leavings

(199), Heidegger’s conception of resources in reserve, of potential, and of truth through revelation is

echoed in Lawrence Buell’s recent eco-criticism writing. Buells posits that an “environmental

unconscious” can be viewed as “embeddedness in spatio-physical context…constitutive of personal and

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social identity” (24) and as “potential: as a residual capacity…to awake to fuller apprehension of

physical environment and one’s interdependence with it” (22).

Buell’s discussion of “environmental awakening—retrievals of physical environment from

dormancy to salience,” mirror Heidegger’s view, albeit in a new age, with a new set of expectations and

conditions. For Heidegger, there existed a dormant “reserve” that awaited “revelation” (physically, as

natural resources, and metaphorically, as truth) by way of technology, which was ultimately to be

exploited by humanity. This overall process is by no means completely salutary (that is, exploitation of

natural resources is not always beneficial or constructive), and thus some would probably condemn

Heidegger’s views as exploitative. More importantly, however, Heidegger recognized that humans didn’t

see the complete picture of the environment around them, and tended to employ technology to delimit

and define their views. In something of an extension on this take on environmental “tunnel vision,” Buell

decries humanity’s “habitually foreshortened environmental perception” (18), and strikes in his work

upon the revelation that humans exhibit a tendency to either repress or exaggerate (but not view

realistically or genuinely obligingly) their view of the environment, in their “business-as-usual”

awareness of the world around them (24). Coursing through all of this human perception is the discourse

that condition or creates humanity’s unconscious environmental understanding and orientation within

spaces (natural and manmade).

For Buell, the ultimate hope is not so different than Heidegger’s: recognition of the “limiting

condition of…chronic perceptual underactivation” (Buell 22) and a “bringing to awareness, and then to

articulation, of all that is to be noticed and expressed” (Buell 22). In short, awareness of every

connecting tissue “within and beyond,” “noticed and unnoticed” (Buell 25) in natural and manmade

environments—a vast unused/underused standing reserve of “emotional/mental orientation and

expression” (Buell 26), that will yield a revelation of environmental situatedness and relation—in effect,

of truth—and of human disposition and awarenes within that truth. It is the next stage(s) of ecological

discourse, cultural studies , and practical criticism that will unleash this potential, enlarge human

conceptions of nature and the environment, and reveal what is now hidden behind walls of ignorance

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which, by way of exploration (and, unavoidably, exploitation) will reconnect humans to essential truths

of their existence.

Bibliography

Buell, Lawrence, “Environmental Imagination Environmental Unconscious,” in Writing for an

Endangered World: Literature, Culture, & Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Harvard UP, 2001.

Deitering, Cynthia, “The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s,” in The

Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty, ed. University of Georgia

Press, 1996.

Kraft, Michael E. “U.S. Environmental Policy and Politics: From the 1960s to the 1990s,” Journal of

Policy History - Volume 12, Number 1, 2000, pp. 17-42. Penn State UP.

Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Perennial, 1982.