The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring

Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s)

Margarita Estévez-Saá, María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia, Margarita Estévez-Saá, María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429535703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book applies ecofeminist ethics to the realm of aesthetics, offering instances of how alternative configurations of the self, of nature and of non-human animals can go hand in hand with different and viable experiences and visions of environmental welfare.

Preceded by an insightful introduction on the history of ecofeminism and of ecofeminist literary criticism, the chapters included in the volume illustrate the continuing theoretical influence of seminal ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant, Rosemary Ruether, Karen Warren, Val Plumwood, as well as an awareness of more recent trends in ecofeminist formulations such as those proposed by Greta Gaard, Serenella Iovino, or Vernon Gras. The book also includes instances of contemporary nature writing such as the text by Irish poet Grace Wells, as well as case studies of the application of ecofeminist tenets in contemporary poetry and fiction written by both men and women. As the contributors demonstrate, contemporary writers are currently deploying a sound interest in the envisioning of alternative visions of healthy and ethical relationships between the human self and the natural environment.

This book will be of interest to those researching the use of language for posthumanist ethics, the deconstruction of gender dichotomies and the ethics of care and environmental justice, as well as to those studying the wider field of ecofeminist literature. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Studies.

Culture and Nature: The Roots of Ecopoetics

Grace Wells

The study of “ecology” deals with the relationships of organisms with their environment or home. I want to talk a little about the three homes we each have, our body, our culture, and our planet. Primarily I want to talk about how hard it is for us to live now, how difficult it is for us to be human now, caught as we are between an ancient human loyalty to nature and our planet, and our more immediate and necessary loyalties to Western culture.

I want to begin with a little story that illustrates something of our relationship with our three homes.

I was recently invited to give a poetry workshop to some school children in a wildlife park. The children and I went on a tour of all the animals in their big cages. We came to an enclosure full of cute little black monkeys, called Siamang Gibbons who normally live in Thailand, but are now almost extinct because the gibbons’ natural habitat is being destroyed for farmers to grow palm oil.

Standing there beside the caged monkeys, I wanted to know more about palm oil, so I looked up on my mobile phone all the things it is used for. Bread, cookies, biscuits, chocolate, pizza dough, noodles, ice-cream, and also shampoo, lipstick, soap, and washing powder. Then the children and I went back to the room where we were going to do our poetry workshop, and the children got out their lunchboxes, and in each one was bread, cookies, biscuits, and chocolate. The very things that are killing the gibbons. And this is how we live; our daily Western activities are destroying our own planet and its species.

We all are living in a triangle between endangered nature, Western culture, and selfhood. How can we stay emotionally well and “happy,” how can we thrive and flourish as individuals when we have to constantly live with the tragedies and ironies of our time?

I live in a permanent state of ecological concern. An anxiety not just for the survival of the wild creatures, but for the very survival of nature herself, and indeed of human beings. The British scientist Stephen Hawking has said that humanity has 100 years left on planet Earth before we ourselves face extinction. The main issues we face are climate change and overpopulation of humans, which may increase our chances of becoming more war-like as we run out of oil, water, and other resources. And the great extinction of species that is currently happening, which puts the whole planetary eco-system at risk. I am thinking here about the bees in particular, and the wasps—the threat of taking one creature out of the system, and the effects that may have on the whole.

But what happens to our minds, hearts, and bodies when we face these huge challenges? For myself, I have considered these problems for the last 30 years, and for the most part, I have felt depressed. When I examine my depression, I can see that it is made up of different emotions: disbelief all this is actually happening. And anger at the people I perceive are destroying the environment. Anger that easily becomes rage. But rage that only spills into powerlessness, hopelessness, and a terrible sense of sadness about what is happening to the planet. There’s also fear and panic and a never-ending feeling of concern.

But the real cause of all these dark feelings is that down beneath my depression is love—a deep, boundless love for the earth and all her dominions. And a boundless love of being alive.

To go on living and thriving and flourishing in this world, which is, after all, still a very beautiful place for many of us, I have needed a lot of different medicines. I have gone looking and listening and reading to discover what other human beings are saying, what advice others have for coping with the constant bad news of the environment. And curiously the main message that I have been given is that we as a species, as individuals, need to become more animal. Many environmentalists are saying that if we come into greater connection with our own wildness and animal nature, we will be in a better position to save our wild planet.

I want to talk about the challenge of trying to become more animal while living within Western culture. Because here in this territory between nature and culture and selfhood are the roots of ecopoetics. We could think of ecopoetics as simply a kind of poetry, a linguistic sanctuary that makes poems out of our current ecological crisis, or we could consider the “term” to mean your own ecopoetics, your own sanctuary that allows you to live poetically and meaningfully in these difficult times. A sanctuary that allows you to flourish and stay well, so that your own soul does not become extinct.

I want to open the conversation further with the poem “Amhlaoibh O’Súilleabháin Meets the Woman from Poll an Chapaill Bog.” The poem speaks to me about a sense of connection to the land beneath our feet, and to the creatures and plants we share the world with. Creatures that share the woman’s external world, and therefore also perhaps her internal space, her world of thoughts, imagination, and dreams, so that she lives within a kind of matrix of connection with nature.

This is a “found” poem, which means the words are not my own, I only found them and shaped them into a poem. The words were written down in 1828 when Humphrey O’Sullivan was walking in the country and got lost. The woman he asked his way from was crying because she was about to be evicted from her home.

Her story of eviction is very particular to Ireland, but during the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution, millions of people across Europe were forced to move to towns and cities, much as millions of people move to the slums in the developing world today.

Amhlaoibh O’Súilleabháin Meets the Woman from Poll an Chapaill Bog

Found Poem from The Diary of Humphrey O’Sullivan, 22 September 1828

It was my husband who built that house.

It was I who put soot on the rafters,

but the son of Páidín na gCeann took

the door off the jamb and the hinges off the hooks.

He left the cabin without a door,

the window without a pane of glass,

the hearth without a fire,

the chimney without smoke,

the pigsty without sow, boar or bonham.

I’ll never again hear my cow low to her calf,

my mare neigh to her foal or her colt,

my sheep bleat to her lamb,

my goat meg to her kid,

my hen cackle to her chicks,

I won’t be here to see again

either my white duck or my spotted drake,

my hatching goose or my fair gander.

I won’t see the bog lake.

I’ll no more the heron’s cry,

the lapwing’s or the plover’s call,

nor the jacksnipe’s bleat.

I won’t see the cormorant again.

I won’t hear the water-hen.

I won’t drain the pool to catch an eel or a pike.

It is far from them all I myself,

my poor persecuted husband

and my ruined children are being sent.

I won’t be here to grow sweet, white-topped watermint

in the meadow by the pool,

nor the white and red clover in my dry meadow.

I won’t set the flax seed. I’ll not cut the flax.

I’ll not steep it in the pool.

I’ll not draw a thread from my spinning wheel

or my distaff. I’ll make no more yarn.

My spinning wheel is in the ditch,

my press in the sandpit,

my table on the fence,

my pot in the undergrowth,

my chair out in the rain,

my straw bed has no cover, sheet or mattress,

my head no cap,

my back no cloak.

The woman does not live in a triangle between Western culture, nature, and self-hood, but in a kind of figure 8, a lemniscate, where she has a constant flow of relatedness between herself, the land with its creatures, animals, and plants, and with the elements of water, earth, fire, and air. Before our European eviction of the 1800s, our flow between selfhood and nature was constant, we had little division or separation, and the elements and animas moved through our daily experience, and our minds, with creaturely thoughts and dreams.

Even today we still have the chance of living in a similar lemniscate of relatedness with the earth. When we are born into this world, our first experience is of breath. We breathe in, and we breathe in the earth’s breath. We tend to think of air as something above us, from the heaven world of sky and space. But each in-breath we take is an embroidery of minute stitches made by the earth beneath us. She sends up her blades of grass, the leaves on her three trillion trees, and through each wave of her oceans, and all of these things combine to make a complex embroidery or tapestry of threads that is our biosphere: the earth’s breath.

We literally breathe in the trees and the grass, so our primary experience is with the earth herself. Each breath is a communion with the earth, offering us a direct relationship with her. And yet Western Culture with its busy, stressful demands can prevent us from breathing deeply and sever us from that relationship.

Our culture encourages us to scoop in our stomach muscles to look thin. It asks women to wear tight bras, which mean our ribs cannot open, and we all wear belts or tight clothes so our diaphragms cannot descend and our lungs do not fill. Each breath, rather than connecting us to the life of our planet, is connected to the demands of our culture.

But our breath is like the ticking of your body’s own clock. Its own unique rhythm. Your natural speed. Without our natural breath, we can lose our pace, lose our ability to slow down, so that we often lose touch with the earth’s natural rhythms, the pace of her day, the sun’s journey in the sky, the moon’s monthly cycle. Even the seasons. We often live our lives at a galloping, technological pace, rather than in our body’s own natural breath.

But each cell in the body requires breath to stay healthy. If we do not breathe deeply, we fall ill. And this is what is happening. Millions of human beings are suffering from a great rise in auto-immune diseases like cancer, hypo-myalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and rheumatoid arthritis. Our collective immune system is telling us that we cannot quite cope with the stresses of Western culture.

In many ways, our breath is the root of ecopoetics; it is also our most immediate vehicle for expressing our own experience, and that of the planet beneath us. We quite literally take in the breath off the trees and the grasses, off the ocean waves, and we shape their breath into words and messages. We take in the earth, and we speak on the out-breath.

We might take a moment to consider what the Woman from Poll an Chapaill bog says, compared to the things we talk about. Much of our language is human-centric: social media, entertainment, fashion, politics, work, relationships. Are our words as beautiful as the sound of leaves in the wind? Are they as powerful as waves crashing on a beach, as elegant as prairie grass dancing on the breeze? Nature gives us the tongue of speech but how many of us return the favor, and speak of our love and concern for the 78 million acres of rainforest being lost each year?

I have a sense that Western culture is curbing our tongues, shaping our conversations, and possibly denying us full self-expression and self-hood. We can speak and sing, but our grunting, roaring, growling, shrieking, and snoring are disapproved of. So there’s a sense of our self-expression being curbed, not only in how we communicate, but who we communicate to. Eco-activist David Abram points out that indigenous cultures address nature and spea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s)
• 1. Culture and Nature: The Roots of Ecopoetics
• 2. Inside the Whale: Configurations of An-other Female Subjectivity
• 3. Isms and Prisms: A Mormon View on Writing about Nature and Women
• 4. Susan Howe’s Historical Ethics of Space and Puritan Spirituality: An Ecofeminist Reading of Souls of the Labadie Tract
• 5. Caring for People, Caring for Nature: A Deconstructive Ecofeminist Reading of Sylvia Wantanabe’s Fiction
• 6. Ecofeminism and Science Fiction: Human-Alien Literary Intersections
• 7. Ecofeminist Replicants and Aliens: Future Elysiums through an Ethics of Care
• Index