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Ecopolitics/ecocriticism
To see how ecopolitical insights can inform critical readings of Shakespeare, it is necessary to survey briefly the origins of the Green movement and in particular the twentieth-century scientific and industrial developments that it defined itself in opposing. In the summer of 1942 Edward Teller, one of J. Robert Oppenheimer's team building the first atomic bomb, calculated what would happen in the first few millionths of a second after detonation. Enrico Fermi was worried that the new weapon might disastrously replicate the conditions inside the Sun, and Teller's new calculations started to convince Oppenheimer's team that merely testing the bomb ‘might ignite the earth's oceans or its atmosphere’ (Rhodes 1986, 418). Unknown to the Americans, in June 1942, the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg expressed to Hitler, via Albert Speer, the same fear about Germany’s atomic programme (Rhodes 1986, 404–5). The night before the first Manhattan Project test, Fermi offered to take bets on whether the atmosphere would catch fire, and Teller wondered if he was right (Rhodes 1986, 664–5). Stunned by the brightness of the flash, Oppenheimer's colleague Emilio Segrè feared that the worst had indeed happened (Segrè 1970, 147). The scientists who performed the first atomic test believed it carried a small, but quite real, chance (about one-in-fifty, some of them thought) of instantly igniting the world, and they decided to risk it.
Among other things, the international Green movement is a response to the rapid increase in the power of human technologies and the hubris of the scientists and technocrats in charge of them. All life on Earth is a direct expression of the energy released by thermonuclear reactions inside the Sun and, ironically, the means to initiate such reactions on Earth made Oppenheimer’s the first generation capable of ending all life. Over the succeeding decades, the nuclear states developed the technologies with which to threaten doing this, each fearing another gaining a technical advantage that would upset the balance of terror. This fear was acute in the 1960s when intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) became too fast for the available computers to track reliably, raising the possibility that a sneak attack might overwhelm an opponent before retaliation could be mounted.
One of the breakthroughs that restored the balance came from, of all places, the technique of lithography used in commercial book publishing and refined into a fine art by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. Rather than wire individual components together, transistors, diodes, capacitors, and resistors of microscopic size could be lithographically printed directly onto semiconductor material, to make an integrated circuit, or microchip. Computing devices shrank in size and cost, and rose exponentially in power. A second breakthrough was the distributed networking of computers invented by Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, which showed that ‘highly survivable system structures can be built, even in the thermonuclear era’ (Baran 1964, 4). The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) embodying this technology first connected four university computer sites in 1969, and in 1972 it explicitly acquired the adjective ‘defense’ to become DARPANET, which became the Internet. Epitomizing the beauty of the swords-into-ploughshares principle, the Internet is now the primary means by which Green activism communicates with itself and the wider political domain.
A certain kind of political idealism and activism driven by global thinking came to an end in 1968 as within a few months Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, anti- Vietnam demonstrations were suppressed, the French uprising collapsed and Charles de Gaulle won a landslide victory, the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland was violently crushed, and Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and stayed there to ensure that Alexander Dubček’s political and social reforms were cancelled. One strand of activism turned from the global to the local, producing the communes and self-help groups of the early 1970s, but at the same time a new kind of global thinking emerged to replace the old. In September 1969, Friends of the Earth was formed by David Brower in San Francisco and the following year it was transformed into an international organization with affiliated groups forming first in France (1970) and the United Kingdom (1971). In 1970, Friends of the Earth began to publish the journal Not Man Apart that outlined its core campaign topics: the fur trade, preservation of rivers, pollution from supersonic flight, and whaling.
The international organization Greenpeace arose from protests against American underground nuclear bomb tests. In 1970 three Canadian activists, Jim Bohlen, Irving Stowes, and Paul Cote, formed the Don’t Make a Wave committee to prevent nuclear testing on the island of Amchitka, one of the Aleutian Islands off the west coast of Alaska. The name alluded to the danger of triggering a tsunami, for Amchitka is a few miles from a geological weakness that leads to the Californian San Andreas Fault. The youngest member of the committee, Bill Darnell, suggested that ‘Green Peace’ captured the group’s philosophy and should be the name of their boat. In the event the trip failed to prevent the test, but brought extensive media coverage, following which the future, bigger tests at Amchitka were cancelled (Hunter 1979, 11–118; Brown and May 1989, 7–15).
Yet another strand of the new movement arose within the academy. The phrase ‘animal liberation’ – with an exclamation mark to indicate the novelty – first appeared in print on the cover of the 5 April 1973 issue of the New York Review of Books to advertise that within was Peter Singer’s review of a collection of essays on the maltreatment of ‘non-humans’ (Godlovitch, et al. 1971; Singer 1973). Singer, a philosopher of the preference utilitarian school, approvingly quoted Jeremy Bentham’s assertion that what mattered when deciding how much value to place on individuals’ interests was not ‘Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (Bentham 1789, 309n). Singer coined the expression ‘speciesism’ to liken the unthinking assumption of human superiority to the long-standing but recently challenged assumption of racial superiority by whites and of gender superiority by men. Singer developed his review into a full-blown utilitarian argument for the capacity to suffer, rather than membership of a particular species, being the primary criterion by which to weigh the good or harm of any of our interactions with humans and other animals (Singer 1975). Looked at this way, a severely mentally disabled person incapable of preferences and protected from pain has less right to life than a healthy chimpanzee with rudimentary signlanguage skills, a well-developed social network, and a degree of self-consciousness, as Singer argues in his book Practical Ethics (Singer 1979, 93–105, 127–57).
These roots of the Green movement are worth tracing because they counter the common misconception that ecopolitical thinking arose only after the collapse of communism. In truth, it was an active force in the extraordinary events of 1989–90. The final decline of the Soviet Union was triggered by Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to assist Erich Honecker’s government in suppressing the fledgling ecology-and-peace movement in the German Democratic Republic. This movement was inspired by the West German Green Party founded by Herbert Gruhl and Petra Kelly in 1979, whose programme called for the demilitarization of Europe by dissolving the NATO and Warsaw Pact agreements, the closure of nuclear power plants, rigorous state control of polluting industries, and economic advantages being given to small-scale businesses over large corporations. The connection between nuclear power and pollution was especially urgent after the explosion of the Ukrainian nuclear electricity generator at Chernobyl in April 1986 spread radiation clouds across Western Europe as far as Ireland. This outcome contrasted with the narrow escape from a similar reactor core meltdown at the Pennsylvanian Three Mile Island nuclear electricity generator in 1979, strengthening a perception of communist technological inferiority rooted in political and economic inferiority. Chernobyl bolstered the nascent Ukrainian independence movement which achieved its goal when Gorbachev’s government in Moscow collapsed in August 1991.
It is clear, then, that ecopolitics has operated strategically at key moments in recent world history. What are the consequences of this for literary criticism? By analogy with the politics of class, race, and gender, it would seem that ecopolitics will necessarily have things to teach us about literary criticism, but it is far from clear what those lessons might be. Virtually every dramatic character, like every reader and theatre spectator, has an identifiable class, a race, and a gender and it is abundantly clear that politicized criticism can investigate how these classifications arise, how they are figured in oppression, and how they might be transfigured in the future. By analogy with these, ecocriticism would seem to lack an oppressed subject, unless it take up something as potentially risible as the Earth’s point of view, or the animals’. I will suggest some means by which ecopolitical concerns can be projected into the domain of criticism, despite the absence of an oppressed subject on whose behalf a political struggle could be mounted. For this, a little more popular science must be essayed before we return to the literary and the dramatic.
The Earth is effectively a sealed system, bombarded by energy from the Sun but closed in the sense that (barring a few trivial exceptions) we and our products cannot leave. Whatever we make here stays here, and the only replenishment of spent energy is in the form of sunlight. This insight is largely absent from mainstream Marxist analysis, which treats the Earth as an infinitely rich supplier of raw materials and an infinitely capacious sink for wastes. This is a surprising oversight, since one of the central principles of Marx’s analysis of capitalism was that the extraction of surplus value from producing workers leaves them too poor to buy back what they have made, so capitalism is forced to scour the world for new markets and new workforces (Marx 1954, 713–15; Marx and Engels 1974, 58) and must eventually come up hard against the Earth’s finitude: at some point it will exhaust the last market and the last free worker. Since this is a central principle, acknowledging the finite ought really to be habitual for Marxists. The ever-increasing productive forces of humankind cannot go on indefinitely even if the systems of production and exchange are revolutionized, since the Earth’s resources are finite. Marx, however, chose to focus on the vast and as-yet untapped resources of the Earth and the fact that individual productivity has always increased more quickly than population, which is why humankind’s capacity to feed itself has never faltered. (As is well known, distribution rather than production is the cause of majority world hunger: more than enough food is produced each year to feed the world’s population.) Engels was explicit about what keeps productivity ahead of consumption: ‘science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population’ (Marx 1977, 176).
The rapidly expanding production of the Industrial Revolution, also enabled by a mistaken sense of the Earth’s infinitude, was undergirded by a new conception of nature that arose in the second half of the seventeenth century. It was, in essence, the replacement of a vitalistic model with a mechanistic model. Instead of the natural state of things being movement, as Aristotle articulated in his Physics (Aristotle 1930, 184a–267b), it was inertia, as Isaac Newton proved; the transition is neatly summarized by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of Nature. Throughout the drama of Shakespeare, characters speak of the world around them as though it is alive, and this view is put into conflict with the emergent mechanistic view, as we shall see. As Collingwood points out, ‘The naturalistic philosophies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attributed to nature reason and sense, love and hate, pleasure and pain, and found in these faculties and passions the causes of natural process’ (Collingwood 1945, 95). In an essentially clockwork universe, on the other hand, the Earth is merely an instrument of human self-fulfilment.
The twentieth-century field of cybernetics bridges these different conceptions of the world in its concern with communication and control systems in living organisms and machines, and its origins can be traced to the eighteenth-century invention of mechanical self-regulation modelled on living organisms. The key notion is feedback: the connection of the outcome of an event or process with the originating conditions. Contrary to everyday use of the term, positive feedback is often a bad thing and negative feedback often a good one. In positive feedback, the outcome of a process reinforces the originating conditions so that the system accelerates, as when a snowball rolls downhill, a debt accumulates compound interest, or the subatomic particles ejected in a chain reaction excite yet more particles. Exponential growth is the characteristic outcome of positive feedback. In negative feedback, however, the outcome diminishes the originating conditions so that the system achieves a dynamic equilibrium, and if perturbed by an external force (so long as it is not too great) the system is able to restore its equilibrium.
The ecological processes with which Green politics are concerned are chiefly examples of either of these two conditions: explosive growths (bombs, populations, atmospheric gases) and the countervailing systems of self-regulation. The ozone layer problem identified in the 1980s has been solved by banning chlorofluorocarbons. A zone of partial ozone depletion over the Antarctic remains, but will disappear in about 50 years because of what atmospheric chemists – a group not given to excessive anthropomorphism – call the self-healing effect, a classic negative-feedback loop. The ozone layer is created in the upper atmosphere by the bombardment of solar ultraviolet radiation that turns O2 (oxygen) molecules into O3 (ozone) molecules that block the radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface. Where ozone depletion occurs, solar radiation penetrates further, but in doing so it creates fresh ozone at the lower level and backfills the hole.
On the other hand, the accumulation of greenhouse gases from human activity starts a positive-feedback reaction. The northern polar ice cap floats on an ocean, so as it melts it occupies the volume it formerly displaced, leaving the sea-level unchanged. The southern ice cap, however, rests on land and as it melts it exposes dark soil where there was previously white ice, lowering the Earth’s capacity to reflect sunlight and thereby accelerating the absorption of heat and the melting. The key determinate of whether humankind survives the next 100 years is whether our perturbations of the Earth’s self-regulating systems have exceeded its capacity to restore an equilibrium, or, to be more precise, whether the new equilibrium state that emerges can support human life. In these debates, distinctions between organic and inorganic processes begin to break down, as we shall see.
The most famous early example of a machine emulating organic self-regulation was James Watt’s steam engine governor of 1769, which made an engine run at a constant speed irrespective of the load applied to it (Figure 1). The collar (C) is connected to the engine’s throttle, so if the speed rises, the balls (M) rise under centrifugal force and pull the throttle closed, thus lowering the speed; if the speed falls, the balls descend and so open the throttle to raise the speed.
For Charles Dickens, such regulatory devices made for fearful hybrid creatures, animal yet robotic, that mocked human labour in the fictional Coketown of Hard Times:
But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the yea...
