Reinventing Eden

The Fate of Nature in Western Culture

Carolyn Merchant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136161247
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

This revised edition of Carolyn Merchant's classic Reinventing Eden has been updated with a new foreword and afterword.

Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western Culture. This book traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations and offers a bold new way to think about the earth.

1 A Garden Planet

Life
Like a spider
Spins its web
In cyclical melodies
Telling enigmatic, sacred tales
To deaf, dumb, blind me.

Carolyn Merchant, 1998

A lush garden. Pathways wander invitingly among rolling lawns and fragrant flowers. Lilies, roses, and herbs send forth a sweet ambrosia. The air smells continuously fresh. Peacocks strut among the trees in the near distance and doves make their distinctive three-note coo. A cottontail, appearing unconcerned, nibbles at grass nearby, while lambs suckle at their mother's teat. Nearly hidden among the taller and more distant cedars, a doe and fawn munch at the undergrowth. A small grove of fig trees can be glimpsed down a side path. A couple strolls arm in arm toward a fig grove near the middle of the garden, where a waterfall gushes over rocks fed by a clear bubbling stream. At the garden's very center are two trees known simply as the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Where is this Eden? It is not in the Mesopotamian lands of the pre-Christian era. It is the new downtown square on the promenade in Anytown, California. The square is replete with fountains, grassy knolls, meandering streams, and benches for passersby. Along each side of the river flowing through the square are the shops of the revived cityscape. Gracefully arched bridges connect the two sides of the street, and the shops face the greenbelt along the river. The stores are those found in hundreds of towns across the nation: Borders Books, Starbucks Coffee, Cost Plus World Market, Noah's Bagels, Banana Republic, The Gap, Crate and Barrel, and Jamba Juice. This is the new American Eden.¹

The Garden of Eden story has shaped Western culture since earliest times and the American world since the 1600s. We have tried to reclaim the lost Eden by reinventing the entire earth as a garden. The shopping mall, the “new main street,” the gated community, and the Internet are the latest visions of a reinvented Eden. From Christopher Columbus's voyages, to the search for the fountain of youth, to John Steinbeck's East of Eden, visions of finding a lost paradise have motivated global exploration, settlement, and hope for a better life.

The Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most important mythology humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth. Internalized by Europeans and Americans alike since the seventeenth century, this story has propelled countless efforts by humans to recover Eden by turning wilderness into garden, “female” nature into civilized society, and indigenous folkways into modern culture. Science, technology, and capitalism have provided the tools, male agency the power and impetus. Today's incarnations of Eden are the suburb, the mall, the clone, and the World Wide Web.

As with any mainstream story, however, a counternarrative challenges the plot. Recent postmodern and postcolonial stories reject the Enlightenment accounts of progress. Many environmentalists see the loss of wilderness as a decline from a pristine earth to a paved, scorched, endangered world. Many feminists see a nature once revered as mother now scarred, desecrated, and abused, and women as the victims of patriarchal culture. Similarly, many African Americans and Native Americans see their history as one of colonization by Europeans who “explored,” “discovered,” and took over their lands and viewed their bodies as animal-like and close to nature. But even as they call for new pathways to a just society, these counterstories of a slide downward (or declension) from Eden buy into the overarching, metanarrative of recovery. Both storylines, whether upward or downward, compel us to find a new story for the twenty-first century.

Narratives form our reality. We become their vessels. Stories find, capture, and hold us. Our lives are shaped by the stories we hear as children; some fade as we grow older, others are reinforced by our families, churches, and schools. From stories we absorb our goals in life, our morals, and our patterns of behavior. For many Americans, humanity's loss of the perfect Garden of Eden is among the most powerful of all stories. Consciously at times, unconsciously at others, we search for ways to reclaim our loss. We become actors in a storyline that has compelled allegiance for millennia.

But “mastering” nature to reclaim Eden has nearly destroyed the very nature people have tried to reclaim. The destruction of nature in America became clearly apparent in the late nineteenth century. The railroad, the steam engine, the factory, and the mine began to demolish forests, blemish landscapes, and muddy the air and water. Romantics reacted sharply. They began to tell a new story of what went wrong—a story of decline from pristine nature. Explorers, writers, poets, and painters proclaimed their love for untouched wilderness. The early conservation movement attempted to redeem both nature and humanity by saving places of pristine beauty.

Yet the new parks, the modern suburbs, and the garden cities reclaimed nature at a cost. These Edenic spaces ostracized those “others” of different classes and colors who did not fit into the story. The green veneer became a cover for the actual corruption of the earth and neglect of its poor; that green false consciousness threatened the hoped-for redemption of all people. The middle class appropriated wild nature at the expense of native peoples by carving national parks out of their homelands. The new suburbs existed at the cost of poor minorities who lived with polluted wells, blackened slums, and toxic dumps. Today, many people of color look back to an apparent Edenic past before slavery and colonization changed their lives forever.

The narrative of reinventing Eden, told by progressives as well as environ-mentalists, raises fundamental questions about the viability of the Recovery Narrative itself. Do not the earth and its people need a new story? What would a green justice for the earth and humanity really look like? Why do people tell stories, and whose ends do they serve? Both the modern progressive and declensionist stories, however compelling, are flawed. They are products of the linear approach of modern scientific thinking and also reflect the oppositional polarities of self and other. New kinds of stories, new ways of thinking, and new ethics are required for the twenty-first century.

A narrative approach raises the question of the fit between stories and reality. There is a reality to the progressive story. Great strides have been made in many people's struggle for survival and ease of life. There is also a reality to the Decline from Eden narrative. The environmental crisis and its connections to overdevelopment, population, consumption, pollution, and scarcity are critical issues confronting all of humanity. Through these contrasting stories, we can see both progress and decline in different places at different times. Progressives want to continue the upward climb to recover the Garden of Eden by reinventing Eden on Earth, while environmentalists want to recover the original garden by restoring nature and creating sustainability.

The two stories seem locked in conflict. Played out to its logical conclusion, each narrative negates human life: the mainstream story leads to a totally artificial earth; the environmental story leads to a depopulated earth. Pushed to one extreme, the recovered Eden would be a completely reinvented, totally managed, artificially constructed planet in which shopping on the web would replace shopping at the mall, the gated community the urban jungle, and greenhouse farms the vicissitudes of nature's droughts and storms. Pushed to the opposite extreme, the recovery of wilderness implies a humanly depauperate earth. The tensions between the two plots create the need for a new story that entails a sustainable partnership with nature.

We interpret our hopes and fears through such powerful cultural stories. We act out our roles in the stories into which we were born. The American dream holds out a promise, dangling its rewards for those who work hard and are lucky enough to find its treasures. For those who fail, dire consequences may result. These larger stories propel those who act within them to reinvent the planet as a new world garden. Rich and poor alike buy into the mainstream recovery story and act it out over their lifetimes.

The environmental crisis of the 1960s showed that all was not well on the “garden planet.” Rachel Carson's Silent Spring alerted the nation to the disruptive effects of pesticides on the food chain,² while the testing of nuclear weapons raised the specter of the widespread effects of radiation on biotic, especially human, life. In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr.'s classic article “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” laid the blame for environmental disruption on an idea: Christian arrogance toward nature. “God . . . created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely,” White wrote, “Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. . . . Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” White's assessment was, “We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man,” and the article brought forth cries of criticism over its assignment of the ecological crisis to a single cause. Critics such as Lewis Moncrief responded that a more complex scenario was needed that included capitalism, industrialization, the American frontier, manifest destiny, urbanization, population growth, and property ownership. Others argued that the rise of science and technology contributed to the ability of humanity to dominate nature and to the idea that mechanistic science promoted the separation of humans from nature.³

The complexity of causes leading to environmental degradation as well as efforts to conserve nature and its resources helped to spawn the field of environmental history. In the 1970s and 1980s, an array of books documented the loss of wilderness, the erosion of soils, increased urban pollution, and the decline of biotic diversity. The early successes of environmental history helped to create an overarching narrative of environmental decline as one of the dominant themes in the field. By the mid-1980s, Donald Worster, William Cronon, and others identified the plots of many environmental histories as “declensionist.” Cronon compared two different narratives by two different authors about the 1930s Dust Bowl of the Great Plains, both with virtually the same title (The Dust Bowl and Dust Bowl), and both published in the same year (1979)— one a story of progress, the other a story of decline. Cronon wrote, “Although both narrate the same broad series of events with an essentially similar cast of characters, they tell two entirely different stories. In both texts, the story is inextricably bound to its conclusion, and the historical analysis derives much of its force from the upward or downward sweep of the plot.” The question raised was one of the fit between stories and reality. How accurately did these or any histories fit the events in question? Who were the characters in the stories? Who was omitted? Was all environmental history declensionist history? And even if that were the case, did this insight in any way undercut the value of environmental history's insights into historical change?⁴

By the 1990s, chaos and complexity theory further challenged ecology and environmental history. The new approaches disrupted the idea of a balance of nature that humans could destroy but also restore. Humanity was not the only major disturber of an evolved prehuman ecosystem. Natural disturbances, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes could in an instant wipe out an old-growth forest, demolish a meadow, or redirect the meander of a river. Humanity was less culprit and more victim; nature more violent and less passive. Environmental history moved away from assigning all destructive change to humans and toward chance and contingency in nature.⁵

My own view is that both progressive and declensionist stories reflect real world history, but from different perspectives. Both open windows onto the past, but they are only partial windows depending on the characters included and omitted. The linearity of the upward and downward plots also masks contingencies, meanderings, crises, and punctuations. Including nature and its climatic and biotic manifestations, however, adds complexity and contingencies to the unidirectional plots of progress and decline. Droughts, freezes, “little ice ages,” domesticated animals and plants, invasive nonnative species, bacteria, viruses, and humans are all actors who are often unpredictable and unmanageable. They inject uncertainties into the trajectories of progress and decline. As environmental historian Theodore Steinberg argues, “it is quite simply wrong to view the natural world as an unchanging backdrop to the past. Nature can upset even the best-laid, most thoroughly orchestrated plans. . . . We must acknowledge the unpredictability involved in incorporating nature into human designs and, in so doing, bring natural forces to the fore of the historical process.”⁶

My view is that the new sciences of chaos and complexity not only reinforce the role of natural forces in environmental history, they also challenge humanity to rethink its ethical relationship to nature. The new sciences suggest that we should consider ourselves as partners with the nonhuman world. We should think of ourselves not as dominant over nature (controlling and managing a passive, external nature) or of nature as dominant over us (casting humans as victims of an unpredictable, violent nature) but rather in dynamic relationship to nature as its partner. In the following pages I present a new perspective on the history of humanity's relationship to nature. I draw on the framework of progressive and declensionist plots, on the roles of men and women in transforming and appreciating the environment, on ideas of contingency and complexity in history, of nature as an actor, and of humanity as capable of achieving a new ethic of partnership with the nonhuman world.

In Reinventing Eden, I begin by naming the powerful, overarching story of modern history as a Recovery Narrative. I show how the new millennium presents a major turning point for both the progressive Enlightenment stories and the counternarratives told by women, minorities, and nature itself. I look at the origins of the Recovery Narrative as it arose through biblical, ancient, and medieval history and then set out its political and environmental codification during the Scientific Revolution and European Enlightenment. I focus on the role of Christianity in the formation of the Recovery Narrative and do not attempt to include the influence of Judaism or the Hebrew interpretation of the Genesis stories. Although I am aware that a very large and important literature on biblical interpretation exists, my goal is not to reinterpret biblical scholarship, to write a history of religion, or to examine the development of religious movements, denominations, and sects; nor do I attempt to review or assess the vast literature on Eden in Western culture or Edenic ideas in other cultures and throughout the world.⁷

I then examine the impact of the mainstream Recovery Narrative as it comprises European culture's development and transformation of the New World. American stories—from John Winthrop's Puritan garden to Thomas Hart Benton's manifest destiny—follow and recreate the progressive Recovery storyline. This powerful story of reclaiming and redeeming a fallen earth by human labor becomes the major justification for the westward movement and the effort to remake indigenous Americans in the image of European culture. Eastern wilderness and western deserts are turned into gardens for American settlers.

Throughout the ensuing chapters, I also examine the second story, or what went wrong—the story of Earth in decline. From Plato to Henry David Thoreau, writers have noted the destruction of nature and the problems of vanishing forests and fouled waters. I set out the nineteenth century origins of the romantic counternarrative, the conservation movement, and the late-twentieth-century narratives of environmental crisis. The effects of development on nature, women, and minorities are part of a larger counterstory of the loss of an evolved, earthly abundance and human equality. Despite nuances, hopeful advances, and upward trends, these counternarratives of decline and loss relate the all-too-real experiences of large numbers of people. The continued downward spiral leads to an impoverished earth where diversity is decreasing and environmental health is declining. This also is a story in which we live. It too affects our lives. Over time the Recovery Narrative with its two storylines—one of progress, the other of decline—has shaped the earth's landscape as well as human hopes, desires, and lives.

Within the broad arc of the Recovery Narrative, nature itself has played a major role in affecting outcomes. Despite the efforts of humans to control the natural world, contingencies and crises have occurred. Lurches, advances, and dips disrupt the apparent linearity of the narrative. Natural disturbances inject unpredictability and question the foundations of the narrative within the trajectory of modernity itself. From Noah's flood in Genesis 7 to the volcanic destruction of Pompei during the Roman Empire (C.E. 79), to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, nature has shaped human actions and limited possibilities. Nature's actions along with new sciences that incorporate contingencies and complexities into their very assumptions suggest new ways for humanity to relate to the material world.⁸

Since the 1960s, I have witnessed enormous contention within the trajectories of progress and decline. Developers and wilderness advocates are in continual conflict. One group presses for ever greater profits at the earth's expense; the other struggles to save what remains of wilderness on the planet. In the final chapters of the book, I explore possibilities for new narratives about nature. I examine new ways of thinking about the human–nature relationship suggested by postmodern and postcolonial thinking, as well as the implications of recent theories of chaos and complexity. I offer some new ways to think about a multiplicity of stories and introduce ideas about nonlinear plots.

Throughout the book, I suggest possibilities for alternatives to domination based on a partnership between humanity and nature. Finally, I propose an environmental ethic based on a partne...