The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives
Restoring animals as peers through totemic kinship: The Quest For A New Kinship With Nature by James William Gibson
Book: A Reenchanted World: The Quest For A New Kinship With Nature by James William Gibson.
Introduction
James William Gibson:
"1, The culture of enchantment creates symbolic, totemic kinship ties with wild animals. It does not erases human-animal differences, but clearly links them in human-animal kinship ties.
2. Consecrating land--restoring enchantment or sacredness to lands and waters--is a collective act. Consecration changes the public meaning of places. It helps create commons.
3. Both the political/economic right and the fundamentalist right tried to destroy this culture and the enviro movement during the Bush administration. They failed. The evangelicals split. Using sacred in a broad sense of the term, most of Christianity and Judaism embraces some form of sacred earth theology--even if they don't stress it.
4. Ordinary people fight for animals and places. It's not a top-down movement."
Excerpts
James William Gibson:
"Desires for place and the animal Other
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, a new and striking kind of yearning was evident in the ways ordinary people felt and talked about nature. People were touched by stories of bears who befriended humans, enthralled by the fluid grace of whales, moved to the depths of their souls by majestic trees, newly alive to the sense of mystery, of a world larger than themselves. Some suburban residents came to feel deeply connected to the few remaining open spaces—slivers of forest, wetland, meadow—around them, dedicating years to trying to save them from development. Others restored degraded places such as polluted wetlands and rivers. People began speaking up for the dignity of ordinary domestic animals such as cows and pigs.
How are we to understand this upsurge of feeling? To some degree, it can be considered a product of contemporary environmentalism. But the spreading influence of the environmental movement only partially explains the last two decades’ fundamental change of consciousness. No political movement or platform can account for the intensity of feeling expressed by those who long to rediscover and embrace nature’s mystery and grandeur, who experience an attachment to animals and places so overwhelming that they feel morally compelled to protect them, and who look to nature for psychic regeneration and renewal. More than an ideology, this quest for connection indicates a fundamental rejection of the most basic premises of modern thought and society.
Those premises center on a view of nature as inert matter, void of spirit and consciousness. For an early scientist like René Descartes, writing in the first half of the 17TH century, animals were simply unfeeling machines, incapable of emotions or pain. As the accomplishments of science earned it increasing prestige, this utilitarian view of nature became the dominant mode, further reinforced by the success of industrial capitalism. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed in The Communist Manifesto, the modern world was built largely through “the subjection of Nature’s forces to man.”
This subjection was so complete it eclipsed humankind’s past and, with it, the traditional unity between humans and the rest of creation that is typical of premodern societies. Among Native American tribes, for example, animal species were, like other tribes, deemed “nations,” such as the buffalo nation or beaver nation.
The premodern cosmos possessed a kind of enchantment. Humans were never alone: The crane flying overhead, the ground beneath one’s feet, the great oak tree near the creek, the creek itself, could all be addressed as kin by those who knew the right words and rituals.
Modernity, as has been widely noted, drained the cosmos of that magic. In Max Weber’s formulation, the West’s elevation of “rational empirical knowledge” led to the “disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” Radical and utter isolation followed. Carl Jung, a contemporary of Weber, grasped that loneliness had tragic implications: “Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him.”
Yet, the idea of the human world as separate from the rest of nature never gained complete acceptance. A few mavericks and romantics have always seen such isolation as wrong in substance and unbearable in spirit. Over generations, they repeatedly fought back, launching waves of protest, both cultural and political.
A rapidly dying world
The current wave of spiritual interest in nature is not simply another outburst of romanticism. For one thing, it is fueled by a new sense of urgency.
In 2005, the United Nations released the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the result of a five-year study of the world’s environment involving some 1,360 scientists. In its executive summary, “Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-Being,” the report’s authors write, “Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. “
Global warming looms ominously, with the climate changing faster than anything seen since the end of the last ice age some 10,ooo years ago. The rapid rise in temperature is endangering countless animals. People converted more forests and prairies to cropland from 1950 to 1980 than in the century and a half between 1700 and 1850. The destruction of habitat leaves animals with nowhere to go. The report’s authors conclude: “Some 12 percent of birds, 25 percent of mammals, and at least 32 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction over the next century.”
The assessment reads like a funeral oratory.
A new covenant takes shape
Funerary rhetoric marks what is irretrievably gone, but it also reveals a people’s fundamental moral values—what the deceased meant to those still living, and what their hopes are for the future. In a growing public acknowledgment of kinship, laments for the deceased are now given on behalf of wild animals and places of all kinds. Such oratory serves as a reveille, a call to make amends for creatures’ wrongful deaths by acting to save those who are still left: Outlaw lead bullets, so the few remaining California condors won’t die from lead poisoning when they eat carcasses left by hunters. Urgently study the mysterious deaths of whales. Put the U.S. Navy’s testing of powerful sonar systems under stringent government regulation.
Increasingly, for every funeral story or call for action there is also a tale of resurrection and renewal. Searches for “ghost” species, for instance, are holy pilgrimages, mythic quests to bring back life from death’s grasp. If one near-extinct creature can be restored to a healthy population, then possibly others can, too.
When researchers announced in 2005 that they had videotaped an ivory-billed woodpecker in a forested Arkansas swamp, the first sighting since 1944, government agencies and the Nature Conservancy bought more forested river-bottom lands near the location of the sighting to increase the bird’s chances for survival.
The response to the sighting shows a new covenant between society and nature taking shape. As novelist and bird-watcher Jonathan Rosen commented, the return of the ivorybill offers hope: “It somehow suggests that we have found more than just a missing bird and that God, whom we invoked when we conquered the wilderness, is also present in our effort to get it back.” (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4907/the_politics_of_enchantment/)
Introduction
James William Gibson:
"1, The culture of enchantment creates symbolic, totemic kinship ties with wild animals. It does not erases human-animal differences, but clearly links them in human-animal kinship ties.
2. Consecrating land--restoring enchantment or sacredness to lands and waters--is a collective act. Consecration changes the public meaning of places. It helps create commons.
3. Both the political/economic right and the fundamentalist right tried to destroy this culture and the enviro movement during the Bush administration. They failed. The evangelicals split. Using sacred in a broad sense of the term, most of Christianity and Judaism embraces some form of sacred earth theology--even if they don't stress it.
4. Ordinary people fight for animals and places. It's not a top-down movement."
Excerpts
James William Gibson:
"Desires for place and the animal Other
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, a new and striking kind of yearning was evident in the ways ordinary people felt and talked about nature. People were touched by stories of bears who befriended humans, enthralled by the fluid grace of whales, moved to the depths of their souls by majestic trees, newly alive to the sense of mystery, of a world larger than themselves. Some suburban residents came to feel deeply connected to the few remaining open spaces—slivers of forest, wetland, meadow—around them, dedicating years to trying to save them from development. Others restored degraded places such as polluted wetlands and rivers. People began speaking up for the dignity of ordinary domestic animals such as cows and pigs.
How are we to understand this upsurge of feeling? To some degree, it can be considered a product of contemporary environmentalism. But the spreading influence of the environmental movement only partially explains the last two decades’ fundamental change of consciousness. No political movement or platform can account for the intensity of feeling expressed by those who long to rediscover and embrace nature’s mystery and grandeur, who experience an attachment to animals and places so overwhelming that they feel morally compelled to protect them, and who look to nature for psychic regeneration and renewal. More than an ideology, this quest for connection indicates a fundamental rejection of the most basic premises of modern thought and society.
Those premises center on a view of nature as inert matter, void of spirit and consciousness. For an early scientist like René Descartes, writing in the first half of the 17TH century, animals were simply unfeeling machines, incapable of emotions or pain. As the accomplishments of science earned it increasing prestige, this utilitarian view of nature became the dominant mode, further reinforced by the success of industrial capitalism. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed in The Communist Manifesto, the modern world was built largely through “the subjection of Nature’s forces to man.”
This subjection was so complete it eclipsed humankind’s past and, with it, the traditional unity between humans and the rest of creation that is typical of premodern societies. Among Native American tribes, for example, animal species were, like other tribes, deemed “nations,” such as the buffalo nation or beaver nation.
The premodern cosmos possessed a kind of enchantment. Humans were never alone: The crane flying overhead, the ground beneath one’s feet, the great oak tree near the creek, the creek itself, could all be addressed as kin by those who knew the right words and rituals.
Modernity, as has been widely noted, drained the cosmos of that magic. In Max Weber’s formulation, the West’s elevation of “rational empirical knowledge” led to the “disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” Radical and utter isolation followed. Carl Jung, a contemporary of Weber, grasped that loneliness had tragic implications: “Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him.”
Yet, the idea of the human world as separate from the rest of nature never gained complete acceptance. A few mavericks and romantics have always seen such isolation as wrong in substance and unbearable in spirit. Over generations, they repeatedly fought back, launching waves of protest, both cultural and political.
A rapidly dying world
The current wave of spiritual interest in nature is not simply another outburst of romanticism. For one thing, it is fueled by a new sense of urgency.
In 2005, the United Nations released the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the result of a five-year study of the world’s environment involving some 1,360 scientists. In its executive summary, “Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-Being,” the report’s authors write, “Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. “
Global warming looms ominously, with the climate changing faster than anything seen since the end of the last ice age some 10,ooo years ago. The rapid rise in temperature is endangering countless animals. People converted more forests and prairies to cropland from 1950 to 1980 than in the century and a half between 1700 and 1850. The destruction of habitat leaves animals with nowhere to go. The report’s authors conclude: “Some 12 percent of birds, 25 percent of mammals, and at least 32 percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction over the next century.”
The assessment reads like a funeral oratory.
A new covenant takes shape
Funerary rhetoric marks what is irretrievably gone, but it also reveals a people’s fundamental moral values—what the deceased meant to those still living, and what their hopes are for the future. In a growing public acknowledgment of kinship, laments for the deceased are now given on behalf of wild animals and places of all kinds. Such oratory serves as a reveille, a call to make amends for creatures’ wrongful deaths by acting to save those who are still left: Outlaw lead bullets, so the few remaining California condors won’t die from lead poisoning when they eat carcasses left by hunters. Urgently study the mysterious deaths of whales. Put the U.S. Navy’s testing of powerful sonar systems under stringent government regulation.
Increasingly, for every funeral story or call for action there is also a tale of resurrection and renewal. Searches for “ghost” species, for instance, are holy pilgrimages, mythic quests to bring back life from death’s grasp. If one near-extinct creature can be restored to a healthy population, then possibly others can, too.
When researchers announced in 2005 that they had videotaped an ivory-billed woodpecker in a forested Arkansas swamp, the first sighting since 1944, government agencies and the Nature Conservancy bought more forested river-bottom lands near the location of the sighting to increase the bird’s chances for survival.
The response to the sighting shows a new covenant between society and nature taking shape. As novelist and bird-watcher Jonathan Rosen commented, the return of the ivorybill offers hope: “It somehow suggests that we have found more than just a missing bird and that God, whom we invoked when we conquered the wilderness, is also present in our effort to get it back.” (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4907/the_politics_of_enchantment/)
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Comment by Sepp Hasslberger on January 12, 2010 at 8:51
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Very interesting. To me, it brings to mind a series of books written by Russian author Vladimir Megre', which are available at http://www.ringingcedars.com/.
Anastasia is described as a beautiful girl living in the Siberian forest, in harmony with the space and the animals around her. She transmits, through the series of books, a philosophy of kinship with Nature.
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