Seeking a nexus between society and nature

Author: By Roger S. Gottlieb

Date: SUNDAY, June 14, 1998

Page: C5

Section: Books

Our attempts to live by these images, Eisenberg argues, have led us to make three kinds of mistakes. First, we have thought that we can actually live on the mountain, in ``Eden,'' or somehow return to it. We try to ``get back to nature and leave culture behind,'' forgetting that we can no more approach the natural world without culture than we can do so without our peculiarly human senses and nervous system. In fact, the wilderness of Eden can only be what it is without us in it!

Alternatively, we think that the tower can replace the mountain. However, for energy, raw materials, genetic information, ecosystem balance, and a host of other reasons, the tower is ultimately dependent on the mountain, from which it grew.

Finally, we may imagine that we can capture a little bit of the mountain and make it our own. In gardens, parks, and suburbs we confuse a human-made reservation for true wilderness. However, the garden walls and suburban zoning laws only obscure the recognition that this bit of Eden has been irrevocably altered by human hands.

To overcome these errors, Eisenberg counsels, we must creatively rework our city life so that we can leave some room for the wilderness, realizing that Eden can only be paradise ``from a distance.'' This move need not diminish our ultimate sense of our place in the universe. Properly constructed, the city can be our own natural and sustainable contribution to the cosmos.

There are many fine things in this book. Eisenberg's portrayal of planetary evolution provides a particularly useful counterweight to those who think only civilization has drastically altered the earth. His account of the Sumerian myths of heroism, death, and the destruction of forests, his explanation of why the Greeks had no gardens, and his insights into the ecologically mixed records of indigenous peoples are wonderfully original and provocative.

Further, for a long book with a massive scholarly apparatus, ``The Ecology of Eden'' is surprisingly well written. It is filled with clever phrases and adroit similes, such as a description of an oil spill as a ``kind of night of the living dead, in which dead organic matter that we have called from its grave rises and strangles the living.''

Yet I found this book unsatisfying. To begin with, the author's scholarship is somewhat uneven. While small errors are to be expected in a book that ranges over a vast history, the issue is more serious when distortions surface at the heart of his discussion. For example: Eisenberg's discussion of ``deep ecology,'' which he thinks is one of the two main current perspectives on the human-nature relationship, is a disrespectful caricature. He asserts, for instance, that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, strongly identified with Nazism, is ``the'' philosopher of deep ecology. This highly inaccurate claim obscures the movement's many other and much more important influences, as well as the vicissitudes of Heidegger's own standing among environmentalists.

Eisenberg misconstrues deep ecology's essence as a policy of drastic population reduction and human withdrawal from the wild, when in fact it is an attitude of respect and reverence for nature -- an attitude that has given rise to a wide variety of policy proposals. Eisenberg's treatment of deep ecology is all the more strange given that his book constantly repeats one of its basic principles: that wilderness has an inherent value and that we ourselves will be impoverished in innumerable ways if we decimate it.

In a similar mistake, Eisenberg dismisses as naive and confused any thinkers who offer a facile distinction between culture and nature. Yet he nevertheless employs the very same distinction (offered as that between culture or the city and wilderness) countless times.

Most important, ``The Ecology of Eden'' disappoints because its history of our relations with nature focuses almost exclusively on ideas. Institutions, economies, political interests, social struggles, colonialism, the effects of the market economy -- all these are treated in passing or not at all. Thus it is not surprising that his account of important environmental worldviews ignores a host of perspectives that focus on the interconnections between the treatment of nature and the treatment of other people, rather than stressing the priority of either one over the other.

Social ecology, ecosocialism, ecofeminism, and the environmental-justice movement argue that what we do to forests and whales depends on how much justice, freedom, and respect we accord people; and that it is the inequalities of class, gender, nationality, and race, rather than a set of beliefs held by a homogeneous ``Western culture,'' that need to be changed if we are to mend our ways. The environmental-justice movement in particular focuses on the racially unequal distribution of toxic wastes. The movement has spread throughout the United States, had its mandates written into Environmental Protection Agency policy, and altered the policies of all the leading environmental organizations. But environmental justice is left out of Eisenberg's story.

If these aspects of the story are not told, a discussion of attitudes and philosophies alone -- no matter how erudite -- will not fully explain why the West has created a tower that threatens both itself and the mountain that makes it possible.