- Good evening!
My name's Paul Robbins,
I'm the director of
the Nelson Institute for
Environmental Studies
here at the UW-Madison,
and it is an enormous
honor to have been invited
to introduce tonight's speaker.
Jed Purdy wrote very recently
that this country,
the United States,
is "a country whose
environmental politics
"has always been Anthropocene,
"though often not
self-consciously so."
And that, but that's an
interesting thing to say.
It's interesting to say
for at least three reasons,
which I think captures
some of what's special
about Jed Purdy.
First, it's extremely,
it's a counterintuitive
notion that the Anthropocene,
that name that we would
give to a geologic era
formed by human beings,
which calls upon us
for all of its novelty
and all of its difference
and how different everything is,
the idea that it
would be driven back
into the violent beginnings
of American history
is counterintuitive,
and it says something
very complicated in an
extremely accessible way.
This is an accessible writer.
Two, it would take a
pretty formidable reading
and understanding of
American history to prove it.
(audience laughs)
It would.
That history would have
to hinge on a lot of legal
and policy history.
You'd have to know
a lot about the law,
not just about American
history, to get that right.
It would have to be rigorous,
accessible and rigorous.
And it's also an
observation, I think,
that opens doors
for new politics
because the
Anthropocene politics
actually aren't all that new,
like it actually gives us
space of possibilities,
like there's something we can
do instead of gnash our teeth,
which makes it poignant,
accessible, rigorous,
poignant.
Jedediah Purdy is the Robinson
O. Everett Professor of Law
at the Duke University
School of Law.
He holds a J.D. from
the Yale Law School
and a B.A. summa cum laude
from Harvard College.
He's author of six books,
the first of which
was written in 1999,
which must've been like
the first year of your J.D.
(audience laughs)
I haven't read them,
except this one.
They got great titles,
including a 2009 Knopf title
"A Tolerable Anarchy."
That title alone is sending
me home for some reading.
His 2015 book is
the one I hold here,
"After Nature: Environmental
Law, Politics, and the Ethics
of the Anthropocene," and I
recommend it to everyone.
He has countless chapters,
reviews, and essays,
especially in
rigorous law journals,
the Harvard Law Review,
Columbia Law Review.
He's taught countless courses
at Duke University
and elsewhere,
and if I was only allowed
to take three of them,
they would be Past and Future
of Capitalist Democracy,
- That's two semesters.
(audience laughs)
- Well, I'd fail the
first semester and
then I'd have an excuse
to take The Conversation
of Law and History
and then his class on The
Occupy Movement in 2012.
There's a lot here that I
don't have to tell you about.
I think, well, some
of the other things
that stand out are his
popular essays and reviews.
He has written for The New
Yorker, The Daily Beast,
The Huffington Post, accessibly.
And finally, he's got a
lot of media appearances,
Morning Edition
and The Connection
and Talk of the Nation,
you know, lefty radio,
but also a lot of other outlets
that I think we'd understand
to be extremely mainstream
and an important voice
for these complicated issues
to the broader public.
I'll close by reading
from the conclusion
of this terrific
book, "After Nature,"
to speak to this
question of poignancy
because he suggests that
writing this legal history,
of a legal American
environmental history,
he suggests that
"people are best able
to change their ways
"when they find two
things at once in nature,
"something to fear and
also something to love."
Now, "Either impulse," he
says, "can stay the human hand,
"but the first stops it just
short of being burnt or broken.
"The second keeps
the hand poised,
"extended in greeting
or in offer of peace.
"This gesture is the
beginning of collaboration,
"among people but
also beyond us,
"in building our new home."
And that home, I take
it, is the Anthropocene,
and I can't really think
of a better architect.
Thank you and welcome Jed Purdy.
(audience applauds)
(faint speaking)
- Wow, thanks for that really,
really generous introduction.
Thank you to the people
who brought me here,
and thank you to
all of you who are,
who can't hear me.
(audience laughs)
I think we need a little
more vocals in the mic maybe.
So it's obviously a,
can you hear me now?
- No.
- No, all right.
Oh, wait!
There's a button.
(audience laughs)
There we are.
So I really appreciate
the generous introduction.
I also really appreciate
the work people have done
to bring me here and all of
you coming out on what feels,
from the perspective
of North Carolina,
like a cold winter evening.
(audience laughs)
It's also really
great to be asked
and exciting to be asked
to speak at Wisconsin.
Although I come to
you from a law school,
the kind of thinking
that I try to do,
in this book and elsewhere,
would be much harder even
to imagine without the
work of Bill Cronon,
whom I've admired for years
and whom it's
touching to see here.
And behind him, people
like Willard Hurst
and Charles Van Hise.
These names may not all be
meaningful to all of you,
but they are people who've
thought about the interplay
of landscape and law, humanity
and the non-human world
in Wisconsin and at Wisconsin
for a very long time.
So, I want to talk about
what we do when we
look at a landscape,
though to speak of a part
of the world as a landscape
is to consider it
in a specific way,
as a terrain that's viewed,
that's seen and
organized by the eye,
even, especially,
the mind's eye.
A landscape is a place
organized by the meanings
it has for people,
and I'm going to talk
about some of the ways
that our meanings form
and organize landscapes.
The first,
we may understand
a landscape as an origin.
Famously,
nature,
nation,
native,
all have the same root,
birth, the place where life
arises and renews itself.
And nature, in this
sense, means the world,
viewed in light of its
life-making powers,
the origin of each of us and
every other living thing,
and, ultimately,
of every thought
that we could have about
it or about one another.
And by the same token,
nature is linked to nationalism,
to nativism,
and other doctrines that have
been demanding our attention.
I want to start
at this etymology,
this common root of words that
name the very idea of roots,
because it's especially
vexed and vexing.
The talking of origins
is always partly fictional.
In a sense, because
we're born of nature,
we come from the whole world.
In a sense, because we're born,
we're native to just
one other person.
A nation,
with the same root,
is famously an
imagined community,
a story about an us and a them,
a kind of story that's
done a lot of harm
and is not finished doing harm.
So saying these things about
how origins are fictional
and nations, like
nature, are constructed
is easy in my generation
of the academic humanities.
You might even say that
it comes naturally,
that it's second
nature to say it.
But I think there's something
else also worth naming,
in the idea that a
landscape of origin,
of your birth,
where you're native,
is also your nature,
who and how you are.
There's an image that people
come to again and again
of being born from
their terrain.
A few examples,
E.P. Thompson's great
historical study,
"The Making of the
English Working Class,"
is very nearly the antithesis
of picturesque
landscape writing.
And nevertheless, the book has
a steady rhythm of
place-names and terrain
that infuses, at least to me,
an earthborn quality into
the human actions he details,
and once he comes
out and says it.
Writing of Dan Taylor,
"a Yorkshire collier,"
a coal miner,
"who had worked in the
pit from the age of five,
"who had been converted
by the Methodists,"
who, still quoting Thompson,
"built his own meeting-house,
"digging the stone out of
the moors above Hebden Bridge
"and carrying on his own back"
and went on to walk
25,000 miles across England
to preach 20,000 sermons
of low church radicalism.
And Thompson concludes,
"he came from neither
the Particular
"nor the General
Baptist Societies,
"spiritually, perhaps, he came
from Bunyan's inheritance,"
that is Pilgrim's Progress,
but, still quoting,
"but literally
"he just came out
of the ground."
And here, is Wendell Berry,
the Kentucky agrarian writer,
in an essay from the 1960s
called "A Native Hill,"
that word again.
Berry writes of a place
"where his face is
mirrored in the ground."
He imagines his own death
and decay on his native hill
and concludes,
"When I move to go,
"it is as if I rise
up out of the world."
I could multiply examples,
but I think these will do enough
to get at the thought or
feeling that I'm after here.
I'll come back to it.
Second, when they
look at a landscape
as a record of wounds,
a landscape is also,
is always partly
a place that is held in
memory in a certain way.
The Polish-Lithuanian
poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote,
"It's possible that
there is no memory
but the memory of wounds."
And it's surely
true that the way
a landscape memorializes us,
how it holds our memory,
is largely in the harm we do
in our use and habitation of it.
In the passage where Wendell
Berry imagines rising
from the hill of
his native land,
he also reflects that his
path is several feet below
where he would once have
walked and where he would walk
today if his ancestors had
not cut the land in ways
that cost it all its topsoil.
The Appalachian
hills where I grew up
are much steeper than his.
They're a beautiful
place of wreckage.
Mature red oaks collapse
with their roots out
because the soil is thin.
Gullies slash the hillsides
where people farmed sheep
during World War One,
answering a lucrative demand
for wool to make uniforms,
which was a very rare chance
to turn that land into money.
The streams are
sluggish and muddy
because all the topsoil
has run through them
on the way to the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers.
And that is nothing compared
with the condition
of the coalfields,
just an hour's drive south,
and less if you know
exactly where you're going.
You may know some
of the basic facts
about mountaintop
removal strip-mining,
which combines dynamite
to blast mountains apart
with earth-moving equipment
that can pick up 130 tons
of rubble at a bite.
You may know that the
blasting lowers ridges
and mountaintops by
as much as 600 feet
in a region where that is
about the usual clearance
between valley and ridge.
You may have heard that 2,000
miles of headwater
streams have been buried
under hundreds of feet
of the resulting rubble
and that that 2,000 miles is
a very conservative estimate,
that 500 individual mountains
have been destroyed,
and that 1.4 million
acres of native forest
have been cleared
in the process.
Where mining has been,
the terrain is now
something utterly different
from what it used to be.
A terrain dominated by steep
hillsides has been replaced
by a mix of plateaus
with remnant or
reconstructed hillsides
that are shorter and
blunter than before mining.
The most common
pre-mining landform there
was a slope with a
pitch of 28 degrees,
about as steep as
the upper segments
of the cables of
the Brooklyn Bridge
or similar bridges
from the same period.
And today, the most
common is a plain
with a slope of two degrees,
that is, level but uneven.
Mining has filled
a steep terrain
with pockets of
nearly flat ground.
And what does this
terrain show about us?
Henry Thoreau wrote
about wild places,
that we go there, quote,
"to see our serenity
reflected in them."
Continuing, "when we are not
serene, we go not to them."
He was talking about the period
when Boston was in turmoil
over the return of an
enslaved man to the South
under the Fugitive Slave Act.
But what about when
landscapes show back to us
a breaking of the land
on a geological scale?
What we find there is
ecological derangement.
And what can we say
that it reflects of us?
It's partly because this
question is unpleasant
that a third way of viewing
landscapes has been so appealing
to many Americans.
This is a painterly view
of landscapes as instances
of aesthetic ideals.
Viewed in this light,
we may catalog the
qualities of landscapes
in the way that Frederick
Law Olmsted did those
of Yosemite Valley, which,
he wrote in the 1860s,
combined the following,
beauty,
the look of a welcoming,
regular, gentle world
where you could feel at home,
and sublimity,
the wild, strange, even
frightening extremity
of a world that was not made
for your comfort
or safety at all,
that was vastly bigger
than your powers
and maybe even bigger
than your imagination.
These aesthetic principles
were also psychological,
even spiritual principles.
They tuned your
mind a certain way,
toward peace and calm
or toward inspiration
and wonder.
If this is a painterly
ideal, what's the brush?
Whoever made the world,
whatever made the world,
of course, is one answer,
but another answer, also true,
is the law that picks out
these places as special
and preserves and
manages them according
to aesthetic principles.
In national parks, monuments,
and wilderness areas,
the law has picked out
hundreds of millions
of acres of land as the
exemplary American nature,
the places where what's
best in the world
reflects what's best in us,
and the other way around.
In what may be the
most widely read
of all his amazing
and invaluable work,
Bill Cronon has taught
now more than a generation
of scholars and students
that the ideal of the
exemplary, nearly sacred place
is connected with the
sacrifice of the fallen place.
In prizing what we prize,
we also give ourselves license
to neglect or wreck
what we do not
so that more than
atmospheric carbon levels
connect Yosemite
with the coalfields.
Parks and wilderness
areas suggest a connection
between the more abstract
and literary ideas
about the nature of nature
and why it matters
to human beings,
and the most material
facts about the world,
the landscapes that compose it.
The link between the two,
which completes the circuit,
is often the law.
The circuit that law completes
is very clear when we're looking
at legislation as a kind
of landscape architecture,
rather like the aristocratic
gardens of England and France,
except that, as Frederick
Law Olmsted emphasized,
Olmsted, again, in an
1864 report on Yosemite,
recommending its adoption as
a state park in California,
here they should be thought
of as parks for citizens,
not for aristocratic owners,
and for that reason
they must be shaped
by a sovereign's power
rather than a proprietor's.
But just as law can perform
landscape architecture
when it has a very clear,
painterly template,
in the same way it can
shape other landscapes
in line with other
ways of seeing.
So, for example, we might see
a landscape in a fourth way,
as a stockpile of
resources to use
for our utilitarian purposes.
And this is the way of seeing
that the U.S. Forest Service
was created to implement
in the almost 200 million acres
of national forests
that it manages,
an area almost the size
of five Wisconsins.
This idea was very important
to utilitarian reformers
in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
It was connected with ideas
of the American nation
and the American state,
and the national forests
dedicate terrain to the idea.
They make it real.
They make it as real as dirt.
Or you might see a landscape
as ratifying a national
mission and identity.
The idea was widespread
in the early republic
that the world, by its nature,
belonged to the people
who could make it bloom,
and blooming meant being
economically productive,
according to the paradigm
of the agriculture
and the commodity markets
of northern Europe.
People who settled,
timbered, and planted land
could become its owners.
Those who merely hunted or
lived transient lands there
were not owners.
They passed over it like deer,
the lawyers of the time said,
or like ships at sea.
All of this doctrine had the
convenient effect of showing,
to the satisfaction
of the demonstrators,
that Native Americans
had never become,
legally or morally speaking,
rooted in the place.
Only Europeans did that.
John Marshall,
the second chief justice
of the U.S. Supreme Court,
explained in one of the more
candid treatments of this issue
that although the European
claim to North America
offended one's sense
of natural justice,
it had to prevail.
The alternative was to leave
the continent a forest,
a wilderness, unowned,
legally uninhabited.
The image of the continent
and the national
mission it called forth
is, of course, intimately linked
with the expropriation and
genocide of Native Americans.
And, contrary to certain
historical images,
very little about the
clearing and settlement
that it set in motion
was spontaneous.
Much of American law in the
first century of independence
was dedicated to converting
frontier into private property.
Federal statutes offered
a series of bargains.
You could become an
owner, a proprietor,
by settling a place,
by cutting trees in forest land
or planting them in grassland,
by draining wetlands
or irrigating drylands,
by mining valuable minerals
or, in some cases,
simply gathering stone.
The key was to
transform something
in a way that drew
economic value from it
and brought it into the
legal terms of ownership.
The landscapes we
mostly know, personally,
the private land of the
East and the Midwest,
began in these ways.
John Locke's famous parable,
that people made property by
mixing their labor with nature,
happened again and again under
the aegis of American law,
often enough via the
labor of enslaved people.
In North Carolina,
where I live now,
and in other Southern
jurisdictions,
settlers could claim extra acres
for each body the
law said they owned.
So a few points
are emerging here.
One is that different kinds
of landscapes are produced
by different kinds of legal
landscape architecture.
Laws creating and managing parks
are only the most
obvious example,
the way in, so to speak.
In fact, for every part
of every landscape,
the soil, the trees
and other plants,
the animals, the water,
the oil or gas or
metals underground,
the law has said,
in some respects,
what shall be done with it,
and, in every case, has said
who will make that decision.
The sum of these two questions,
what will be done and who
decides what will be done,
is our collective,
often implicit landscape making,
whether it's the cathedrals
of Yosemite and
Glacier that we make
or the geology of wreckage in
the Appalachian coalfields,
which you can trace
through property deeds,
the legislative
compromises that produced
the Surface Mining Control
and Reclamation Act of 1978,
and the interpretation
of the Clean Water Act
that allows the
burial of streams
in disposing of mining rubble.
Not every way of
seeing a landscape
corresponds to a legal regime
as neatly as the ones
I've been discussing,
but when a way of
seeing shapes a terrain,
when ideas and materiality
rise and meet each other
in a changing landscape,
law is often the
circuit that links them.
A second point is that,
although I have been
naming a landscape
to instance each way of seeing,
every landscape in which
people have taken an interest
is also a landscape of conflict.
They're cross-cut by competing
visions and narratives.
In Appalachia, for instance,
my way of telling the story
will run up against another
in which the survival
of coal mining
against environmentalist
intrusion is heroic
self-defense.
And as recently as the 1970s,
there was a third
narrative there,
advanced by the
insurgent labor movement,
the Miners for Democracy,
which held that
miners should work
in a way that preserved
their own health
and the health of the land,
and should strike
when they were asked to dig
coal in ways that either
threatened to give
workers black lung
or trapped them
in mine collapses,
or promised to destroy
streams and mountains.
Now that version of
the coalfields is gone,
along with most of the
power of its union,
the United Mine Workers,
and the meaning of this land
is split between two poles.
From one, the sacrifice of
a region for a few decades
of marginally cheaper energy
is one of the great pieces
of environmental
injustice in our age.
From the other, the victims
of environmental injustice
are the miners themselves,
expelled from their work,
much as farmers were
expelled from the land
that became the Shenandoah
National Park nearby,
a few hours to the
east of the coalfields.
I don't share the second view.
I think it's ill-founded,
but I don't find it mysterious.
By the way, I never use slides,
so my fingers are figuring
out how to use them.
(audience chuckles)
The lecture is about
the words always,
but I felt, in this case,
that some images would help.
In some landscapes,
the lines of conflict--
Actually, I'm not going
to talk about those
because we need the time.
The conflict that I'm
talking about here
is not just notional
or metaphoric.
These overlapping,
competing landscapes
have their constituencies,
people invested in certain ways
of relating to
the natural world,
in the ways they make a living,
but also at the
level of identity.
To take an extreme example,
those militia types
who occupied the
Malheur Wildlife Refuge
in Southeastern
Oregon last spring
were carrying forward the
view that land really belongs
to those who work it
and make it productive.
Their beef was with
the visions and laws
of each ensuing generation,
with federal land managers,
with romantic aficionados
of undisturbed beauty,
and, of course, with
ecologists who can explain
how cattle grazing
harms the waterways
where migratory birds
rest in the Malheur.
These landscapes are
overburdened with
conflicting uses,
conflicting laws,
conflicting meanings,
and sometimes the
lines of tension snap.
These landscapes of
conflict, it seems to me,
are very concrete expressions
of something that is often
said in grandly abstract terms,
that the world has entered
a new geological era,
which some earth
scientists and others call
the Anthropocene,
the epoch of humanity.
I think the Anthropocene idea
is best broken down
into two ideas,
which are distinct but
entangled together.
First is the
Anthropocene condition,
the intensity and pervasiveness
of human influence
on the world's biological
and chemical orders,
which means that,
from here forward,
the world we inhabit will
be the world we have made,
shared with the other life
that we've valued
enough to preserve it,
on the landscapes that
match our visions,
or, as with the coalfields
and, in some respects,
with every
climate-changed place,
our unspoken priorities,
even if not the ideas many of
us would stand up to claim.
Second, is the
Anthropocene insight,
the recognition that all these
competing ideals of nature
and the human place in it
are cultural creations,
ways that we've learned
to see and to be,
and, usually, ways of arguing
about our political,
economic and cultural lives
as much as about
the non-human world.
Once we've peeled
away the layers
of human activity that
shape these landscapes
and appreciated the
many angles of vision
from which they can make sense,
there's no avoiding that they
are Anthropocene landscapes.
What else could they be,
as long as we are in them?
And what, then,
could be the value
of imagining that you
rise from a piece of land,
continuous somehow with
its spirit and meaning,
the idea of a
landscape as an origin,
the place where I
began this lecture?
I'd like to return
to that idea now,
but along a different path,
by thinking of a landscape
not as an origin exactly
but, in one sense, the
opposite, as a sanctuary,
a place
of respite and reprieve,
not the place where
you come from,
but the place you flee to.
"Without wilderness," said
Senator Frank Church of Idaho,
debating the
Wilderness Act of 1964,
"Without wilderness, this
country would become a cage."
"We need a place,"
Thoreau had written
more than a century earlier,
"where we feel our
limits transgressed,"
a place outside villages
and subdivisions.
This was something,
this idea of the outside,
the outside of everything
as a kind of sanctuary,
an alternative inside,
that enslaved people understood
when they escaped into
the Great Dismal Swamp
at the border of North
Carolina and Virginia,
and established long-lasting
settlements there
with furtive ties
to the solid ground
where they would have quickly
been reclassified as property.
It was apparent to the peoples
of highland Southeast Asia
who resisted domination
by lowland empires
for many centuries,
a story Jim Scott tells in
"The Art of Not Being Governed,"
a study in geographic
imagination
that puts the upland
margins of empire
at the center of
a counter-imperial
picture of history.
I have my own way of
thinking about this question,
which, as it happens,
I developed while thinking
about a series of dreams
that I began having
a few years ago.
In these dreams, I start
walking up a wooded slope,
and here the dreams depart
from the low terrain of the
Carolina Piedmont where I live.
In the dreams, the
slope rises and rises,
through the loblolly
pine into steep pastures,
which level out
into high meadows
and then rise again
to crests of stone.
Sometimes there's no stone.
The meadows are the top.
They slope along a
broad ridge line,
or they may be just
a couple hundred
vertical feet of pasture
with a little mix of beech
and oak tufting on top.
Only waking destroys
my new geography.
And when I wake up,
my sense that the dream
has identified something
real is so strong
that I've more than once
looked up topographic maps
just to see whether
the hills I've dreamed
are actually there,
which, of course, they're not.
I think the wish
these dreams express
is for a way to get above a
terrain without leaving it,
to merge many small horizons
into one image.
These dreams sketch a
geography of thinking,
a way of seeing a place
whole without leaving it.
Of course, my dream landscape
is not the only
geography of thinking.
It's the one that you might
carry if you had grown up
where I did, in a very
specific Appalachian landscape.
From any place that
people lived there,
you could escape on
foot to a higher spot.
Every settled place contained
its own upward exits.
It was really not one
landscape but two,
a pattern of valleys
called hollows
with its counterpart in a
second pattern of ridges.
The pair of terrains were joined
by steep, mainly
wooded hillsides,
and knowing the valleys did
not mean you knew the ridges.
A slight misstep setting
off from a high place
could land you in
an unintended valley
with unexpected people and
miles by the valley roads
from where you meant to be.
The two landscapes had
complementary logic,
and moving between them
took caution and attention.
That's a landscape that
gives its dissidents
an upward path to escape on
foot, at least for a while,
and that lends its critics a
commanding view of its shape.
It's not a safe or
certain landscape,
and moving across
it can always exact
the price of confusion,
the likelihood of still
walking the wrong way
when night comes.
So with this image in mind,
let's return for a minute
to those opening images of a
landscape as a point of origin.
Take E.P. Thompson,
whose radical coal miner
literally came from the
ground as Thompson says.
Actually, everything
in Thompson's story
feels as if it came
from the ground
and had some sense of it
clinging to the defining acts
of the radicals whose
stories he tells.
Without saying so, not
more than once anyway,
Thompson manages to conjure
up that most un-Marxist
and un-academic thought,
that the land itself
was somehow aligned
with the populist and radical
ancestors of English socialism
and that its defining
chemistry, color, and scent
were present in the moments
of their decisive acts,
that the land was a friend
to its own dissenters.
Berry, too, wants the land to
be with him in his dissent,
dissent from what he called
in the title of his
most famous book,
"The Unsettling of America,"
the separation of
identity from place,
pleasure from work,
eating from knowledge.
These claims of nativity
are really bids for sanctuary,
for a piece of ground
where the higher,
not the higher,
let's say the larger,
the larger logic of the
world does not entirely rule,
a seedbed for your dissent.
What else are people
getting at when they say,
"They tried to bury us,
"they didn't know
we were seeds"?
Imagine a terrain
where that's true.
Thoreau wrote in his journal,
around the same time that he
was engaging Massachusetts's
dispute over the Fugitive
Slave Act's enforcement,
that it was a "maimed
and imperfect nature"
that he was "conversant with."
For someone who went
into the landscape
to see himself reflected,
that's a strong piece
of self-knowledge.
Walking to the
ponds, as he put it,
was never a return to
something pristine.
It was, like politics,
a way of joining in
with a record of damage
and of conceits and fantasies
that have turned
to material facts,
which then have to be inhabited.
The violence of nationalism
and of nativism,
to return to those words,
is partly in their denial
of these realities,
the realities of imperfection,
of conflict, of multiplicity,
of inherited damage,
their torrid
fantasy of a terrain
that is theirs
and no one else's,
that's home to their
meaning and no other.
The violence gets more
concrete, of course,
in detention centers
and airports and the
building of walls,
but some of it belongs
to the very idea
that any place in the world
could belong to and ratify
just one way of being in it.
A landscape that sides
with its dissenters,
like a historical narrative
or a constitutional culture
that prizes its
dissidents and outsiders,
may be a resource for
a certain productive
ethical ecology and
political ecology
between self-restraint
and self-assertion,
at least for people like me
whose minds are
already and always
bent toward terrain.
In landscapes whose
meaning is as crowded
and conflictual as ours,
there's room, at least, for
strange kinds of dissent
and for unexpected
kinds of consciousness.
When I finish a
reflection like this one,
I feel, like Berry or like
E.P. Thompson's miner,
that I'm recollecting myself,
rising up from the ground
and reborn into my
usual consciousness.
We might ask this
question about any little
ecological trip like
this one, any sojourn
into the question of
nature, nativity and place.
The question is does
it make the question,
does it make the issue of how
to live among other people
seem simpler or seem
more complicated?
If it makes it seem simpler,
maybe we should mistrust
where we've been.
If it makes the question
feel more complicated,
then we might, for the moment,
be doing something right,
no matter how difficult
making sense of it may be.
Thank you very much
for joining me,
and I'm delighted to discuss
the themes of this lecture
or anything else with you.
(audience applauds)