Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. Print.
This book in particular has helped me conceptualize ecofeminism and understand how the theory opposes the current patriarchal ideology in favor of a heterarchical view of the world where all humans and nonhumans are acknowledged and treated respectfully according to their interdependent state.
In the chapter “Let the Survivors of Contact Speak: in the Canon and in the Classroom,” Murphy declares that trying to codify and define nature writing leaves out women and minority voices (125). This is especially unfortunate because Native American women writers, who are left out because they do not “fit” the category of nature writing, are a valuable resource because they have experienced living outside of the current patriarchal structures (131-33). Studying Native American women writers will help contemporary students see themselves as immigrants to America, and therefore, help them recognize the necessity to learn about how to live in/with the environment from the indigenous inhabitants (133).
“The Present is to nature as the Past is to Culture as the Future is to Agency”
This chapter explains how the American ideal of independence is merely a false construct that denies the actual interconnectedness of the human and nonhuman (143). We ignore the natural past (changing environments, species, evolution) and pretend that nature is static and that culture is evolving toward some “advanced” state (144-45). With Enlightenment came the firm belief in the mind/body dichotomy, which allowed nature to be used as a commodity. Currently, we accept that the mind and body are separate, which allows us to be indifferent to the destruction of the physical world (145).
This passage in particular helped me understand how people could sit by passively as farmers in Florida poured chemical rich fertilizer onto the land and not expect/or care about the environmental consequences. In a (I believe it was Discovery Channel) special I saw how a decade of sludge farming changed the composition of the waters in one of Florida’s largest lakes, which resulted in scores of brain-damaged alligators that could not maintain their balance in the water and ultimately drowned. Once the researchers discovered the cause of the gators’ deaths, they began a project to strip the harmful chemicals from the soil and the gators eventually stopped drowning. The false belief that the mind is separate from the physical seems to partly explain why the farmers were alright with putting dangerous chemicals in the soil: in their minds it was the way to increase crops and profit; they must not have worried about the effects in the physical world.
As a solution to the current human alienation from the nonhuman world, Murphy purposes “a human culture that functions on the basis of harmonizing human and nonhuman interaction, rather than on the basis of maximizing human action on the nonhuman” (150). He describes the necessity of volitional interdependence, of seeing how the elements of our own bioregions need each other, and how all of our actions have consequences that will be felt one way or another because of the inherent interdependence of the web of all life (151). He provides his definition of (an)otherness in relation to otherness, that I would like to quote:
“Anotherness proceeds from a heterarchical sense of difference, recognizing that we are not ever only one for ourselves but are also always another for others (in the U.S. being one for oneself remains an ideal for men, while being another for others, with no regard for self, remains the operative definition for mother). Otherness isolated from anotherness suppresses knowledge of the ecological processes of interdependency—the ways in which humans and other entities survive, change, and learn by continuously mutually influencing each other—and denies any ethics of reciprocity” (152).
Acknowledging anotherness and volitional interdependence are essential to the success of bioregional communities that foster human acceptance, education, and living with the local natural diversity in a relationship of “sustainable cohabitation” (155).
“Simply Uncontrollable, Or Steaming Open the Envelope of Ideology”
Murphy explains that destruction such as the colonization of the Americas and eradication of Native American civilizations was a product of ideology, which sold these events as fostering order. He points out that similar ideology is at work today, “in altered but accelerated forms” (157). After describing various women activists who fight against patriarchal domination to ensure the respect of women and nature, he says that men should learn to listen to women’s voices because their cause is one that concerns everyone because “as women recover the wilderness within” they will also “reinvent the nature of female-male relationships and the nature of human participation on the world” (159-160).
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