DIFFERENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY AS ANOTHERNESS AND ANSWERABILITY
In the previous chapter I focused on works that would normally be labeled creative or literary nonfiction. But I don’t want to imply by that set of examples that referentiality requires writing in an allegedly nonfictional genre, or even that works labeled fiction need to be written in a realist mode to be treated by readers as referential. Rather, here I want to claim that the dialogical concepts of answerability and anotherness provide a way of talking about how various movements within nature-oriented literatures ground their action and ground their readers in ethically referential situations aware of difference and responsibility. They do so without presuming that nonfiction equals fact and that facts are required for writing about nature. Thus the equation of nature writing = nonfiction = fact = truth that formed the dominant mode of literary criticism that privileged the nonfiction natural history essay over all other literary modes in the early years of American ecocriticism is cast aside for a recognition of the multivalent textual displays of the search for better ecologically ethical understanding. Also, we find the casting aside of perhaps the most profound symbol of realism, the nation-state, as authors turn to transnational, bioregional, localist, new agrarian, and futurist sites and locations for the settings, contexts, and political placement of the ethical conflicts they narrate in which allegiance to, and betrayal of, habitat, place, and environment take center stage.
But are these thought-experiment literary alternatives to the nation-state just that, imaginative fictions, self-referential verbal constructs; or, do they indeed ground their readers in a specific ethically referential position of having to examine the role of the nation-state in relation to environmental issues and environmental justice? And, in particular, to what degree do these literary works align themselves with, provide alternatives to, or push forward contemporary philosophical and political thinking about the future of the state in contemporary green political theory? The best way to consider answers to these questions is to combine the Bakhtinian-based concepts of anotherness and answerability in relation to literary allonational formations in conjunction with the most advanced thinking about ecological democracy, which, at the moment, is represented by the recently published work of Robyn Eckersley.
The concepts of anotherness and answerability are initially derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Bakhtin emphasizes at the outset the “once-occurrent event” of being (1993, 1), which he understands as the actual plane of existence upon which each of our thoughts and actions occurs as a deed performed once and only once by a unique individual. And while he defines these deeds of thought and action in a radically individualistic way, he does not define them in a solipsistic way. Rather, these unique events—such as a person’s decision to eat meat or go vegetarian at lunch, perhaps to skip the mad cow lurking in the menu—do not occur in isolation from other unique events but in solidarity with them through mutual participation in human culture and in the material world.
The individual fear about tainted food is linked with a government policy, is linked with cultural taboos regarding cannibalism, is linked with a social network that has or has not debated bovine growth hormone (bgh), cloning, or genetically modified organism (gmo) food processing. In this larger domain of culture my unique and once occurrent actions take on the ethical responsibility of answerability. And in the cultural domain of environmental ethics that answerability must necessarily involve both human and nonhuman actants, must necessarily involve other entities that have their own unique once occurrent event of being, whether they enjoy volitional behavior or not.
Many writers have perceived this answerability in the domain of culture as obligating their characters and themselves to entertain alternatives to the nation-state and, at times, to rebuke those readers who imagine the human world only in terms of nation-states and who accept the limitations on answerability that the environmental instrumentalism of their respective governments would place on them. The U.S. nation-state, for instance, tells us that we must accept the use of depleted uranium on the battlefield and the practice field without regard to its long-term environmental impact on non-combatants, both human and nonhuman. For some, answerability requires that we protest such weaponry for its environmental contamination and that we also protest the military occupation of native peoples’ lands where so much military practice degrades the inhabitability of those environments. Such native writers as Simon Ortiz in the U.S. southwest and Haunani-Kay Trask in Hawai’i have written eloquent poems of military protest precisely along these lines.
For environmental ethics answerability must extend beyond moral considerability for humans to encompass other entities. And here we get to the concept of otherness. But I quickly want to step beyond that concept of the Other, extremely popular in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. I want instead to think about the concept of anotherness, based on the Another—not the Alien and not the Stranger, but the brother, the cousin, the sister, and not just the human ones, but all the creatures with whom we share the planet. In this postmodern period of globalization, that sharing is becoming increasingly destructive, self-destructive, and excessively consumptive. The domain of culture is one largely dominated throughout the realm of the new world order by the propaganda of nation-states using continuous growth economic models to guide national political, economic, and military policy. If that claim is descriptively accurate in its larger outline, then literature that presents allonational formations necessarily stands at the forefront of a contestatory international environmental literature by offering alternatives to the business-as-usual models accepted as realpolitik (for earlier discussions of these ideas, see Murphy 1995, 1998).
GLOBALIZATION AND THE NATION-STATE
Arjun Appadurai, referenced in my introduction to this book, writes that “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation. . . . But most writers who have asserted or implied that we need to think postnationally have not asked exactly what emergent social forms compel us to do so, or in what way” (1996, 158). He claims that we see today in identity politics an effort to generate nationalism based on nonterritorial principles of solidarity that necessarily rely on cultural constructions of ethnicities and counterethnicities because of the strongly diasporic character of much contemporary global population flows (Appadurai 1996, 165). Such efforts would generate a stateless or multistate nationalism, but it is doubtful that such an entity could hold people’s allegiance for long without some homeland or territory to picture, to visit, to desire. In that regard, Masao Miyoshi views recent efforts at nationalism and ethnic separatism as “brute” response to the expansion of transnational corporations (TNCs) that are coming to dominate the economic world order (1993, 744). These TNCs are particularly troubling to Miyoshi because they no longer have any interests in or allegiances to a particular territory on the planet, national or otherwise, and thus are wholly irresponsible ecologically(Miyoshi 1993, 748). At the same time, nationalism divorced from situated knowledge, local culture, and any history of responsibility or stewardship of local ecologies could end up equally irresponsible in terms of long-range commitments to sustainability and any form of ecological restoration or conservation.
In early 2004, MIT Press published The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty by Robyn Eckersley, which represents some of the most advanced thinking on the notion of the “green state” from the position of green critical theory. It is noteworthy that the two key terms in her subtitle are “Democracy” and “Sovereignty,” because ecotheory, environmentalism, environmental justice, and ecopolitics have all called in various ways for radically extending the concept of democracy to embrace entities beyond the human in political deliberations and have all called for the debunking of the myth of sovereignty. As J. F. Rischard, the World Bank’s vice president for Europe, observes, the theories of the nation-state based on the establishment of absolute rule within the borders of a given state as decreed by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia presumed that the borders of the nation-state could contain not only a political system but also under it an economic system and an environmental system. But, Rischard points out that the new world economy “is creating an economic system that straddles . . . borders” (Rischard 2002, 46). Increasingly the economy takes place across borders and, as we have seen with the rise of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is adjudicated multilaterally. And “Global warming, regional water shortages, and other stresses accompanying the population increase also dilute the nation-state’s mastery over its own environmental system. So do AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, diseases that respect no boundaries and sweep through the world at a faster rate than before” (Rischard 2002, 46).
That certainly was the case with SARS. In other words, the concept of absolute or complete control of activities within a set of borders outlined on a map is being increasingly revealed as an illusion that fails to enable states to meet the needs of their people, their economies, and their ecosystems, much of all three of which they increasingly share with other states.
While Eckersley speaks out strongly against turning our backs on the state as a potential agent of positive change in human environmental behavior, she is quick to decouple the “state” from the “nation.” In her introduction, Eckersley explicitly states that her theories of the green state are not based on a nation-state but rather on a “transnational, democratic green state” (2004, 2). She, in fact, devotes an entire chapter to the issue of “the Transnational State” (Eckersley 2004, chapter 7). This transnationalism arises from her recognition that, for the state to play a positive role in regard to the global environment, it must function as “an ecological steward and facilitator of trans-boundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory and ignoring or discounting the needs of foreign lands. Such a normative ideal poses a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of the nation, of national sovereignty, and the organization of democracy in terms of an enclosed space and polity” (Eckersley 2004, 3).
Eckersley identifies in relation to her own theorizing what constitutes the strongest justification for taking seriously the role of environmental literature in encouraging new ways of thinking about government and social organization in the minds of its readers: “the role of imagination—thinking what ‘could be otherwise’—should not be discounted. As [Andrew] Vincent also points out, ‘We should also realize that to innovate in State theory is potentially to change the character of our social existence” (2004, 4). And as we look at the allonational formations imagined in environmental literature in comparison with Eckersley’s state theory, we will see repeatedly that the novelists, poets, and literary essayists have already imagined and described both the steps toward a green democratic state and various versions of such a state in operation.
But why do we find both political theorists and environmental writers entertaining alternatives to the nation-state as a necessary transition in political sovereignty in order to realize specific and general environmental goals? First of all, nation-states by definition are organized around the alleged homogeneity of a group of people within a given territory. And, as we have seen in the history of Europe as well as in the Manifest Destiny policy of the United States, it is the appeal to the unity of the people that is frequently used as a justification for the expansion of territorial boundaries or the annexation of another state. In some cases, the other human inhabitants of a territory are either annihilated to make room for the expansion of the nation, or restricted to a small portion of the annexed territory. In other cases, the subject people are defined as having once been a part of the greater nation and are brought back into the fold through military conquest or political negotiation, with their cultural divergences from this alleged greater nation then suppressed. When subject peoples then appeal to their own separate national identity as a basis for resistance to their subjugation, extermination, or territorial restriction, they end up appealing to the same fundamental concepts that the invading state has used to justify its expansion.
As Eckersley notes, it is increasingly the case that nation-states do not have the human homogeneity necessary to maintain the racial, religious, and even linguistic myths on which they have been based, and a new kind of “patriotism” is needed in which there is a sense of shared membership (2004, 182). Although territorial in basis, this new kind of patriotism, to have progressive environmental potential, must take a fundamentally different approach to the territory of its inhabitation than has been the approach of the modern nation-state. Land, not as the father, not as a frozen, demarcated setting or mere backdrop for the human drama, or as a resource base for capital accumulation, but land as the ground of an entity, an ecosystem or set of ecosystems, a portion of the earth as ecosystem, with which we interact along with all of the other biota residing in specific places must become the basis for a state in which political relationships incorporate all of the actants and entities of a territory, not just the human. A green state, perforce, must be more comprehensive in its orientation and representation than one based on the nation can possibly be.
To the degree that any such green state must have human relationships built on the basis of communities and community interaction, their variability, permutations, and diversity must be taken into account, evolved, and recognized. As Eckersley claims, “National communities are only one kind of community and they are under increasing strain from the processes of globalization. If nations are imaginary communities based on abstract rather than embodied social bonds, then there seems to be no good reason for denying the significance of other kinds of imaginary communities that come into being in response to common problems that transcend national boundaries or simply in response to human suffering or ecological degradation wherever it may occur in the world” (2004, 185).
In many instances, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) represent types of networking communities, which span vast territories, or which focus on segments of a territory. Water affinity groups, for instance, dedicated to supporting struggles for clean water, wild rivers, and aquaculture communities around the world can form networks and alliances with each other that represent a type of global community based on shared interests, concerns, and objectives. The Indigenous Environmental Network is an excellent example of what we might call an intentional community in which disparate groups are linked by fundamental commonalities and threats, regardless of the local territories of inhabitation, but who, through their commonalities of inhabitory practices, feel a sense of shared identification and common bonds. Along these lines, Rischard sees the formation of global issues networks as a key civil society structure necessary to function multilaterally in order to exert pressure on states to respond less hierarchically and more laterally to pressing environmental crises worldwide. These groups, then, would be fundamentally transnational in their orientation.
Such networks represent a progressive response to what Miyoshi perceives as the growing domination of TNCs. We see a resurgence and historical continuation of territorial solidarity smaller than the nation-state, along community lines and more recently along explicitly articulated bioregional lines, and solidarities larger than nation-states along international NGO and transnational allegiances that challenge the environmental exploitation justified within national boundaries by appeals to energy self-sufficiency, national security, and the denial of answerability for pollution that circulates from within but beyond national borders (see Kuehls 1996). These larger than nation and transnational formations, like the smaller than nation ones, maintain territorial identifications that generate loyalty to specific, concrete locations that are defined by a sense of shared threats and shared interests based on both a sense of answerability and a sense of anotherness. Such sensibilities constitute the diametrical opposite of the fundamental fears and privileges that undergird national identity because, as Thom Kuehls notes in Beyond Sovereign Territory, “The problem . . . lies not with the size of sovereign territories, but with the concept of sovereignty itself. Ecopolitics forces an engagement with a host of questions that challenge the otherwise unproblematic presentation of the space of sovereignty” (1996, xi), which is currently formulated as the borders of the nation-state.
Challenges to the nation-state, and its TNC competitors, as a political entity organizing cultural change and cultural conservation can thus come from the development in the political arena of materially anchored entities larger than and smaller than the nation-state as an organization. For example, as we have seen in Rio, Seattle, and elsewhere, environmental alliances are being formed that are as equally transnational in scope as corporations, but maintain their loyalty and answerability to real environments in specific locations. In response to the WTO, we are seeing the gradual development of what may one day be known as the WEO, the World Ecological Organization, formed not through mergers but through alliances and affiliations. Such a WEO would become the allonational opposite of the WTO, one that would continuously make the representation of nonhuman anothers a part of its fundamental answerability. It then comes as no surprise that Eckersley, in line with voices within the European Union, calls for the formation of both a world environment council and a world environment court (2004, 239).
LITERARY TRANSNATIONAL FORMATIONS
Literary works have already been published that point to such ecologically answerable transnational formations and resistance to WTO regulations, such as Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Other literatures that I would place under the same category consist of literary representations of cultural, political, and economic formations that ignore, repudiate, or consistently transgress national boundaries in order to maintain the integrity of historically established peoples and groups whose environmentally located inhabitation preexisted national boundaries, or people who have come to rely on traversing established boundaries for their contemporary existence. Writing by and about indigenous or native peoples around the world constitute the bulk of such literature.
For example, Leslie Marmon Silko’s sprawling novel, Almanac of the Dead, links the rebellions in the Chiapas region of Mexico with the resistance to oppression of people of color in the United States, who in turn at the end of the novel link up with environmental activists to assault the U.S. government on multiple fronts. Silko ends the novel by presenting to her readers a vision of large political alliances that unite groups and organizations across tribal, national, and racial lines, such that long-standing ethnic peoples and various recently evolved micro-cultures can work toward common ecological goals. Thus, in opposition to the reactionary neoethnicism that Miyoshi de-cries, Silko posits a recognition of anotherness on the part of a variety of characters from different ethnicities and nationalities who unite around a common ground of answerability for the fate of the earth.
In Yaqui Deer Songs: Maso Bwikam, Larry Evers and Felipe Molina show a different kind of transnational antinationalism in a nonfiction work that discusses the cross-border interaction of Yaqui Indian communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. They take the deer songs that unite the various Yaqui communities in ceremony and ritual and define their culture’s relationship with the natural world as the focus of their discussion of Yaqui survival as a people. These deer songs function within ritual as displays of both anotherness and answerability in relation to the deer and the other animals with whom the Yaqui interact, many of whom serve as food. And Linda Hogan, working on native relations across the U.S.-Canada border in her novel, Solar Storms, shows the fallacy of sovereignty that Kuehls critiques. Hogan demonstrates how the lives of native peoples on both sides of the border are affected by the destruction of First Nation lands by Hydro Quebec’s enormous rerouting of rivers and flooding of huge tracts of land in the name of electricity generation—electricity that is mostly sold to the United States. And she does so through depicting the lives of female characters who accept both answerability and anotherness as part and parcel of their daily interaction with the rest of the world.
Most of the environmental responses to the limitations of the nation-state and TNCs have come not at the transnational level but at sub-national/sub-state, regional, and local levels. Mitchell Thomashow in Ecological Identity grounds his environmental education on the concept of the commons. The commons, in his teaching and writing, functions as an allonational formation because it requires his students and his readers to define their moral obligations and to critique their own daily behaviors in relation to various levels of community affiliation, from the very local to the global, insisting that they think beyond the illusion of absolute political, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Thus, the commons functions simultaneously as a type of bioregional situated space for local identification and affiliation, and as a type of transnational relationship for global ecological citizenship. Eckersley’s theorizing supports this simultaneity of identification, giving priority to the local, in order to provide the experiential basis for the appreciation of the global, when she writes that “Without knowledge of and attachment to particular persons or particular places and species, it is hard to understand how one might be moved to defend the interests of persons, places, and species in general. Local social and ecological attachments provide the basis for sympathetic solidarity with others; they are ontologically prior to any ethical and political struggle for universal environmental justice” (2004, 190).
Likewise, for Thomashow, community is key to all other affiliations and identifications, and in support of his argument quotes Vaclav Havel’s concern for how a nation can become a community in the contemporary world (Thomashow 1995, 92, 98). Ecological identity, then, becomes the foundation for local and global citizenship in the forthcoming age of the green state (Thomashow 1995, 99). Gary Snyder makes the point that “small cultures” within larger nation-states “are not only arguing for cultural authenticity and the right to exist, but also for the maintenance of the skills and practices that belong with local economies and that enable them to operate in a sustainable manner, via their own specialized, local forms of knowledge, over the centuries” (1990b, 13).
Part of the flip side of the transnational formation of larger alliances is the bioregional movement of small intentional communities. There is a very narrow definition of bioregional that defines it as a self-consciously articulated political movement within the United States, Australia, and other countries, marked by bioregional congresses and political parties. There is also a looser sense of the term that understands bioregional as a regional commitment to place and social organization based on natural conditions and formations.
With the looser definition, we find that much of the contemporary writing about new agrarianism is bioregional and localist in emphasis, such as the writing of Wendell Berry, who focuses on the specific problems of the survival of family farming in Kentucky in particular and the rural South in general. He tackles these issues in essays, novels and short stories, and poems. Particularly pertinent here would be his collections of essays, The Unsettling of America, Home Economics, What Are People For? and Another Turn of the Crank. Like many other writers focused on agrarian concerns, such as Wes Jackson, Berry shows a strong sense of answerability but a relatively weak sense of anotherness, as embodied in his particular stewardship model detailed in The Gift of Good Land. In Becoming Native to This Place, however, Jackson argues that
Becoming native to this place means that the creatures we bring with us—our domesticated creatures—must become native, too. . . . Our interdependency has now become so complete that, if proprietorship is the subject, we must acknowledge that in some respects they own us. . . . We must acknowledge that our domesticated creatures are descendants of wild things that were shaped in an ecological context not of our making when we found them. . . . We must think in terms of different relationships. . . . (1996, 98–99)
Bessie Head, writing several decades ago, portrays a new kind of agrarian community in the just-independent Botswana of the 1960s. Through her depiction of the village of Golema Mmidi, in When Rain Clouds Gather, Head thematically states that inhabitation in a Botswana existing on the border of South Africa, surviving in a postcolonial world, and struggling in a global economy, requires the establishment of new techniques of sustainable agriculture and animal husbandry, the development of new gender and family relationships, and the generation of new traditions and customs. Fortunately for Makhaya, the novel’s protagonist, he has landed in a progressive village established around an experimental farm, which has attracted individuals from all over Botswana who are ready to break with the negative aspects of tradition and forge a new life on the land.
Head makes it clear that the people of this village cannot rely exclusively on traditional cultural beliefs and values in order to build a viable new community. The new villagers must overcome traditional prejudices not only against women but also against so-called inferior tribes who actually demonstrate better sense about the selection of agricultural crops in relation to soil quality and rainfall. As one might expect, then, anotherness first has to be extended to other human beings outside of tribal affiliations and in contradiction to hierarchies and prejudices reinforced by colonial ideology. At the same time, the animal husbandry model Head extols would lead to a reduction in suffering of the cattle that constitute a mainstay of the local economy, but traditionally have been subjected to misery and starvation by the inability of nomadic herding practices to mitigate cycles of drought.
In the narrower sense of the term, we can look at the writing of Gary Snyder, particularly his prose work from the 1980s and 1990s. His most spectacular essay on this subject would have to be “Coming into the Watershed.” As Snyder states explicitly in that essay, bioregionalism as a political practice “would be a small step toward the deconstruction of America as a superpower into seven or eight natural nations—none of which ha[s] a budget big enough to support missiles” (1995, 227). Further, Snyder contends that “The city, not the nation-state, is the proper locus of an economy, and then that city is always to be understood as being one with the hinterland” (1995, 233). Freeman House, a friend and ally of Snyder, demonstrates this kind of bioregional environmental and political activism in his memoir, Totem Salmon, discussed in the previous chapter.
For Snyder and House and other bioregionalists, such as the contributors to Home! A Bioregional Reader, the key features of this kind of antinational bioregional politics is an emphasis on human inhabitation based on the carrying capacity and sustainability of the land base in terms of food production. They are concerned with the daunting task of reducing the ecological footprints of contemporary societies. Both Snyder and House extend their attention not only to answerability but also to anotherness, seeing the other animals of their region as mutual inhabitants with whom we share an interdependency that requires respect and consideration in terms of a high appreciation of long-term affectedness. As Snyder observes, “Human beings who are planning on living together in the same place will wish to include the non-human in their sense of community. This also is new, to say our community does not end at the human boundaries; we are in a community with certain trees, plants, birds, animals. The conversation is with the whole thing. That’s community political life” (1990b, 18).
Richard Manning in Inside Passage takes up House’s concerns and places them in a larger framework of analyzing the bioregional and indigenous movements of the watersheds of the North American Pacific Northwest from the Columbia River dividing Oregon and Washington states and British Columbia up to the Alaskan border. Manning in each chapter looks at a different watershed and the issues of coevolution, biodiversity preservation and stimulation, and local sustainable economies. For Manning and the various informants who speak through his essays in this volume, national governments cannot address any of those issues. First, they do not recognize that “Economy is a subset of the environment” (Manning 2001, 15). Second, they support and propagate industrialism, which, in the case of agriculture in both the United States and Canada, generates monocultural farming, and, as Manning notes, “Nature abhors a monoculture” (2001, 16). Third, “Nature,” not governments, “show us that there are limits, and this is the fundamental limit from which all others are derived” (Manning 2001, 19). For many of the communities that Manning explores in Inside Passage, answerability based on a clear sense of long-term affectedness is integral to their systemic thinking about watershed and bioregional communities; for some, particularly Native American communities, that answerability includes a historic and revitalized sense of anotherness, which other peoples who are seeking to become reinhabitory are adopting.
Many European critical theorists might be quick to warn American theorists that such concepts as the commons and bioregionalism can be, and are, deployed by both progressive and reactionary forces. To ensure that identification with the commons as a foundation for global citizenship will further the goals of a movement toward progressive green states, Eckersley is careful to posit that the principle of belongingness, both in individual emotional identification and in domestic and international legislation and litigation, must be accompanied by the principle of affectedness (2004, 193). Here, without using the terms, Eckersley invokes both answerability and anotherness as requisite principles of ethical political behavior. The principle of affectedness requires that all of those entities, human and nonhuman, affected by political and economic decisions made by human communities need to be taken into account before policies are implemented and actions are taken. The weakest version of this probably is the existing legal practice of the filing of environmental impact reports. But Eckersley and numerous other environmental thinkers and writers would radically expand the moral considerability of affectedness and the ways in which those affected would have a voice in decision making.
For Eckersley,
many nonhuman others are not capable of giving approval or consent to proposed norms; however, proceeding as if they were is one mechanism that enables human agents to consider the well-being of nonhuman interests in ways that go beyond their service to humans . . . the relevant moral community must be understood as the affected community or community at risk, tied together not by common passports, nationality, blood line, ethnicity, or religion but by the potential to be harmed by the particular proposal, and not necessarily all in the same way or to the same degree. (2004, 112–13)
Along these lines, Snyder proposed in the 1970s that there ought to be mechanisms for a whale to make a speech before the U.S. Congress, for the other creatures who are affected by human actions to be able to have their interests represented in political decision making. This participation, via human spokespersons, goes beyond the notion of legal standing first outlined by Christopher Stone. Snyder reiterated this idea in 1992 in “A Village Council of All Beings.” Building on the ideas of Australians Joanna Macy and John Seed, Snyder calls for a political formation that includes anotherness as a foundational structure of government: “Imagine a village that includes its trees and birds, its sheep, goats, cows, and yaks, and the wild animals of the high pastures . . . as members of the community. The village councils, then, would in some sense give all these creatures voice” (1995, 79–80).
In The Fifth Sacred Thing, an ecofeminist novel set in California in the near future, Starhawk embodies this very idea in the local government she describes. The Council Hall of the San Francisco Bay Area is envisioned as a regional government that has radically extended democratic representation so that various nonhuman entities have their spokespersons participating in political deliberations. The healer Madrone reflects on the time five years earlier when Council participants realized that a weakness of their organization was revealed in the fact that the nonliving inhabitants of their region had no representation in the decision making process. In response, they developed four seats at Council to represent the “Four Sacred Things,” the Four Elements: White Deer for the earth, Hawk for the air, Coyote for fire, and Salmon for water. For each a human sits masked in trance with the duty to represent the interests of the entities of each element. While some might be quick to note that this utopian format still contains the reality that human beings are speaking “for” nature, such a practice would be a radical step beyond the anthropocentrism and androcentrism of current governmental bodies (on the issue of humans speaking for/as nature, see Murphy 1995 and Armbruster 1998).
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: ORION AND WILD EARTH
The conflict of whether or not environmentally ethical political, cultural and economic formations can be developed within the framework of the existing geopolitical reality of nation-states, or if such development requires the dismantling of that geopolitical reality and its replacement with formations that are simultaneously postnational, transnational, and local, can be seen in the focus of two American environmental magazines: Orion and Wild Earth. Orion tends to focus on the playing out of environmental issues within the context of U.S. national interests, political structures, and American culture. Articles treating U.S. laws and freedoms focus on readers as “Americans,” as when David Orr writes about constitutional quality of life guarantees. In contrast, Wild Earth takes a bioregional and continental approach that is both localist and transnational as indicated by its manifesto that links environmental actions across the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican borders. Both magazines play valuable educational roles, but in terms of developing allonational potential and consciousness, Wild Earth generally has more to contribute (although it has had to suspend publication to divert more funds to direct action).
Whether we are talking about environmental magazines, literary nonfiction, poetry, or novels, literature that constructs and imagines allonational formations necessarily reflects and encourages expectations on the part of authors and readers that people and places need not be run by governments in the ways that they are run today. Their depictions of anotherness and answerability generate a cognitive dissonance with the existing status quo of the instrumentalist nation-state that will affect not only the way readers think about the world, but to some extent, no matter how discretely minute, will also affect the way they act in the world.