The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment

Disenchantment: that the natural world has lost its magic, that rivers are reduced to an energy source for hydroelectric dams, the sea to a thoroughfare for oil tankers and a vast waste disposal site – these are now widespread perceptions. In intellectual life they often feed into the so-called disenchantment thesis: that is, that the more the world becomes thoroughly mapped and understood in formalised scientific laws, the less personally and immediately meaningful it seems to become. Jane Bennett traces the thesis that the domination of science has deprived the world of all human significance to the work of Max Weber and others. She offers the following summary:

There was once a time when Nature was purposive, God was active in the details of human affairs, human and other creatures were defined by a pre-existing web of relations, social life was characterized by face-to-face relations, and political order took the form of organic community. Then, this pre-modern world gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism, and the bureaucratic state – all of which, combined, disenchant the world.¹

Bennett, however, argues that the disenchantment thesis is exaggerated. That modern science is not necessarily a mode of disenchantment is suggested, among other things, by the rise of the popular science book. The success of books such as Richard Fortey's Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (2001) shows public fascination even for an unsensational family of extinct arthropods. Public demand for accessible overviews of whole fields of science has been met by works such as John McPhee's Annals of the Former World (1981); books about cosmology or the nature of life (Paul Davies, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins); studies of individual discoveries or research projects, such as Richard Osborne's The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology (1999) or Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: Evolution in Real Time (1995); and books that blend nature writing with scientific work and natural history, such as Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986). Overall such texts and related television documentaries show the emergence of an influential ‘third culture’ (John Brockman), one lying between and overlapping old demarcations of the sciences and humanities.²

Popular science presents itself as making esoteric information available in a form that reaches a wide audience, a publicly responsible and important role. The sociologist Ron Curtis, however, is more sceptical, and argues that ‘Popular science, written in a narrative mode, is a powerful tool for promoting a particular normative view of science while, at the same time, rendering that view immune to criticism.’³ He stresses especially the way such writing is dominated by narratives of resolution with a strong sense of progression and closure. A standard pattern is for a book or documentary to begin by setting up some initial mystery crying out to be resolved, then offering a plethora of possible explanations, many mutually exclusive but also impossible to rank, till the story of sudden moment of insight or decisive discovery is followed by dramas of dispute in which an advance is nevertheless gradually confirmed. It is a kind of suspenseful detective story, a tale of persistence, of patience rewarded, leading to a full narrative closure. The reader tends to be cast in the role of satisfied spectator.⁴ Popular science books can also exaggerate a view of science as solely the disinterested investigation of natural phenomena, downplaying deep disputes between scientists about the method, philosophy and social function of science, presenting these often as little more than clashes of personality (e.g., maverick newcomer pitched against a dismissive old guard, etc.). Such narratives also implicitly endorse the dominant conception of humanity's mission as the gradual but inevitable conquest of nature.

Such accounts of science have increasingly occupied a space of cultural legislation and that of philosophical and even religious overview that used to be the preserve of the humanities or the churches. Their success highlights the failure of traditional literary and cultural critics to engage public attention and discussion in the way that, say, Richard Dawkins, Richard P. Feynman or Stephen Hawking have done. Ecocriticism is one of the few branches of received literary scholarship to have engaged with this cultural shift.

Curtis argues that popular science needs to move away from offering only ‘narratives of resolution’ (451) and that ‘This will change only if there is a systematic effort to represent science with a variety of forms’ (452). What, for instance, if a scientific issue were presented not in the form of a progressive narrative but in the ancient form of the dialogue? This would counter the tendency to view true scientific understanding as the exclusive domain of specialists, with the public able only to glean ‘popularised’ versions. The dialogue form is not the presentation of a fait accompli: it foregrounds opposed methods of argument. The reader of a dialogue is positioned less as a spectator and more as a kind of judge between differing positions. Its dual nature also downplays the sense of closure inherent to the progressive narrative. Some nature writing and ecocriticism also differs from many popular science books in an explicit concern with the social and political issues that pervade the actual work of scientists.

Scientific work often presents itself as defined by its respect for ‘objective fact’. A professional scientist looks to offer a dispassionate theory of how things are, one whose impersonality and rigour is supposedly guaranteed by the exclusion of all judgements of value. Such a model of strict objectivity highlights a crucial problem for any defence of the literary in a predominantly scientific culture – how to defend the claim that the literary arts are themselves a genuine and distinct mode of knowledge, not just a realm of subjective preferences and emotional escapism? If the scientific attitude would condemn a great deal of environmental writing as a sloppy mixture of fact and moralism, yet workers in the humanities often demonstrate the hidden values latent in the supposed objectivity of scientific practice. Ecocriticism, environmental writing and popular science have become the site of a general struggle between differing conceptions of cultural authority.

The ‘naturalistic fallacy’

If any one issue may focus these struggles for cultural authority, it is the status of the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ as it pervades and even defines crucial issues in the relationship of ecocriticism and science.⁵ The supposed fallacy is simple enough to describe. It names the seemingly false assumption that any kind of judgement of value necessarily follows from any establishment of fact. Arguments about what is are of a totally different kind from arguments about what ought to be. As Stephen Jay Gould writes, ‘My technical knowledge of the genetics of cloning gives me no right, or expertise, to dictate legal or moral decisions about the politics, sociology, or ethics of creating, say, a genetic Xerox copy of a grieving couple's dead child.’⁶ Although the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ is most explicitly an issue in philosophy and environmental ethics, the fact–value distinction is at play in almost every controversy about the environment and is sometimes explicitly criticised (see below). For instance, to cite scientific authority showing that a policy will destroy the habitat of a particular species is just not the same as arguing why that species should be valued in the first place.

The environmental writing of Annie Dillard is distinctive as a site in which these struggles of authority are unusually legible. In her essay ‘Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos’ (1982) the challenge is that of many environmental writers in the tradition after Thoreau.⁷ How does one continue to write in a mode originally grounded in transcendentalist conceptions of nature, that is, producing analogies and sometimes even moral parallels between natural processes and human attitudes and behaviour, but to do so now within a modern scientific understanding of geology, evolution and cosmology? At times, a sense of clumsy anachronism remains, as in, for instance, Dillard’s sentence, ‘What if we the people had the sense or grace to live as cooled islands in an archipelago live, with dignity, passion, and no comment.’⁸

Dillard's piece instantiates another characteristic problem in the use of scientific research in modern nature writing. Whereas Thoreau was writing at a time when his own observations could still make original contributions to natural history, only a few modern writers (Carson, Leopold) can write about science as practitioners. A literary essay about evolution and the Galápagos must primarily occupy the stance of a mediator, presenting material gathered from others. This effects a substantial shift in the stance of authorship compared to other kinds of modern literature. In Dillard's case this restriction, as in her classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), leads to a would-be virtuoso cultivation of the rhetorical and poetic skills of presentation, for any space for invention will lie more in the presentation of evolutionary theory than in its content.

Dillard's essay takes up this challenge by depicting events inferred by science but actually far outside the dimensions of human experience, doing so within a pseudo-religious stance that presents the Galápagos as an image of general processes of genesis. There are rhetorical jumps between accounts of events spanning millions of years and Dillard's own visit to the Galápagos, as in the sentence, ‘The ice rolled up, the ice rolled back, and I knelt on a plain of lava boulders in the islands called Galápagos’ (109). Dramatised accounts of geological change are interspersed with fragments of biblical quotation: ‘And the rocks themselves shall be moved. The rocks are not pure necessity, given, like vast, complex molds around which the rest of us swirl. They heave to their own necessities, to stirrings and prickings from within and without’ (127). There are also passages of more conventional reportage on Darwin's visit in the 1830s and on the later contributions of genetics to neo-Darwinism.

‘Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos’ reads as a site of conflict between Dillard's evident attachment to an inherited romantic ideal of the writer as the vehicle of individual creative vision and the very different ethos of scientific research. The reader suspects an underlying insecurity that the writer's role may dwindle to that of provider of info-tainment. In the Galápagos essay the occasional fragility of the rhetoric lies in the attempted forcing of the facts of evolution and geology into a would-be celebration of their value. As it proceeds, Dillard's essay becomes more and more a personal vision of life, conveyed in figurative language that spirals higher and higher above the empirical referents it started with. It becomes a kind of festive account of continents in motion like ‘beautiful pea-green boats’ (127) and of life as a great multiplicitous wave of adapted freedoms:

Life is more than a live green scum on a dead pool, a shimmering scurf like slime mould on rock. Look at the planet. Everywhere freedom twines its way around necessity, inventing new strings of occasions, lassoing time and putting it through its varied and spiralled paces. Everywhere live things lash at the rocks.

127

The essay becomes an ambitious exercise in an imaginative perception informed by scientific understanding. However, Dillard's evaluation of evolutionary processes as a matter of joyful celebration can seem rather more arbitrary (‘what shall we sing?’ [128]). To image life over eons as if it could become the directly perceived object of personal experience, comparable to watching waves break against rock, may translate scientific knowledge into a vivid image, but one that also enacts the illusory fiction of transcending or surviving the implications of that knowledge. Life as a planetary phenomenon cannot convincingly be depicted as some kind of continuous super-subjectivity with which a reader can easily identify, for, as Dillard acknowledges elsewhere, ‘Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.’⁹ Contemplating this, one could argue that a sense of horror and even despair would be as rational a response as Dillard’s sense of rapture.

Overall, the vaguely religious stance of the essay may seem fragile. The clash of fact and value is arguably not overcome by depicting geological processes vastly accelerated and in a figurative way to inspire a sense of wonder. Dillard ends in this mode, with a quote from S. T. Coleridge's visionary poem ‘Kubla Khan’. This famous passage acts as a kind of coda, summary and epitome of the Galápagos ‘paradise’ itself:

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.129

This is also, finally, Dillard's implicit claim as author for the authority of the inspired poet, a stance incorporating but also transcending that of the scientist.

Simon Critchley traces how the disenchantment thesis, figuring the everyday world as banal, has defined the understanding of much romantic and post-romantic literature. Again and again people have looked to writers to recreate that sense of wonder and significance in things that scientific rationalism is held to have destroyed, whether this be through fantasy literature like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), environmental non-fiction or the defamiliarising strategies of modern poetry. Dillard's essay clearly enacts just such a conception of the writer, trying to cast a vaguely religious colouring over the accepted understanding of the evolution of life.¹⁰

Critchley also describes some intellectual traps for such a conception: ‘The dilemma seems to be intractable: on the one hand the philosophical cost of scientific truth seems to be scientism’, so that human life is reduced to amoral physical laws with no ethical content or meaning. On the other hand, ‘the rejection of scientism through a new humanization of the cosmos seems to lead to obscurantism’, so that we inhabit only our own fantasies.¹¹

It is very rare to find an ecocritic who merely rejects the findings of the natural sciences. The issues are rather two. Firstly, there is a refusal to accept that scientific understanding is the only admissible form of knowledge, with exclusive authority against which one cannot appeal. Are not in fact some notions of objectivity already effectively a judgement of value?

Among ecocritics, especially ecofeminists, a refusal to accept the exclusive claim of science to the understanding of human life leads to a reaffirmation of the prereflective or of bodily experience. The world as actually lived is immediately full of human significance and meaning and it is, after all, from out of this primary, unreflective immediate knowledge of things that science, through certain procedures, comes to abstract and construct its particular account of reality. The relation to nature exemplified by the natural sciences is hardly culturally neutral: its very ideal of objectivity means that ‘Nature, in this tradition, becomes truly accessible only when it is alienated from human feeling and desire’ (George Levine).¹² For science, in other words, nature can only be objectively known if the observer is effectively dead or absent (‘The human sciences are precisely the knowledge of self-alienation, the transformation of self into object’).¹³ Scientific writing purveys a would-be cultureless ideal of a terminology of pure denotation, a totally factual language without metaphor or cultural or aesthetic association. To posit such a complete divide of fact and value is also to enshrine in knowledge a total and uncrossable dualism between the natural world and the human observer, precisely the kind of alienation some environmentalist thinking tries to address.

This brings us to the second major point of contestation between ecocriticism and the institutions of science. This is the deep implication of science in politics, both as a support and resource for the techno-industrial project of dominating the natural world and also in relation to the way ‘the scientific’ so often functions as a kind of ideology, restricting important decisions to a culture of approved experts. Reference to science often serves to disguise issues of moral and political contestation under blunt assertions of supposed fact.¹⁴ Science in the modern world patently acts often as an ideology: Bruno Latour defines ‘Science’ (with a capital S) as ‘the politicization of the sciences through epistemology [the theory of what knowledge is] in order to render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature’.¹⁵ Against this, environmental thinkers may open up such issues as the cultural imperialism of scientific classifications (e.g., how the Linnaean system of scientific names for species discredits the authority of local names) or the quirkier one of possible sexism in field guides to birds (‘The Female is Somewhat Duller: The Construction of the Sexes in Ornithological Literature’).¹⁶

The institutions of science are becoming newly contested and politicised as places in which environmental problems are defined, their risks predicted and often adjudicated, with huge implications in economics, politics and law. Some fear that such work, however vital, is also fostering the emergence of a culture of global managerialism: ‘global constructs of environmental issues involve a universalizing discourse that steers us away from the difficult politics of enduring structural inequalities and differentiated interests and towards technomanagerialist remedies, preferred (and constituted) by élite, Northern-based scientists and bureaucrats’ (Michael Goldman and Rachel A. Sherman).¹⁷ In this respect the environmental crisis becomes a crisis in the social and political function of science. Scientists find themselves increasingly recruited to form advisory panels on all kinds of issues, from climate change to radiation levels or the

Figure 11 Global warming science (Pixelbrat)

design of fishing nets. Such pressure takes people well beyond any pretence that scientific work is merely factual or apolitical. The list of issues that patently transgress supposed borders of fact and value grows longer each year. Latour lists some of them:

– Questions of medicine: for instance, how is it that the life-style of some Americans triggers diabetes?

– Questions of ideology: Is aggression among males rooted in primate society in chimpanzees as much as in humans? This question is clearly mixed, pertaining as much to the ethnologists biases as to apes and monkeys.

– Questions that are clearly technical and political imbroglios: What is a safe level of radiation from nuclear tests in the Nevada desert? What is the amount of carbon dioxide an industry may be allowed to release safely in the atmosphere?¹⁸

In these cases, to insist on a strict distinction of fact and value is to ask for the impossible.

This doubtful distinction also helps maintain arguably unhelpful boundaries between the various intellectual disciplines. Environmental issues may refuse to be encompassed by boundaries between the natural sciences on the one side and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Such intellectual and institutional divisions may already seem problematic for building a rigid nature–culture or human–non-human opposition into the very constitution of areas of inquiry. Such dubious distinctions even become reinforced by the way these disciplines try to keep themselves supposedly pure or ‘rigorous’. For instance, the reaction of people in the humanities against such scientific initiatives as sociobiology shows how defensively many protect the stakes of studying ‘the cultural as the cultural’. Sociobiology proposes to study and explain the social behaviour of animals – including human beings – in evolutionary terms, that is, as built-in adaptations to the conditions in which they evolved. For many in the humanities, however, any suggestion that something, xenophobia for instance, is ‘natural’ or ingrained as having been perhaps evolutionarily advantageous in the past becomes suspect immediately as disguised cultural prejudice.

In sum, ecocritical work both stresses and questions the way the authority of western scientific institutions is being changed by the environmental crisis itself, giving scientists new forms of power. For Latour the main force of radical environmentalism is that, in openly destabilising the fact–value distinction upon which so much modern thinking and practice is based, it also demystifies ‘Science’ as a political ideology, calling scientists to new forms of thought and responsibility.

That environmental criticism should have a close connection to ecology is stating the obvious. As that science which studies living things in their complex interdependence, ecology is both a source of insight into the nature of life and, in some ways, a source of guidance for an emergent green ethics.¹⁹ Ian Marshall, for example, makes the jump from natural science to politics when he writes, ‘Perhaps the insights of ecology could do more to advance the cause of multiculturalism than any amount of politically correct preaching. To recognize the advantages of diversity and the verities of interrelationship and interdependency – that is the ecological way of knowing.’²⁰

Other critics are more cautious. Nevertheless, in a world in which human activities are so evidently destructive, the science that focusses on the interrelations of all living things easily acquires the status of a kind of grim providence, as in Keith Tester's statement, ‘So long as we civilized men imagine ourselves to be apart from the land, and from our fellow creatures, we shall attempt to exploit them for our private gain, and the attempt will kill us.’²¹

A closer look, however, suggests that things are not quite so simple. ‘Ecology’ actually names two usually separate intellectual fields, such that references in environmental writing to ‘the ecological’ or ‘ecology’ will often need further thought. Firstly, there is ecology as the science first named by the German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s, the study of organisms in relation to each other and to the surroundings in which they live. On the other hand, the term ‘ecology’ has long come to name a school of thought quite distinct from ecology as an empirical science. Its subject is really ethics and its issue the kind of relationship that human beings ought to have to the natural world. The gap between ecology as science and ecology as ethics becomes apparent if one turns to a modern university textbook, Ecology: Principles and Applications.²² To open the bibliography of this work of scientific ecology, looking for such names as Murray Bookchin, Donald Worster or other political ecologists, is to draw a blank. Scientific ecology is itself the often heavily statistical analysis of energy flows, population dynamics and behavioural studies. In effect, ‘ecology’ names two quite different things, the one a natural science, the other, including ‘deep ecology’ and ‘social ecology’, a speculative part of the humanities and social sciences.

Because the two senses of ecology are often blurred, references to ecology in environmental writing have sometimes functioned in an underexamined ethical/political way. Josef Keulartz sees a great many modern appeals to ecology as continuing that long and dubious tradition in which what are essentially political arguments present themselves as grounded on the supposed facts of nature. He observes how radical environmentalism ‘is in the habit of making an appeal to the cognitive authority of ecology – under the motto “Nature knows best” – on the understanding that ecology can provide social and personal rules of conduct’.²³ A dated and now frequently questioned model of scientific ecology still sometimes functions as a kind of moral norm in some environmentalist discourse. According to this model, a natural ecosystem supposedly exists in a state of harmony, diversity in unity, balance, and so on, already, that is, as an image of coexistence and mutual dependence ripe to be transmitted as an ideal of human politics – exactly what happens, in fact, in the influential ‘social ecology’ of Murray Bookchin. Keulartz writes:

[radical ecology/environmentalism] is a discourse which calls incessantly for a humble holism and a submission of the individual to the greater whole while at the same time using ‘the’ ecology to silence dissenting voices and thus smother the debate on alternative future scenarios. Meanwhile, we are left completely in the dark as to the true essence of nature and confronted time and time again with the now familiar litany of mantras about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, about balance and harmony, stability and diversity, etc.²⁴

Contrast the biologist Richard Lewontin: ‘The environment has never existed and there has never been balance or harmony.’²⁵ The assumption that a natural state of things, untouched by humanity, would be one of an harmonious or at least balanced interaction, a sustainable and continuous diversity, was often so entrenched that it acted more as a template through which people discussed such things as human interventions in ecosystems, rather than coming itself under examination. In fact, however, as Daniel Botkin showed in a series of case studies, actual ecosystems often show drastic transformations, sudden imbalances or irreversible shifts.²⁶

Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology

One of the most sustained appropriations to date of ecological thinking to literary theory and criticism is Hubert Zapf's Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans [Literature as Cultural Ecology: On the Cultural Function of Imaginative Texts with Examples from the American Novel] (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002).²⁷ This book has been influential among German critics and remains representative of the way in which some ecocritics use references to ecology. Zapf argues that literature represents what he calls ‘an ecological principle or ecological force’ within culture, working against tendencies towards rigidity in society. Literary texts offer a ‘Sensorium and symbolical principle of compensation in relation to cultural deficits and imbalances’ (3), a space in which socially repressed or marginalised people or issues may voice themselves. As a counterweight to social forces of homogeneity and conformity, literary works renew continually the cultural imaginary, language and perception.

In relation to scientific ecology itself, this function is presented cautiously as a matter of analogy. Nevertheless, Zapf still clearly implies that literature acts as a kind of ‘natural’ corrective of distortions and imbalances in the workings of human culture. His reading of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) is a good example. Zapf reads Captain Ahab's quest to destroy the white whale as an extreme image of the anthropocentric drive to control and master all that is other and unknowable in the natural world, a drive that is itself also expressed in the whale industry's ghastly cutting up and exploitation of almost every body part or fluid in its prey. Demonising the white whale, Ahab himself becomes the white fiend he thinks he is pursuing. Against this, Zapf argues, such instances of the ultimately self-destructive drive to total authority and control are counterbalanced by other elements of the novel, by a ‘cultural–ecological counter-discourse’, for instance in the realm of dreams and fantasy in the narrator, Ishmael, and other characters, including crew members from non-western cultures, as well as in non-human nature itself. This ‘cultural–ecological counter-discourse’ dramatises the normally overlooked matrix or condition of Ahab's ‘civilised’ order in universal vital forces, common to all life. In this way Moby Dick stages how a drive to dominate the unknowable otherness of nature forms only an unbalanced denial of being part of the original interconnection of all life.

For Zapf, the analogy between the working of great literature and a certain understanding of ‘ecology’ renders texts such as Moby Dick agents of cultural self-stabilisation. Nevertheless, the analogy between ‘ecology’ and the social function of literature may seem rather forced on examination. Words such as ‘distortion’ and ‘imbalance’ are normative terms, and they are arguably appropriating references to scientific ecology to serve what is really a familiar contemporary politics of social inclusion. Zapf projects an implicit norm of culture as achieving the maximised ‘vital’ (7) working together of all its previously divided elements and, as such, his ‘cultural ecology’ could be said to blend a now common conception of the social function of literature with a recognisably romantic cultural ideal, of maximised social integration and interrelation. Is there much that is strictly ‘ecological’ in the social/political ideal of literature as an agent of cultural homeostasis in which marginalised subcultures find recognition?

Zapf's idealisation of the literary as a principle of natural counterbalance within the work of culture has been questioned by pointing to a counterexample, as Anne D. Peiter has done in relation to Ernst Jünger's unquestionably unbalanced In Stahlgewittern (1920).²⁸ In the genealogy of literary theories, moreover, Zapf’s work recalls the kind of romantic modernism associated with mid- twentieth-century literary criticism, with for instance the New Critics’ defence of the intellectual and moral complexities of literary language as against the one-sided terminologies of scientism.²⁹ The moral critic F. R. Leavis offers another analogue here: his vitalist language and references to ‘life’ as a norm of critical judgement often worked in a way that was very similar to references to ecology in Zapf and other modern ecocritics. Leavis defended creative writers for their ‘more penetrating consciousness of that to which we belong’, and their rendering of a language uniquely ‘alive to [its] own time’,³⁰ making the literary a sensitive conduit of cultural energies, uniquely alert to interrelationship and to the ‘vital’ or ‘deadening’ tendencies in its surrounding culture.

In effect, in both Leavis and Zapf, ‘life’ and ‘ecology’ are primarily moral and political concepts, not biological ones, backing up relatively traditional theories of the social function of literature as an anti-doctrinaire agent of social counterbalancing, inclusion and moderation.

Even in the sphere of environmental management, references to ‘ecology’ as a science may mask what are actually major political and social decisions. Adrian Franklin's study of controversies about introduced and invasive species in Australia may illustrate this. At issue are Australian efforts to restore indigenous ecosystems and eradicate or at least control such introductions as the red fox or the feral cat. Such programmes usually take 1788, the date of the first European settlement, as a kind of benchmark for restoration. Franklin writes:

the orthodoxy in Australia holds that native animals are those that were here at the time of white settlement. However, this traps environmental action in the enigma of an ecosystem they can never aspire to restore: the extensively burned pre-colonial landscape of Aboriginal Australia, or indeed the dominance of acacias on the continent before they were displaced by eucalypts. By this logic the dingo that came before the whites visited Australia is a native animal but the brumby [a local breed of horse gone feral] is not because it came just after.³¹

As Franklin's point shows, what ‘natural’ may finally mean is hard to gauge in this context. Ecological restoration projects may be a valuable response to the devastation wrought by settlement, as are calls for more suitable kinds of farming practice and water use. However, such projects may also feed an unacknowledged and problematic kind of eco-nationalism or even eco-cleansing (indigenous equals good, introduced equals bad), a policy dubious in itself for its dogmatism and with uncomfortable overtones in a country often torn by debates about human immigration. Franklin shows that the people who might be imagined most to support such eco-cleansing, the Aborigines, are in fact often against it. For instance, they value and exploit the introduced cats and have in some cases made them part of their culture. Tim Low argues that Australia's now hybrid fauna and flora need sometimes to be accepted and celebrated for what they are.³²

In sum, environmental politics cannot be decided for us by the science of ecology. Ecology offers a vital and chastening understanding of how ecosystems function, their fragility, instability or endurance. It cannot, however, take on the role of a political authority. Recognising this, environmental politics is increasingly becoming more like politics elsewhere, the art of making the least bad decision in the face of often incompatible, singular claims.

The disenchantment thesis

Facts versus values? a reading, Annie Dillard's ‘Galápagos’

The ‘naturalistic fallacy’

Against the facts–values split

Ecology, ‘ecology’ and literature

Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology

Chapter 14 Science and the crisis of authority