Integral Ecology Chapter 9.3

Mr. Grumpy here again, with my usual burblings into the whiskey glass of despair...Now I've sloughed off some of my excess dislike baggage, I come once again to chapter 9 of Integral Ecology by Michael Zimmerman et al.

The authors continue, arguing that one doesn't have to regress to commune with nature (287–288). There are some good quotations from Theodore Roszak, whose ideas about ecopsychology I like quite a lot. The unconscious is ecological: I like that, and could do with some more filling out there. As a physical entity holding the inscribed trace of all kinds of stimulation and so forth, the unconscious is without doubt part of the biosphere, in quite an ordinary yet rather strange sense.

There is a tension between Roszak's idea that children have an inherently animistic and thus beneficial view, and those developmental psychologists who stress that children are not yet fully mature.

The authors are unsure as to whether humans should try to return to a previous phase of human social development, possibly before agriculture. There is some discussion of Paul Shepard, another ecopsychologist (288–291).

Did we ever in fact stop being one with nature? The authors then address this issue ((291–295). Zimmerman (again, shorthand for both authors) addresses a paradox, the reliance of environmentalist language on Judaeo-Christian Fall and apocalypse narratives.

Now at last a useful graph: Zimmerman shows how according to these narratives, the fall happened either very recently, or a very long time ago: but never somewhere in the middle. I would like to see more pressing of this. It is a very striking data set.

However, Zimmerman focuses instead on a list of possible culprits, drawing on numerous witnesses starting with David Abram, who makes writing the culprit (and, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, Jacques Derrida is an accomplice). These guys (Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno, Shepard) move by at an alarming clip.

Then a slightly more general paragraph (294–295): all periods had their bad points and integral ecology should integrate them all. For instance “There is a strong possibility that the Pleistocene tribes hunted several species of North American megafauna to extinction.”

Oh dear. Mr. Grumpy is awakening. I'll make this short so as not to give him too much of a chance.

Here is a metatheoretical question: in what kind of a medium are all these different world historical moments and worldviews suspended? Does “integrate” here mean “combine all the good and bad of all periods and views.” What would that look like? Or does it mean “take the best of all periods.” Can that be integrated into a whole? Are we looking at a jigsaw into which all the pieces fit? Or is this actually an assemblage of contingent entities—Pleistocene, Enlightenment, human “lack of character” (Wendell Berry's culprit, 293), technology?

Having raided the pantry of history and spread everything out on the floor, is anything like a decent meal capable of being assembled with the tools available?

I think Zimmerman goes for “take the best of all periods,” which he calls “honoring and integrating the dignities of the premodern, modern, and postmodern” (295). What does that look like? David Byrne working in a steel mill while singing Mongolian throat songs? What?

And in the end, doesn't this default to a decidedly postmodern view, not a modern or a premodern one at all? I mean, if Zimmerman were to offer his theory at the feet of Henry VIII or some paleolithic shaman, might he not be executed or simply laughed at?

What makes Zimmerman so sure that he is outside of history, capable of seeing it all objectively and weighing “dignity” and “disaster,” delight and dole (as King Claudius puts it in Hamlet) accurately?

And once we've assembled the good parts in our transhistorical smorgasbord, aren't we still being the ultimate postmodern consumer as we pick and choose our way through it?