In the Western News of June 18, I suggested that it would be desirable to move towards a car-free campus (Butterflies, not cars).
The editor, David Dauphinee, then asked if I would be interested in writing an environmental piece on a regular basis and we agreed that I would produce a short article each month during the academic year. This first contribution draws on the still emerging field of ecocriticism and focuses in particular on the ‘green world’ of English poet and author John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In October I’ll write about ecofeminism and in November on the meaning and enduring influence of James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia. Although during the past year the Western Newshas featured a number of informative articles on Western’s environmental initiatives, I want to take my columns in somewhat different directions that probe the field of cultural ecology – a place where literature, the arts, and the natural world meet.
We tend to regard severe environmental damage as occurring largely in the past 50 years; however, it was well underway long before. When John Milton (1608-1674) wrote his epic poem Paradise Lost(completed in 1664) he was keenly aware of and distressed by the rapid ecological changes England was experiencing in the 17th century. The term ecology, oikos, literally an account of the house of nature, was beginning to enter the discourse by the end of the 17th century. Old-growth forests had all but disappeared, the wood used, as though the supply was inexhaustible, for shipbuilding and housing as well as fuel for new industries – copper smelting and glass making. Urban air pollution was as toxic as it is now in many places. Fens, wetlands and marshes were drained to make available a vast increase in land for grazing and crops. Metal and coal mining brought home their own ravages, with Milton condemning mining practices as those who “with impious hands / Rifl’d the bowels of their mother earth / For treasures better hid.”
Recent scholarship by Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology(2003), and Dianne McColley, A Gust for Paradise(1993) explore, from the perspective of a green Milton, not only how paradise on earth from an ecological perspective was lost, but how in the present an ecological reading of Milton can point us in the direction of how to regain a green earth. So when Milton retells the Biblical tale of the garden of Eden and its loss as a paradise, he introduces a green strain into the story and the allegory of the fall is seen by Milton as “Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat sighing through all her works gave signs of woe, that all was lost.” With the fall from the timeless garden, tended lovingly by Adam and Eve, into history, the wounding of the earth occurs since earth will gradually no longer be cared for in the sense of a deep-ecology of place but will now be a space to be exploited for human desires.
Milton’s interpretation of the fall reverses 17th-century theological thought which maintained that the fall occurs because Eve is too earthy, eating the forbidden unripe fruit (unlike the original story the fruit in Milton is unripe) and hence not spiritual enough. Instead Milton has Eve being duped by Satan to give up her place in the garden to gain supposedly greater knowledge outside, that is, to give up her sense of place and deep connection to the earth and natural world. When Eve quickly realizes the consequences of what she has been tempted to do and faces exile she laments, “O unexpected stroke, worst than of Death / Must I leave thee paradise? Thus leave / Thee native Soile?” She will no longer be able to go “forth among her Fruits and Flowers, / To visit how they prosper’d, bud and bloom.” Eve sadly asks her beloved plants, “Who shall reare ye to the Sun or ranke / Your Tribes?” Both humanity and the earth share the deep wound of paradise/place lost. What Milton is ultimately driving at in Paradise Lostis to show that once the earth-human connection is severed our environmental woes begin.
In translating the Biblical notion of temptation, the temptation to go beyond the limits of what the earth can bear, into contemporary environmental terms, philosopher Martin Heidegger’s idea of a “standing reserve” is worth considering. This perspective views the material world as simply existing, standing in reserve, for our use and for us to exploit. Back of this is the damaging belief that, in unfolding a human plan with the aid of technology, the natural world should just stand by waiting for us to control it for our ends. Milton’s complex poem suggests the opposite: that as humans we should wait on the earth to unfold and present us with its riches when the time is right, not when the fruit is unripe. The central environmental message of Paradise Lostis that the expulsion from the garden happened as a result of not waiting, but instead symbolically exploiting the environment by eating the unripe fruit before it was ready. Milton challenges us to ask the question: is the earth ready for us at any given time to do what we desire?; he encourages us to attune ourselves to a recognition of the signs of when we can act and when we must simply patiently wait. Drawing on Ecclesiastes Milton writes, “All things are best fulfill’d in their due time, / And time there is for all things.” A good example of not waiting for nature is the destructive deforestation of the of the South American rain forests to provide an off-season source of food for North America – the forests seen as a reserve just waiting for our use.
With the flaming leaves of fall soon here a poet with Milton’s green understanding can serve to remind us that the shift from an ethos of mastery over the natural world to one of living in reverence and unity with it, might give us glimpses us of a paradise lost. Once we have seen what we have lost we can begin the gentle work of creating a ‘garden’ of beauty and harmony here on earth.
The writer is a professor at King’s University College at Western.